SILENT SPRING REVOLUTION

Brinkley continues his cycles of histories in which presidents engage with the environment.

The great presidential conservationist, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt, subject of Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior. Rightful Heritage chronicled “FDR’s enthusiasm for preserving treasured landscapes in every state.” Here, the author charts the transformation of conservation into environmentalism, a change of understanding and emphasis that, in his view, owes disproportionately to popular books by Rachel Carson. Silent Spring inspired a campaign to reduce the use of the toxic pesticides that were entering the food chain and killing birds by the millions, and Carson’s works were favorites in the Kennedy White House. As Brinkley relates, when Lyndon Johnson came into office, he took action a step further. While his disastrous policies in Vietnam dragged his Great Society program down, Johnson got some important things done, drawing on the talents of environmental researchers who “were elevated as indispensable first responders rushing to save nothing less than the future of the United States.” Considering the Great Society a “bookend” of FDR’s New Deal, Brinkley also documents the considerable resistance to these environmental reforms on the part of industry, so that, when Richard Nixon arrived in the White House, he had to balance two opposing impulses: to let business and its right-wing think tanks have their way or to push through environmental legislation. He allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to come into being while cautioning its director that environmentalists were “a bunch of commie pinko queers.” Despite his many failures, Nixon got things done, too. (Who knew that he had “a soft spot in his heart for whales”?) Still, as this readable but overlong history documents, it was Carson who merits most of the credit, along with her Kennedy/Johnson Cabinet member Stuart Udall, “the most successful interior secretary in American history.”

A solid addition to the literature at the intersection of environmentalism and politics.