Part 9 :The Underground History Of American Education...The Empty Child

The Underground History Of American Education

By John Taylor Gatto

Chapter Thirteen 

The Empty Child 

Walden Two (1948) B.F. Skinner. This utopist is a psychologist, inventor of a mechanical baby-tender, presently engaged on experiments testing the habit capacities of pigeons. Halfway through this contemporary utopia, the reader may feel sure, as we did, that this is a beautifully ironic satire on what has been called "behavioral engineering".... Of all the dictatorships espoused by utopists, this is the most profound....The citizen of this ideal society is placed during his first year in a sterile cubicle, wherein the conditioning begins.... In conclusion, the perpetrator of this "modern" utopia looks down from a nearby hill of the community which is his handiwork and proclaims: "I like to play God!" 

— Negley and Patrick, The Quest For Utopia 

Miss Skinner Sleeps Scientifically 

At the university people used to call Kings College before the American Revolution, I lived for a time under a psychological regime called behaviorism in the last golden moments before Mind Science took over American schooling. At Columbia, I was in on the transformation without ever knowing it. By the time it happened, I had shape-shifted into a schoolteacher, assigned to spend my adult life as a technician in the human rat cage we call public education. 

Although I may flatter myself, for one brief instant I think I was the summer favorite of Dr. Fred S. Keller at Columbia, a leading behaviorist of the late 1950s whose own college textbook was dedicated to his mentor, B.F. Skinner, that most famous of all behaviorists from Harvard. Skinner was then rearing his own infant daughter in a closed container with a window, much like keeping a baby in an aquarium, a device somewhat misdescribed in the famous article "Baby in a Box," (Ladies Home Journal, September 28, 1945). 

Italian parents giving their own children a glass of wine in those days might have ended up in jail and their children in foster care, but what Skinner did was perfectly legal. For all I know, it still is. What happened to Miss Skinner? Apparently she was eventually sent to a famous progressive school the very opposite of a rat-conditioning cage, and grew up to be an artist. 

Speaking of boxes, Skinner commanded boxes of legal tender lecturing and consulting with business executives on the secrets of mass behavior he had presumably learned by watching trapped rats. From a marketing standpoint, the hardest task the rising field of behavioral psychology had in peddling its wares was masking its basic stimulus-response message (albeit one with a tiny twist) in enough different ways to justify calling behaviorism "a school." Fat consultancies were beginning to be available in the postwar years, but the total lore of behaviorism could be learned in about a day, so its embarrassing thinness required fast footwork to conceal. Being a behaviorist then would hardly have taxed the intellect of a parking lot attendant; it still doesn’t. 

In those days, the U.S. Government was buying heavily into these not-so-secret secrets, as if anticipating that needy moment scheduled to arrive at the end of the twentieth century when Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies would write for Harper’s in a voice freighted with doom: 

The problem is starkly simple. An astonishingly large and increasing number of human beings are not needed or wanted to make the goods or provide the services that the paying customers of the world can afford. 

In the decades prior to this Malthusian assessment, a whole psychological Institute for Social Cookery sprang up like a toadstool in the United States to offer recipe books for America’s future. Even then they knew that 80 percent of the next generation was neither needed nor wanted. Remedies had to be found to dispose of the menace psychologically. 

Skinner had wonderful recipes, better than anyone’s. Not surprisingly, his procedures possessed a vague familiarity to readers listed in the Blue Book or the Social Register, people whose culture made them familiar with the training of dogs and falcons. Skinner had recipes for bed wetting, for interpersonal success, for management of labor, for hugging, for decision-making. His industrial group prepackaged hypotheses to train anyone for any situation. By 1957, his machines constituted the psychological technology of choice in institutions with helpless populations: juvenile detention centers, homes for the retarded, homes for wayward mothers, adoption agencies, orphan asylums— everywhere the image of childhood was most debased. The pot of gold at the end of Skinner’s rainbow was School. 

Behaviorism’s main psychological rival in 1957 was psychoanalysis, but this rival had lost momentum by the time big government checks were available to buy psychological services. There were many demerits against psychoanalysis: its primitive narrative theory, besides sounding weird, had a desperate time proving anything statistically. Its basic technique required simple data to be elaborated beyond the bounds of credibility. Even where that was tolerable, it was useless in a modern school setting built around a simulacrum of precision in labeling. 

Social learning theorists, many academic psychiatrists, anthropologists, or other specialists identified with a university or famous institution like the Mayo Clinic, were behaviorism’s closest cash competition. But behind the complex exterior webs they wove about social behavior, all were really behaviorists at heart. Though they spun theory in the mood of Rousseau, the payoff in each case came down to selling behavioral prescriptions to the policy classes. Their instincts might lead them into lyrical flights that could link rock falls in the Crab Nebula to the fall of sparrows in Monongahela, but the bread and butter argument was that mass populations could be and should be controlled by the proper use of carrots and sticks. 

Another respectable rival for the crown behaviorism found itself holding after WWII was stage theory, which could vary from the poetic grammar of Erik Eriksson to the impenetrable mathematical tapestry of Jean Piaget, an exercise in chutzpah weaving the psychological destiny of mankind out of the testimony of less than two dozen bourgeois Swiss kids. Modest academic empires could be erected on allegiance to one stage theory or another, but there were so many they tended to get in each other’s way. Like sevenstep programs to lose weight and keep it off, stage theory provided friendly alternatives to training children like rats—but the more it came into direct competition with the misleading precision of Skinnerian psychology, the sillier its clay feet looked. 

All stage theory is embarrassingly culture-bound. Talk about the attention span of kids and suddenly you are forced to confront the fact that while eighteen-month-old Americans become restless after thirty seconds, Chinese of that age can closely watch a demonstration for five minutes. And while eight-year-old New Yorkers can barely tie their shoes, eight-year-old Amish put in a full work day on the family homestead. Even in a population apparently homogenous, stage theory can neither predict nor prescribe for individual cases. Stage theories sound right for the same reason astrological predictions do, but the disconnect between ideal narratives and reality becomes all too clear when you try to act on them. 

When stage theory was entering its own golden age in the late 1960s, behaviorism was already entrenched as the psychology of choice. The federal government’s BSTEP document and many similar initiatives to control teacher preparation had won the field for the stimulus-response business. So much money was pouring into psychological schooling from government/corporate sources, however, that rat psychologists couldn’t absorb it all. A foot-in-the-door opportunity presented itself, which stage theorists scrambled to seize. 

The controlling metaphor of all scientific stage theories is not, like behaviorism’s, that people are built like machinery, but that they grow like vegetables. Kinder requires garten, an easy sell to people sick of being treated like machinery. For all its seeming humanitarianism, stage theory is just another way to look beyond individuals to social class abstractions. If nobody possesses a singular spirit, then nobody has a sovereign personal destiny. Mother Teresa, Tolstoy, Hitler—they don’t signify for stage theory, though from time to time they are asked to stand as representatives of types. 

Behaviorists 

To understand empty child theory, you have to visit with behaviorists. Their meal ticket was hastily jerry-built by the advertising agency guru John Watson and by Edward Lee Thorndike, founder of educational psychology. Watson’s "Behaviorist Manifesto" (1913) promoted a then novel utilitarian psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior." Like much that passes for wisdom on the collegiate circuit, their baby was stitched together from the carcasses of older ideas. Behaviorism (Thorndike’s version, stillborn, was called "Connectionism") was a purified hybrid of Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory at Leipzig and Comte’s positivism broadcast in the pragmatic idiom of the Scottish common-sense philosophers. We needn’t trace all the dead body parts pasted together to sigh at the claim of an originality which isn’t there—reminiscent of Howard Gardner’s fashion as seer of multiple intelligence theory—an idea as ancient as the pyramids. 

Behaviorists read entrails; they spy on the movements of trapped and hopeless animals, usually rats or pigeons. This gives an advantage over other psychologists of standing on a pile of animal corpses as the emblem of their science. The study of learning is their chief occupation: how rats can be driven to run a maze or press a bar with the proper schedule of reward and punishment. Almost from the start they abjured the use of the terms reward and punishment, concluding that these beg the question. Who is to say what is rewarding except the subject? And the subject tells us more credibly with his future behavior than with his testimony. You can only tell whether a reward is truly rewarding from watching future behavior. This accurate little semantic curve ball allows a new discipline to grow around the terms "positive reinforcement" (reward) and "negative reinforcement" (punishment). 

Behavior to behaviorists is only what can be seen and measured; there is no inner life. Skinner added a wrinkle to the simpler idea of Pavlovian conditioning from which subsequent libraries of learned essays have been written, when he stated that the stimulus for behavior is usually generated internally. In his so-called "operant" conditioning, the stimulus is thus written with a small "s" rather than with a Pavlovian capital "S." So what? Just this: Skinner’s lowercase, internal "s" leaves a tiny hole for the ghost of free will to sneak through! 

Despite the furor this created in the world of academic psychology, the tempest in a teapot nature of lowercase/uppercase stimuli is revealed from Skinner’s further assertion that these mysterious internal stimuli of his can be perfectly controlled by manipulating exterior reinforcements according to proper schedules. In other words, even if you do have a will (not certain), your will is still perfectly programmable! You can be brought to love Big Brother all the same. 

The way I came to the attention of Dr. Keller’s teaching assistants was by writing a program to cause coeds to surrender their virginity behaviorally without realizing they had been scored, with an operant conditioning program. My blueprint delighted the assistants. Copies were prepared and sent informally to other colleges; one went, I believe, to Skinner himself. When I look back on my well-schooled self who played this stupid prank I’m disgusted, but it should serve as a warning how an army of grown-up children was and still is encouraged to experiment on each other as a form of higher-level modern thinking. An entire echelon of management has been trained in the habit of scientific pornography caught by the title of the Cole Porter song, "Anything Goes." 

Behaviorism has no built-in moral brakes to restrain it other than legal jeopardy. You hardly have to guess how irresistible this outlook was to cigarette companies, proprietary drug purveyors, market researchers, hustlers of white bread, bankers, stock salesmen, makers of extruded plastic knick-knacks, sugar brokers, and, of course, to men on horseback and heads of state. A short time after I began as a behaviorist, I quit, having seen enough of the ragged Eichmannesque crew at Columbia drawn like iron filings to this magnetic program which promised to simplify all the confusion of life into underlying schemes of reinforcement. 

Plasticity 

The worm lives in our initial conception of human nature. Are human beings to be trusted? With what reservations? To what degree? The official answer has lately been "not much," at least since the end of WWII. Christopher Lasch was able to locate some form of surveillance, apprehension, confinement, or other security procedure at the bottom of more than a fifth of the jobs in the United States. Presumably that’s because we don’t trust each other. Where could that mistrust have been learned? 

As we measure each other, we select a course to follow. A curriculum is a racecourse. How we lay it out is contingent on assumptions we make about the horses and spectators. So it is with school. Are children empty vessels? What do you think? I suspect not many parents look at their offspring as empty vessels because contradictory evidence accumulates from birth, but the whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty, or so plastic it’s the same thing. 

The commodification of childhood—making it a product which can be sold—demands a psychological frame in which kids can be molded. A handful of philosophers dominates modern thinking because they argue this idea, and in arguing it they open up possibilities to guide history to a conclusion in some perfected society. Are children empty? John Locke said they were in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: 

Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store...? To this I answer in one word, from Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. 

Are there no innate ideas? Does the mind lack capacities and powers of its own, being etched exclusively by sensory inputs? Locke apparently thought so, with only a few disclaimers so wispy they were abandoned by his standard bearers almost at once. Are minds blank like white paper, capable of accepting writing from whoever possesses the ink? Empty like a gas tank or a sugar bowl to be filled by anyone who can locate the filler-hole? Was John Watson right when he said in 1930: 

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, his penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. 

Do you find something attractive in that presumption of plasticity in human nature? So did Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, two of the century’s foremost applied behaviorists on the grand scale. Taylorism sought to manage by the control of physical movements and environments, but the behaviorists wanted more certainty than that, they wanted control of the inner life, too. A great many reflective analyses have placed our own two Roosevelt presidencies in the same broad category. 

The trouble in school arises from disagreement about what life is for. If we believe human beings have no unique personal essence, this question is meaningless, but even then you can’t get rid of the idea easily. Life commands your answer. You cannot refuse because your actions write your answer large for everyone to see, even if you don’t see it yourself. As you regard human nature, you will teach. Or as someone else regards it, you will teach. There aren’t any third ways. 

Is human nature empty? If it is, who claims a right to fill it? In such circumstances, what can "school" mean? 

If ever a situation was capable of revealing the exquisite power of metaphor to control our lives, this must be it. Are children empty? As helpless infants and dependent youth we lay exposed to the metaphors of our guardians; they colonize our spirit. 

Elasticity 

Among structural engineers, the terms plastic and elastic describe propensities of material; these are concepts which can also be brought to bear on the question whether human nature is built out of accidents of experience or whether there is some divine inner spark in all of us that makes each person unique and self-determining. As you decide, the schools which march forward from your decision are predestined. Immanuel Kant thought both conditions possible, a strong, continuous effort of will tipping the balance. 

In structural engineering, implications of the original builder/creator’s decision are inescapable; constructions like bridges and skyscrapers do have an inner nature given them by the materials chosen and the shapes imposed, an integrity long experience has allowed us to profile. The structure will defend this integrity, resisting wind stress, for example, which threatens to change its shape permanently. 

When stress increases dangerously as it would in a hurricane, the building material becomes elastic, surrendering part of its integrity temporarily to protect the rest, compromising to save its total character in the long run. When the wind abates the urge to resume the original shape becomes dominant and the bridge or building relaxes back to normal. A human analogy is that we remember who we are in school even when coerced to act like somebody else. In engineering, this integrity of memory is called elastic behavior. Actors practice deliberate elasticity and the Chechens or the Hmong express remarkable group elasticity. After violent stresses abate, they remember who they are. 

But another road exists. To end unbearable stress, material has a choice of surrendering its memory. Under continued stress, material can become plastic, losing its elasticity and changing its shape permanently. Watch your own kids as their schooling progresses. Are they like Chechens with a fierce personal integrity and an inner resilience? Or under the stress of the social laboratory of schooling, have they become plastic over time, kids you hardly recognize, kids who’ve lost their original integrity? 

In the collapse of a bridge or building in high wind, a decisive turning point is reached when the structure abandons its nature and becomes plastic. Trained observers can tell when elasticity is fading because prior to the moment of collapse, the structure cannot regain its original shape. It loses its spirit, taking on new and unexpected shapes in a struggle to resist further change. When this happens it is wordlessly crying HELP ME! HELP ME! just as so many kids did in all the schools in which I ever taught. 

The most important task I assigned myself as a schoolteacher was helping kids regain their integrity, but I lost many, their desperate, last-ditch resistance giving way, their integrity shattering before my horrified eyes. Look back in memory at your kids before first grade, then fast forward to seventh. Have they disintegrated into warring fragments divided against themselves? Don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s natural human development. 

If there are no absolutes, as pragmatists like Dewey assert, then human nature must be plastic. Then the spirit can be successfully deformed from its original shape and will have no sanctuary in which to resist institutional stamping. The Deweys further assert that human nature processed this way is able to perform efficiently what is asked of it later on by society. Escaping our original identity will actually improve most of us, they say. This is the basic hypothesis of utopia-building, that the structure of personhood can be broken and reformed again and again for the better. [yeah like Brandon's delusional build back better horses*#t dc]

Plasticity is the base on which scientific psychology must stand if it is to be prescriptive, and if not prescriptive, who needs it? Finding an aggressive, instrumental psychology associated with schooling is a sure sign empty-child attitudes aren’t far away. The notion of empty children has origins predating psychology, of course, but the most important engine reshaping American schools into socialization laboratories,1 after Wundt, was the widely publicized work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) who had been a student of Wundt at Leipzig. Pavlov won the Nobel in 1904, credited with discovering the conditioned reflex whereby systems of physical function thought to be fixed biologically, like the salivation of dogs, could be rewired to irrelevant outside stimuli, like bells ringing. 

This had immense influence on the spread of behavioral psychology into government agencies and corporate boardrooms, for it seemed to herald the discovery of master wiring diagrams which could eventually bring the entire population under control of physiological psychology. 

Pavlov became the most prestigious ally of the behavioral enterprise with his Nobel. His text The Conditioned Reflexes (1926) provided a sacred document to be waved at skeptics, and his Russian nationality aided immeasurably, harmonizing well with the long romance American intellectuals had with the Soviet Union. Even today Pavlov is a name to conjure with. Russian revolutionary experimentation allowed the testing of what was possible to go much further and faster than could have happened in America and western Europe. 

Notions of emptiness turn the pedestrian problem of basic skills schooling into the complex political question of which outside agencies with particular agendas to impose will be allowed to write the curriculum. And there are nuances. For instance, the old fashioned idea of an empty container suggests a hollow to be filled, an approach not unfamiliar to people who went to school before 1960. But plastic emptiness is a different matter. It might lead to an armory of tricks designed to fix, distract, and motivate the subject to cooperate in its own transformation—the new style commonly found in public schools after 1960. The newer style has given rise to an intricately elaborated theory of incentives capable of assisting managers to work their agenda on the managed. Only a few years ago, almost every public-school teacher in the country had to submit a list of classroom motivation employed, to be inspected by school managers. 

1 The whole concept of "socialization" has been the subject of a large library of books and may be considered to occupy an honored role as one of the most important ongoing studies (and debates) in modern history. In shorthand, what socialization is concerned with from a political standpoint is the discovery and application of a system of domination which does not involve physical coercion. Coercion (as Hegel is thought to have proven) will inevitably provoke the formation of a formidable counter-force, in time overthrowing the coercive force. The fall of the Soviet Union might be taken as an object lesson. 

Before Hegel, for 250 years along with other institutions of that society the state church of England was a diligent student of socialization. The British landowning class was a great university of understanding how to proceed adversarially against restive groups without overt signs of intimidation, and the learnings of this class were transmitted to America. For example, during the second great enclosure movement which ended in 1875, with half of all British agricultural land in the hands of just two thousand people, owners maintained social and political control over even the smallest everyday affairs of the countryside and village. Village halls were usually under control of the Church of England whose clergy were certifiably safe, its officials doubling as listening posts among the population. All accommodations suitable for meetings were under direct or indirect control of the landed interests. It was almost impossible for any sort of activity to take place unless it met with the approval of owners. 

Lacking a long tradition of upper-class solidarity, the United States had to distill lessons from England and elsewhere with a science of public opinion control whose ultimate base was the new schools. Still, before schooling could be brought efficiently to that purpose, much time had to pass during which other initiatives in socialization were tried. One of these, the control of print sources of information, is particularly instructive. 

After the Rockefeller disaster in the coal fields of southeastern Colorado in April of 1914, ordinary counter-publicity was insufficient to stem the tide of attacks on corporate America coming from mass circulation magazines such as Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, McClures’s, Everybody’s, Success, Hampton’s, Collier’s, The Arena, The Masses, and others. A counterattack was launched to destroy the effectiveness of the magazines: West Virginia Pulp and Paper bought McClure’s, Butterick Patterns bought Everybody’s, bankers folded Success by calling in its loans and ordered the editors of Collier’s to change its editorial policies, the distributor of Arena informed the publisher that unsold copies would no longer be returned, and Max Eastman’s Masses was doomed by the passage of legislation enabling the postmaster to remove any publication from the mails at his own discretion. Through these and similar measures, the press and magazines of the United States had been fairly effectively muzzled by 1915 with not a single printing press broken by labor goons. These midrange steps in the socialization of American society can best be seen as exposing the will to homogenize at work in this country once the entire economy had been corporatized. 

Emptiness: The Master Theory 

Conceptions of emptiness to be filled as the foundation metaphor of schooling are not confined to hollowness and plasticity, but also include theories of mechanism. De La Mettrie’s 2 Man a Machine vision from the Enlightenment, for instance, is evidence of an idea regularly recurring for millennia. If we are mechanisms, we must be predetermined, as Calvin said. Then the whole notion of "Education" is nonsensical. There is no independent inner essence to be drawn forth and developed. Only adjustments are possible, and if the contraption doesn’t work right, it should be junked. Everything important about machinery is superficial. 

This notion of machine emptiness has been the master theory of human nature since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It still takes turns in curriculum formation with theories of vegetable emptiness, plastic emptiness, systems emptiness and, from time to time, some good old-fashioned Lockean blank sheet emptiness. Nobody writes curriculum for self-determined spiritual individuals and expects to sell it in the public school market. 

This hardline empiricism descends to us most directly from Locke and Hume, who both said Mind lacks capacities and powers of its own. It has no innate contents. Everything etched there comes from simple sense impressions mixed and compounded. This chilly notion was greatly refined by the French ideologues 3 who thought the world so orderly and mechanical, the future course of history could be predicted on the basis of the position and velocity of molecules. For these men, the importance of human agency vanished entirely. With Napoleon, these ideas were given global reach a few years later. So seductive is this mechanical worldview it has proven itself immune to damage by facts which contradict it.4 

2 Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) was the earliest of the materialistic writers of the Enlightenment.His conclusion that religious thought was a physical disorder akin to fever forced him to flee France. In the middle of the eighteenth century his two master works, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, stated principles which are self-evident from the titles. The ethics of these principles are worked out in later essays. The purpose of life is to pleasure the senses, virtue is measured by self-love, the hope of the world lies in the spread of atheism. De La Mettrie was compelled to flee the Netherlands and accept the protection of Frederick of Prussia in 1748. The chief authority for his life is an eulogy entitled "The Elegy," written by Frederick II himself. 

3 Ideologue is a term coined by Antoine Destuit de Tracy around 1790 to describe those empiricists and rationalists concerned to establish a new order in the intellectual realm, eradicating the influence of religion, replacing it with universal education as the premier solution to the problem of reforming human shortcomings. They believed that Hume’s rationalized morality (after the methods of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and astronomy) was the best way to accomplish this. 

4 For instance, the serious problems encountered by mechanists in the nineteenth century when developments in electricity revealed a cornucopia of nonmechanical, non-gravitational forces and entities which eroded the classical conception of matter. In optics, the work of Young and Fresnel on diffraction and refraction made Newton’s particle theory of light untenable, yet it was still being taught in senior physics at Uniontown High School when I got there in the 1950s. The earth might move, but human nature only accepts the move when it suits human purposes. 

A Metaphysical Commitment 

At the core of every scientific research program (and forced schooling is the largest such program in history) lies a metaphysical commitment on which all decision-making rests. For instance, the perspective of which pedagogy and behavioral science are both latterday extensions rests on six pillars: 

1. The world is independent of thought. It is atomic in its basic constituents. 

2. The real properties of bodies are bulk, figure, texture, and motion. 

3. Time and Space are real entities; the latter is Euclidean in its properties. 

4. Mass is inert. Rest or uniform motion are equally "natural" conditions involving no consciousness. 

5. Gravitational attraction exists between all masses. 

6. Energy is conserved in interactions. 

There is no obvious procedure for establishing any of these principles as true. There is no obvious experimental disproof of them either, or any way to meet Karl Popper’s falsification requirement or Quine’s modification of it. Yet these religious principles, as much metaphysics as physics, constitute the backbone of the most powerful research program in modern history: Newtonian physics and its modern fellow travelers.5 

The psychology which most naturally emerges from a mechanical worldview is behaviorism, an outlook which dominates American school thinking. When you hear that classrooms have been psychologized, what the speaker usually means is that under the surface appearance of old-fashioned lessons what actually is underway is an experiment with human machines in a controlled setting. These experiments follow some predetermined program during which various "adjustments" are made as data feed back to the design engineers. In a psychologized classroom, teachers and common administrators are pedagogues, kept unaware of the significance of the processes they superintend. After a century of being on the outside, there is a strong tradition of indifference or outright cynicism about Ultimate Purpose among both groups. 

Behaviorism holds a fictionalist attitude toward intelligence: mind simply doesn’t exist. "Intelligence" is only behavioral shorthand for, "In condition A, player B will act in range C, D, and E rather than A, B and C." There is no substantive intelligence, only dynamic relationships with different settings and different dramatic ceremonies. 

The classic statement of behavioristic intelligence is E.G. Boring’s 1923 definition, "Intelligence is what an intelligence test measures." Echoes of Boring reverberate in Conant’s sterile definition of education as "what goes on in schools." Education is whatever schools say it is. This is a carry-over of Percy Bridgman’s 6 recommendation for an ultimate kind of simplification in physics sometimes known as operationalism (which gives us the familiar "operational definition"), e.g., Boring’s definition of intelligence. This project in science grew out of the positivistic project in philosophy which contends that all significant meaning lies on the surface of things. Positivism spurns any analysis of the deep structure underlying appearances. Psychological behaviorism is positivism applied to the conjecture that a science of behavior might be established. It’s a guess how things ought to work, not a science of how they do. 

B.F. Skinner’s 7 entire strategy of behavioral trickery designed to create beliefs, attitudes, and behavior patterns in whole societies is set down in Walden Two, a bizarre illustration of some presumed uses of emptiness, but also a summary of observations (all uncredited by Skinner) of earlier undertakings in psychological warfare, propaganda, advertising research, etc., including contributions from public relations, marketing, schooling, military experience, and animal training. Much that Skinner claimed as his own wasn’t even secondhand—it had been commonplace for centuries among philosophers. Perhaps all of it is no more than that. 

6 My discussion here is instructed by the lectures of Michael Matthews, philosopher of science. 

7 Physics professor, Harvard. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize. Perhaps the most influential American writer on the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. 

The Limits Of Behavioral Theory 

The multibillion dollar school-materials industry is stuffed with curriculum psychologized through application of behaviorist theory in its design and operation. What these kits are about is introducing various forms of external reinforcement into learning, based on the hypothesis the student is a stimulus-response machine. This surrender to questionable science fails its own test of rationality in the following ways. 

First and foremost, the materials don’t work dependably. Behavior can be affected, but fallout is often negative and daunting. The insubstantial metaphysics of Behaviorism leads it to radically simplify reality; the content of this psychology is then always being undermined by experience. 

Even some presumed core truths, e.g., "simple to complex, we learn to walk before we can run" (I’ve humanized the barbaric jargon of the field), are only half-truths whose application in a classroom provoke trouble. In suburban schools a slow chaos of boredom ensues from every behavioral program; in ghetto schools the boredom turns to violence. Even in better neighborhoods, the result of psychological manipulation is indifference, cynicism, and overall loss of respect for the pedagogical enterprise. Behavioral theory demands endless recorded observations and assessments in the face of mountainous evidence that interruptions and delays caused by such assessments create formidable obstacles to learning—and for many derail the possibility entirely. 

By stressing the importance of controlled experience and sensation as the building blocks of training, behaviorism reveals its inability to deal with the inconvenient truth that a huge portion of experience is conceptualized in language. Without mastery of language and metaphor, we are condemned to mystification. The inescapable reality is that behind the universality of abstraction, we have a particular language with a particular personality. It takes hard work to learn how to use it, harder work to learn how to protect yourself from the deceptive language of strangers. Even our earliest experience is mediated through language since the birth vault itself is not soundproof. 

Reality Engages The Banana 

Michael Matthews’ analysis of language as a primary behavior in itself will serve as an illustration of the holes in rat psychology. His subject is the simple banana.8 Contrary to the religion of behaviorism, we don’t experience bananas as soft, yellowish, mildly fibrous sense impressions. Instead, reality engages the banana in drama: "Food!", "Good for you!", "Swallow it down or I’ll beat you into jelly!" We learn rules about bananas (Don’t rub them in the carpet), futurity (Let’s have bananas again tomorrow), and value (These damn bananas cost an arm and a leg!). And we learn these things through words. 

When behaviorism pontificates that children should all "learn from experience," with the implication that books and intellectual concepts count for little, it exposes its own poverty. Behaviorism provides no way to quantify the overwhelming presence of language as the major experience of modern life for everyone, rich and poor. Behaviorism has to pretend words don’t really matter, only "behavior" (as it defines the term). 

To maintain that all knowledge is exclusively sense experience is actually not to say much at all, since sense experience is continuous and unstoppable as long as we are alive. That is like saying you need to breathe to stay alive or eat to prevent hunger. Who disagrees? The fascinating aspect of this psychological shell game lies in the self understanding of behavioral experts that they have nothing much to sell their clientele that a dog trainer wouldn’t peddle for pennies. The low instinct of this poor relative of philosophy has always been to preempt common knowledge and learning ways, translate the operations into argot, process them into an institutional form, then find customers to buy the result. 

There is no purpose down deep in any of these empty-child systems except the jigsaw puzzle addict’s purpose of making every piece FIT. Why don’t children learn to read in schools? Because it doesn’t matter in a behavioral universe. This goes far beyond a contest of many methods; it’s a contest of perspectives. Why should they read? We have too many smart people as it is. Only a few have any work worth doing. Only the logic of machinery and systems protects your girl and boy when you send them off to behavioral laboratories on the yellow behaviorist bus. Should systems care? They aren’t Mom and Dad, you know. 

8 While fact-checking the book in March 2003, I had occasion to contact Professor Matthews in Australia, who had no memory of ever using bananas in his scholarly prose! Fortunately, he found the reference in his works several days later and was gracious enough to contact me, or this lovely critique of psychobabble would have been lost to the Underground History. 

Programming The Empty Child 

To get an act of faith this unlikely off the ground there had to be some more potent vision than Skinner could provide, some evidence more compelling than reinforcement schedule data to inspire men of affairs to back the project. There had to be foundational visions for the scientific quest. One will have to stand for all, and the one I’ve selected for examination is among the most horrifyingly influential books ever to issue from a human pen, a rival in every way to Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management. The author was Jean Jacques Rousseau. The book, Emile, published in 1762. Whether Rousseau had given his own five children away to the foundling home before or after he wrote it, I can’t say for sure. Before, I’m told. 

Emile is a detailed account of the total transformation of a boy of ten under the precisely calculated behavioral ministrations of a psychological schoolmaster. Rousseau showed the world how to write on the empty child Locke had fathered; he supplied means by which Locke’s potent image could be converted to methodology. It took only a quarter century for Germans to catch on to the pick-and-shovel utility of dreamy Rousseau, only a little longer for Americans and English to do the same. Once Rousseau was fully digested, the temptation to see society’s children as human resources proved irresistible to those nations which had gone furthest in developing the mineral resource, coal, and its useful spirits, heat and steam. 

Rousseau’s influence over pedagogy began when empty child explanations of human nature came to dominate. With emotional religion, village life, local elites, and American tradition reeling from hammer blows of mass immigration, the nation was broadly transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century without much conscious public awareness of what was happening. 

One blueprint for the great transformation was Emile, an attempt to reestablish Eden using a procedure Rousseau called "negative education." Before the book gets to protagonist Emile, we are treated to this instructive vignette of an anonymous student: 

The poor child lets himself be taken away, he turned to look backward with regret, fell silent, and departed, his eyes swollen with tears he dared not shed and his heavy heart with the sigh he dared not exhale. 

Thus is the student victim led to the schoolmaster. What happens next is reassurance that such a scene will never claim Emile: 

Oh you [spoken to Emile] who have nothing similar to fear; you, for whom no time of life is a time of constraint or boredom; you, who look forward to the day without disquiet and to the night without impatience—come, my happy and good natured pupil, come and console us.9 

Look at Rousseau’s scene closely. Overlook its sexual innuendo and you notice the effusion is couched entirely in negatives. The teacher has no positive expectations at all; he promises an absence of pain, boredom, and ill-temper, just what Prozac delivers. Emile’s instructor says the boy likes him because he knows "he will never be a long time without distraction" and because "we never depend on each other." 

This idea of negation is striking. Nobody owes anybody anything; obligation and duty are illusions. Emile isn’t happy; he’s "the opposite of the unhappy child." Emile will learn "to commit himself to the habit of not contracting any habits." He will have no passionately held commitments, no outside interests, no enthusiasms, and no significant relationships other than with the tutor. He must void his memory of everything but the immediate moment, as children raised in adoption and foster care are prone to do. He is to feel, not think. He is to be emptied in preparation for his initiation as a mindless article of nature. 

The similarity of all this to a drugged state dawns on the critical reader. Emile is to find negative freedom—freedom from attachment, freedom from danger, freedom from duty and responsibility, etc. But Rousseau scrupulously avoids a question anybody might ask: What is this freedom for? What is its point? 

9 The creepy tone of this authorial voice reminded me of a similar modern voice used by a district school psychologist for the Londonderry, New Hampshire, public schools writing in an Education Week article, "Teacher as Therapist" (October 1995): 

"Welcome....We get a good feeling on entering this classroom.... M&M’s for every correct math problem [aren’t necessary]. A smile, on the other hand, a "Good Job!" or a pat on the back may be effective and all that is necessary. Smiling faces on papers (even at the high-level) with special recognition at the end of the week for the students with the most faces...can be powerful.... By setting appropriate expectations within a system of positive recognition and negative consequences, teachers become therapists." 

Dr. Watson Presumes 

Leapfrogging 163 years, Dr. John B. Watson, modern father of behaviorism, answered that question this way in the closing paragraphs of his Behaviorism (1925), when he appealed to parents to surrender quietly: 

I am trying to dangle a stimulus in front of you which if acted upon will gradually change this universe. For the universe will change if you bring your children up not in the freedom of the libertine, but in behavioristic freedom....Will not these children in turn with their better ways of living and thinking replace us as society, and in turn bring up their children in a still more scientific way, until the world finally becomes a place fit for human habitation? 

It was an offer School wasn’t about to let your kid refuse. Edna Heidbredder was the first insider to put the bell on this cat in a wonderful little book, Seven Psychologies (1933). A psychology professor from Minnesota, she described the advent of behaviorism this way seven decades ago: 

The simple fact is that American psychologists had grown restive under conventional restraints. They were finding the old problems lifeless and thin, they were "half sick of shadows" and...welcomed a plain, downright revolt. [Behaviorism] called upon its followers to fight an enemy who must be utterly destroyed, not merely to parley with one who might be induced to modify his ways. 

John B. Watson, a fast-buck huckster turned psychologist, issued this warning in 1919: The human creature is purely a stimulus-response machine. The notion of consciousness is a "useless and vicious" survival of medieval religious "superstition." Behaviorism does not "pretend to be disinterested psychology," it is "frankly" an applied science. Miss Heidbredder continues: "Behaviorism is distinctly interested in the welfare and salvation—the strictly secular salvation—of the human race." 

She saw behaviorism making "enormous conquests" of other psychologies through its "violence" and "steady infiltration" of the marketplace, figuring "in editorials, literary criticism, social and political discussions, and sermons.... Its program for bettering humanity by the most efficient methods of science has made an all but irresistible appeal to the attention of the American public." 

"It has become a crusade," she said, "against the enemies of science, much more than a mere school of psychology." It has "something of the character of a cult." Its adherents "are devoted to a cause; they are in possession of a truth." And the heart of that truth is "if human beings are to be improved we must recognize the importance of infancy," for in infancy "the student may see behavior in the making, may note the repertoire of reactions a human being has...and discover the ways in which they are modified...." (emphasis added) During the early years a child may be taught "fear," "defeat," and "surrender"—or of course their opposites. From "the standpoint of practical control" youth was the name of the game for this aggressive cult; it flowed like poisoned syrup into every nook and cranny of the economy, into advertising, public relations, packaging, radio, press, television in its dramatic programming, news programming, and public affairs shows, into military training, "psychological" warfare, and intelligence operations, but while all this was going on, selected tendrils from the same behavioral crusade snaked into the Federal Bureau of Education, state education departments, teacher training institutions, think tanks, and foundations. The movement was leveraged with astonishing amounts of business and government cash and other resources from the late 1950s onwards because the payoff it promised to deliver was vast. The prize: the colonization of the young before they had an opportunity to develop resistance. The holy grail of market research. 

Back to Rousseau’s Emile. When I left you hanging, you had just learned that Emile’s "liberty" was a well-regulated one. Rousseau hastens to warn us the teacher must take great pains to "hide from his student the laws that limit his freedom." It will not do for the subject to see the walls of his jail. Emile is happy because he thinks no chains are held on him by his teacher/facilitator. But he is wrong. In fact the tutor makes Emile entirely dependent on minuscule rewards and microscopic punishments, like changes in vocal tone. He programs Emile without the boy’s knowledge, boasting of this in asides to the reader. Emile is conditioned according to predetermined plan every minute, his instruction an ultimate form of invisible mind control. The goals of Rousseau’s educational plan are resignation, passivity, patience, and, the joker-in-the-deck, levelheadedness. Here is the very model for duplicitous pedagogy. 

This treating of pupils as guinea pigs became B.F. Skinner’s stock in trade. In a moment of candor he once claimed, "We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled nevertheless feel free, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system." Rousseau was Skinner’s tutor. 

1 The "problem" with English phonics has been wildly exaggerated, sometimes by sincere people but most often by those who make a living as guides through the supposed perils of learning to read. These latter constitute a vast commercial empire with linkages among state education departments, foundations, publishers, authors of school readers, press, magazines, education journals, university departments of education, professional organizations, teachers, reading specialists, local administrators, local school boards, various politicians who facilitate the process and the U.S. offices of education, defense and labor. 

2 Mitford Mathews, Teaching to Read Historically Considered (1966). A brief, intelligent history of reading. A number of other good treatments are available for the newcomer. 

Cleaning The Canvas 

Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make mind and character blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon. 

Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies reveals with great clarity how old the idea of tabula rasa (erroneously attributed to John Locke) actually is. In writing of Plato’s great utopia, The Republic, Popper shows Socrates telling auditors: "They will take as their canvas a city and the characters of men, and they will, first of all, make their canvas clean—by no means an easy matter....They will not start work on a city nor on an individual unless they are given a clean canvas, or have cleaned it themselves." (emphasis added) Popper continues: 

In the same spirit, Plato says in The Statesman of the royal rulers who rule in accordance with the royal science of statesmanship: "Whether they happen to rule by law or without law, over willing or unwilling subjects;...whether they purge the state for its good by killing or banishing some of its citizens—as long as they proceed according to science...this form of government must be declared the only one that is right." This is what canvas-cleaning means. He must eradicate existing institutions and traditions. He must purify, purge, expel, banish and kill. 

Canvas-cleaning frees the individual of all responsibility. Morality is voided, replaced by reinforcement schedules. In their most enlightened form, theories of a therapeutic community are those in which only positive reinforcements are prescribed. 

The therapeutic community is as close as your nearest public school. In the article "Teacher as Therapist" (footnote, pages 270–271), a glimpse of Emile programmed on a national scale is available. Its innocently garrulous author paints a landscape of therapy, openly identifying schools as behavioral training centers whose positive and negative reinforcement schedules are planned cooperatively in advance, and each teacher is a therapist. Here everything is planned down to the smallest "minimal recognition," nothing is accidental. Planned smiles or "stern looks," spontaneity is a weed to be exterminated—you will remember the injunction to draw smiling faces on every paper, "even at the high school level." 

An important support girder of therapeutic community is a conviction that social order can be maintained by inducing students to depend emotionally on the approval of teachers. Horace Mann was thoroughly familiar with this principle. Here are Mann’s words on the matter: 

When a difficult question has been put to a child, the Teacher approaches with a mingled look of concern and encouragement [even minimal recognition requires planning, here you have a primer of instructional text]; he stands before him, the light and shade of hope and fear alternately crossing his countenance. If the little wrestler triumphs, the Teacher felicitates him upon his success; perhaps seizes and shakes him by the hand in token congratulation; and when the difficulty has been formidable and the effort triumphant, I have seen Teacher catch up the child and embrace him, as though he were not able to contain his joy...and all this done so naturally and so unaffectedly as to excite no other feeling in the residue of the children than a desire, by the same means, to win the same caresses. (emphasis added) 

Children were to be "loved into submission; controlled with gestures, glances, tones of voice as if they were sensitive machinery." What this passes for today is humanistic education, but the term has virtually the same magnitude of disconnect from the historical humanism of the Erasmus/DeFeltre stripe (which honored the mind and truly free choice) as modern schooling is disconnected from any common understanding of the word education. 

Therapy As Curriculum 

To say that various psychologies dominate modern schooling is hardly to plow new ground. The tough thing to do is to show how that happened and why—and how the project progresses to its unseen goals. The Atlantic Monthly had this to say in April 1993: 

...schools have turned to therapeutic remediation. A growing proportion of many school budgets is devoted to counseling and other psychological services. The curriculum is becoming more therapeutic: children are taking courses in self-esteem, conflict resolution, and aggression management. Parental advisory groups are conscientiously debating alternative approaches to traditional school discipline, ranging from teacher training in mediation to the introduction of metal detectors and security guards in the schools. Schools are increasingly becoming emergency rooms of the emotions, devoted...to repairing hearts. What we are seeing....is the psychologization of American education. 

Two years before I ran across that Atlantic broadside, I encountered a different analysis in the financial magazine Forbes. I was surprised to discover Forbes had correctly tracked the closest inspiration for school psychologizing, both its aims and its techniques, to the pedagogy of China and the Soviet Union. Not similar practices and programs, mind you, identical ones. The great initial link with Russia, I knew, had been from the Wundtian Ivan Pavlov, but the Chinese connection was news to me. I was unaware then of John Dewey’s tenure there in the 1920s, and had given no thought, for that reason, to its possible significance: 

The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs...they are not isolated idiosyncrasies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers. Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through roleplaying assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao. 

The Forbes writer, Thomas Sowell, perhaps invoking the slave states in part to rouse the reader’s capitalist dander, could hardly have been aware himself how carefully industrial and institutional interest had seeded Russia, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands with the doctrine of psychological schooling long ago, nearly at the beginning of the century, and in Japan’s case even before that. All along we have harvested these experimental growths in foreign soil for what they seem to prove about people-shaping. 

For example, the current push for School-to-Work deep mines specific practices of the former Soviet Union, even to the point of using identical language from Soviet texts. School-to-Work was a project installed in Russia by Americans in the 1920s to test the advice of the nineteenth-century Swiss aristocrat von Fellenberg that manual labor should be combined with academic schooling. Fellenberg’s doctrine was a short-lived fad in this country in the 1830s, but ever after it had a place in the mind of certain men of affairs and social theorists. The opportunity afforded by Russia’s chaos after WWI seemed too promising to pass up. 

The New Thought Tide 

The great forced schooling plan even long ago was a global movement. Anatomizing its full scope is well beyond my power, but I can open your eyes partway to this poorly understood dimension of our pedagogy. Think of China, the Asian giant so prominently fixed now in headline news. Its revolution which ended the rule of emperors and empresses was conceived, planned, and paid for by Western money and intellectuals and by representatives of prominent families of business, media, and finance who followed the green flag of commerce there. 

This is a story abundantly related by others, but less well known is the role of ambitious Western ideologues like Bertrand Russell, who assumed a professorship at the University of Peking in 1920, and John Dewey, who lived there for two years during the 1920s. Men like this saw a unique chance to paint on a vast blank canvas as Cecil Rhodes had shown somewhat earlier in Africa could be done by only a bare handful of men. 

Listen to an early stage of the plan taken from a Columbia Teachers College text written in 1931. The author is John Childs, rising academic star, friend of Dewey. The book, Education and the Philosophy of Experimentalism: 

During the World War, a brilliant group of young Chinese thinkers launched a movement which soon became nationwide in its influence. This movement was called in Chinese the "Hsin Szu Ch’au" which literally translated means the "New Thought Tide." Because many features of New Thought Tide were similar to those of the earlier European awakening, it became popularly known in English as "The Chinese Renaissance."

While the sources of this intellectual and social movement were various, it is undoubtedly true that some of its most able leaders had been influenced profoundly by the ideas of John Dewey....They found intellectual tools almost ideally suited to their purposes in Dewey’s philosophy.... Among these tools...his view of the instrumental character of thought, his demand that all tradition, beliefs and institutions be tested continuously by their capacity to meet contemporary human needs, and his faith that the wholehearted use of the experimental attitude and method would achieve results in the social field similar to those already secured in the field of the natural sciences. 

At about the time of the close of the World War, Dewey visited China. For two years, through lectures, writing, and teaching, he gave in-person powerful reinforcement to the work of the Chinese Renaissance leaders. 

It’s sobering to think of sad-eyed John Dewey as a godfather of Maoist China, but that he certainly was. 

To Abolish Thinking 

Dewey’s Experimentalism 10 represented a new faith which was swallowed whole in Watson’s behaviorism. According to Childs, the unavowed aim of the triumphant psychology was "to abolish thinking, at least for the many; for if thinking were possible the few could do it for the rest." For Dewey as for the behaviorists, the notion of purpose was peculiarly suspect since the concept of conditioning seemed to obsolete the more romantic term. A psychological science born of physics was sufficient to explain everything. The only utopia behaviorism allowed was one in which the gathering of facts, statistical processing, and action based on research was allowed. 

It is tempting to bash (or worship) Dewey for high crimes (or high saintliness), depending on one’s politics, but a greater insight into the larger social process at work can be gained by considering him as an emblem of a new class of hired gun in America, the university intellectual whose prominence comes from a supposed independence and purity of motives but who simultaneously exists (most often unwittingly) as protégé, mouthpiece, and disguise for more powerful wills than his own. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are prime examples of the type in our own day. 

Dewey was determined his experimental subjects would be brought to actively participate in the ongoing experiments, not necessarily with their knowledge. All education was aimed at directing the responses of children. Orwell is really satirizing Deweyists and Fabians in his post-WWII dystopian nightmare, 1984, when Winston Smith’s execution is delayed until he can be brought to denounce the people he loves and to transfer his love to Big Brother. In Dewey’s world this is only bringing Smith into active participation. That it is in his own degradation is final proof that private purposes have been surrendered and the conditioning is complete. 

"[We] reject completely the hypothesis of choice. We consider the traditional doctrine of ‘free-will’ to be both intellectually untenable and practically undesirable," is the way Childs translates Dewey. The new systems theorists, experimentalists, and behaviorists are all Wundt’s children in regarding human life as a mechanical phenomenon.11 But they are polemicists, too. Notice Childs’ hint that even if free will were intellectually tenable, it would only cause trouble. 

10The best evidence of how intensely the zeitgeist worked on Dewey is found in the many mutations his philosophy underwent. After an early flirtation with phrenology, Dewey became a leader of the Young Hegelians while William Torrey Harris, the Hegelian, presided over the Federal Department of Education, then for a brief time was a fellow traveler with the Young Herbartians when that was voguish at Columbia Teachers. Soon, however, we find him standing in line of descent from Pierce and James as a pragmatist. Thereafter he launched Instrumentalism (crashed) and Experimentalism (crashed). And there were other attempts to build a movement. 

His long career is marked by confusion, vaunting ambition, and suspicious alliances with industrialists which earned him bitter enmity from his one-time acolyte, the brilliant radical Randolph Bourne. In retaliation against Bourne’s criticism, Dewey destroyed Bourne’s writing career by foreclosing his access to publication under threat that Dewey himself would not write for any magazine that carried Bourne’s work! 

11. The bleak notion of mechanism first appears unmistakably in recorded Western history in the Old Norse Religion as the theology of ancient Scandinavia is sometimes called. It is the only known major religion to have no ethical code other than pragmatism. What works is right. In Old Norse thinking, nothing was immortal, neither man nor gods; both were mere accidental conjunctions of heat and cold at the beginning of time—and they are destined to pass back into that state in an endless round. 

Old Norse establishes itself in England after the Norman Conquest, locating its brain center at Cambridge, particularly at College Emmanuel from which the Puritan colonization of New England was conceived, launched, and sustained. Old Norse was slowly scientized into rational religion (various unitarian colorations) over centuries. It transmuted into politics as well, particularly the form known in England and America as Whig. An amusing clue to that is found in the history of the brilliant Whig family of Russell which produced Bertrand and many more prominent names— the Russells trace their ancestry back to Thor. 

Understanding the characteristics of the Old Norse outlook in its rampant experimentalism and pragmatic nature allows us to see the road the five thousand year old civilization of China was put upon by its "New Thought Tide," and to understand how the relentlessly unsentimental caste system of Old Norse history could lead to this astonishing admission in 1908 at a National Education Association national convention: 

How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which...cannot possibly be fulfilled?....How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be leaders? Is human nature so constituted that those who fail will readily acquiesce in the success of their rivals? 

The speaker was a Russell, James Russell, dean of Columbia Teachers College. No pussy-footing there. 

The Old Norse character, despising the poor and the common, passes undiluted through Malthus’ famous essay (Second edition, 1803), in which he argues that famine, plague, and "other forms of destruction" should be visited on the poor. "In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses and court the return of the plague." No pussy-footing there, either. Over a century later in Woman and the New Race (1920), Margaret Sanger wrote, "the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it." Great Britain’s Prince Philip said that if he were reincarnated he would wish to return as "a killer virus to lower human population levels." Even the kindly oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau , writing in the UNESCO Courier, (November 1991) said "we must eliminate 350,000 people per day...This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation...is lamentable." The eugenic implications of this prescription go unremarked by Cousteau. Suppose you were among the inner circle of global policymakers and you shared these attitudes? Might you not work to realize them in the long-range management of children through curriculum, testing, and the procedural architectonics of schooling? 

Wundt! 

The great energy that drives modern schooling owes much to a current of influence arising out of the psychology laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in Saxony. With a stream of international assistants, Wundt set out to examine how the human machine was best adjusted. By 1880, he laid the basis for Pavlov’s work and the work of Watson in America, for the medical procedure of lobotomy, for electroshock therapy, and for the scientific view that school was a ground for social training, "socialization" in John Dewey’s terminology. 

Among Wundt’s principal assistants was the flamboyant American, G. Stanley Hall, who organized the psychology lab at Johns Hopkins in 1887, established the American Journal of Psychology, and saw to it that Sigmund Freud was brought to America for a debut here. Stanley Hall’s own star pupil at Hopkins was the Vermonter, John Dewey. Wundt’s first assistant, James McKeen Cattell, was also an American, eventually the patron saint of psychological testing here. He was also the chief promoter of something called "the sight-reading method," the dreadful fallout from which helped change the direction of American society. Cattell was the first "Professor of Psychology" so titled in all the world, reigning at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1894, he founded The Psychological Review. Over the next twenty-five years, he trained 344 doctoral candidates. In these stories and many others like them, the influence of Wundt and Prussia multiplied. Cattell later created the reference books Leaders in Education, American Men of Science, and The Directory of American Scholars and, for good measure, founded Popular Science, all of which boosted the stock of the infant discipline. 

Other Wundtian Ph.D.s in the United States included James Baldwin who set up the psych lab at Princeton, Andrew Armstrong who did the same at Wesleyan, Charles Judd who became director of education at the University of Chicago, and James Earl Russell, president of Teachers College at Columbia. There were many others. 

Russell’s Teachers College, the Rockefeller-sponsored, Prussian-inspired seminary on 120th Street in New York City, had a long reign dominating American pedagogy. By 1950, it had processed an unbelievable one-third of all presidents of teacher-training institutions, one-fifth of all American public schoolteachers, one-quarter of all superintendents. Thus the influence of Prussian thought dominated American school policy at a high level by 1914, and the Prussian tincture was virtually universal by 1930. 

Some parts of the country were more resistant to the dumbing down of curriculum and the psycho socializing of the classroom than others, but by a process of attrition Prussianization gained important beachheads year by year—through private foundation projects, textbook publishing, supervisory associations, and on through every aspect of school. The psychological manipulation of the child suggested by Plato had been investigated by Locke, raised to clinical status by Rousseau, refined into materialist method by Helvetius and Herbart, justified philosophically as the essential religion by Comte, and scientized by Wundt. One does not educate machines, one adjusts them. 

The peculiar undertaking of educational psychology was begun by Edward Thorndike of Teachers College in 1903. Thorndike, whose once famous puzzle box became the Skinner box of later behavioral psychology after minor modifications, was the protégé of Wundtians Judd and Armstrong at Wesleyan, taking his Ph.D. under Wundtian Cattell before being offered a post by Wundtian Russell at Teachers College. 

According to Thorndike, the aim of a teacher is to "produce and prevent certain responses," and the purpose of education is to promote "adjustment." In Elementary Principles of Education (1929), he urged the deconstruction of emphasis on "intellectual resources" for the young, advice that was largely taken. It was bad advice in light of modern brain research suggesting direct ties between the size and complexity of the brain and strenuous thought grappled with early on. 

Thorndike said intelligence was virtually set at birth—real change was impossible—a scientific pronouncement which helped to justify putting the brakes on ambitious curricula. But in the vitally important behavioral area—in beliefs, attitudes, and loyalties—Thorndike did not disappoint the empty-child crowd. In those areas so important to corporate and government health, children were to be as malleable as anyone could want them. An early ranking of school kids by intelligence would allow them to be separated into tracks for behavioral processing. Thorndike soon became a driving force in the growth of national testing, a new institution which would have consigned Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie to reform school and Edison to Special Education. Even before we got the actual test, Thorndike became a significant political ally of the semi covert sterilization campaign taking place in America. 

That pioneering eugenic program seemed socially beneficial to those casually aware of it, and it was enthusiastically championed by some genuine American legends like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. But if you find yourself nodding in agreement that morons have no business with babies, you might want to consider that according to Thorndike’s fellow psychologist H.H. Goddard at Princeton, 83 percent of all Jews and 79 percent of all Italians were in the mental defective class. The real difficulty with scientific psychology or other scientific social science is that it seems to be able to produce proof of anything on command, convincing proof, too, delivered by sincere men and women just trying to get along by going along. 

Napoleon Of Mind Science 

William James wrote in 1879: 

[Wundt] aims on being a Napoleon....Unfortunately he will never have a Waterloo....cut him up like a worm and each fragment crawls....you can’t kill him. 

From his laboratory in upper Saxony near the Prussian border, Wundt wrote 53,735 published pages in the sixty-eight years between 1853 and 1920, words which sculpted modern schooling, from a disorderly attempt to heighten human promise in individuals or to glorify God’s creation, into mandated psychological indoctrination. 

Wundt’s childhood was unrelieved by fun. He never played. He had no friends. He failed to find love in his family. From this austere forge, a Ph.D. emerged humorless, indefatigable, and aggressive. At his end he returned to the earth childless. Wundt is the senior psychologist in the history of psychology, says Boring: "Before him there was psychology but no psychologists, only philosophers." 

Coming out of the physiological tradition of psychophysics in Germany, Wundt followed the path of de La Mettrie, Condillac, and Descartes in France who argued, each in his own way, that what we think of as personality is only a collection of physiological facts. Humanity is an illusion. 

Wundt had a huge advantage over the mechanists before him. For him the time was right, all religious and romantic opposition in disarray, bewildered by the rapid onset of machinery into society. Over in England, Darwin’s brilliant cousin Francis Galton was vigorously promoting mathematical prediction into the status of a successful cult. In one short decade, bastions of a more ancient scholarly edifice were overrun by number crunchers. A bleak future suddenly loomed for men who remained unconvinced that any transcendental power was locked up in quantification of nature and humankind. 

The Pythagorean brotherhood was reseating itself inexorably in this great age of Wundt, the two in harmony as both contributed heavily to the centralization of things and to the tidal wave of scientific racism which drowned the university world for decades, culminating in the racial science station maintained on the old Astor estate in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, by Carnegie interests until the events of September 1939, caused it to quietly close its doors.12 Even at the beginning of the marriage of scholarship and statistics, its principals saw little need to broaden their investigations into real life, an ominous foreshadowing of the eugenical outlook that followed. 

A friendless, loveless, childless male German calling himself a psychologist set out, I think, to prove his human condition didn’t matter because feelings were only an aberration. His premises and methodology were imported into an expanding American system of child confinement and through that system disseminated to administrators, teachers, counselors, collegians, and the national consciousness. 

As Germany became the intellectuals’ darling of the moment at the end of the nineteenth century, a long-dead German philosopher, Kant’s successor at the University of Berlin, Johann Herbart, enjoyed a vogue in school-intoxicated America. "Herbartianism" is probably the first of a long line of pseudoscientific enthusiasms to sweep the halls of pedagogy. A good German, Herbart laid out with precision the famous Herbartian Five Step Program, not a dance but a psychologized teacher training program. By 1895, there was a National Herbartian Society to spread the good news, enrolling the likes of Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia and John Dewey. Herbart was finally laid to rest sometime before WWI when Dewey’s interest cooled, but his passage was a harbinger of many Herbart-oid enthusiasms to follow as a regular procession of educational gurus rose and fell with the fashion of the moment. The Moorish dance of scientific pedagogy accelerated its tempo relentlessly, and arms, legs, heads, perspiration, cries of venereal delight, and some anguish, too, mingled in the hypnotic whirl of laboratory dervishes. By 1910, Dewey was substituting his own five steps for Herbart’s in a book called How We Think. Few who read it noticed that a case was being made that we don’t actually think at all. Thinking was only an elusive kind of problem-solving behavior, called into being by dedicated activity; otherwise we are mindless. 

12 America’s academic romance with scientific racism, which led directly to mass sterilization experiments in this country, has been widely studied in Europe but is still little known even among the college-trained population here. An entire study can be made of the penetration of this notion—that the makeup of the species is and ought to be controllable by an elite—into every aspect of American school where it remains to this day. I would urge any reader with time and inclination to explore this matter to get Daniel J. Kevles’ In The Name of Eugenics where a thorough account and a thorough source bibliography are set down. This essay offers a disturbing discussion which should open your eyes to how ideas flow through modern society and inevitably are translated into schooling. Dr. Kevles is on the history faculty at California Institute of Technology. 

Oddly enough, on December 11, 1998, the New York Times front page carried news that an organization in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, had deciphered the full genetic code of a microscopic round worm, a landmark achievement. The president of the National Academy of Sciences is quoted as saying, "In the last 10 years we have come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined." Whether the Cold Spring Harbor facility which announced this has any connection with the former racial science station, I do not know. 

What Is Sanity? 

What we today call the science of child development grew out of the ambition of G. Stanley Hall, Wundt’s first assistant at Leipzig, Dewey’s mentor at Hopkins, and a man with a titanic ego. Hall inserted the word "adolescence" into the American vocabulary in 1904. If you wonder what happened to this class before they were so labeled, you can reflect on the experience of Washington, Franklin, Farragut, and Carnegie, who couldn’t spare the time to be children any longer than necessary. Hall, a fantastic pitchman, laid the groundwork for a host of special disciplines from child development to mental testing. 

Hall told all who listened that the education of the child was the most important task of the race, our primary mission, and the new science of psychology could swiftly transform the race into what it should be. Hall may never have done a single worthwhile scientific experiment in his life but he understood that Americans could be sold a sizzle without the steak. Thanks in large measure to Hall’s trumpet, an edifice of child development rose out of the funding of psychological laboratories in the early 1900s during the famous Red Scare period. 

In 1924, the Child Welfare Institute opened at Teachers College, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation. Another was opened in 1927 at the University of California. Generous donations for the study of all phases of child growth and development poured into the hands of researchers from the largest foundations. Thirty-five years later, during what might be thought of as the nation’s fourth Red Scare, the moment the Soviets beat America into space, the U.S. Education Office presided over a comprehensive infiltration of teacher training and schools.13 Judiciously applied funds and arm-twisting made certain these staging areas would pay proper attention to the psychological aspect of schooling. 

Dewey, Hall, Thorndike, Cattell, Goddard, Russell, and all the other intellectual stepchildren of Wundt and the homeless mind he stood for, set out to change the conception of what constitutes education. They got powerful assistance from great industrial foundations and their house universities like Teachers College. Under the direction of James Earl Russell, president (and head of the psychology department), Teachers College came to boast training where "psychology stands first." Wherever Columbia graduates went this view went with them. 

The brand-new profession of psychiatry flocked to the banner of this new philosophy of psychological indoctrination as a proper government activity, perhaps sensing that business and status could flow from the connection if it were authoritatively established. In 1927, Ralph Truitt, head of the then embryonic Division of Child Guidance Clinics for the Psychiatric Association, wrote that "the school should be the focus of the attack." 

The White House appeared in the picture like a guardian angel watching over the efforts this frail infant was making to stand. In 1930, twelve hundred child development "experts" were invited to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, an event with no precedent. One primary focus of attendees was the role "failure" played as a principal source of children’s problems. The echo of Rousseau was unmistakable. No attempt was made to examine how regularly prominent Americans like Washington or successful businessmen like Carnegie had surmounted early failure. Instead, a plan to eliminate failure structurally from formal schooling was considered and endorsed— failure could be eliminated if schools were converted into laboratories of life adjustment and intellectual standards were muted. 

By 1948, the concept of collective (as opposed to individual) mental health was introduced at an international meeting in Britain to discuss the use of schools as an instrument to promote mental health. But what was mental health? What did a fully sane man or woman look like? Out of this conference in the U.K. two psychiatrists, J.R. Rees and G. Brock Chisholm, leveraged a profitable new organization for themselves—the World Federation for Mental Health. It claimed expertise in preventative measures and pinpointed the training of children as the proper point of attack: 

The training of children is making a thousand neurotics for every one psychiatrists can hope to help with psychotherapy. 

Chisholm knew what caused the problem in childhood; he knew how to fix it, too: 

The only lowest common denominator of all civilizations and the only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality, the concept of right and wrong. 

Shakespeare and the Vikings had been right; there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. Morality was the problem. With WWII behind us and everything adrift, a perfect opportunity to rebuild social life in school and elsewhere—on a new amoral, scientific logic—was presenting itself: 

We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers....The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living.... If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. 

Old Norse pragmatism, the philosophy most likely to succeed among upper-crust thinkers in the northeastern United States, was reasserting itself as global psychiatry. 

The next advance in pedagogy was the initiative of a newly formed governmental body, the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). In 1950, it arranged the White House Conference on Education to warn that a psychological time-bomb was ticking inside the schools. An epidemic of mental insufficiency was said to be loose among Americans, imperiling the advances that industry and the arts had given America. Barbarians were already through the gates and among us! 

13 The story of the BSTEP document and the Delphi Technique, two elements in this initiative, is told in Beverly Eakman’s Educating for the New World Order, by a former Department of Justice employee. The book offers an accessible, if somewhat breathless, passage into the shadow world of intrigue and corporate shenanigans behind the scenes of schooling. Also worth a look (and better edited) is Eakman’s Cloning of the American Mind. Whatever you think of her research, Miss Eakman turns over some rocks you will find useful. 

Bending The Student To Reality 

Twice before, attempts had been made to tell the story of an Armageddon ahead if the government penny-pinched on the funding of psychological services. First was the great feeble-mindedness panic which preceded and spanned the WWI period, word was spread from academic centers that feeble-mindedness was rampant among Americans. 

The "moron!" "imbecile!" and "idiot!" insults which ricocheted around my elementary school in the early 1940s were one legacy of this premature marketing campaign. During WWII, this drive to convince keepers of the purse that the general population was a body needing permanent care was helped powerfully by a diffusion of British psychological warfare bureau reports stating that the majority of common British soldiers were mentally deficient. Now that notion (and its implied corrective, buying protection from psychologists) made inroads on American managerial consciousness, producing monies to further study the retarded contingent among us. 

Reading the text "Proceedings of the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth," we learn that school has "responsibility to detect mental disabilities which have escaped parental or pre-school observation." Another huge duty it had was the need to "initiate all necessary health services through various agencies." Still another, to provide "counseling services for all individuals at all age levels." 

The classic line in the entire massive document is, "Not only does the child need to be treated but those around him also need help." A hospital society was needed to care for all the morons, idiots, and mental defectives science had discovered lurking among the sane. It would need school as its diagnostic clinic and principal referral service. Western religious teaching—that nobody can escape personal responsibility—was chased from the field by Wundt’s minimalist outlook on human nature as mechanism. A complex process was then set in motion which could not fail to need forced instruction to complete itself. 

The NIMH used the deliberations of the 1950 conference to secure government funding for an enormous five-year study of the mental health of the nation, a study conducted by the very people whose careers would be enhanced by any official determination that the nation faced grave problems from its morons and other defectives. Can you guess what the final document said? 

"Action for Mental Health" proposed that school curriculum "be designed to bend the student to the realities of society." It should be "designed to promote mental health as an instrument for social progress," and as a means of "altering culture." 

What factors inhibit mental health that are directly in the hands of school authorities to change? Just these: expectations that children should be held responsible for their actions, expectations that it is important for all children to develop intelligence, the misperceived need to assign some public stigma when children lagged behind a common standard. New protocols were issued, sanctions followed. The network of teachers colleges, state education departments, supervisory associations, grant-making bodies, and national media inoculated the learning system with these ideas, and local managers grew fearful of punishment for opposition. 

In 1962, an NIMH-sponsored report, "The Role of Schools in Mental Health," stated unambiguously, "Education does not mean teaching people to know." (emphasis added) What then? "It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave," a clear echo of the Rockefeller Foundation’s "dream" from an earlier part of the century (See page 45). Schools were behavioral engineering plants; what remained was to convince kids and parents there was no place to hide. 

The report was featured at the 1962 Governor’s Conference, appearing along with a proclamation calling on all states to fund these new school programs and use every state agency to further the work. Provisions were discussed to overturn resistance on the part of parents; tough cases, it was advised, could be subjected to multiple pressures around the clock until they stopped resisting. Meanwhile, alarming statistics were circulated about the rapid growth of mental illness within society. 

The watershed moment when modern schooling swept all competition from the field was the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 (ESEA). The Act allocated substantial federal funds to psychological and psychiatric programs in school, opening the door to a full palette of "interventions" by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, agencies, and various specialists. All were invited to use the schoolhouse as a satellite office, in urban ghettos, as a primary office. Now it was the law. 

Along the way to this milestone, important way stations were reached beyond the scope of this book to list. The strand I’ve shown is only one of many in the tapestry. The psychological goals of this project and the quality of mind in back of them are caught fairly in the keynote address to the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar in Boulder, Colorado, delivered by Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce. This quote appears to have been edited out of printed transcripts of the talk, but was reported by newspapers in actual attendance: 

Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well—by creating the international child of the future. [what a piece of s*#t dc]

Perhaps it’s only a fortuitous coincidence that in the ongoing psychologization of schools from 1903 onwards, the single most prominent thread—the nearly universal prescription for better-ment offered by every agency, analyst, and spokesperson for mental health— has been the end of competition in every aspect of training and the substitution of cooperation and intergroup, interpersonal harmony. In utopia, everyone has a fixed place. Envy and ambition are unwelcome, at least among the common classes. The prescription should sound familiar, we’ve encountered it before as the marching orders of the Prussian volksschulen. Unfortunately we know only too well how that Pestalozzian story ended. 

Paying Children To Learn 

As it turned out, my own period of behaviorist training came back to haunt me thirty years later as garlic sausage eaten after midnight returns the next afternoon to avenge being chewed. In 1989, to my delight, I secured a substantial cash grant from a small foundation to pay kids for what heretofore they had been doing in my class for free. Does that sound like a good idea to you? I guess it did to me, I’m ashamed to say. 

Wouldn’t you imagine that after twenty-eight years of increasingly successful classroom practice I might have known better? But then if we were perfect, who would eat garlic sausage after midnight? The great irony is that after a long teaching career, I always made it a major point of instruction to actively teach disrespect for bribes and grades. I never gave gold stars. I never gave overt praise, because I believe without question that learning is its own reward. Nothing ever happened in my experience with kids to change my mind about that. Soaping kids, as street children called it then, always struck me as a nasty, self-serving tactic. Addicting people to praise as a motivator puts them on a slippery slope toward a lifetime of fear and exploitation, always looking for some expert to approve of them. 

Let me set the stage for the abandonment of my own principles. Take a large sum of money, which for dramatic purposes, I converted into fifty and one hundred dollar bills. Add the money to a limited number of kids, many of them dirt poor, some having never eaten off a tablecloth, one who was living on the street in an abandoned car. None of the victims had much experience with pocket money beyond a dollar or two. Is this the classic capitalist tension out of which a sawbuck or a C-note should produce beautiful music?

Now overlook my supercilious characterization. See the kids beneath their shabby clothing and rude manners as quick, intelligent beings, more aware of connections than any child development theory knows how to explain. Here were kids already doing prodigies of real intellectual work, not what the curriculum manual called for, of course, but what I, in my willful, outlaw way had set out for them. The board of education saw a roomful of ghetto kids, but I knew better, having decided years before that the bell curve was an instrument of deceit, one rich with subtleties, some of them unfathomable, but propaganda all the same. 

So there I was with all this money, accountable to nobody for its use but myself. Plenty for everyone. How to spend it? Using all the lore acquired long ago at Columbia’s Psychology Department, I set up reinforcement schedules to hook the kids to cash, beginning continuously—paying off at every try—then changing to periodic schedules after the victim was in the net, and finally shifting to aperiodic reinforcements so the learning would dig deep and last. >From thorough personal familiarity with each kid and a data bank to boot, I had no doubt that the activities I selected would be intrinsically interesting anyway, so the financial incentives would only intensify student interest. What a surprise I got! 

Instead of becoming a model experiment proving the power of market incentives, disaster occurred. Quality in work dropped noticeably, interest lessened markedly. In everything but the money, that is. And yet even enthusiasm for that tailed off after the first few payments; greed remained but delight disappeared. 

All this performance loss was accompanied by the growth of disturbing personal behavior—kids who once liked each other now tried to sabotage each other’s work. The only rational reason I could conceive for this was an unconscious attempt to keep the pool of available cash as large as possible. Nor was that the end of the strange behavior the addition of cash incentives caused in my classes. Now kids began to do as little as possible to achieve a payout where once they had striven for a standard of excellence. Large zones of deceptive practice appeared, to the degree I could no longer trust data presented, because it so frequently was made out of whole cloth. 

Like Margaret Mead’s South Sea sexual fantasies, E.L. Burtt’s fabulous imaginary twin data, Dr. Kinsey’s bogus sexual statistics, or Sigmund Freud’s counterfeit narratives of hysteria and dream,14 like the amazing discovery of the mysterious bone which led to the "proof" of Piltdown Man having been discovered by none other than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who, after the fraud was exploded, refused to discuss his lucky find ever again),15 my children, it seemed, were able to discern how the academic game is played or, perhaps more accurately, they figured out the professional game which is about fame and fortune much more than any service to mankind. The little entrepreneurs were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear! 

In other unnerving trends, losers began to peach on winners, reporting their friends had cheated through falsification of data or otherwise had unfairly acquired prizes. Suddenly I was faced with an epidemic of kids ratting on each other. One day I just got sick of it. I confessed to following an animal-training program in launching the incentives. Then I inventoried the remaining money, still thousands of dollars, and passed it out in equal shares at the top of the second floor stairs facing Amsterdam Avenue. I instructed the kids to sneak out the back door one at a time to avoid detection, then run like the wind with their loot until they got home. 

How they spent their unearned money was no business of mine, I told them, but from that day forward there would be no rewards as long as I was their teacher. And so ended my own brief romance with empty-child pedagogy. 

14 When you come to understand the absolute necessity of scientific fraud, whether unintentional or deliberate, to the social and economic orders we have allowed to invest out lives, it is not so surprising to find the long catalogue of deceits, dishonesties, and outright fantasies which infect the worlds of science and their intersection with the worlds of politics, commerce, and social class. The management of our society requires a stupefying succession of miracles to retain its grip on things, whether real miracles or bogus ones is utterly immaterial. To Mead, Burtt, Kinsey, Freud, and de Chardin, might be added the recent Nobel laureate James Watson, double-helix co-discoverer. Watson’s fraud lies in his presumption that having solved one of the infinite puzzles of nature, he is qualified to give expert opinion on its uses. As The Nation magazine reported on April 7, 2003, Watson is an energetic advocate of re-engineering the human genetic germline. In a British documentary film, Watson is shown declaring that genetic expertise should be used to rid the world of "stupid" children. And "ugly" girls! It is only necessary to recall the time when corporate science presented the world with DDT as a way to rid the world of stupid and ugly bugs, and the horrifying aftermath of that exercise in problem-solving, to reflect that we might be better off ridding the world of Watsons and keeping our stupid kids and ugly girls. 

15 One of the most amazing deceptive practices relating to science has been the successful concealment, by the managers of science and science teaching, of the strong religious component shared by many of the greatest names in science: Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin and many more. Even Galileo had no doubt about his faith in God, only in the established church’s interpretation of His will. Newton’s Principia is unambiguous on this matter, saying "He must be blind who...cannot see the infinite wisdom and goodness of [the] Almighty Creator and he must be mad, or senseless, who refused to acknowledge [Him]. 

A.P. French quotes Albert Einstein in his Einstein: A Centenary Volume (1979) on the matter this way: You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling....,rapturous amazement of the natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work. It is beyond questions closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. But neither Newton or Einstein cut the mustard, where their spirituality might raise embarrassing questions among school children. School science is almost purely about lifeless mechanics. In the next chapter we'll see why that happened.

next 313s

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/01/part-10the-underground-history-of.html

Absolute Absolution 

Part 1 Silent Spring : A Fable for Tomorrow...The Obligation to Endure..Elixirs of Death

I came across this book, while I was looking into Coal Ash. That this was written when I was a mere two years old is disturbing. All they have ever cared about was control and $$$, Whenever they decided to kill us off slowly, they had to have known that there would be a point in the future, where they would have to create a big misdirection, so that the targeted would not realize that what was affecting him or her was in fact cumulative. It is my personal opinion that the last two years have been part of that misdirection. It is not covid that is killing people, it is our poisoned environment.  

Silent Spring

 by Rachel Carson

SILENT SPRING, winner of 8 awards*, is the history making bestseller that stunned the world with its terrifying revelation about our contaminated planet. No science fiction nightmare can equal the power of this authentic and chilling portrait of the un-seen destroyers which have already begun to change the shape of life as we know it. 

“Silent Spring is a devastating attack on human carelessness, greed and irresponsibility. It should be read by every American who does not want it to be the epitaph of a world not very far beyond us in time.” 

--- Saturday Review

“I recommend SILENT SPRING above all other books.” --- N. J. Berrill author of MAN’S EMERGING MIND 

• "Certain to be history-making in its influence upon thought and public policy all over the world." --Book-of-the-Month Club News 

• "Miss Carson is a scientist and is not given to tossing serious charges around carelessly. When she warns us, as she does with such a profound sense of urgency, we ought to take heed. SILENT SPRING may well be one of the great and lowering books of our time. This book is must reading for every responsible citizen." --Chicago Daily 

• "Miss Carson's cry of warning is timely. If our species cannot police itself against overpopulation, nuclear weapons and pollution, it may become extinct." --The New York Times 

• "A great woman has awakened the Nation by her forceful account of the dangers around us. We owe much to Rachel Carson." --Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the Interior 

• "It is high time for people to know about these rapid changes in their environment, and to take an effective part in the battle that may shape the future of all life on earth." -The New York Times Book Review{front page} 

• "It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of THE SEA AROUND US can take another branch of science ... and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about. Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance of nature as decreed in the science of life --- and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death." -Virginia Kirkus Bulletin

Foreword 

IN 1958, when Rachel Carson undertook to write the book that became Silent Spring, she was fifty years old. She had spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist and writer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But now she was a world-famous author, thanks to the fabulous success of The Sea Around Us, published seven years before. Royalties from this book and its successor, The Edge of the Sea, had enabled her to devote full time to her own writing. To most authors this would seem like an ideal situation: an established reputation, freedom to choose one’s own subject, publishers more than ready to contract for anything one wrote. It might have been assumed that her next book would be in a field that offered the same opportunities, the same joy in research, as did its predecessors. Indeed she had such projects in mind. But it was not to be. While working for the government, she and her scientific colleagues had become alarmed by the widespread use of DDT and other long-lasting poisons in so-called agricultural control programs. Immediately after the war, when these dangers had already been recognized, she had tried in vain to interest some magazine in an article on the subject. A decade later, when the spraying of pesticides and herbicides (some of them many times as toxic as DDT) was causing wholesale destruction of wildlife and its habitat, and clearly endangering human life, she decided she had to speak out. Again she tried to interest the magazines in an article. Though by now she was a well-known writer, the magazine publishers, fearing to lose advertising, turned her down. For example, a manufacturer of canned baby food claimed that such an article would cause “unwarranted fear” to mothers who used his product. (The one exception was The New Yorker, which would later serialize parts of Silent Spring in advance of book publication.) So the only answer was to write a book—book publishers being free of advertising pressure. Miss Carson tried to find someone else to write it, but at last she decided that if it were to be done, she would have to do it herself. Many of her strongest admirers questioned whether she could write a salable book on such a dreary subject. She shared their doubts, but she went ahead because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.” 

Silent Spring was over four years in the making. It required a very different kind of research from her previous books. She could no longer recount the delights of the laboratories at Woods Hole or of the marine rock pools at low tide. Joy in the subject itself had to be replaced by a sense of almost religious dedication. And extraordinary courage: during the final years she was plagued with what she termed “a whole catalogue of illnesses.” 

Also she knew very well that she would be attacked by the chemical industry. It was not simply that she was opposing indiscriminate use of poisons but—more fundamentally—that she had made clear the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world. When the attack did come, it was probably as bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before. 

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by the chemical industry in an attempt to discredit the book and to malign the author—she was described as an ignorant and hysterical woman who wanted to turn the earth over to the insects. These attacks fortunately backfired by creating more publicity than the publisher possibly could have afforded. A major chemical company tried to stop publication on the grounds that Miss Carson had made a misstatement about one of their products. She hadn’t, and publication proceeded on schedule. She herself was singularly unmoved by all this furor. 

Meanwhile, as a direct result of the message in Silent Spring, President Kennedy set up a special panel of his Science Advisory Committee to study the problem of pesticides. The panel’s report, when it appeared some months later, was a complete vindication of her thesis. Rachel Carson was very modest about her accomplishment. As she wrote to a close friend when the manuscript was nearing completion: “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.... Now l can believe I have at least helped a little.” In fact, her book helped to make ecology, which was an unfamiliar word in those days, one of the great popular causes of our time. It led to environmental legislation at every level of government. 

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Silent Spring has more than a historical interest. Such a book bridges the gulf between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures.” Rachel Carson was a realistic, well-trained scientist who possessed the insight and sensitivity of a poet. She had an emotional response to nature for which she did not apologize. The more she learned, the greater grew what she termed “the sense of wonder.” So she succeeded in making a book about death a celebration of life. Rereading her book today, one is aware that its implications are far broader than the immediate crisis with which it dealt. By awaking us to a specific danger—the poisoning of the earth with chemicals—she has helped us to recognize many other ways (some little known in her time) in which mankind is degrading the quality of life on our planet. 

And Silent Spring will continue to remind us that in our over-organized and over mechanized age, individual initiative and courage still count: change can be brought about, not through incitement to war or violent revolution, but rather by altering the direction of our thinking about the world we live in.

1. 

A Fable for Tomorrow

THERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. 

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. 

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. 

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. 

On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs—the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. 

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. . . .

This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know. What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.

2. 

The Obligation to Endure 

THE HISTORY OF LIFE on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. 

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. 

Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. 

As Albert Schweitzer has said, ‘Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.’ It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature. 

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience. 

Among them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as ‘pests’; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names. These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes— nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. 

Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides’, but ‘biocides’. The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed—and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened also because, for reasons to be described later, destructive insects often undergo a ‘flareback’, or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire. 

Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm—substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. 

Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it will be possible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray. 

All this has been risked—for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program. And is the situation helped when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while another states, as it did in 1958, ‘It is believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops.’ All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects. . . . 

The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train of disaster in its wake is an accompaniment of our modern way of life. Long before the age of man, insects inhabited the earth—a group of extraordinarily varied and adaptable beings. Over the course of time since man’s advent, a small percentage of the more than half a million species of insects have come into conflict with human welfare in two principal ways: as competitors for the food supply and as carriers of human disease. Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings are crowded together, especially under conditions where sanitation is poor, as in time of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is a sobering fact, however, as we shall presently see, that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb. 

Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture—the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. One important natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on wheat can build up its population to much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not adapted. The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting. 

Another factor in the modern insect problem is one that must be viewed against a background of geologic and human history: the spreading of thousands of different kinds of organisms from their native homes to invade new territories. This worldwide migration has been studied and graphically described by the British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology of Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some hundred million years ago, flooding seas cut many land bridges between continents and living things found themselves confined in what Elton calls ‘colossal separate nature reserves’. There, isolated from others of their kind, they developed many new species. When some of the land masses were joined again, about 15 million years ago, these species began to move out into new territories—a movement that is not only still in progress but is now receiving considerable assistance from man. 

The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern spread of species, for animals have almost invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being a comparatively recent and not completely effective innovation. The United States Office of Plant Introduction alone has introduced almost 200,000 species and varieties of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as hitchhikers on plants. 

In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its native land, an invading plant or animal is able to become enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most troublesome insects are introduced species. These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those dependent on human assistance, are likely to continue indefinitely. Quarantine and massive chemical campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying time. We are faced, according to Dr. Elton, ‘with a life-and-death need not just to find new technological means of suppressing this plant or that animal’; instead we need the basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations to their surroundings that will ‘promote an even balance and damp down the explosive power of outbreaks and new invasions.’ 

Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity. Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words of the ecologist Paul Shepard, ‘idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment...Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?’ 

Yet such a world is pressed upon us. The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies. On every hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations exercise a ruthless power. ‘The regulatory entomologists...function as prosecutor, judge and jury, tax assessor and collector and sheriff to enforce their own orders,’ said Connecticut entomologist Neely Turner. The most flagrant abuses go unchecked in both state and federal agencies. It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. 

I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life. There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. 

When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand, ‘The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.’

3. 

Elixirs of Death 

FOR THE FIRST TIME in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere. They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth. Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds—and in man himself. For these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child. All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of manmade or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man. The result has been a seemingly endless stream of synthetic insecticides. In being man-made—by ingenious laboratory manipulation of the molecules, substituting atoms, altering their arrangement—they differ sharply from the simpler insecticides of prewar days. These were derived from naturally occurring minerals and plant products—compounds of arsenic, copper, , manganese, zinc, and other minerals, pyrethrum from the dried flowers of chrysanthemums, nicotine sulphate from some of the relatives of tobacco, and rotenone from leguminous plants of the East Indies.

What sets the new synthetic insecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They have immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways. Thus, as we shall see, they destroy the very enzymes whose function is to protect the body from harm, they block the oxidation processes from which the body receives its energy, they prevent the normal functioning of various organs, and they may initiate in certain cells the slow and irreversible change that leads to malignancy. Yet new and more deadly chemicals are added to the list each year and new uses are devised so that contact with these materials has become practically worldwide. The production of synthetic pesticides in the United States soared from 124,259,000 pounds in 1947 to 637,666,000 pounds in 1960—more than a fivefold increase. The wholesale value of these products was well over a quarter of a billion dollars. But in the plans and hopes of the industry this enormous production is only a beginning.

A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals—eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones—we had better know something about their nature and their power. Although the Second World War marked a turning away from inorganic chemicals as pesticides into the wonder world of the carbon molecule, a few of the old materials persist. Chief among these is arsenic, which is still the basic ingredient in a variety of weed and insect killers. Arsenic is a highly toxic mineral occurring widely in association with the ores of various metals, and in very small amounts in volcanoes, in the sea, and in spring water. Its relations to man are varied and historic. Since many of its compounds are tasteless, it has been a favorite agent of homicide from long before the time of the Borgias to the present. Arsenic is present in English chimney soot and along with certain aromatic hydrocarbons is considered responsible for the carcinogenic (or cancer-causing) action of the soot, which was recognized nearly two centuries ago by an English physician. Epidemics of chronic arsenical poisoning involving whole populations over long periods are on record. Arsenic-contaminated environments have also caused sickness and death among horses, cows, goats, pigs, deer, fishes, and bees; despite this record arsenical sprays and dusts are widely used. In the arsenic-sprayed cotton country of southern United States beekeeping as an industry has nearly died out. Farmers using arsenic dusts over long periods have been afflicted with chronic arsenic poisoning, livestock have been poisoned by crop sprays or weed killers containing arsenic. Drifting arsenic dusts from blueberry lands have spread over neighboring farms, contaminating streams, fatally poisoning bees and cows, and causing human illness. ‘It is scarcely possible...to handle arsenicals with more utter disregard of the general health than that which has been practiced in our country in recent years,’ said Dr. W. C. Hueper, of the National Cancer Institute, an authority on environmental cancer. ‘Anyone who has watched the dusters and sprayers of arsenical insecticides at work must have been impressed by the almost supreme carelessness with which the poisonous substances are dispensed.’

Modern insecticides are still more deadly. The vast majority fall into one of two large groups of chemicals. One, represented by DDT, is known as the ‘chlorinated hydrocarbons. The other group consists of the organic phosphorus insecticides, and is represented by the reasonably familiar malathion and parathion. All have one thing in common. As mentioned above, they are built on a basis of carbon atoms, which are also the indispensable building blocks of the living world, and thus classed as ‘organic’. To understand them, we must see of what they are made, and how, although linked with the basic chemistry of all life, they lend themselves to the modifications which make them agents of death.

The basic element, carbon, is one whose atoms have an almost infinite capacity for uniting with each other in chains and rings and various other configurations, and for becoming linked with atoms of other substances. Indeed, the incredible diversity of living creatures from bacteria to the great blue whale is largely due to this capacity of carbon. The complex protein molecule has the carbon atom as its basis, as have molecules of fat, carbohydrates, enzymes, and vitamins. So, too, have enormous numbers of nonliving things, for carbon is not necessarily a symbol of life. Some organic compounds are simply combinations of carbon and hydrogen. The simplest of these is methane, or marsh gas, formed in nature by the bacterial decomposition of organic matter under water. Mixed with air in proper proportions, methane becomes the dreaded ‘fire damp’ of coal mines. Its structure is beautifully simple, consisting of one carbon atom to which four hydrogen atoms have become attached:

Chemists have discovered that it is possible to detach one or all of the hydrogen atoms and substitute other elements. For example, by substituting one atom of chlorine for one of hydrogen we produce methyl chloride:

Take away three hydrogen atoms and substitute chlorine and we have the anesthetic chloroform:

Substitute chlorine atoms for all of the hydrogen atoms and the result is carbon tetrachloride, the familiar cleaning fluid:

In the simplest possible terms, these changes rung upon the basic molecule of methane illustrate what a chlorinated hydrocarbon is. But this illustration gives little hint of the true complexity of the chemical world of the hydrocarbons, or of the manipulations by which the organic chemist creates his infinitely varied materials. For instead of the simple methane molecule with its single carbon atom, he may work with hydrocarbon molecules consisting of many carbon atoms, arranged in rings or chains, with side chains or branches, holding to themselves with chemical bonds not merely simple atoms of hydrogen or chlorine but also a wide variety of chemical groups. By seemingly slight changes the whole character of the substance is changed; for example, not only what is attached but the place of attachment to the carbon atom is highly important. Such ingenious manipulations have produced a battery of poisons of truly extraordinary power. . . .

DDT (short for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) was first synthesized by a German chemist in 1874, but its properties as an insecticide were not discovered until 1939. Almost immediately DDT was hailed as a means of stamping out insect-borne disease and winning the farmers’ war against crop destroyers overnight. The discoverer, Paul Müller of Switzerland, won the Nobel Prize. DDT is now so universally used that in most minds the product takes on the harmless aspect of the familiar. Perhaps the myth of the harmlessness of DDT rests on the fact that one of its first uses was the wartime dusting of many thousands of soldiers, refugees, and prisoners, to combat lice. It is widely believed that since so many people came into extremely intimate contact with DDT and suffered no immediate ill effects the chemical must certainly be innocent of harm. This understandable misconception arises from the fact that—unlike other chlorinated hydrocarbons—DDT in powder form is not readily absorbed through the skin. Dissolved in oil, as it usually is, DDT is definitely toxic. If swallowed, it is absorbed slowly through the digestive tract; it may also be absorbed through the lungs. Once it has entered the body it is stored largely in organs rich in fatty substances (because DDT itself is fat-soluble) such as the adrenals, testes, or thyroid. Relatively large amounts are deposited in the liver, kidneys, and the fat of the large, protective mesenteries that enfold the intestines.

This storage of DDT begins with the smallest conceivable intake of the chemical (which is present as residues on most foodstuffs) and continues until quite high levels are reached. The fatty storage depots act as biological magnifiers, so that an intake of as little as of 1 part per million in the diet results in storage of about 10 to 15 parts per million, an increase of one hundredfold or more. These terms of reference, so commonplace to the chemist or the pharmacologist, are unfamiliar to most of us. One part in a million sounds like a very small amount—and so it is. But such substances are so potent that a minute quantity can bring about vast changes in the body. In animal experiments, 3 parts per million has been found to inhibit an essential enzyme in heart muscle; only 5 parts per million has brought about necrosis or disintegration of liver cells; only 2.5 parts per million of the closely related chemicals dieldrin and chlordane did the same. This is really not surprising. In the normal chemistry of the human body there is just such a disparity between cause and effect. For example, a quantity of iodine as small as two ten-thousandths of a gram spells the difference between health and disease. Because these small amounts of pesticides are cumulatively stored and only slowly excreted, the threat of chronic poisoning and degenerative changes of the liver and other organs is very real.

Scientists do not agree upon how much DDT can be stored in the human body. Dr. Arnold Lehman, who is the chief pharmacologist of the Food and Drug Administration, says there is neither a floor below which DDT is not absorbed nor a ceiling beyond which absorption and storage ceases. On the other hand, Dr. Wayland Hayes of the United States Public Health Service contends that in every individual a point of equilibrium is reached, and that DDT in excess of this amount is excreted. For practical purposes it is not particularly important which of these men is right. Storage in human beings has been well investigated, and we know that the average person is storing potentially harmful amounts. According to various studies, individuals with no known exposure (except the inevitable dietary one) store an average of 5.3 parts per million to 7.4 parts per million; agricultural workers 17.1 parts per million; and workers in insecticide plants as high as 648 parts per million! So the range of proven storage is quite wide and, what is even more to the point, the minimum figures are above the level at which damage to the liver and other organs or tissues may begin. One of the most sinister features of DDT and related chemicals is the way they are passed on from one organism to another through all the links of the food chains. For example, fields of alfalfa are dusted with DDT; meal is later prepared from the alfalfa and fed to hens; the hens lay eggs which contain DDT. Or the hay, containing residues of 7 to 8 parts per million, may be fed to cows. The DDT will turn up in the milk in the amount of about 3 parts per million, but in butter made from this milk the concentration may run to 65 parts per million. Through such a process of transfer, what started out as a very small amount of DDT may end as a heavy concentration. Farmers nowadays find it difficult to obtain uncontaminated fodder for their milk cows, though the Food and Drug Administration forbids the presence of insecticide residues in milk shipped in interstate commerce.

The poison may also be passed on from mother to offspring. Insecticide residues have been recovered from human milk in samples tested by Food and Drug Administration scientists. This means that the breast-fed human infant is receiving small but regular additions to the load of toxic chemicals building up in his body. It is by no means his first exposure, however: there is good reason to believe this begins while he is still in the womb. In experimental animals the chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides freely cross the barrier of the placenta, the traditional protective shield between the embryo and harmful substances in the mother’s body. While the quantities so received by human infants would normally be small, they are not unimportant because children are more susceptible to poisoning than adults. This situation also means that today the average individual almost certainly starts life with the first deposit of the growing load of chemicals his body will be required to carry thenceforth.

All these facts—storage at even low levels, subsequent accumulation, and occurrence of liver damage at levels that may easily occur in normal diets, caused Food and Drug Administration scientists to declare as early as 1950 that it is ‘extremely likely the potential hazard of DDT has been underestimated.’ There has been no such parallel situation in medical history. No one yet knows what the ultimate consequences may be. . . .

Chlordane, another chlorinated hydrocarbon, has all these unpleasant attributes of DDT plus a few that are peculiarly its own. Its residues are long persistent in soil, on foodstuffs, or on surfaces to which it may be applied. Chlordane makes use of all available portals to enter the body. It may be absorbed through the skin, may be breathed in as a spray or dust, and of course is absorbed from the digestive tract if residues are swallowed. Like all other chlorinated hydrocarbons, its deposits build up in the body in cumulative fashion. A diet containing such a small amount of chlordane as 2.5 parts per million may eventually lead to storage of 75 parts per million in the fat of experimental animals. So experienced a pharmacologist as Dr. Lehman has described chlordane in 1950 as ‘one of the most toxic of insecticides—anyone handling it could be poisoned.’ Judging by the carefree liberality with which dusts for lawn treatments by suburbanites are laced with chlordane, this warning has not been taken to heart. The fact that the suburbanite is not instantly stricken has little meaning, for the toxins may sleep long in his body, to become manifest months or years later in an obscure disorder almost impossible to trace to its origins. On the other hand, death may strike quickly. One victim who accidentally spilled a 25 per cent industrial solution on the skin developed symptoms of poisoning within 40 minutes and died before medical help could be obtained. No reliance can be placed on receiving advance warning which might allow treatment to be had in time.

Heptachlor, one of the constituents of chlordane, is marketed as a separate formulation. It has a particularly high capacity for storage in fat. If the diet contains as little as of 1 part per million there will be measurable amounts of heptachlor in the body. It also has the curious ability to undergo change into a chemically distinct substance known as heptachlor epoxide. It does this in soil and in the tissues of both plants and animals. Tests on birds indicate that the epoxide that results from this change is more toxic than the original chemical, which in turn is four times as toxic as chlordane. As long ago as the mid-1930s a special group of hydrocarbons, the chlorinated naphthalenes, was found to cause hepatitis, and also a rare and almost invariably fatal liver disease in persons subjected to occupational exposure. They have led to illness and death of workers in electrical industries; and more recently, in agriculture, they have been considered a cause of a mysterious and usually fatal disease of cattle. In view of these antecedents, it is not surprising that three of the insecticides that are related to this group are among the most violently poisonous of all the hydrocarbons. These are dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin. Dieldrin, named for a German chemist, Diels, is about 5 times as toxic as DDT when swallowed but 40 times as toxic when absorbed through the skin in solution. It is notorious for striking quickly and with terrible effect at the nervous system, sending the victims into convulsions. Persons thus poisoned recover so slowly as to indicate chronic effects. As with other chlorinated hydrocarbons, these long-term effects include severe damage to the liver. The long duration of its residues and the effective insecticidal action make dieldrin one of the most used insecticides today, despite the appalling destruction of wildlife that has followed its use. As tested on quail and pheasants, it has proved to be about 40 to 50 times as toxic as DDT. There are vast gaps in our knowledge of how dieldrin is stored or distributed in the body, or excreted, for the chemists’ ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism. However, there is every indication of long storage in the human body, where deposits may lie dormant like a slumbering volcano, only to flare up in periods of physiological stress when the body draws upon its fat reserves. Much of what we do know has been learned through hard experience in the antimalarial campaigns carried out by the World Health Organization. As soon as dieldrin was substituted for DDT in malaria-control work (because the malaria mosquitoes had become resistant to DDT), cases of poisoning among the spraymen began to occur. The seizures were severe—from half to all (varying in the different programs) of the men affected went into convulsions and several died. Some had convulsions as long as four months after the last exposure.

Aldrin is a somewhat mysterious substance, for although it exists as a separate entity it bears the relation of alter ego to dieldrin. When carrots are taken from a bed treated with aldrin they are found to contain residues of dieldrin. This change occurs in living tissues and also in soil. Such alchemistic transformations have led to many erroneous reports, for if a chemist, knowing aldrin has been applied, tests for it he will be deceived into thinking all residues have been dissipated. The residues are there, but they are dieldrin and this requires a different test. Like dieldrin, aldrin is extremely toxic. It produces degenerative changes in the liver and kidneys. A quantity the size of an aspirin tablet is enough to kill more than 400 quail. Many cases of human poisonings are on record, most of them in connection with industrial handling. Aldrin, like most of this group of insecticides, projects a menacing shadow into the future, the shadow of sterility. Pheasants fed quantities too small to kill them nevertheless laid few eggs, and the chicks that hatched soon died. The effect is not confined to birds. Rats exposed to aldrin had fewer pregnancies and their young were sickly and short-lived. Puppies born of treated mothers died within three days. By one means or another, the new generations suffer for the poisoning of their parents. No one knows whether the same effect will be seen in human beings, yet this chemical has been sprayed from airplanes over suburban areas and farmlands.

Endrin is the most toxic of all the chlorinated hydrocarbons. Although chemically rather closely related to dieldrin, a little twist in its molecular structure makes it 5 times as poisonous. It makes the progenitor of all this group of insecticides, DDT, seem by comparison almost harmless. It is 15 times as poisonous as DDT to mammals, 30 times as poisonous to fish, and about 300 times as poisonous to some birds. In the decade of its use, endrin has killed enormous numbers of fish, has fatally poisoned cattle that have wandered into sprayed orchards, has poisoned wells, and has drawn a sharp warning from at least one state health department that its careless use is endangering human lives. In one of the most tragic cases of endrin poisoning there was no apparent carelessness; efforts had been made to take precautions apparently considered adequate. A year-old child had been taken by his American parents to live in Venezuela. There were cockroaches in the house to which they moved, and after a few days a spray containing endrin was used. The baby and the small family dog were taken out of the house before the spraying was done about nine o’clock one morning. After the spraying the floors were washed. The baby and dog were returned to the house in mid afternoon. An hour or so later the dog vomited, went into convulsions, and died. At 10 p.m. on the evening of the same day the baby also vomited, went into convulsions, and lost consciousness. After that fateful contact with endrin this normal, healthy child became little more than a vegetable—unable to see or hear, subject to frequent muscular spasms, apparently completely cut off from contact with his surroundings. Several months of treatment in a New York hospital failed to change his condition or bring hope of change. ‘It is extremely doubtful,’ reported the attending physicians, ‘that any useful degree of recovery will occur.’ . . .

The second major group of insecticides, the alkyl or organic phosphates, are among the most poisonous chemicals in the world. The chief and most obvious hazard attending their use is that of acute poisoning of people applying the sprays or accidentally coming in contact with drifting spray, with vegetation coated by it, or with a discarded container. In Florida, two children found an empty bag and used it to repair a swing. Shortly thereafter both of them died and three of their playmates became ill. The bag had once contained an insecticide called parathion, one of the organic phosphates; tests established death by parathion poisoning. On another occasion two small boys in Wisconsin, cousins, died on the same night. One had been playing in his yard when spray drifted in from an adjoining field where his father was spraying potatoes with parathion; the other had run playfully into the barn after his father and had put his hand on the nozzle of the spray equipment.

The origin of these insecticides has a certain ironic significance. Although some of the chemicals themselves—organic esters of phosphoric acid—had been known for many years, their insecticidal properties remained to be discovered by a German chemist, Gerhard Schrader, in the late 1930s. Almost immediately the German government recognized the value of these same chemicals as new and devastating weapons in man’s war against his own kind, and the work on them was declared secret. Some became the deadly nerve gases. Others, of closely allied structure, became insecticides. The organic phosphorus insecticides act on the living organism in a peculiar way. They have the ability to destroy enzymes—enzymes that perform necessary functions in the body. Their target is the nervous system, whether the victim is an insect or a warm-blooded animal. Under normal conditions, an impulse passes from nerve to nerve with the aid of a ‘chemical transmitter’ called acetylcholine, a substance that performs an essential function and then disappears. Indeed, its existence is so ephemeral that medical researchers are unable, without special procedures, to sample it before the body has destroyed it. This transient nature of the transmitting chemical is necessary to the normal functioning of the body. If the acetylcholine is not destroyed as soon as a nerve impulse has passed, impulses continue to flash across the bridge from nerve to nerve, as the chemical exerts its effects in an ever more intensified manner. The movements of the whole body become uncoordinated: tremors, muscular spasms, convulsions, and death quickly result. This contingency has been provided for by the body. A protective enzyme called cholinesterase is at hand to destroy the transmitting chemical once it is no longer needed. By this means a precise balance is struck and the body never builds up a dangerous amount of acetylcholine. But on contact with the organic phosphorus insecticides, the protective enzyme is destroyed, and as the quantity of the enzyme is reduced that of the transmitting chemical builds up. In this effect, the organic phosphorus compounds resemble the alkaloid poison muscarine, found in a poisonous mushroom, the fly amanita.

Repeated exposures may lower the cholinesterase level until an individual reaches the brink of acute poisoning, a brink over which he may be pushed by a very small additional exposure. For this reason it is considered important to make periodic examinations of the blood of spray operators and others regularly exposed. Parathion is one of the most widely used of the organic phosphates. It is also one of the most powerful and dangerous. Honeybees become ‘wildly agitated and bellicose’ on contact with it, perform frantic cleaning movements, and are near death within half an hour. A chemist, thinking to learn by the most direct possible means the dose acutely toxic to human beings, swallowed a minute amount, equivalent to about .00424 ounce. Paralysis followed so instantaneously that he could not reach the antidotes he had prepared at hand, and so he died. Parathion is now said to be a favorite instrument of suicide in Finland. In recent years the State of California has reported an average of more than 200 cases of accidental parathion poisoning annually. In many parts of the world the fatality rate from parathion is startling: 100 fatal cases in India and 67 in Syria in 1958, and an average of 336 deaths per year in Japan. Yet some 7,000,000 pounds of parathion are now applied to fields and orchards of the United States—by hand sprayers, motorized blowers and dusters, and by airplane. The amount used on California farms alone could, according to one medical authority, ‘provide a lethal dose for 5 to 10 times the whole world’s population.’

One of the few circumstances that save us from extinction by this means is the fact that parathion and other chemicals of this group are decomposed rather rapidly. Their residues on the crops to which they are applied are therefore relatively short-lived compared with the chlorinated hydrocarbons. However, they last long enough to create hazards and produce consequences that range from the merely serious to the fatal. In Riverside, California, eleven out of thirty men picking oranges became violently ill and all but one had to be hospitalized. Their symptoms were typical of parathion poisoning.

The grove had been sprayed with parathion some two and a half weeks earlier; the residues that reduced them to retching, half-blind, semiconscious misery were sixteen to nineteen days old. And this is not by any means a record for persistence. Similar mishaps have occurred in groves sprayed a month earlier, and residues have been found in the peel of oranges six months after treatment with standard dosages. The danger to all workers applying the organic phosphorus insecticides in fields, orchards, and vineyards, is so extreme that some states using these chemicals have established laboratories where physicians may obtain aid in diagnosis and treatment. Even the physicians themselves may be in some danger, unless they wear rubber gloves in handling the victims of poisoning. So may a laundress washing the clothing of such victims, which may have absorbed enough parathion to affect her.

Malathion, another of the organic phosphates, is almost as familiar to the public as DDT, being widely used by gardeners, in household insecticides, in mosquito spraying, and in such blanket attacks on insects as the spraying of nearly a million acres of Florida communities for the Mediterranean fruit fly. It is considered the least toxic of this group of chemicals and many people assume they may use it freely and without fear of harm. Commercial advertising encourages this comfortable attitude. The alleged ‘safety’ of malathion rests on rather precarious ground, although—as often happens—this was not discovered until the chemical had been in use for several years. Malathion is ‘safe’ only because the mammalian liver, an organ with extraordinary protective powers, renders it relatively harmless. The detoxification is accomplished by one of the enzymes of the liver. If, however, something destroys this enzyme or interferes with its action, the person exposed to malathion receives the full force of the poison.

Unfortunately for all of us, opportunities for this sort of thing to happen are legion. A few years ago a team of Food and Drug Administration scientists discovered that when malathion and certain other organic phosphates are administered simultaneously a massive poisoning results—up to 50 times as severe as would be predicted on the basis of adding together the toxicities of the two. In other words, of the lethal dose of each compound may be fatal when the two are combined. This discovery led to the testing of other combinations. It is now known that many pairs of organic phosphate insecticides are highly dangerous, the toxicity being stepped up or ‘potentiated’ through the combined action. Potentiation seems to take place when one compound destroys the liver enzyme responsible for detoxifying the other. The two need not be given simultaneously. The hazard exists not only for the man who may spray this week with one insecticide and next week with another; it exists also for the consumer of sprayed products. The common salad bowl may easily present a combination of organic phosphate insecticides. Residues well within the legally permissible limits may interact. The full scope of the dangerous interaction of chemicals is as yet little known, but disturbing findings now come regularly from scientific laboratories. Among these is the discovery that the toxicity of an organic phosphate can be increased by a second agent that is not necessarily an insecticide. For example, one of the plasticizing agents may act even more strongly than another insecticide to make malathion more dangerous. Again, this is because it inhibits the liver enzyme that normally would ‘draw the teeth’ of the poisonous insecticide.

What of other chemicals in the normal human environment? What, in particular, of drugs? A bare beginning has been made on this subject, but already it is known that some organic phosphates (parathion and malathion) increase the toxicity of some drugs used as muscle relaxants, and that several others (again including malathion) markedly increase the sleeping time of barbiturates. . . .

In Greek mythology the sorceress Medea, enraged at being supplanted by a rival for the affections of her husband Jason, presented the new bride with a robe possessing magic properties. The wearer of the robe immediately suffered a violent death. This death-by indirection now finds its counterpart in what are known as ‘systemic insecticides’. These are chemicals with extraordinary properties which are used to convert plants or animals into a sort of Medea’s robe by making them actually poisonous. This is done with the purpose of killing insects that may come in contact with them, especially by sucking their juices or blood. 

The world of systemic insecticides is a weird world, surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm—perhaps most closely akin to the cartoon world of Charles Addams. It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where a flea bites a dog, and dies because the dog’s blood has been made poisonous, where an insect may die from vapors emanating from a plant it has never touched, where a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey.

The entomologists’ dream of the built-in insecticide was born when workers in the field of applied entomology realized they could take a hint from nature: they found that wheat growing in soil containing sodium selenate was immune to attack by aphids or spider mites. Selenium, a naturally occurring element found sparingly in rocks and soils of many parts of the world, thus became the first systemic insecticide. What makes an insecticide a systemic is the ability to permeate all the tissues of a plant or animal and make them toxic. This quality is possessed by some chemicals of the chlorinated hydrocarbon group and by others of the organophosphorus group, all synthetically produced, as well as by certain naturally occurring substances. In practice, however, most systemics are drawn from the organophosphorus group because the problem of residues is somewhat less acute. Systemics act in other devious ways. Applied to seeds, either by soaking or in a coating combined with carbon, they extend their effects into the following plant generation and produce seedlings poisonous to aphids and other sucking insects. Vegetables such as peas, beans, and sugar beets are sometimes thus protected. Cotton seeds coated with a systemic insecticide have been in use for some time in California, where 25 farm labourers planting cotton in the San Joaquin Valley in 1959 were seized with sudden illness, caused by handling the bags of treated seeds. In England someone wondered what happened when bees made use of nectar from plants treated with systemics. This was investigated in areas treated with a chemical called schradan. Although the plants had been sprayed before the flowers were formed, the nectar later produced contained the poison. The result, as might have been predicted, was that the honey made by the bees also was contaminated with schradan. 

Use of animal systemics has concentrated chiefly on control of the cattle grub, a damaging parasite of livestock. Extreme care must be used in order to create an insecticidal effect in the blood and tissues of the host without setting up a fatal poisoning. The balance is delicate and government veterinarians have found that repeated small doses can gradually deplete an animal’s supply of the protective enzyme cholinesterase, so that without warning a minute additional dose will cause poisoning.

There are strong indications that fields closer to our daily lives are being opened up. You may now give your dog a pill which, it is claimed, will rid him of fleas by making his blood poisonous to them. The hazards discovered in treating cattle would presumably apply to the dog. As yet no one seems to have proposed a human systemic that would make us lethal to a mosquito. Perhaps this is the next step. . . . 

So far in this chapter we have been discussing the deadly chemicals that are being used in our war against the insects. What of our simultaneous war against the weeds? The desire for a quick and easy method of killing unwanted plants has given rise to a large and growing array of chemicals that are known as herbicides, or, less formally, as weed killers. The story of how these chemicals are used and misused will be told in Chapter 6; the question that here concerns us is whether the weed killers are poisons and whether their rise is contributing to the poisoning of the environment.

The legend that the herbicides are toxic only to plants and so pose no threat to animal life has been widely disseminated, but unfortunately it is not true. The plant killers include a large variety of chemicals that act on animal tissue as well as on vegetation. They vary greatly in their action on the organism. Some are general poisons, some are powerful stimulants of metabolism, causing a fatal rise in body temperature, some induce malignant tumors either alone or in partnership with other chemicals, some strike at the genetic material of the race by causing gene mutations. The herbicides, then, like the insecticides, include some very dangerous chemicals, and their careless use in the belief that they are ‘safe’ can have disastrous results. Despite the competition of a constant stream of new chemicals issuing from the laboratories, arsenic compounds are still liberally used, both as insecticides (as mentioned above) and as weed killers, where they usually take the chemical form of sodium arsenite. The history of their use is not reassuring. As roadside sprays, they have cost many a farmer his cow and killed uncounted numbers of wild creatures. As aquatic weed killers in lakes and reservoirs they have made public waters unsuitable for drinking or even for swimming. As a spray applied to potato fields to destroy the vines they have taken a toll of human and nonhuman life.

In England this latter practice developed about 1951 as a result of a shortage of sulfuric acid, formerly used to burn off the potato vines. The Ministry of Agriculture considered it necessary to give warning of the hazard of going into the arsenic-sprayed fields, but the warning was not understood by the cattle (nor, we must presume, by the wild animals and birds) and reports of cattle poisoned by the arsenic sprays came with monotonous regularity. When death came also to a farmer’s wife through arsenic-contaminated water, one of the major English chemical companies (in 1959) stopped production of arsenical sprays and called in supplies already in the hands of dealers, and shortly thereafter the Ministry of Agriculture announced that because of high risks to people and cattle restrictions on the use of arsenites would be imposed. In 1961, the Australian government announced a similar ban. No such restrictions impede the use of these poisons in the United States, however.[ 2022, and STILL poisoning us, wake up people! dc]

Some of the ‘dinitro’ compounds are also used as herbicides. They are rated as among the most dangerous materials of this type in use in the United States. Dinitrophenol is a strong metabolic stimulant. For this reason it was at one time used as a reducing drug, but the margin between the slimming dose and that required to poison or kill was slight—so slight that several patients died and many suffered permanent injury before use of the drug was finally halted. A related chemical, pentachlorophenol, sometimes known as ‘penta’, is used as a weed killer as well as an insecticide, often being sprayed along railroad tracks and in waste areas. Penta is extremely toxic to a wide variety of organisms from bacteria to man. Like the dinitros, it interferes, often fatally, with the body’s source of energy, so that the affected organism almost literally burns itself up. Its fearful power is illustrated in a fatal accident recently reported by the California Department of Health. A tank truck driver was preparing a cotton defoliant by mixing diesel oil with pentachlorophenol. As he was drawing the concentrated chemical out of a drum, the spigot accidentally toppled back. He reached in with his bare hand to regain the spigot. Although he washed immediately, he became acutely ill and died the next day.

While the results of weed killers such as sodium arsenite or the phenols are grossly obvious, some other herbicides are more insidious in their effects. For example, the now famous cranberry-weed killer aminotriazole, or amitrol, is rated as having relatively low toxicity. But in the long run its tendency to cause malignant tumors of the thyroid may be far more significant for wildlife and perhaps also for man. Among the herbicides are some that are classified as ‘mutagens’, or agents capable of modifying the genes, the materials of heredity. We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?

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Surface Waters and Underground Seas