The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  On a personal level, the article was unwise. The reaction at the Pan American Union was as immediate as it was negative. Latin American members resented his description of their citizens as “dominated by ancient superstitions and beliefs.” The Washington officials who funded his Conservation Department didn’t like his sneers at U.S. “bad manners and superciliousness.” While the article was still on newsstands, union secretary general Lleras told Vogt that his rote disclaimer that it did not reflect the views of the Pan American Union was insufficient. Still even-toned despite the provocation, Lleras told Vogt that “there is an incompatibility, prone to all types of conflicts, between the active career of a published writer and the post of a chief of a section of the Pan American Union.”

  Wizards and Prophets

  Four weeks later, the initial Pinchot-inspired, Truman-proposed U.N. conference opened in Lake Success, on Long Island, in a former gyroscope factory that had become the temporary headquarters of the United Nations. It was barely five miles from Vogt’s birthplace in Garden City. It is interesting to speculate what he made of a meeting there devoted to spreading the industrial prosperity that had overwhelmed the rural landscape of his youth. Officially entitled the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources, the gathering was known by its acronym: UNSCCUR (“un-sker”). Point Four had given it a jolt of urgency. More than 1,100 official contributors, participants, and observers from fifty-two countries representing scores of learned societies, government agencies, and private groups attended, orbited by a Kuiper belt of several thousand U.N. staff, journalists, minor diplomats, minions and toadies of all sorts, and security personnel. Not one delegate came from the Soviet Union or its satellites.

  Garden City, the village where Vogt was born, was near the epicenter of the wave of suburbanization that transformed the Long Island landscape from the fields and forests of Vogt’s childhood (top, the village in about 1905) to a sea of middle-class real estate (bottom, Garden City in the 1930s). The shockingly rapid change, which occurred all over the world in the twentieth century, was a powerful impetus to the creation of the environmental movement. Credit 79, 80

  U.S. Interior Secretary Julius A. Krug gave UNSCCUR’s opening address. “It’s high time that we start a new era in conservation,” he said, “an era consecrated to the development and wise use of what is available to the people of the world.” Krug had read Vogt and Osborn, and scoffed. “There is not the slightest question in my mind,” he said, “that scientists and engineers can find and develop food, fuels, and material to meet the demands of the world’s increasing population with a greatly improved standard of living. I do not side with those who ‘view with alarm’ the increasing world population and the decreasing reserves of some things which now appear to be essential to our way of living.” Those who view with alarm—that was Vogt and Osborn, sitting in the audience. Minutes later Antoine Goldet, head of the U.N. Department of Economic Affairs, promised that “the disciples of Malthus will be put to confusion.”

  The conference proceedings sprawl over eight volumes. With so many people at Lake Success discussing so many subjects, diversity of opinion was unavoidable. Osborn gave a talk, for example, insisting that humanity must forge a “new and enlightened” relationship with the environment. (The environment, one recalls, was a new concept, introduced by Vogt and Osborn; one sees it coming into focus in these talks.) And there were other expressions of concern. Nonetheless, as the historian Jundt has pointed out, the Borlaugian credo predominated: science and technology, properly applied, will allow us to produce our way out of our environmental worries. UNSCCUR discussions focused on mining oil from oil shale, spraying pesticides on a wide scale, extracting lumber from tropical forests more efficiently, manufacturing artificial fertilizers more cheaply, manipulating plant breeding, expanding nuclear power, and a host of other techno-fixes.

  Typical of the gathering was the geologist A. I. Levorsen, dean of Stanford’s School of Mineral Science, extolling the happy news that the world would never run out of fossil fuels. Undiscovered petroleum reserves, he said, “are on the order of 500 times the current annual world production.” Shortfalls could only occur if societies failed to look for oil, and that could only occur if they failed to organize themselves in the “free enterprise—profit-incentive—system.” This was the session that outraged M. King Hubbert and led to a public argument and, eventually, his Vogtian depiction of a peak of production. But few attendees paid attention to Hubbert’s objections, or to Osborn’s, or to anyone else’s. The closing address summarized the meeting as conveying “the ways in which mankind can secure a larger return now and tomorrow, from the earth’s resources.” UNSCCUR was the public debut of Wizardly thought.

  Vogt sat in the first conference’s audience, but he was on the dais at the second. It was a smaller affair than the first: 173 delegates from thirty-two nations and a variety of agencies and private groups. Among those drawn to Lake Success were old friends like Robert Cushman Murphy, Ernst Mayr, Frank Darling, Aldo Leopold’s son Starker, Clarence Cottam (Vogt’s partner in the anti-mosquito-control debate), and most of the IUPN leadership—the cream of Western conservation. Julian Huxley was not present; he had been pushed out of UNESCO, partly because his drive to establish IUPN had ruffled U.N. sensibilities. Vogt led three of the eleven sessions, more than anyone else, and was one of the four members of the conference’s general committee. The conference was formally known as the International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature. It naturally had its own acronym: ITCPN.

  The two conferences—UNSCCUR and ITCPN—took place in the same converted factory that housed the United Nations. Delegates to one rushed past delegates to the other in the hallways, but they were in different worlds. UNSCCUR was nature utilization; ITCPN was nature protection. UNSCCUR looked at the forces of industrialization and said, Yes, but be smart about it. ITCPN looked at the same forces and said, No, there is a better way. UNSCCUR was the hard path; ITCPN, the soft. UNSCCUR had money and official attention and the force of institutionalization. ITCPN had fervor and the energy of rebellion and a totalizing ideology. If UNSCCUR was the Wizard’s manifesto, ITCPN laid out the Prophet’s case. Each side was sincerely idealistic, privately dismissive of the other, and blind to its own faults. They were two groups of men with dark suits and dark ties and dark briefcases imagining the shape of the future in rooms cloudy with tobacco smoke.

  “The environmentalism put forth at the ITCPN was an intellectual and moral broadside against the liberal international order that the United States was seeking to set in motion.” (I am again quoting Jundt, the historian, whose work I am following here.) Osborn’s address at UNSCCUR had been cautious. At ITCPN he also gave a speech—he was “practically a double agent,” Jundt wrote—and there he pulled out all the stops. Darwin, Osborn said, “proved that man was an integral part of nature itself, and not a separate and independent being.” People are not special! But the wonders of airplanes, radar, and the atomic bomb had “tricked” us into believing “that we are ‘masters of the universe.’ ” Humanity’s future could be bright, Osborn said, but only if people didn’t think themselves “exempt from natural laws.” The sole route to securing a future for our species, democratic society, and the planet itself was to understand our place within nature’s limits and to base civilization on this knowledge.

  Speakers decried environmental problems that would become the subject of crusades in decades to come: oil spills; predatory whaling; herbicide overuse; river-destroying dam projects; the introduction of exotic species; vanishing elephants, tigers, and other great creatures; and mindless consumption and materialism. A dozen papers questioned the use of DDT and other pesticides. It was like opening a window into the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, a concatenation of headlines from the future. Many of the delegates represented small organizations that had never before encountered the others. Just as Vogt and Huxley had hoped, the conference was creating a network of t
he like-minded. Groups concerned with bald eagles met groups concerned with protecting shorelines met groups concerned with air pollution. Among the few commonalities was that everyone seemed to have read Road to Survival.

  Typical was Ollie E. Fink of Friends of the Land. Formed in 1940 and based in Ohio, the organization’s ten thousand members initially focused on degraded agricultural properties in the Middle West. But they were tiptoeing past that to something broader, and this movement was reflected in Fink’s speech, which went beyond soil conservation to human affairs in general. “Conservation is a way of life…but it is not the traditional American way,” Fink said (ellipsis in original). Instead, the nation and the world needed “a new culture,” a new way of thought, “an ecological conscience.” The boldness had limits, though. One attendee had asked, “Wouldn’t it be useful to discuss openly the problem of the almost inevitable antagonism between protective measures and the interests of the economy?” The answer: No. Not yet, anyway.

  Lake Success Conference No. 2 was as fruitful in its own way as Lake Success Conference No. 1. But Vogt was not able to lever its prestige into the director’s chair at IUPN; the organization wouldn’t take on someone who had annoyed the U.S. State Department, a major funding source. In October Pan American Union secretary general Lleras summoned Vogt to his office to tell him that he had used up his goodwill. Vogt agreed to resign. He doesn’t seem to have borne any animosity toward Lleras, whom he had put into a difficult position. Vogt gave a final speech, defiantly titled “The United States Is Not the World.” His last day at the union was November 15, 1949.

  As in his dismissal from Audubon, he had angered powerful people, and they had thrown him onto the curb. He had reinvented himself then, going to the guano islands, but now he was forty-seven years old. He had a reputation, but it was not the kind that was welcomed by potential employers. He had no clear path forward. But the urgency hadn’t gone away. On every continent factories were springing up, trees were coming down, and open land was being transformed into farms and suburbs. Vogt was standing on a beach, and the human tide was coming in.

  “Starting a CONFLAGRATION!”

  How to save the future? Hugh Moore knew the answer. Moore was a compact figure with arrow-straight hair and the preternatural energy of a self-made man. He was born in 1887, the youngest of six children on a Kansas farm. His father died when Moore was twelve. Moore left Kansas, became a reporter in New York City, then managed to get himself into Harvard. During his freshman year, his sister’s husband, Lawrence Luellen, came to town. Everyone in the country, Luellen said, drank out of public dippers, which were rarely washed and never sterilized. In those days of rampant tuberculosis, America needed non-infectious drinking vessels. Luellen had a brainstorm: Paper cups! Hearing this, Moore had a second: What a gold mine!

  Moore folded himself some test cups, origami-style. They looked so good he quit Harvard. The two men optimistically rented a room in the Waldorf Astoria. They used the hotel’s gold-embossed stationery to write potential investors. One venture capitalist was so horrified by Moore’s portrait of the nation’s water dippers, hanging on public drinking fountains like so many bacteriological time bombs, that he contributed a whopping $200,000. The Public Cup Vendor Company was born in 1909. Luellen soon quit to do other things. Meanwhile, Moore launched campaigns to abolish the common drinking cup. State after state banned them. Moore’s cups—Dixie Cups, he later called them—made him rich.

  Moore served in the First World War; his horrific experiences led him to become an ardent pacifist. When international tensions mounted in the 1930s, he sought to convene an international conference to head off another war. He also invented the paper ice cream cup and, later, the paper plate. The Second World War happened despite his efforts. Moore formed the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. He had the leisure; people were throwing away 25 million Dixie Cups a day. His ideology evolved, not always coherently. Fierce pacifism became fierce anti-Communism and fierce support of world government.

  In 1948 he read Road to Survival. The book fell on him like a blow. Ever after, Moore credited Vogt with “really waking me up” to the truth: overpopulation was “the basic cause of wars” and “the spread of tyranny and communism.” Vogt said that courageous people had to find a way out. Moore decided to be one of those people. He would devote his life and fortune to population control. He gave money to the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America. He formed the Population Action Committee in 1953 to—as he shouted at meetings—“come up with a plan for starting a CONFLAGRATION!” Seizing a typewriter, he wrote an impassioned pamphlet, “The Population Bomb.” Its cover depicted a cartoon Earth, its continents jammed with cartoon people, a lighted fuse emerging from the North Pole. He sent more than a million copies to politicians, journalists, schoolteachers, and businesspeople. Moore promised that he was “not primarily interested in the sociological or humanitarian aspects of birth control. We are interested in the use which Communists make of hungry people in their drive to conquer the Earth.” All this was after he stepped into William Vogt’s life.

  Moore wrote to Vogt as soon as he finished reading Road in November 1948. He kept in touch after Vogt left the Pan American Union and embarked on a tour of Scandinavia. While he was at Audubon and in Peru, Vogt had applied three times for a Guggenheim fellowship to write a popular book on ecology. After being turned down all three times, he had applied a fourth time in 1943, now promising to write a book about the guano birds. This idea finally convinced the Guggenheim Foundation to give him a fellowship, but he had never taken the money, because in the meantime he had been hired by the Pan American Union. Vogt had also received a Fulbright grant. Now he accepted the money from both, but not to study birds in Peru. Instead in May 1950 he traveled with his wife, Marjorie, to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The Scandinavian countries had legalized abortion and birth control and vigorously sterilized “deficient” people. Vogt wanted to see the results.

  Marjorie Vogt on a birdwatching excursion in Scandinavia in 1950 Credit 81

  For nine months Bill interviewed officials, collected research papers, and tramped with his canes through the woods; at night, Marjorie typed up her husband’s verbal notes as he lay, exhausted, on the couch or bed. All the while, he was being peppered with letters from Moore. Quick with languages, Marjorie spoke French and picked up some Swedish on the road; she often translated for Vogt. Ten weeks into the trip, the couple attended an ornithology conference, and she was fluent enough in Bird to join the give-and-take. Vogt’s Fulbright was associated with the University of Oslo, which gave him an office and a comfortable apartment. Nonetheless, he worried obsessively about money—which may explain why he quit research instantly when Moore persuaded the birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger to hire him as national director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

  Sanger would dominate Vogt’s life for a decade. Born into a struggling working-class family in 1879, she was the sixth of eleven children (there were also seven miscarriages). Sanger was convinced that her mother’s multiple pregnancies—a legacy, in part, of her Catholic faith—contributed to her early death. As a young woman Sanger was a nurse on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which exposed her to the realities of poor women’s lives: lack of contraception, dangerous abortions, nonexistent prenatal care, risky childbirth. Becoming a campaigner for birth control—a term she invented—she published (illegal) birth-control pamphlets, delivered (illegal) birth-control speeches, and, in 1916, opened an (illegal) birth-control clinic, the first in the United States. Sanger ran afoul of the law and went to jail, but she kept publishing pamphlets, delivering speeches, and opening clinics. Her goal was for women to be able to run their own lives. Her opponents ranged from the Roman Catholic Church to the Indian Communist Party. In a mix of calculation and enthusiasm Sanger allied with anyone who offered to help her, supporting at one time or another anarchists, socialists, labor activists, race purifiers, conservationists, and Wall Street blueblo
ods. At various times she espoused racist sentiments that seem appalling today. Historians disagree on whether she truly embraced these ideas or was merely mouthing them to ingratiate herself with powerful people who would serve her larger cause.

  By 1937 her movement had managed to have contraception legalized on the federal level, but forty states had birth-control bans of various sorts that had to be fought piecemeal (they endured until 1972). Despite the slow accumulation of political victories, Sanger was dissatisfied. The available birth-control methods were cumbersome, expensive, and often ineffective. She wanted a cheap, easy-to-use, oral contraceptive—a “birth-control pill,” as she sometimes called it. Medical scientists were reluctant to take on the task, and many of her male allies didn’t believe that women were competent enough to use a pill if one existed. The increasingly frustrated Sanger suffered a heart attack in 1949 and was confined to bed for six months, standard treatment at the time. Three more cardiac incidents rapidly followed, leaving her with agonizing angina. To alleviate her pain, Sanger’s doctor son Stuart prescribed Demerol, an opioid to which she became addicted for the rest of her life. Despite poor health, Sanger remained determined to develop a contraceptive, and to do it under the aegis of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the organization that had grown out of her birth-control clinics.