The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests

By Amy Marie Hay and Mark D. Hersey

Examines the domestic and international use of phenoxy herbicides by the United States in the mid-twentieth century
 
In The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests, Amy M. Hay profiles the attitudes, understandings, and motivations of grassroots activists who rose to fight the use of phenoxy herbicides, or Agent Orange chemicals as they are commonly known, in various aspects of American life during the post-WWII era. Hay focuses her analysis on citizen responses to illuminate how regulatory policies were understood, challenged, and negotiated, contributing to a growing body of research on chemical regulatory policies, risk society, and hazardous chemicals. This volume uncovers new understandings about the authority of the state and its obligation to society, the role of scientific authority and expertise, and the protests made by various groups of citizens.
 
First introduced in 1946, phenoxy herbicides mimic hormones in broadleaf plants, causing them to “grow to death” while grass, grains, and other monocots remain unaffected. By the 1950s, millions of pounds of these chemicals were produced annually for use in brush control, weed eradication, forest management, and other agricultural applications. Pockets of skepticism and resistance began to appear by the late 1950s, and the trend intensified after 1962 when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring directed mainstream attention to the harm modern chemicals were causing in the natural world. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War, however, when nearly 19 million gallons of Agent Orange and related herbicides were sprayed to clear the canopy and destroy crops in Southeast Asia, that the long-term damage associated with this group of chemicals began to attract widespread attention and alarm.
 
Using a wide array of sources and an interdisciplinary approach, Hay contributes to the robust fields of chemical toxicity, regulation, environmental management, and public health. This study of the scientists, health and environmental activists, and veterans who fought US chemical regulatory policies and practices reveals the mechanisms, obligations, and constraints of state and scientific authority in mid-twentieth-century America. Hay also shows how these disparate and mostly forgotten citizen groups challenged the political consensus and contested government and industry narratives of chemical safety.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780817393793

Book preview

THE DEFOLIATION OF AMERICA

NEW HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AGRICULTURE & MEDICINE

NEXUS is a book series devoted to the publication of high-quality scholarship in the history of the sciences and allied fields. Its broad reach encompasses science, technology, the environment, agriculture, and medicine, but also includes intersections with other types of knowledge, such as music, urban planning, or educational policy. Its essential concern is with the interface of nature and culture, broadly conceived, and it embraces an emerging intellectual constellation of new syntheses, methods, and approaches in the study of people and nature through time.

SERIES EDITORS

Alan I Marcus

Mark D. Hersey

Alexandra E. Hui

ADVISORY BOARD

Amy Sue Bix

Frederick R. Davis

Jim Downs

Richard A. Richards

Suman Seth

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

Jessica Wang

THE DEFOLIATION OF AMERICA

Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests

AMY M. HAY

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image: Agent Orange demonstration in Milwaukee, 1981; courtesy of Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2108-6

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9379-3

For Dolores Huston Hay, Jo Ann Carrigan, and Anthony Carrigan

Contents

List of Figures

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Defoliation of America: Chemical Uses and Protests in Post-1945 America

PART ONE

The Origins of the Phenoxy Herbicide Uses and Protests, 1940–70

CHAPTER ONE

Controlling Jungle Lawns and Jungle Wars

Domestic and International Uses of the Phenoxy Herbicides

CHAPTER TWO

The Quickening Conscience

Seminarians, Students, and Scientists Protest the Phenoxy Herbicides

CHAPTER THREE

Ecological Disruption in Vietnam

International Protests over Crop Destruction, Defoliation, and Ecological Imperialism

PART TWO

Three Cases in the West

Arizona, California, and Oregon, 1960–80

CHAPTER FOUR

Water in the West

Billee Shoecraft and Herbicide Use in Arizona

CHAPTER FIVE

Fires, Farms, Forests

Ida Honorof and Herbicide Use in California

CHAPTER SIX

Timber and Rights-of-Way

Carol Van Strum and Herbicide Spraying in Oregon

PART THREE

The Phenoxy Herbicides’ Toxic Legacies, 1970–95

CHAPTER SEVEN

The War on Drugs

The Phenoxy Herbicides in Counterinsurgency and the Counterculture

CHAPTER EIGHT

Fighting the Deadly Fog

Vietnam Veterans Protest Agent Orange Herbicides

CHAPTER NINE

Unexpected Casualties

The Phenoxy Herbicides and Reproductive Harm

Conclusion

The Dissenters: Citizens Protest Chemical Herbicides

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Jay Cravens and the US Agency for International Development team sent to South Vietnam

2. Satirical illustration in the University of Pennsylvania’s student paper

3. Yale plant physiologist Arthur Galston

4. Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson

5. Gerhard Grümmer’s Herbicides in Vietnam

6. Billee Shoecraft, environmental activist from Globe, Arizona

7. Ida Honorof, environmental activist from Los Angeles, California

8. Carol Van Strum, environmental activist from Five Rivers, Oregon

9. A hippie commune in Mendocino County, California, 1967

10. Maude DeVictor, Vietnam Veterans Against the War investigation of Agent Orange

11. Book cover for Kerry: Agent Orange and an American Family

12. Three generations of the Zumwalt family

13. Vietnamese mother and child with a birth defect

14. Community members attend Mario Bravo’s funeral

Foreword

Few chemicals have captured the public imagination in quite the same way as Agent Orange. Its use during the Vietnam War—to define boundaries, uncover North Vietnamese Army routes, limit attacks by removing cover, and target enemy food supplies—rendered it a synecdoche for the American war effort as a whole and a synonym for phenoxy herbicides writ large. Its lingering effects on the landscape of Vietnam and its consequences for those servicemen and Vietnamese civilians exposed to it have attracted the attention of scholars and made their way into film documentaries and undergraduate lectures. But for all its familiarity, Agent Orange remains two-dimensional in most accounts, which treat it as a chemical that proved germane to the conflict far away in Vietnam and which affected the home front only through returning soldiers. The domestic use of Agent Orange chemicals and the grassroots opposition they inspired have remained largely obscured—until now.

In this important addition to the Nexus series, Amy Hay moves ordinary citizens to the center of the story. In so doing she significantly reframes our understanding of a story we thought we knew well and in the process introduces us to what is arguably the most important anti-toxics movement of the postwar era. Beginning with a world in which most citizens welcomed the application of phenoxy herbicides, Hay shows how the unintended consequences of the chemicals inspired critiques from a growing number of quarters, as religious organizations, university students, and scientists, both domestic and international, expressed a growing sense of alarm. Expecting politicians to protect the citizens they represented rather than corporate profits, and believing that corporations ought to take responsibility for the products they manufactured and marketed, activists grew increasingly frustrated with what they saw as an inadequate, even dismissive, governmental response to their concerns.

Led by overlooked figures like Billee Shoecraft, Ida Honorof, and Carol Van Strum, these activists worked to inform the public of the hidden risks of the chemicals’ application, and over time they inspired a diverse and widespread movement that sought to halt the domestic application of Agent Orange chemicals. Hay’s accounts of their efforts call attention to the manifold ways in which phenoxy herbicides were applied in the United States—from increasing water runoff to meet the needs of an expanding population in Phoenix, to controlling brush in California, to facilitating timber companies’ access to forests in Oregon. Significantly, they also point to the outsized role of women in the efforts to check the use of the chemicals, an aspect of the movement that previous studies have ignored. Moreover, Hay casts new light on the men who have played the key roles in narratives about opposition to Agent Orange to date. Where previous studies of the veterans’ protests have centered on the veterans themselves, Hay adroitly demonstrates how the veterans often focused on the chemicals’ effects on their families and children. In tracing the threads that connected the efforts of women like Shoecraft, Honorof, and Van Strum to those of the veterans, Hay highlights the degree to which an emphasis on gender can continue to reframe ostensibly familiar stories.

By calling attention to the ways in which the activists, male and female alike, challenged state and scientific authority, Hay offers fresh insights into the place of citizen science in the second half of the twentieth century. Hay makes a compelling case that by operating on the assumption that phenoxy herbicides were safe in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, companies and government agencies effectively shunted the burden of proof to those who endured the effects of the chemicals. Later studies would largely support the activists’ claims about the perils posed by Agent Orange chemicals, but Hay is less interested in assessing the veracity of their claims than in exploring the significance of their engagement in the process of knowledge making, in their claims that ordinary citizens have a right to have a say about the consequences of actions that have real bearing on their lives, and especially their health. Thus, in tracing the divergent motivations of her activists and the uneven results with which they met, Hay offers a sympathetic and convincing account of the ways in which their efforts laid a profoundly democratic foundation for citizen engagement with science.

Writing with a clear moral compass, Hay has produced a definitive study that fundamentally reshapes the contours of scholarship on Agent Orange chemicals. Situated at the nexus of the history of science, environmental history, and the history of health, it is an ideal fit for this series, not only because it makes significant contributions to those fields but because it is ambitious in its scope. Historians of toxics and toxicants, of citizen science, of technology, of gender, of political activism in postwar America, and of modern American environmentalism will all find much of value in Hay’s analysis. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is a study with profound implications for our world today. It is a study that deserves a wide readership in the academy and beyond, and we are pleased to see its publication as part of the Nexus series.

MARK D. HERSEY, on behalf of the Nexus series editors

Acknowledgments

Aside from being done, the gratitude is the best part. First, my thanks to Claire Lewis Evans, my editor at the University of Alabama Press, for her knowledge and insight, patience, and timely support. I am very pleased to be published as a part of the press’s NEXUS series and want to especially thank series editor Mark Hersey, who expressed interest in my work and took the time at an international conference to speak with me about publishing with the press. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who gave such thoughtful, helpful, and encouraging feedback about the book. It is better for their care.

The University of Texas Pan American (now University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) supported this work with a College of Arts and Humanities grant that allowed me to research at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland. Thanks to the helpful archivists there. Archivists and staff at the Texas Tech University Vietnam Archive in Lubbock, Texas, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Forest History Society in Durham, North Carolina, also aided me in negotiating their rich collections. At the Forest History Society, Jaime Lewis and Steve Anderson were great hosts and made my research trip productive and pleasant. I should also thank the various archives, groups, and individuals who provided images for this book.

Two residential writing fellowships supported this project. The Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) gave me money, space, and a home in the summer of 2009. I had a chance to research the Dow Company Collection, think about Agent Orange, and write about some of my activists. Jody Roberts helped both intellectually and practically, offering insights about the chemical industry and finding me a place to live while in Philadelphia. His support and encouragement of my research were just a happy bonus.

The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, located in Munich, Germany, funded me to come and live and participate with a brilliant group of environmental humanities scholars in 2012. My fellowship changed my research and my life in important and wonderful ways. Directors Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler created what one friend described as an academic utopia (and she was right). My officemates, my Carson Fellow cohort, and all of the thoughtful, gifted, and supportive people I met while there and afterward deserve recognition and thanks; and I cannot begin the list, because it would be a very, very long one indeed. You know who you are. (I have a whole new level of respect for awardees who must thank a host of deserving people in thirty seconds or less.) I should also say thank you to the Federal Republic of Germany for its funding of the Carson Center.

I came back from a conference once and realized something: I was a well-trained gender historian. I owe so very much to my mentors and am so glad to be able to publicly acknowledge the wisdom, patience, and good humor they displayed while guiding me. With an undergraduate degree in pharmacy, I presented some interesting challenges. Jo Ann Carrigan taught me that I could research and write the history of medicine, with help from Marty Pernick. Lisa Fine and Darlene Clark Hine were crucial to my understandings of gender, class, and race (what one of my professors called the historical Holy Trinity). Kirsten Fermaglich, you know everything you have done. Thank you all. I continue to grow as a scholar and a person because of the foundations, and friendships, you all have given me.

Like almost any academic, I see many of my friends at academic conferences. If we eat together, your name should be in this list (and sorry if I forgot). From the Carson Center and ASEH, love to Arielle Helmick, Erika Bsumek, Katie Ritson, Melanie Arndt, Michelle Mart, Ellen Arnold, Ruth Morgan, Sherry Johnson, Fritz Davis, David Vail, Jim Rice, and Rob Gioielli. I am very lucky to have friends like Teresa Sabol Spezio, Amy Cummins, Shawn Thomson, Dora Garcia Saavedra, Russ Skowronek, Peg Graham, Anne and Dave Gossage, Pamela Herring, and Pamela Anderson-Meijas, all of whom have generously (both in quality and quantity) cared about me and my work over many years. Y’all kept me laughing and sane. My tribe, connected to me by blood and/or choice, includes some awesome people. Thank you to my sister Cris Hay Merchant and my brothers Bill, Scott, and Jim Hay, along with their families; to Susan Kroeg, Donna Kroeg, Brad Wood, and Clare Wood; Grace and the extended Legaspi family; Kristine Wirts; Chris Miller; Tamer Balci, Tania Han, and Ayda and Ayla Han Balci.

Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank the activists whose stories appear here, and the people I met while finding them. I regret that Ida Honorof and Maude DeVictor died while I was working on this project and before I got to meet them. I would like to thank Carol Van Strum, Faye Honorof, Nga Le, Susan Hammond, and Heather Morris Bowser for meeting with me and for all their help. Activists shed blood, sweat, and tears—all while remembering to laugh—in their efforts to make a better world. I am grateful beyond words that their vision, determination, and action give us hope, and eventually, make change for a better world.

Introduction

The Defoliation of America: Chemical Uses and Protests in Post-1945 America

The original scientific investigations of the chemical compounds 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T emphasized their ability to accelerate plant growth. Scientists initially hoped that the quantity and quality of fruits and vegetables might be improved. In an apocalyptic twist, researchers realized the chemicals’ real value lay with their ability to accelerate growth and kill plant life in the process. It would be these chemicals that were used in a 50/50 mixture to form one of most infamous weapons of war, Agent Orange. These phenoxy herbicides, as they were commonly known, became an essential component of Cold War counterinsurgent response, as they offered one means to environmentally expose the insurgent forces invading South Vietnam. The wartime defoliation missions raised the public’s awareness of these chemicals and increased the number of people concerned about their use.

From the beginning, using the chemicals provoked controversy and protest. This book investigates those protests. It uses the phenoxy herbicides as a lens to consider citizen resistance in post-1945 America by exploring the ways different groups challenged the domestic and international use of these chemicals on various grounds. Examining these challenges tells us much about citizen understandings of state authority and obligation in the postwar period as the United States assumed a new global stature and achieved significant economic prosperity. As science and technology gained prominence in both military and civilian society, scientists became key players in the emerging technocratic state. In the process, government authorities assigned responsibility for mediating conflict connected to the emerging risk society wherein industrialization and capitalism had created new hazards, ones often unseen and dangerous in minute quantities. In this new landscape of risk, the scientists’ authority did not go unchallenged, as ordinary citizens worried about their fate and fought for protection.¹

In the aftermath of World War II, Americans participated in several grassroots—mostly progressive—social movements. These movements included civil rights, self-determination (power movements), student democracy, environmentalism, and women’s liberation. One grassroots movement that has gone mostly unrecognized is the antichemical/anti-toxics.² Anti-toxics activists worked at the intersection of human and ecological health. These campaigns were often overlooked in subsequent understandings of environmentalism, despite the iconic place of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) in conventional narratives of the environmental movement.³ Several factors may have led to the invisibility of these decades-long movements, including its major actors (women), geographies (dispersed and local), and contested nature (scientific uncertainty). To be sure, anti-toxic activism never fully cohered in its membership, ideology, or tactics. Carson’s 1964 death deprived the movement of a visible, acclaimed, and intuitive leader. Yet, despite the diversity of anti-toxic campaigns, most challenged the Cold War political consensus in much the same way as other progressive movements. While this book tells the history of a broader set of protests over the use of the phenoxy herbicides, it is the use of these herbicides in South Vietnam that elevated the issue and amplified activists’ concerns. Even the name of the chemicals took on the branding of the orange-striped barrels used to transport the chemical defoliant during the war. For this reason, I often refer to the phenoxy herbicides 2,4-D; 2,4,5-T; and the other rainbow defoliants that contained one or the other of the phenoxies as Agent Orange herbicides.⁴

The science of postwar America provides the scaffolding that my stories of protest rest upon. The first addresses the perennial dilemma in scientific studies of chemical toxicity. Chemical manufacturers almost always claim safety in the absence of concrete harm and almost always contest charges of illness or demands that the chemicals be treated as hazardous to human and environmental health. In the case of the phenoxy herbicides, the chemical industry was not alone in playing this game of toxic uncertainty. Powerful allies in other business sectors like agriculture and timber, and governmental agencies like the United States Department of Agriculture, all reinforced narratives of safety and economic benefit. In the absence of definitive scientific studies, the argument went, the chemicals must be safe. Individuals and groups concerned about potential harm bore the burden of proof in showing ill effects. In this manner chemical manufacturers successfully muddied the regulatory waters. One way this line of thought succeeded lay in its dismissal of animal studies as not applicable to human beings. As National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences director Linda Birnbaum explained in 2004, while individual studies cannot show definitive causal links, virtually all the studies show the adverse effects of dioxins. The chemical, a contaminant present in the manufacturing of 2,4,5-T, disrupts basic biological processes, and thus biological systems. These include the immune, reproductive, cardiovascular, nervous, and endocrine systems.⁵

This continued absence of definitive scientific and medical proof that the phenoxy herbicides caused ill health provided another challenge in writing the story of these chemicals. For the most part, activists’ claims of concern (and harm) are treated as legitimate. Unfounded charges and those instances of when individuals and groups made questionable (and specific) scientific assertions are noted. Activists’ concerns in questioning the safety of these chemicals are considered legitimate. I came to this work after researching and writing about another case of hazardous chemicals. In the 1970s residents of Niagara Falls’ LaFalce neighborhood challenged public health and elected officials regarding the safety of their community, which had been built over an uncontained buried waste site filled with more than 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals. The episode became known as the Love Canal chemical disaster. Here too toxic uncertainties and politics permeated the situation, and while the chemical disaster resulted in some positive legislative outcomes—most significantly the passage of the 1980 legislation known as Superfund—it also revealed major fault lines in postwar American society. The use of Agent Orange herbicides represents a different kind of chemical disaster, what scholars have recognized as slow violence. This incremental disaster proves equally revealing about not just the state of America but its place within the global community. As with my research on Love Canal, here I am more interested in the process of how these competing paradigms of hazard play out than in trying to determine a singular truth about chemical toxicity.⁶

Science in the form of US chemical policies and regulations offers a compelling lens through which to examine post-1945 grassroots social movements. The chemicals were used as a part of a broader Cold War project that sanctioned a relationship between government and industry and used chemicals like DDT or the phenoxy herbicides to achieve state-sanctioned outcomes, such as their use in South Vietnam. The concluding chapters show a different way the use of the chemicals reflected a Cold War mind-set that demanded citizen compliance. Like other groups that protested the political consensus that arose in the post-1945 period, what historian Arthur Schlesinger called the vital center, the individuals and groups protesting the use of the phenoxy herbicides offered a critique of postwar governmental policies and actions.⁷

My own perspective tends toward sympathy and support of citizens asking that they be a part of decisions made that they think affect them. I also think science has yet to catch up with respect to detection and understanding despite the new research field of epigenetics, an area of research that examines how phenotypic characteristics can be inherited without changing DNA. This research also suggests that male genetic material may be as vulnerable to external factors as female genetic material. In the story of the phenoxy herbicides, the emergence of new scientific paradigms and understandings has generally supported activists’ concerns about harm, and not industry and government claims of safety.

The history of humans, chemicals, health, and the environment cuts across a broad range of disciplinary areas. These include the histories of agriculture, science, the environment, and health. Many of these works were published concurrently and, in the early decades, spoke to different audiences and often not to each other. This brief review, arranged chronologically within fields, outlines the most significant research and explains what The Defoliation of America contributes to the scholarship. Agricultural history was one of the first fields to examine chemicals generally, and the phenoxy herbicides specifically, over an extended period. Gale Peterson’s 1967 essay examines the discovery of 2,4-D. Like Peterson, Nicolas Rasmussen focused specifically on the phenoxy herbicides and their development domestically as a means of controlling weeds, with the understanding they could be potential wartime weapons. Pete Daniel’s Toxic Drift considers the aerial spraying of agricultural chemicals undertaken as a partnership between the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the chemical industry and the health consequences for crop dusters and field workers. J. L. Anderson focuses on the use of chemicals in modernizing the Corn Belt, where the use of chemicals and machines transformed the postwar Midwest.⁸

In the history of science, studies of chemicals, chemical policy and regulation, and chemical hazards proliferate. The influence of Carson on the field could be seen from the start. In one of the first histories of chemical policy that appeared after the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring, James Whorton investigated US chemical policy in the decades prior to 1962. Like Whorton, Thomas Dunlap concentrated on chemical policy, specifically examining the controversies over DDT and its eventual banning in 1972. The United States government has long sponsored the development and use of hazardous chemicals. Edmund Russell examines this relationship in his examination of industry, hazardous chemicals, and their use in agriculture and warfare. Joshua Buhs’s work complements Russell’s, albeit in a much more narrowly focused study of the USDA’s massive campaign to eradicate the fire ant through the use of DDT. Several works examine questions of chemical toxicity, safety, and risk. Sarah Vogel considers the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), challenging traditional understandings of toxicity in the process. Frederick Rowe Davis examines the process by which measurements and standards of toxicity were developed by agencies like the Food and Drug Administration. Michelle Mart’s cultural look at Americans’ relationship with pesticides tries to answer why people continued to use chemicals they understood to be unsafe. The use of chemicals and their health consequences represents an overlapping area of study.⁹

Many of the initial studies on chemicals and health examined them in occupational settings, focusing on lead, asbestos, and other toxic chemicals. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have published extensively on occupational health, lead, and industrial pollution. Christopher Sellers has examined occupational health in the United States and worldwide, tracing its evolution from a focus on industrial disease to one on health. Christian Warren examines the history of lead poisoning over the twentieth century and the two primary routes of exposure: leaded gasoline and paint. Diethylstilbestrol (DES) was used for a variety of reasons over the course of the twentieth century—fed to cattle to increase weight gain, young girls to decrease their height, and eventually women to forestall morning sickness and menopause. Nancy Langston examines the problems these various uses posed as the scientific and medical communities recognized DES as an endocrine disruptor causing health problems across generations. David Kinkela considers the dilemma of using DDT in various global public health campaigns as officials and physicians weighed the risks and benefits. Similar to Kinkela’s reframing of DDT studies, Jennifer Thomson recovers environmental activists’ using the idea of health as a fundamental way to frame their ecological understandings and interventions.¹⁰

Vulnerable communities experienced toxic contamination as one of the major parts of environmental racism. Sociologist Robert Bullard’s studies of the prevalence of waste sites in southern African American communities appeared just five years after the landmark 1985 United Church of Christ report on environmental racism. Andrew Hurley used Gary, Indiana, as a case study to examine the ways poor minority communities bore the brunt of industrial pollution in that midwestern steel and auto town. Eileen McGurty examines the case of Warren County, North Carolina, where county residents protested the state’s plan to locate thousands of pounds of soil resulting from illegal dumping. In two works on toxic contamination, race plays a more subtle and complicated role. Many environmentalists consider the 1978 Love Canal chemical disaster, located in Niagara Falls, New York, a pivotal moment in environmental activism. The success achieved by Lois Gibbs and the activist homemakers she led in protesting the hazardous chemicals buried under the community became a national story. Elizabeth Blum examines the more-than-two-year conflict that eventually saw over nine hundred families relocated from their homes surrounding the dump site, and the tensions between white and Black residents. Kate Brown compares two cities, plutopias, essential in producing the radioactive materials needed for atomic weapons. Richmond, Washington, home to the Hanford nuclear plant, and Ozersk, Russia, the Russian production center for plutonium, both traded health and civil liberties for comfortable consumerism. Ellen Griffith Spears’s study of Anniston, Alabama, and its contamination with PCBs produced by the local Monsanto chemical plant combines many of the themes with this broader body of scholarship—vulnerable minority communities, often located in the South, situated in the midst of industrial pollution produced by international companies (or their own government). The risk presented by the phenoxy herbicides themselves and their use in Vietnam has produced a voluminous body of research as well.¹¹

Studies of Agent Orange appeared soon after the formal end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and have continued to be published. Fred Wilcox’s account of the veteran protests over the ill health they thought was caused by exposure to Agent Orange and the failure of government actors to respond provides a scathing critique of a government waiting for its soldiers to die. Peter Schuck does a close examination of the 1978 lawsuit pursued by veterans trying to hold chemical companies and the US military and government to account. To the veterans’ misfortune, the latent nature of the illnesses caused by exposure to the phenoxy herbicides hurt their attempts to be compensated for their health problems. Wilbur Scott examines the cases of Agent Orange and the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) suffered by US veterans. Several books complement these earlier investigations in examining a broader array of actors involved with Agent Orange. David Zierler looks at the scientists who framed the herbicide-spraying missions as ecocide—the willful destruction of an ecosystem. Edwin Martini scrutinizes the continued uncertainty surrounding exposure to Agent Orange and claims of its ill effects within both the US and Australian militaries. Peter Sills reconsiders the legal and scientific uncertainty that surrounded use of the herbicides.¹²

The Defoliation of America complements and expands these previous studies in several ways, primarily in its focus on dissent. It recovers the different incarnations of antichemical protest by focusing on groups of citizens: religious leaders and laity, students, scientists, veterans, labor, and environmental activists. It uses the phenoxy herbicides to examine US chemical policies, and the state’s relationships with various industries, a reinsertion of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. It continues the studies of large-scale government projects—their planning, implementation, and outcomes. It also revises our understanding of the postwar American environmental movement, the politics of chemical uncertainty, and the erosion of scientific authority. In one sense it carries on Rachel Carson’s gentle subversiveness in recovering the citizen challenges to human hubris in their interactions with nature.¹³ The various groups of actors structure the book. Each chapter examining these groups advances the story chronologically, although parts do overlap.

Part 1 (1940–70) identifies the creation of the phenoxy herbicides, their assorted uses, and the first protests over their use. Chapter 1 considers the uses of the phenoxy herbicides prior to and during the Vietnam War. It argues that while domestic and international applications of the phenoxy herbicides were initially received with enthusiasm and widespread use, problems emerged that led to protests, which are examined in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 follows three different groups of US citizens—religious communities, university students, and biological scientists—who integrated critiques of herbicide defoliation in their broader protests of the US involvement in Southeast Asia. Their protests set the stage for international critiques. Chapter 3 considers two different spaces of condemnation—scientific testimony at various international tribunals, and in the negative assessments made by two scientists, a North Vietnamese surgeon and an East German botanist, in scientific and protest literature.

Part 2 (1965–80) focuses on the activism of three Western women challenging herbicide spraying in response to various environmental challenges. These chapters shift from the transnational development, use, and protest over the Agent Orange herbicides during war to uses of the chemicals on public lands. There are several reasons for this regional case study approach. Carson examined the phenoxy herbicides in Silent Spring, highlighting the extensive use of the chemicals on rangelands in the West, where the chemicals like 2,4-D were used for brush control and timber management. While there were many other anti-toxic protests, some over the phenoxy herbicides, an examination of these three women/states provides a means to consider all the common domestic uses of the herbicides. A case study approach allows the examination of what part the phenoxy herbicides played in large-scale government projects and private enterprises to increase water supplies, control fires, and increase agricultural and timber yields. Influenced by Carson, print media played an important part in each woman’s activism as they wrote books and newsletters to alert the public. The women also formed the backbone of a loose environmental activist network motivated specifically by chemical contamination. In the process they challenged the US government’s chemical regulatory policies, practices, agencies, and authority.

Chapter 4 looks at Arizona and the constant need for water in the western United States. The US Forest Service used the phenoxy herbicides to increase water runoff in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, in part to service the water needs of the expanding Phoenix metropolitan area. One local woman, Billee Shoecraft, was exposed to the chemical spray, along with other community members, and led community organizing and protests. Chapter 5 examines the state of California, where the phenoxy herbicides were used for a variety of purposes, including brush control in Southern California, agricultural use in the Central Valley, and forest access in Northern California. Longtime activist, consumer reporter Ida Honorof used her weekly radio broadcast on progressive station KPFK 90.7 and a monthly newsletter to inform the public about the chemical hazards present throughout the California landscape. Chapter 6 shifts to Oregon, where the phenoxy herbicides were used by road crews to make forests accessible, and by the timber industry to increase more profitable kinds of timber stock. Here, Carol Van Strum and her family, who had moved to western Oregon as a part of the postwar back-to-the-land movement, were directly exposed to the herbicides. The Van Strums helped organize a community response to the routine roadside and aerial spraying. In the process of challenging the chemical and timber industries and Forest Service, Van Strum argued for a new approach to chemical regulation.

Part 3 (1970–95) looks at the phenoxy herbicides’ continuing toxic legacies. The concluding chapters examine the protests of new groups of citizens dealing with the toxic legacies of the phenoxy herbicides. President Richard Nixon, responding to fears of addicted soldiers returning from Vietnam, declared a war on drugs in 1971, a war dependent on chemical herbicides. These same veterans protested their exposure to those same chemicals, anxious about the potential harm done to Vietnamese and American children. The concluding chapters consider the role the phenoxy herbicides played in controlling counterculture protests, deepening veterans’ disillusionment, and the growing awareness that the routine use of chemicals harmed vulnerable populations. In the process, these protests challenged official narratives of chemical safety.

Chapter 7 examines the use of the chemicals to attack the counterculture, one site of resistance to the political consensus in general, and Nixon’s policies and activities in specific. What has been called the herbicide wars arose when residents who embodied a new environmental consciousness moved into longtime farming and ranching communities in Northern California and began challenging local practices though greater environmental regulation. Chapter 8 focuses on another group that began challenging the safety of the phenoxy herbicides in the late 1970s, American Vietnam veterans. The claim that Agent Orange had hurt veterans’ health launched a class action suit and empowered veterans’ groups. Chapter 9 considers the unexpected casualties of chemical use in warfare and peacetime—children. The conviction that exposure to the phenoxy herbicides had caused the birth defects and illnesses experienced by their children haunted veterans, farmworkers, and Vietnamese families and motivated their efforts to stop the continued use of the chemicals. These citizens challenged industry and government interests and sought restitution for the consequences of environmental degradation and harm to human health.

Before phenoxy herbicides’ widespread domestic, and later wartime, use, scientists had approached them with caution. A 1942 Science news update discussing a newly identified group of chemicals known as plant hormones noted the need for further research. The question was whether this new category of chemicals, these growth regulators, would harm crops, or if their actions might promote growth and even be added to fertilizers. The news brief ended with the observation, The idea would be good, but the results might be disastrous.¹⁴ Uncertainty abounds in science and is what scientists attempt to resolve. Chemists conduct their science primarily within a laboratory setting and usually under carefully controlled field tests. Biologists, especially ecologists, practice under much more chaotic circumstances as they try to understand nature’s unruly complexity.¹⁵ Like many of the activists who appear within these pages, this book was inspired by Carson’s love and advocacy for the natural world, and the challenges Carson’s work offered to ideas of science, knowledge, decision making, informed consent, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. This book recovers the stories of successful, failed, and uneven outcomes of citizen activism and engagement in the democratic process. I hope these stories about the struggles to hold government and business responsible for people’s health and well-being remind us of past wrongs and suggest ways to better address them in the future.

PART ONE

The Origins of the Phenoxy Herbicide Uses and Protests, 1940–70

Part 1 examines the initial development and use of, and eventual protests over, a new category of chemicals that were found to selectively inhibit the growth of plants, many of which were considered weeds. The phenoxy herbicides —2,4-D and 2,4,5-T—started out as potential chemical agents to be sprayed on enemy crops in World War II. The commercial manufacture and sale of the herbicides began in 1946, and the herbicides saw widespread use across the United States in deserted urban lots, in agricultural fields, and eventually for brush control in fires and to improve timber stock. The enthusiastic responses to