ON A RAINY SPRING DAY LONG AFTER JOSEPH HICKEY HAD died, an associate recalled how the wildlife professor had wept about the suppression of some of his early research on DDT. Sitting in a café not far from the UW–Madison campus, Gene Roark sipped coffee and tugged on his gray goatee as he revisited events that took place when he was a young man.
Roark, who later went on to work as a communications specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and become a longtime Wisconsin conservation leader,1 was harking back to what happened one day in 1959 in Hickey’s office. Roark was a journalism graduate student and graduate assistant in the university’s news service office, where his duties included covering natural resources issues. “Hickey wept that day as we talked,” recalled Roark. “He had all this research about the impact of DDT on birds. But his work was being suppressed. The Agriculture College was in complete denial. Of course, the university was spraying DDT to protect its historic elms from the beetle, and there were dead robins everywhere.”2
Hickey was a frustrated professor and researcher in the Department of Wildlife Management in the College of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “He literally said, ‘I can’t let you publicize this, under orders of the dean,’” Roark recalled.
The research Roark was referring to had been done by Hickey and a graduate student, Barry Hunt, and focused on the effects of DDT spraying on songbird populations. One of their research sites was the University of Wisconsin. Years later, Hickey recalled the events: “They used tons of DDT. There were robins dying all over the place. Even our screech owls died. The screech owls died only after rainstorms, when the rains force the earthworms up. We found the cuticles of the worms in the screech owls’ stomachs.”3 It was an important link. Earthworms accumulated DDT from the soil around trees that had been sprayed. Screech owls, well named for their tremulous wails, are among the smallest in the owl family, and their cosmopolitan diets include invertebrates like worms. The cuticles—the tough, protective outer layer of worms—would have taken longer to digest.
Joseph Hickey’s interest in birds began when he was a boy growing up in the Bronx and continued throughout his life. A professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the Wisconsin DDT hearing, Hickey’s research on eggshell thinning caused by DDT in certain bird species was pivotal in efforts to ban the pesticide. Courtesy of Susan Nehls
Hickey and Hunt found that robin mortality on the Madison campus was about 90 percent. Hunt had also been conducting bird censuses in other Wisconsin communities—some that had sprayed DDT, some that had not. The research showed that the density of songbirds in these communities was inversely proportional to the number of trees per acre sprayed with DDT. “In other words, if they had only one tree the density was only lightly reduced, but if it had 10 trees, it was essentially a silent spring. So we saw a silent spring in the spring of 1959,” Hickey would recall years later.
Hickey’s comments show how the drama surrounding DDT played out step by step, like the pages of a mystery novel. In 1959, Hickey and other scientists had yet to make the full leap from the acute toxicity that killed songbirds to recognizing its buildup in the food chain, which was already decimating raptors and other species.
But even in 1959, the academic differences at the University of Wisconsin were distinctly marked. Indeed, the voices of some of Hickey’s College of Agriculture colleagues were being heard on the use of DDT and had been heard for years. Most who spoke felt DDT was necessary and valuable. It is not surprising that much of the college’s faculty leaned in this direction. The College of Agriculture, like none other on campus, worked closely with the agricultural sector to support the state’s bedrock industry. The school’s researchers were focused on feeding a growing population and relying on an array of modern tools, many only introduced after World War II. From their perspective, DDT was essential for use on crops. It was a broad-spectrum pesticide that could be used to fight a number of insect pests, and it was less expensive than alternatives. The college was also on the receiving end of money from chemical companies and agricultural interests for research.
The college’s entomology department held more than its share of DDT proponents. One was Ellsworth Fisher, who was steadfast in his belief that DDT was an important weapon in the pest-control arsenal. Fisher and C. L. Fluke, another economic entomologist in the college, were authors of a special circular, “DDT: Its Present Uses and Limitations,” published by the College of Agriculture’s Extension Service in 1945.
The publication alternated between advising caution and encouraging use of the newly introduced chemical. On some matters, it was quite clear: “It is safe to recommend the use of DDT in specific preparations for the control of most flies that frequent the house and barn, mosquitoes, most cockroaches, some ants, fleas, sand flies, bedbugs, lice, and brown dog ticks.”4 Given the Extension Service’s mission of extending the university’s resources to all citizens, the circular most certainly found its way into extension offices across the state, including in Brown County, where Jerry Apps was presented with a basket of dead robins and a question about why DDT was being recommended.
While citing the reason DDT was valuable, the entomologists unwittingly indicted it in the same circular: “The chief advantage of DDT is in its ability to remain toxic on a sprayed or dusted surface for days and even months, depending upon conditions.” Still, they advised caution, since “there are yet numerous problems to be solved especially as to its effects upon man, livestock, pets, food plants, beneficial insects, wildlife, and soil organisms which are beneficial to man in aiding better crop production.”
Fisher continued advocating for DDT use even as new information on its impacts became available. He would testify in support of it at the DNR hearing, almost a quarter century after the extension circular made its rounds, and he also sat through the hearing with the Task Force for DDT, the advisory group of the National Agricultural Chemicals Association that intervened in the Madison case.5
Fisher was by no means alone, but many others in the college declined to get into the public fray—or at least declined to be named. Attributed or not, sentiments within the entomology department erupted in 1962, when WHA Radio, the flagship of the state public radio network, brought Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring to its listening audience.
Karl Schmidt, host of “Chapter A Day,” read the book over the air. Schmidt was no stranger to DDT. He and others in his Madison neighborhood had already protested the city’s spraying of DDT by helicopter.6
The reaction to “Chapter A Day” was anything but silent. Schmidt and his bosses at WHA fielded a slew of complaints.
Schmidt responded to the controversy by hosting a panel discussion, “Insecticides and People,” in Madison in November 1962. Professors on the panel included botanists Hugh Iltis and Grant Cottam,7 limnologist Arthur Hasler, chemist Aaron Ihde, medical geneticist James F. Crow, and biochemist Van R. Potter.8
None of the panelists came from the College of Agriculture. The discussion clearly leaned in the direction of defending Silent Spring and warning about overuse of broad-spectrum and persistent pesticides such as DDT.
The College of Agriculture Department of Entomology complained, leading to a subsequent forum, “The Use of Pesticides,” moderated by Ira Baldwin. Baldwin is a captivating figure in his own right, having served as scientific director of the US biological weapons program during World War II, where the focus was on how to turn anthrax and botulinum toxin into weapons of mass destruction. In 1960, he had chaired a committee of the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council that studied the use of pesticides and concluded that the benefits of DDT outweighed its risks. In the midst of that study, he was asked by Science magazine to review Silent Spring. He did so in the September 1962 issue, claiming that Carson chose to be the “prosecuting attorney” and thus failed to present both sides to the issue.9
Baldwin’s panel of entomology, oncology, wildlife management, and zoology faculty wasn’t enough to settle the score in the eyes of the entomology department. The department issued a cover letter written by Chairman Robert Dicke and a blistering eighteen-page critique charging that Schmidt and WHA had violated station policies under which it operated by the authority of the UW Board of Regents, “ignoring their responsibility toward programming in areas of ‘special interest.’” As for the “Insecticides and People” panelists, the critique named the men, noting “none of whom is competent in the field of pesticides.” The letter went on to say, “We are disturbed by the continuing spread, from this campus, of false and misleading information in our field. We, who have collectively over 200 years of experience in the study of insecticides, regret that it has become necessary to correct some of the more glaring, misleading and erroneous statements broadcast over the state network.” It was the entomology department’s belief that WHA staff had “directed its efforts entirely to present the Carson story of pesticide dangers as an authentic, scientific document without notifying or consulting with the appropriate departments.” As a result, they added, “Our considered opinion to ignore Silent Spring, as it deserves, has been thwarted by the actions of the University of Wisconsin personnel who are neither trained nor skilled in the field of pesticides, primarily by the staff of WHA and especially Karl Schmidt.”10
Members of the “Insecticides and People” panel fired back, writing letters to Dicke and H. B. McCarthy, director of the Division of Radio-Television Education at the university. In his letter, Iltis accused the Department of Entomology of “an attempt at censorship by one department of the opinions and concerns of scientists in other departments with which they do not agree.”11
The battle was on, and it would continue for the next several years as Wisconsin’s DDT story unfolded. An exchange between College of Agriculture dean Glenn Pound and Wisconsin Conservation Department director Lester Voigt shows how the battle lines had formed. Pound, dean during much of the DDT debate, steadfastly maintained that the college took no official position on the chemical. But his back-and-forth correspondence with Voigt shows he wasn’t about to back down on the topic, either.12
In a December 14, 1966, letter, Voigt politely but firmly criticized the College of Agriculture for its sponsorship of the Wisconsin Shade Tree Conference and the annual Pesticide Conference with Industry, which presented what he deemed “a one-sided approach to the total problems as related to environmental pollution and especially side effects on fish and wildlife.”
Pointing to his department’s concerns about DDT concentrations in Wisconsin waterways and other warnings about pesticide residues, Voigt added, “It is inconceivable that this mass of evidence and obvious reasons for concern by all conscientious citizens can be ignored—or should be hidden—from individuals attending conferences sponsored by the College of Agriculture.”
Voigt believed that the conference bias had wide-ranging effects. “Because of this incomplete and one-sided approach to a problem with serious ecological implications to our entire environment, we now have a movement toward increased use of DDT by many communities.”
Pound responded on February 2, 1967, relating that faculty and staff had met to discuss Voigt’s concerns, which he termed “rather strong indictments of our public programs.” He noted: “Our scientists made it very clear to me that their concept of a program for Dutch Elm disease control is not totally a DDT program” and that “it is only under certain conditions involving the time of the year and the number of trees to be protected that DDT spraying is recommended as the only feasible method to secure satisfactory control.” He added that Wisconsin Conservation Department engineer Laurence Motl was in fact given an opportunity to present his views at the Wisconsin Shade Tree Conference.
That elicited a three-page letter from Voigt. In his February 16 response, he pointed out that his criticism of information provided at the conference came “because the Conservation Department has made great effort to minimize the use of DDT, particularly in connection with its spring usage for Dutch elm disease control” and acknowledged that the department had made “considerable progress in this direction last year.” He noted that after the conference “a number of large municipalities have informed us that they have gone back to the use of DDT for spring spraying and that they intend to continue its usage.”
As for Motl, Voigt wrote that Motl’s sense was that his participation in the conference would have been extremely limited, noting, “Mr. Motl assures me that there was no provision for such presentation except that he would have stood up from the floor and forcibly announced Conservation Department policies contrary to the tone of the conference.”
Voigt noted in his communications that the official position of the Conservation Department concerning the use of DDT was of great interest to the general public because the department had the responsibility of issuing permits for pesticide use by municipalities. Voigt went on to say: “It has been a recognized tradition of the university for a great many years to encourage the ‘winnowing and sifting’ of factual information in an effort to discover the truth, whatever that may be. I believe the impression given to most all who attended the conference was that the information was all in favor of DDT usage and no information was presented representative of objections to its use.”
Pound’s April 25 reply was: “I should like to make it very clear that the College of Agriculture has no ‘official position’ on Dutch Elm disease control. Our scientists assure me that we have given adequate recognition of the hazards in usage of DDT for Dutch Elm disease control and their public service programs have presented a comprehensive view of Dutch Elm disease control. I must, therefore, reject your inference that we have failed to encourage the ‘winnowing and sifting’ process by which the truth is found.”
But Pound was juggling a hot potato. In a November 11, 1966, speech in Washington, DC, he had said, “We have too much indiscriminate and unilateral use of agricultural pesticides. We in agriculture can no longer let commodity production be our only relationship to pesticides. We must become deeply involved in ecological and sociological relationships.”13
Joseph Hickey was doing his own sifting and winnowing as he learned more about DDT. He had remained relatively quiet during the early 1960s. But by 1964, as research began to show the connection between chronic exposure to DDT and the population declines of peregrine falcons and a number of other bird species, he saw the need for a conference to pull the disparate research together. The international conference on peregrine falcon populations would be held in Madison in 1965, and Hickey recounted later how he had trouble finding funding to bring together scientists from two continents to share their information. A donation of more than eight thousand dollars from the National Audubon Society made it possible, and he speculated that his longtime friend Roger Tory Peterson—an Audubon board member—probably engineered the donation.
That Hickey endured difficulties in the College of Agriculture is clear. That he chose to remain relatively quiet until he had his research in order, to the chagrin of friends and colleagues like Peterson, is also clear. Two things are obvious: He gained confidence as his own research coalesced with that of respected colleagues. And once there was the data behind him, Hickey would become a fearless if reluctant warrior. Dan Anderson, a Hickey graduate student who played a key role in locking down the crucial data on eggshell thinning as the cause of steep population declines in raptors and other bird species, was surprised years after the fact to hear of Roark’s story of Hickey weeping. “Joe probably got over that pretty fast,” Anderson recalled. “The Joe I knew wouldn’t back down.”14
But there was no doubt that scientists who pushed the envelope on DDT encountered academic isolation.
Anderson, who would land a job at University of California, Davis, as a professor of wildlife biology—despite being referred to as “that egg shell son of a bitch” by one of the faculty members—recounted the experience of his colleague, University of California, Davis, zoologist Robert Rudd. Work by Rudd at Clear Lake, California, in the 1960s showed the impact of DDT on fish-eating western grebes. “He was persecuted and shunned so bad,” Anderson said. Undeterred, Rudd ended up being a key witness at the Wisconsin DNR hearing and wrote Pesticides and the Living Landscape, an important work published in 1964 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Charles Wurster, Environmental Defense Fund cofounder and biologist/biochemist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, recalled a similar fate for combining his academic duties and civic activism. “I wasn’t promoted to full professor. I was an associate professor, and my salary was kept low.” He retired in 1996. Chuckling, he later noted the irony, “In 2009, the State University of New York, of all things, awarded me an honorary doctor of science degree.”15
Joseph Hickey never said much about his own struggles. His papers include no direct references to any personal difficulties.
But as tributes rolled out after Hickey’s death in 1993, so did long-held secrets. Bill Foster, a friend and professor in the UW–Madison School of Law who chased bird-watching lists with Hickey, was most direct. In remarks at Hickey’s memorial service, Foster recalled the days after Silent Spring was published. He noted, “From the College of Agriculture at Wisconsin, criticism of Miss Carson was quick to come and harsh: She was an irresponsible fear-monger, utterly without proof that these chemicals caused the harms she suspected. . . . WHA, the university’s public radio station, soon discovered that Joe Hickey was, quite literally, the only member of the Ag School faculty who would appear on the air in defense of Miss Carson. Her critics landed on him: Where are your proofs that Miss Carson is right? You have none and you are as irresponsible as she.”16
Recalling his friend’s fielding of such criticism, Foster said, “Joe’s response was that the critics couldn’t prove their case, either—and evidence suggesting links between these chemicals and harm was mounting. On our list-chasing trips these days, Joe spoke of his loneliness in the Ag School.”
In many ways, Joseph Hickey was misplaced in the College of Agriculture. Wildlife management had little directly to do with agriculture, but natural resources programs sometimes found themselves in those settings in the mid-twentieth century. As the story played out, Hickey found collaborators elsewhere at the university: Hugh Iltis and Orie Loucks, another botanist, would join Hickey as members of the Citizens Natural Resources Association. Both were members of the College of Letters and Science.
The differences between the two colleges—Agriculture and Letters and Science—would be a subplot throughout the DDT battles. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Many of those in the College of Agriculture were charged with improving efficiency and crop production, which was assisted by chemicals. Those in Letters and Science were intensely interested in ecological science: the relationships living organisms have with the environment. Other influences were noted, too. “What was different at the College of Letters and Science was there was a fair sprinkling of people who admired Aldo Leopold,” Loucks recalled. “He had been dead twenty years, and, although his book was not national then, he was very respected.”17
In the mid- to late 1960s, the tension over the activities of scientists such as Hickey, Iltis, and Loucks was palpable at the university. But years later, when looking back on that time, Loucks said he believed that the University of Wisconsin was one of the few schools in the nation where citizen scientists could work with any measure of security. He recalled colleagues at other universities losing their jobs over involvement in contentious issues.
Victor Yannacone, the fiery EDF attorney who would come to Wisconsin for the DDT hearing, agreed. “Wisconsin was one of the few places that hearing could have taken place,” he recalled. “The political climate there was right for it.”18