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When biologist Rachel Carson stepped into a Senate hearing in 1963 to give her testimony regarding the hazardous use of pesticides by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Senator Abraham Ribicoff introduced her with an illusion to one of her literary ancestors : “You are the lady who started all this. . . . I think that all people in this country and around the world owe you a debt of gratitude for your writings and for your actions toward making the atmosphere and the environment safe for habitation, not only by human beings but for animals and nature itself.”1 His declaration echoed a remark made by President Abraham Lincoln in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; in a similar spirit Lincoln suggested that Stowe was the little white lady who wrote a book that instigated the Civil War. Other members of Congress shared Ribicoff’s sense that Carson’s Silent Spring—a book summoning the modern-day environmental movement—would change the course of history.2 In that same hearing, Senator Ernest Gruening drew an even more explicit analogy between the two authors: “Miss Carson, every once in a while in the history of mankind a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history. I think that sometimes those books are in fiction form and sometimes not. One can think of many examples, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance. Your book is of that important character, and I feel you have rendered a tremendous service.”3
Gruening’s remarks foreshadowed the enduring impact of Silent Spring. But they also suggest that Carson’s warnings elicited an affective and gendered public response that was akin to the empathic reactions to Stowe’s novel. To be sure, Carson’s narrative is not sentimental; it is an exhaustively researched scientific study written in a style that matches Henry David Thoreau’s prose more precisely than Stowe’s. But it is the style of public outcry that moves Gruening to link the two texts. That particular response is gendered, raced, and classed because it posits that white, middle-class affective norms govern reactions to political crises. And indeed white, middle-class citizens felt a tremendous emotional charge from the findings in Carson’s research. It is no wonder, then, that some critics felt threatened by the warnings Carson issued in her book despite the fact that her small, white frame was not the least bit intimidating; Silent Spring unleashed enough concern that a week-long Senate hearing was convened to explore the public health implications of insecticides.
The power of the statements by senators who listened attentively to Carson’s testimony and questioned her recommendations about the toxicity of pesticides was profound. In this hearing, Carson’s impeccable research stood up against the claims of the chemical corporations, whose employees testified to the safety of their products. The stakes were high: because of the tendentious arguments she made in her book, she could not risk being discredited; she did not have a wealthy corporation (as did the agricultural industry) or a prestigious university (as did most of the white, male scientists opposing and supporting her) backing her crusade. She worried about corporations looking for ways to undermine her efforts to control widespread carcinogenic pesticide use. Silent Spring catapulted a biologist into the limelight of Washington and the nation. Because Carson believed in her research—and knew how the government system operated after working for sixteen years, most of her adult life, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—she sacrificed her privacy, to a certain extent, for the sake of long-term public and ecological health.4
But one aspect of her personal life in particular would remain removed from public view: the status of her physical health. At the time of this hearing, Carson was treating her breast cancer with radiation, one of the many dangerous carcinogenic substances discussed in her book. Indeed, Carson makes this link explicitly in her chapter on cancer, which is entitled “One in Every Four”: “The battle of living things against cancer began so long ago that its origin is lost in time. But it must have begun in a natural environment, in which whatever life inhabited the earth was subjected, for good or ill, to influences that had their origin in sun and storm and the ancient nature of earth” (Silent 219). She suggests that while radiation from the sun may be nature’s way of causing cancer, “with the advent of man the situation began to change, for man, alone of all forms of life, can create cancer-producing substances, which in medical terminology are called carcinogens” (Silent 219). In other words, like pesticides, radiation accumulates in human and animal bodily tissues and produces known and unforeseen health problems down the line.5 She worried that if her radiotherapy became common knowledge, that information could be used to discredit or undermine her role as a biologist and attention would be fixated on her private life instead of her public work.
Carson dealt with an array of health problems including breast cancer. She hid the most life-threatening of these illnesses for numerous reasons. Michael Warner offers one insight into Carson’s desire for privacy: “In earlier varieties of the public sphere, it was important that images of the body not figure importantly in public discourse. The anonymity of the discourse was a way of certifying the citizen’s disinterested concern for the public good” (242). In other words, Carson kept her breast cancer secret because in order to maintain the veil of scientific objectivity it was important that she remain disembodied. If Silent Spring convinced the public that various properties—including radiation—caused cancer, it would be risky to open up her health status to the chemical corporations’ scrutiny.6 She confided her concern to a friend: “I suppose it’s a futile effort to keep one’s private affairs private. Somehow I have no wish to read of my ailments in literary gossip columns. Too much comfort to the chemical companies.”7 As one who bore witness for nature, as biographer Linda Lear aptly described her, Carson needed to be perceived as an objective scientist and concerned citizen who spoke out on behalf of the public good.
Other social forces as well guided Carson’s decision to keep quiet about her cancer: in the 1960s cancer itself—let alone breast cancer—was not a subject of public discussion. Nevertheless, the decision to maintain a code of secrecy about her breast cancer ensured that the public would not weep over her as some tragic figure, but if they wept at all, they would do so over concern for the state of the planet and its inhabitants more generally. The affective charge Carson carefully groomed, in fact, mobilized concerned citizens into action.
In this chapter I consider the tension between private and public as Carson straddled this line and as it set in motion prominent paradigm shifts in breast cancer research and activism that were evident by the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps for a twenty-first-century audience, used to constant disclosure of personal lives, Carson’s silence about her breast cancer may appear tragic; however, the rewards of her silence were significant changes in U.S. public policy regarding the environment, which likely saved countless lives by minimizing and regulating the use of carcinogenic chemicals. Much of her story and her secrecy can be understood best in the context of the cold war, during which the only cancer that was discussed in public was Communism. This historical backdrop can be viewed most clearly in the most potent claims Carson made about cancer in Silent Spring and in her earlier book, The Sea around Us, in addition to criticism leveled against her person and her research. But most of her reflection about her struggle with her health she shared only in private letters to friends, including her doctor; layered in these documents are her primary concerns: treating her breast cancer with radiation and protecting the environment from substances like DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) and atomic fallout.
Although Carson’s letters about breast cancer did not have a direct effect on medical practices or breast cancer legislation, her book Silent Spring did. This chapter engages with the tension between her private writing and her public writing, dramatizing a historical moment before breast cancer became a public subject. Carson’s scientific research continues to shape the way some scientists approach cancer research. Therefore, this chapter concludes with a look at some of the most promising changes in that research—all of which derive a method and a set of practices from Silent Spring.
Going Public
In the summer of 1962, a few months prior to Silent Spring’s September publication date, excerpts from the book appearing in the New Yorker alerted the public, the government, and the chemical corporations to its provocative argument.8 Most of the major corporations producing DDT—such as E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. and Velsicol Chemical Company—requested proofs from the publisher after reading the New Yorker installments. Velsicol even made veiled threats of a libel suit if Houghton Mifflin published the book.9 Velsicol also targeted the National Audubon Society, which excerpted Silent Spring in its newsletter. A letter to Houghton Mifflin from Velsicol’s lawyer, Louis McLean, indicated that perhaps Communism motivated Carson’s political agenda. He claimed “in McCarthyite tones that Carson might be part of a conspiracy. There were, McLean suggested, ‘sinister influences’ at work. Their purpose was ‘to create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral, and to reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and the countries of western Europe, so that our food will be reduced to east-curtain parity’” (Lear, Witness, 417). 46