Dead Cows on a Georgia Field: Mapping the Cultural Landscape of the Post-World War II American Pesticide Controversies

Abstract

The winter of 1957-1958 was the worst that the American South had seen in fifty years, the mercury hovering below freezing for weeks and snow falling across the Southern coastal plain. For farmers in Decatur County, Georgia, however, April was the cruelest month, breeding despair out of a dead land. Throughout the early part of the year, they had been losing cattle, a trend that reached its culmination in early spring. As quail coveys broke up and the male birds staked out breeding territories, scores of cattle drooled and stumbled, seized and convulsed, then dropped dead. One farm lost fifteen cows and calves. Other animals suffered, too chickens and turkeys, sheep and goats died. Sows aborted their fetuses. Songbird, quail, and rabbit carcasses littered pastures.' What had killed the livestock? Was the cold the cause? Listeriosis, brucellosis, and rabies could account for the symptoms and all three ailments were endemic to the area. Maybe the abnormally low temperatures and diseases had worked in tandem, the cold weakening the animals and the pathogens killing them. Or, perhaps the animals had been poisoned. Several months before that fateful April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had spread granules of heptachlor and, possibly, dieldrin-chemical relatives of DDT, more potent than their famous cousinacross the region in an attempt to eradicate the imported fire ant. The insecticides might have been responsible, and the deaths fit into a growing controversy over the dangers of pesticides. A local veterinarian, affected farmers, USDA employees, wildlife biologists, and officials associated with the Conservation Foundation, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Alabama Department of Conservation, National Wildlife Federation, Welder Wildlife Fund, and the National Audubon Society all probed the mysterious deaths, offering different explanations of the events in Georgia. Rachel Carson later entered the controversy, too, charging in Silent Spring that the department of agriculture had poisoned the animals. This essay focuses on the controversy over the dead cattle and, to a lesser extent, the other animals found dead in southwest Georgia during the spring of 1958, but it is not a whodunit. Rather than sorting through the evidence to decide what killed the cows, who was right, and how the truth was discovered, the mystery surrounding