DAVID KINKELA. DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World.

Abstract

David Kinkela has written a probing analysis of how the pesticide DDT came to embody the contradictory tendencies of what Henry Luce so famously described as “the American Century.” Kinkela's work reveals much about the complex story in which a persistent, inexpensive chemical toxin advanced American policymakers' postwar objective of serving as “the Good Samaritan of the entire world.” The story of the wartime development of DDT as an insecticide has been told on numerous occasions. First synthesized in 1874, DDT found agricultural and commercial applications in the late 1930s when Paul Müller discovered the chemical's insecticidal properties in killing houseflies. Subsequent experiments demonstrated DDT's efficacy as a control agent in combating a Colorado beetle infestation. It was not, however, until 1942 when a sample of DDT was shipped to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laboratory in Orlando, Florida, that the magnitude of the chemical's toxicological properties was understood. In May 1943 Vannevar Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) approved the Orlando USDA laboratory's recommendation for DDT's use by Allied Forces.