Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and the Tumultuous Summer of 1962

Maine, Summer 1962

It was midnight when the lone, auburn-hared woman arrived on the beach. Tall and stooped, just shy of 55, Rachel Carson looked considerably older than her years. She swayed a moment as she sat, drank in the briny air. To feel the full wildness, she switched off her flashlight. Then, adjusting her eyes to the darkness, she turned her attention to the swell and roar of the sea. Tonight it was full of “diamonds and emeralds,” flecks of phosphorescence that wave after wave hurled onto the sand. The individual sparks were huge. She could see them “glowing in the sand, or sometimes, caught in the in-and-out play of water,” sluicing back and forth.

This is what Carson lived for: bearing witness to the natural world in all its mystery, attuning herself to the earth’s rhythms and eternal cycles, feeling a part of the vast stream of time. It was why she’d spent the last four difficult years pushing so hard to complete Silent Spring. For all her travails, she had known from the moment she’d first read the field studies on the dangers of the synthetic pesticide DDT that she would feel “no future peace” until she shared with the world the gravity of what she saw. She had written the book because she wanted to change things, to alter the way people treated the natural world, to stop the mindless poisoning of it. Though Carson knew she had little time left to live, sitting on this beach tonight she had no regrets; she was filled with a sense that it had all been worth it: the years of isolation; the painstaking work; even her battle, now lost, against the cancer.

The public’s reception of the excerpts appearing all summer in The New Yorker had been immediate and enthusiastic, greater, even, than she had dared dream. Especially cheering had been E. B. White’s kind note, commending her for—by now she had memorized the words—“the courage you showed in putting on the gloves and going in with this formidable opponent, and for your skill and thoroughness.” Silent Spring would be “an Uncle Tom’s Cabin of a book,” he predicted, “the sort that will help turn the tide.” Perhaps she could relax now. Finally, people were beginning to ask questions. They no longer “assumed that someone was looking after things,” that the mass aerial spraying of DDT “must be all right, or it wouldn’t be done.” They were beginning to understand that once these pesticides entered the biosphere, they carried the same hazards as nuclear fallout, the same capacity to alter our genetic makeup in grave and irreversible ways; these chemicals not only killed bugs but also migrated up the food chain to poison birds and fish and eventually sicken humans.

Carson hadn’t been surprised by the smear campaign the chemical industry was mounting that summer. She had anticipated their aggressive attacks on the book. But the defamation of her character— the charges that she was a Communist and a subversive, that her purpose in urging more care in the use of agricultural chemicals was to “jeopardize the nation’s food supply”—this she had not expected. The most vulgar had come from the former secretary of agriculture, who had wondered aloud “why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics?”

But none of this mattered; she was winning in the court of popular opinion. Her meticulous care in presenting the science had paid off. It was 1962 and the world was changing. There was a new optimism in the air, a sense that things were opening up in response to the deep freeze of the Cold War. A fresh generation of young people had come of age. They were better educated than their elders, more idealistic and open, more willing to ask questions, to openly challenge the status quo. Their heroes were Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and a band of subversive dreamers who called themselves the Beats. Their anthems spoke of a different sort of America, one in which individualism and community might coexist, an America where social justice and personal fulfillment were not at odds.

President John F. Kennedy was newly elected. He projected youth and daring, as did his young wife, Jackie, with her designer clothes and cosmopolitan chic, her fluency in French and dazzling sophistication. Kennedy had just invited Carson to a private gathering at the White House. He had referred to “Miss Carson’s book” in a recent presidential press conference. In less than a month she was going to do an hour-long interview on television news, the new medium. The chemical companies were right to be worried. Their claim that now “no housewife would reach for a bug bomb without fear” was well founded. Women were already concerned about a host of contamination issues: “food additives, thalidomide, radioactive fallout.” And now they had to worry about poisons in their vegetable gardens. The strict postwar division of the sexes, which had stranded a generation of women in the suburbs, their sole duty to be good mothers and consumers, was backfiring. The problems she was identifying were bigger and more irrefutable than even her critics understood. She had shined a spotlight on big business’s carelessness toward the natural world, daring to make its indifference public. She had had the audacity to mount a critique of the “gospel of technological progress,” forcing an open discussion of the notion that living things and their environment were intertwined.

Carson had never been the wild-eyed crusader her critics hoped to portray. Shy and self-effacing, considered in her speech, she exuded an inner stillness, a ladylike dignity that must have disarmed her foes. A loner at heart, almost pathologically private, devoted to her small, broken family and a handful of friends, attached to her cats and her beloved Maine cottage, she was happiest amidst the wild beauty of the wilderness, alert to the birdsong in the shadowed forest, the seagulls wheeling overhead, the swirling fog and mysterious tide pools along the shore.

She turned to the sea again. It was getting late; she had already stayed longer than she planned. Her eye caught a passing firefly now, his lamp blinking. “He was flying so low over the water that his light cast a long surface reflection, like a little headlight.” She registered a pulse of joy. How ingenious nature was, how intricate the interrelationships between species, including humans. This too was what she wanted to share: the wonder of the natural world in all its variety and strangeness, the amazing interconnectedness of it all. Her eyes swept the shoreline one last time, making a mental note of the rocks “crowned with foam,” the long white crests running down the beach. She was leaving tomorrow. She hoped it wouldn’t be the last time she could manage this walk to the beach. Flicking on her flashlight, she rose now with some effort and started toward the path, the funnel of her flashlight beam bobbing as she crept along. She took slow, halting steps, her breath labored. This too no longer mattered. She had finished the book. She had spoken out, and to her relief, the world seemed to be listening.

*

That same summer of 1962, several hundred miles south of where Carson sat, an impish, white-haired woman in a dark shift and a costume-jewelry necklace of oversize beads stood holding a placard on a street corner in Lower Manhattan. Tall and square-faced, with a Dutch boy haircut and thick, black-rimmed glasses perched atop an aquiline nose, she searched the crowd, smiled in recognition as she spotted her neighbor, the owner of the coffee bar down her block, which lately had become an ersatz community clubhouse, the place where she and others from Greenwich Village and Little Italy had been strategizing over martinis and cigarettes for weeks. Bighearted and affable, the neighborhood sage, tonight he was dressed as a skeleton and carried a placard shaped like a tombstone, on which was scrawled the words “Death of a Neighborhood.” She shot him a quick, amused look, nodded in appreciation at his getup, then leaned in to confer for a moment with the congressman standing to her left, knitting her brow in concentration. She glanced at her watch and shook her head in agreement, sending her thatch of white hair flying. Then, moving with obvious deliberation, she threaded her way through the throng toward the podium, her quizzical face set despite the patter of applause that swelled through the crowd.

The object of this applause was Jane Jacobs, a magnetic 46-year-old writer and mother, who had recently become a celebrity and pariah to every urban planner in the land. A year before, in 1961, she had written an audacious little book called The Death and Life of American Cities, arguing that the men supposedly bettering America’s cities were actually laying waste to them. The power and eloquence of the book had instantly hit a nerve, giving voice to what many had begun to sense—that the “poohbahs” who planned high-rise housing projects and made their decisions mostly behind closed doors were not always acting in the public’s best interest. Almost overnight she had been hailed as an urban hero, a silvertongued prophet of the people, her name synonymous with grassroots efforts to halt urban renewal projects that demolished vital existing neighborhoods. The Village Voice, the scrappy new alternative downtown paper, was calling her “the terror of every politico in town,” gleefully claiming she had made more enemies than any American woman since Margaret Sanger. Diane Arbus had photographed her for Esquire. Vogue had paid its homage, dubbing her simply “Queen Jane.”

On this particular steamy evening, Jacobs stood amidst an overflow crowd of residents from Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and what would soon be dubbed Soho. The idea was to stage a mock, New Orleans–style funeral march down Broome Street into Little Italy, to protest the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, a monstrous, elevated superhighway that master builder Robert Moses was trying to string across Lower Manhattan, part of a vast “spaghetti dish”of expressways that would loop around and across the city. The hulking 10-lane highway would rip through low-slung blocks that still had a tatty, Paris-like feel as it made its way along Broome Street. It would mean bulldozing more than 400 buildings that housed 2,200 residents and 800 small businesses. It would wipe out the pastry shops and cozy restaurants of Little Italy, the lighting and restaurant supply shops on the Bowery, the shady park on Chrystie Street.

This was just the sort of top-down planning Jacobs deplored. It was arrogant and misguided, having nothing to do with what gave a city neighborhood its vitality and charm, its ability to adapt and remake itself as conditions changed. Cities were no different from oyster beds. Or “colonies of prairie dogs.” They were living organisms; they thrived, just as in nature, on diversity and re-adaptation, not rigid order imposed on them from outside. This kind of progress killed cities. It slashed apart close-knit neighborhood communities, leaving desolate, gaping holes in the urban fabric. It was a monstrous mistake that went against everything Jacobs had observed about urban life from her own lively little block in Greenwich Village, whose intricate rhythms she had likened in her book to a kind of exquisite “sidewalk ballet,” a dance that commenced every morning with the clatter of trash cans and the babble of children en route to school, expanding and reinventing itself throughout the day. What made her own neighborhood—and so many others like it—feel so vital was its short, bustling blocks and patchwork of old and new buildings, its crazy-quilt mix of commercial and residential uses: houses interspersed with stores and cafés, warehouses with restaurants and bodegas. At any hour of the day or night, there were people on the street: mothers pushing toddlers in strollers, longshoremen slipping into taverns at the end of their shifts; teenagers preening, checking their reflections in storefront windows, fathers strutting home after work; theatergoers scurrying off in evening clothes. There were always “eyes on the street,” as she liked to describe it, which made everyone feel safe.

For decades, planners had ignored what occurred “tangibly and physically” on the street, which she found exasperating. They had sailed off on “metaphysical fancies” instead of asking people what kind of housing actually made them feel good, or why certain blocks felt inviting, while others breathed menace. This was the genius of her book. She had actually bothered to wade in and ask people, to walk the blocks of neighborhoods that worked—even those the experts deemed expendable—and then describe, in her trademark pungent prose, the intricate dance of particulars that made these districts thrive while others withered. This is what had made the so-called planning experts so mad—besides the fact that she wasn’t college educated, let alone trained in urban planning: she had had the audacity to dismantle, point by point, all their airy abstract theories, drawing on a mix of intuition and her own firsthand observations to make her case.

But clearly that case had to be made again. This was why she and so many others were here tonight—Democrats and Republicans, shopkeepers and professionals, plumbers and artists, Catholics and Jews. To explain once more why this outrageous boondoggle of a road would rip the soul out of these vital neighborhoods. To put the city on notice that the residents here would not stand for it. That they would keep on fighting this ill-conceived plan until it was wiped off the map.

Jacobs was at the podium now. She clomped up the steps and paused, taking full measure of the crowd. This was good, she reflected. The turnout was large; people had gone all out. Many were outfitted with gas masks, to emphasize the soot and air pollution the highway would bring. The press photos would be theatrical, as she had hoped.

Leaning in to the microphone now, she graciously acknowledged the state senator and representative who had just preceded her. The crowd went silent, all eyes on the striking, white-haired woman in a sack dress and sandals who looked like a hausfrau, but seemed to command the respect of a queen. Then she began to speak.

“What kind of administration could even consider bulldozing the homes of more than 2,000 families at a time like this?” she asked matter-of-factly. A camera flash popped and flared, briefly illuminating the platform where she stood, but she seemed not to notice. “With the amount of unemployment in the city, who would think of wiping out thousands of minority jobs?” she continued, widening her eyes. “They must be insane.”

No one wanted this roadway, Jacobs went on to explain. No one but a few out-of-touch bureaucrats, she added. It would kill lively neighborhoods that had been standing almost since the Dutch first put down roots in Manhattan four centuries before. The crowd stood rapt, drinking in every word.

“The expressway would Los Angelize New York,” she declared, pausing for a moment. This was the sound bite she hoped would make the evening news. This proposed highway is a “monstrous and useless folly,” she added. “The arguments for it,” she continued, “amount to piffle.”

Applause rippled through the crowd, whistles and hoots of agreement, more camera flashes. True to form, Jane Jacobs was once again making waves, poking holes in official cant about the efficacy of urban highways, just as she had the city’s earlier arguments for razing the West Village. She was tapping into a current of quiet discontent that lay slumbering just below the surface of the culture, demonstrating that ordinary citizens, if they were organized enough, could push back, even defeat the swaggering bureaucrats who for the last decade had been calling the shots, riding roughshod over the greater good, with no sense of consequence or need for accountability. This was her message tonight, and, like Rachel Carson’s, it was hitting a nerve.

*

For many people, the sudden appearance of Carson’s and Jacobs’s brilliant and prescient books was one of those moments that seem, in retrospect, to have changed the very order of things. Both Silent Spring and The Death and Life of Great American Cities had an almost immediate effect on public sentiment. Silent Spring was not only a runaway bestseller but is credited with having led, in the short run, to the creation of the EPA; in the long run, it spawned America’s environmental consciousness. Jacobs’s book is said to have changed urban renewal policies across America and dethroned Robert Moses. It became the bible, ultimately, for the preservation movement and for the larger idea of self-emerging systems in cities rather than centrally imposed plans.

Like another wildly popular and transformative book that came out at almost the same time, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which also unleashed a tsunami of change—and also had the effrontery to question the culture’s most enshrined assumptions—Jacobs’s and Carson’s books were articulating for ordinary readers what many were beginning to feel. They were connecting with people on a visceral level, calling into question the nation’s exuberant and self-assured path, suggesting that perhaps it wasn’t as rosy as it had been cracked up to be. Both were pointedly addressing one of the central paradoxes of progress: in the blind embrace of technology there had been a loss of human scale and a degradation of the physical and social environment. What each stirred was the slumbering fear that technological innovation held the power to transform life as it was known into something not just alien, but inherently threatening. Change, the great hope and mantra of modernity, was perhaps not so benign.

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From Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World. Used with permission of Ecco. Copyright © 2018 by Andrea Barnet.