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143 Chapter 7 Weapons of Mass Destruction Eight days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the California Mosquito Control Association held its annual meeting. The proceedings convey a sense of urgency. The meeting opened with a symposium on encephalitis. In the discussion that followed, Morris Stewart, a researcher at the University of California’s George Hooper Foundation, noted the value of the Hooper Foundation’s ongoing investigation of encephalitis in the Yakima Valley in Washington State “in view of the present emergency.” “In most [mosquito control] districts,” Stewart warned, “we have conveniently classified certain mosquitoes as of primary importance and we have devoted our attention almost exclusively to those. Now we may be faced with the control of different species, and that means we must re-equip ourselves with the mental elasticity we had when we first went into this work.”1 Seasoned mosquito fighters like Herms and Freeborn advised their younger colleagues to prepare for change. “There are,” Stanley Freeborn observed, “interesting days ahead for all of us. We know more about mosquitoes than we did at the time of the last war, but we need to know a great deal more.”2 The anti-mosquito movement underwent profound changes in the 1940s. Concerns about wildlife issues faded as war clouds gathered over the Pacific and in Europe. New insect-borne diseases emerged to threaten both civilians and the armed forces. After Pearl Harbor, men like Herms, Freeborn, Bishopp, and Williams led efforts to protect soldiers, sailors, marines, and war workers from insect-borne diseases. In laboratories in Orlando, Florida, and Beltsville, Maryland, USDA researchers pioneered innovative means of chemical control while scientists and physicians at the Rockefeller Foundation and engineers and entomologists at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) explored new strategies to reduce malaria parasites and control disease 144 the mosquito crusades vectors. Simultaneously, hundreds of young soldiers and sailors learned the basics of mosquito control. Finally, as Allied Forces were advancing on Tokyo and Berlin, Robert Glasgow, Don Rees, Thomas Headlee, and Tommy Mulhern organized a national mosquito control association with the goal of consolidating the wartime accomplishments and catalyzing the movement’s expansion in the postwar era. Preparations for America’s entry into the war began in 1939. One week after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Franklin Roosevelt declared a limited national emergency and called Congress into a special session. In the days that followed, Roosevelt won a series of measures that placed the country on a war footing. The House and Senate voted to repeal the 1935 Neutrality Act that prohibited the sale of arms and armaments to warring nations. In 1940 Congress approved Roosevelt’s request for a staggering seventeen-billion-dollar defense budget. In September 1940 Congress authorized the first peacetime draft in American history. By Thanksgiving the first wave of the sixteen million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five submitted their registration forms to their local Selective Service Board. Protecting recruits and inductees from mosquito-borne diseases posed a huge challenge. Despite the U.S. Public Health Service’s (USPHS) efforts during World War I, there had been more than ten thousand cases of malaria in the military.3 Dr. Joseph Mountin, director of the USPHS’s State Service Division in Washington, made establishing a comprehensive malaria control program a priority. In 1940 Mountin sent Louis Williams to serve as the USPHS’s liaison with the Fourth Army Corps headquarters in Atlanta.4 Williams, who began his career in malaria control in World War I, had recently returned to the United States from Southeast Asia where he had served as chief of the Malaria Commission for the China Burma Highway project. His experiences in Asia strengthened his conviction in the importance of malaria control for the war effort. Historically, malaria had shown a steady decline in the United States since the midpoint of the nineteenth century. The fact that malaria’s retreat from the Northeast and Midwest began before Ross’s discovery of the role of mosquitoes as the disease’s vector has led some historians to minimize mosquito control’s role in suppressing the disease. Darwin Stapleton, executive director of the Rockefeller Archive Center, observed that the “lessons of malaria control in the twentieth century remain ambiguous.”5 In 1994 J. de Zulueta argued in Parassitologia that “the migration of the rural population, the main support of malaria in past times, to urban areas, the improvement of housing conditions of those who remained...

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