The Organic Profit: Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism

Abstract

Despite the growth of environmental history, first-rate studies of environmental capitalism remain relatively few. Andrew N. Case provides a significant addition to this literature. In 1942 Jerome Rodale (born Jerome Cohen into a religious New York Jewish family in 1913) founded the magazine Organic Farming and Gardening. This early entry into the nascent organic agriculture movement also launched a still-prominent publishing empire connecting consumerism and the body. Receiving unprecedented access to the Rodale family archives, Case has produced an empathetic yet critical study that advances our understanding of the relationship between the environment, the body, and postwar American capitalism. Rodale and his son Robert, who took over the growing empire after Jerome famously died on stage during The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, went far to mobilize consumers for the organic-gardening movement. At the same time, the Rodales were also businessmen first. Always on the lookout for a new way to sell natural products, neither father nor son would shy away from hucksterism and quackery in search of a buck, a point that Case repeatedly and refreshingly makes. Rodale rose to prominence in an era when questioning scientific certainty led to the critical campaigns against toxic pesticides and movements to save species from extinction, but could also easily morph into antiscientific beliefs about bodies and nature that led to extremely harmful results, such as the antivaccination movement today. Rodale never tried to walk that fine line, openly promoting questionable products and making dubious health claims based on what the company thought would sell. Yet Rodale also did much to place the word organic in the American lexicon, provided a forum for consumers worried about poison and toxins, and helped people articulate alternatives to received wisdom about the environment in the 1960s and 1970s.