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1 Introduction The Guardians of Paradise At 1:00 p.m. est on November 10, 1951, Leslie Denning, mayor of Englewood , New Jersey, phoned Frank Osborn, the mayor of Alameda, California. In Englewood, nearly one hundred reporters had crowded into the mayor’s office to watch Denning make the nation’s first long-distance, direct-dial phone call. Three thousand miles to the west in Alameda, Osborn waited expectantly. When the phone rang, Osborn answered declaring, “This is a great thing for both our cities. New Jersey to Alameda in eighteen seconds. The world shrinks so that soon there won’t be enough room for the people.” During the next few minutes smiling members of both the Englewood and Alameda chambers of commerce listened as the mayors extolled their hometowns’ virtues and traded quips over the quality of life on the east and west coasts. At the phone call’s conclusion Osborn fired a parting tease, “Is it true that people in New Jersey ride mosquitoes the same as we ride horses out here?”1 None of the newspaper accounts of the historic phone call included Denning ’s response. Months later Mrs. Harvey Bein, chairperson of the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs committee on mosquito control, sought to set the record straight. “The deadly effect of [the mosquito’s] bite on the health and welfare of the people,” Mrs. Bein told the participants at the thirty-ninth annual meeting of the New Jersey Mosquito Extermination Association, “does not provoke one who knows of it to puns and laughter. You will be interested to know that while the humor has not been entirely dissipated, your good work is being spread to the other side of the continent.” Denning had not allowed Osborn’s taunt, Mrs. Bein reported, to pass unchallenged. “I haven’t 2 the mosquito crusades seen any [mosquitoes] around here lately,” Englewood’s mayor had shouted in an attempt to make himself heard over the reporters’ guffaws.2 To a generation accustomed to instant messaging, cell phones, and video conferencing, the excitement about a direct-dial, long-distance phone call may seem a quaint reminder of a less complicated technological era. Few would dispute the link between the first direct-dial phone call and the ubiquitous wireless networks that define the contemporary world. But the reference to mosquitoes is puzzling. Most Americans in recent decades give little thought to mosquitoes. This was not the case throughout most of American history. The first European travelers to the New World commented on the prodigious numbers and ferocity of America’s indigenous mosquitoes . In the seventeenth century the early English colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth suffered greatly from them. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln grumbled about mosquitoes. In 1879 mosquitoes forced Rutherford Hayes to retreat from the nation’s capital to Fremont, Ohio.3 A generation earlier a Virginia congressman opposed Florida’s entry into the Union because of mosquitoes. Nothing wholesome, John Randolph opined, would come from Florida because it was “a land of swamps, of quagmires, of frogs, and alligators, and mosquitoes.”4 Throughout the country’s history, most Americans assumed that mosquitoes were like the weather. Everyone complained, but nothing could be done to relieve the mosquito blight. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a handful of progressively minded individuals in New Jersey declared their intention to do something about mosquitoes. Led by a self-trained entomologist named John B. Smith, they opened a campaign against the mosquito pest. Their efforts grew into a nationwide crusade. No country in history has waged so vast a war against mosquitoes as the United States. By 1910 a mosquito crusade had spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. Initially the campaign grew out of a desire for relief from pest mosquitoes. Support for mosquito control dramatically increased after the discovery of the role that mosquitoes play in spreading diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. The word “mosquito” bears a distinctly American accent. At least, this is Samuel Rickard Christophers’s argument in his introduction to his monumental examination of the life history and bionomics of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. “With occasional exceptions,” Christophers maintains, it was possible until the end of the nineteenth century to determine whether a speaker was English or American by their “respective use of gnat or mosquito.”5 British entomologists employed the word “gnat” for the double-winged, biting flies that periodically rose above the English fens. They reserved the...

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