To call something “middlebrow” seems to dismiss it as unserious, but, when America was arguably at its intellectual peak, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, this was the territory in which its writers excelled: distinguished work, aimed at readers who took the world seriously, available in mainstream magazines. That was the ocean in which Rachel Carson swam like few others. Her lyrical “The Sea Around Us” won the 1952 National Book Award and appeared on the Times’ best-seller list for an astonishing eighty-six weeks, a stretch when other recent releases included “East of Eden,” “Invisible Man,” and Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Oh, and “Charlotte’s Web.”
As it happens, the author of that last volume, the New Yorker essayist E. B. White, could have written Carson’s classic “Silent Spring,” which exposed the dangers of DDT and other pesticides. In the late fifties, Carson tried to interest White in the dangers of the chemicals then used for insect control on American farms and in gardens; White, after all, had written memorable reflections from his Maine cabin about the era’s most important environmental issue, the fallout from nuclear testing. But White encouraged an overworked Carson to do the job herself and alerted The New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn.
Before Carson turned to writing books, she had spent much of her career as a marine biologist at the federal Bureau of Fisheries, the kind of job that would now likely be DOGE’d. By the fifties, she had earned enough from her best-sellers to write full time, but she was taking care of her mother; also, she had breast cancer, which required a full mastectomy. But she worked steadily on “Silent Spring,” presenting it to Shawn in January, 1962; he responded, “You have made it literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.”
Indeed she had. “Silent Spring,” which Shawn published in three parts, in June of that year, was the best kind of middlebrow: powerful enough to activate emotions, never florid, willing to use the tropes of pastoral Americana for all they were worth. In reporting on the emerging science of pesticides, “Silent Spring” knocked some of the shine off modernity, nailing difficult questions to the door of the Church of Progress. Carson thought that man had grown overlarge and was upsetting a necessary balance.
She was immediately attacked by the industry she had called into question, in a way that set the playbook for the companies that profited from tobacco, asbestos, opioids, and fossil fuels. Pesticide producers assailed Carson’s credentials, her childlessness, and, more broadly, her gender. But she triumphed on the force of her writing and on the credibility that came from her centrality in mainstream intellectual life—a Book of the Month Club edition came with a special pamphlet by the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who called it “the most revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; when she testified before Congress, some people, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, called her “the little lady that started it all.” In 1962, John F. Kennedy—whose “Profiles in Courage” had won a 1957 Pulitzer Prize while sharing the spotlight on best-seller lists with Carson’s “The Sea Around Us” follow-up, “The Edge of the Sea”—saluted “Miss Carson’s book” and launched a Science Advisory Committee investigation. The next year, the committee largely confirmed her reporting, and more rigorous federal regulation of DDT followed.
By then, events were gathering pace. On the one hand, environmentalism, which Carson had done so much to launch, gained momentum; within a decade, Earth Day became the largest political protest in the country’s history, and public scrutiny spread to a wide range of pollutants. But the era’s turbulence also began the erosion of the culture that lent Carson its powers, replacing ascendant middlebrow authority with the ten thousand flavors of contrarianism that have come to dominate civic life. That J.F.K.’s nephew now stands astride D.C., contaminating health policy with the crank complaints of Carson’s time—about fluoride in water, for instance—is as sharp a repudiation as one could imagine of everything that she stood for. ♦
