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103 Chapter 5 Widening the Campaign In 1921 the british writer D. H. Lawrence, with the experience of pest- filled Venetian nights still fresh, penned a seventy-four-line, free verse poem titled “The Mosquito.” Lawrence, whose explicit descriptions of human sexuality seven years later in Lady Chatterley’s Lover shocked his contemporaries, proved less competent in matters concerning the male’s role in nature’s great drama of blood and sex.1 Six years later William Faulkner chose Mosquitoes as the title for his second novel. Drawing on a seven-month stay in New Orleans, Faulkner used a boating excursion on Lake Pontchartrain as the frame for his mocking portrait of the Crescent City’s artistic and socially prominent pests. A flight of salt marsh mosquitoes set the novel in motion. “They came cityward ,” Faulkner observed in the novel’s dedication, “lustful as country-boys, as passionately integral as a college football squad, pervading and monstrous but without majesty: a biblical plague. . . . The majesty of Fate become contemptuous through ubiquity and sheer repetition.”2 While Lawrence and Faulkner mused on insects, organized mosquito control made significant advances in reducing mosquitoes’ injury to the body politic . Encouraged by their wartime achievements, advocates of mosquito control renewed their efforts to win local and state support for anti-mosquito measures in the 1920s. Utah, Florida, and Illinois had passed laws allowing the formation of mosquito abatement districts by 1930. Simultaneously, scientists in Louisiana and New Jersey developed chemical agents opening new possibilities for control. Herms and Freeborn returned to Berkeley in early 1919. Their success in Newport News made them eager to resume anti-malaria work in California. “California,” Herms wrote to his former colleagues in the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) shortly after his return, “has made remarkable strides in the 104 the mosquito crusades control of malaria in the past 10 years, having reduced the prevalence of this disease by at least 60%.”3 The dark shadow of malaria, however, continued to waste the lives of thousands of farmers living in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. In October 1919 Herms told the delegates attending the annual conference of state, county, and municipal health workers that “the control of malaria presents the biggest rural sanitary problem in California today.”4 Herms’s immediate objectives were to complete the statewide 1916–1917 anopheline survey, expand the number of mosquito abatement districts, and reorganize the university’s entomology department. Herms planned to restart the survey in June. Early in the spring, Harold Gray, Herms’s former student, sent word of an alarming outbreak of malaria in northern California. This epidemic gave Herms and Stanley Freeborn an unforeseen opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of anti-mosquito skills they employed in Virginia. Harold Gray provided a detailed description of the growing crisis. Gray had served as a district health officer for the California Department of Public Health since 1917. Having abandoned his plan to earn a doctorate in 1912 after his wife gave birth to their first child, Gray served as the municipal health officer in Palo Alto and San Jose between 1912 and 1916. At the beginning of World War I, Gray placed fourth, highest among nonmedical candidates, in a USPHS nationwide examination. This earned him the position with the California Department of Public Health. Gray’s territory covered seventeen counties in northern California where his duties included oversight of water and sewage facilities, stream pollution, and malaria control. From his base in Chico, Gray was able to monitor the growing malaria problem in the Anderson Valley section of Shasta County. Malaria was long endemic in the region. The focal point of Gray’s concern was the small, unincorporated town of Anderson. Located twelve miles south of Redding, the Anderson Valley had a population of approximately 1,300, of which roughly 450 were concentrated in the town of Anderson. The remaining population were farmers (650) or resided in nearby Cottonwood (200).5 Conditions in the Anderson Valley worsened after 1918 with the completion of the Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District project. Seepage from the drainage district’s canals, failure to maintain lateral ditches, and the introduction of rice cultivation created numerous standing pools of water throughout the district that were “ideal for the breeding of anopheline mosquitoes.” Gray feared that the poorly designed irrigation project would exacerbate the endemic malaria problem. In 1918 he visited virtually every household in valley . “Practically every one” Gray encountered “in the irrigated sections complained...

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