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195 Chapter 9 Discontent and Resistance Stan freeborn liked to tell the story of how he found himself at the end of World War I standing outside a delousing station in Newport News. Freeborn watched as a line of soldiers passed through the facility. When one of the enlisted men paused, Freeborn asked him “how he felt now that he was all cleaned up.” The soldier shook his head and declared, “Mister, I feel just plain lonesome.”1 Had Freeborn, who died in 1960, a year after retiring as UC Davis’s chancellor, lived another decade, he might well have concluded that the mosquito crusaders had much in common with the deloused infantryman. The 1960s represented a tectonic shift in the institutional standing of the mosquito and vector control movement. For seventy years the mosquito crusaders had prided themselves as the champions of public health and the first line of defense against the torment of winged blood-sucking pests. This changed in the tumultuous 1960s. Many factors contributed to the public’s disenchantment with mosquito control in the 1960s. The success of insecticides and water management in reducing nuisance and medically significant mosquitoes in the 1950s proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there was unprecedented growth in the scope of mosquito control. The expansion of mosquito control reached a high point between 1957 and 1963. Advocates of mosquito control during this period succeeded in launching new programs in the Midwest and along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. On the other hand, Clarence Cottam and his protégé, Rachel Carson, mounted a powerful attack on mosquito control. The publication of Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement in America. Eight years later on April 22, 1970, tens of thousands of Americans declared their commitment 196 the mosquito crusades to environmental reform on the first Earth Day. For Dick Peters, Tommy Mulhern , John Mulrennan, and hundreds of other veteran mosquito warriors, Earth Day represented the end of the mosquito crusade and the beginning of a contentious debate about the value of mosquito control that continues to the present. Few if any of the leaders of the American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA) anticipated the turmoil that would define the 1960s and early 1970s. There were numerous positive developments. New mosquito control programs formed. In 1958 organized mosquito control came to the Upper Midwest when the voters in six counties surrounding Minneapolis and St. Paul approved a ballot measure authorizing the formation of the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District.2 Interest in mosquitoes and mosquito control in Minnesota had surfaced in the 1930s. In 1937 William Owen published a report on the state’s mosquitoes as one of the University of Minnesota’s technical bulletins. Twelve years later in 1950 Minnesota’s assembly approved legislation enabling counties and municipalities to form mosquito control districts. Eight years elapsed before the formation of the first district. In the early 1950s a young entomologist named Ralph Barr was one of the catalysts for the development of organized mosquito control in Minnesota . Barr, who earned his bachelor of science degree from Southern Methodist University and his doctorate in public health at Johns Hopkins University, joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota as an instructor in entomology and parasitology in 1950. During the next three years, Barr and his wife, Sylvia, traveled throughout the state collecting mosquitoes. Barr left Minnesota in 1955 when he accepted a position at the University of Kansas. Three years later, the University of Minnesota published Barr’s Mosquitoes of Minnesota. Sylvia Barr prepared the book’s illustrations. “Mosquitoes ,” Barr observed in his introduction to the book, “are extremely important to the economy of the state of Minnesota. Their primary importance at the present time does not concern their ability to carry disease but rather lies in their nuisance value.”3 Surveys revealed that of the state’s forty-nine species of mosquitoes, Aedes vexans comprised close to 80 percent of the mosquitoes captured in New Jersey light traps.4 Ae. vexans, as its name suggests, is a particularly “irritating” pest. The public’s desire to eliminate this “nuisance” led to the formation of the metropolitan district. When the mosquito commissioners appointed Albert W. Buzicky the district’s first director, reporters joked that the commission had certainly chosen an aptly named individual to take the “buzz” out of St. Paul and Minneapolis. A similar desire for relief from pest and...

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