1963
Rachel Carson
Force of nature
There was a time when a book could change the world. Biologist and writer
Rachel Carson’s early works about the ocean were besotted with life.
But her fourth book, Silent Spring, was a searing indictment of synthetic
pesticides—grim nerve agents for insects like DDT that she called “elixirs
of death.” Published in September 1962, it likened the danger from pesti-
cides to the threat from nuclear-weapons testing. Chemicals “are the sinis-
ter and little- recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature
of the world—the very nature of its life,” Carson told the nation in April
1963, in a CBS Reports television documentary. An investigation President
Kennedy had ordered soon confirmed Carson’s claims.
As an editor for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had lived a quiet
life with her adopted son, her mother and a few cats. By the time of her
death from breast cancer in 1964, at 56, she had set in motion a movement
that produced Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, a domes-
tic ban on DDT and a transformation of how Americans see the world they
inhabit. —William Souder
Souder is the author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of
Rachel Carson
1964
Barbara Gittings
“Gay is good”
The Stonewall riots have become the
focal point of the modern LGBTQ-
rights movement, but they didn’t start
it. The groundwork was laid in the
previous decade by activists like Barbara
Gittings, who understood that before
marginalized people can prevail, they
must understand that they are worthy
and that they are not alone.
In an era when it was dangerous to
be out, Gittings edited the Ladder, a
periodical published by the nation’s
first known lesbian-rights organization,
the Daughters of Bilitis, creating
a sense of national identity and
providing a platform for resistance.
In the August 1964 issue, her editorial
blasted a medical report that described
homosexuality as a disease, writing
that it treated lesbians like her more as
“curious specimens” than as humans.
Gittings would go on to be instrumen-
tal in getting the American Psychiatric
Association to stop classifying homo-
sexuality as a mental illness and in get-
ting libraries to carry gay literature.
Whether she was wielding a pen or a
protest sign, the militant advocate had a
simple message: when society said that
being gay was an abomination, Gittings
said that gay was good. ÑKaty Steinmetz1960sCARSON: ALFRED EISENSTAEDT—GETTY IMAGES; GITTINGS: KAY TOBIN—MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES DIVISION/NYPL; HUERTA: DOLORES HUERTA WITH BULLHORN BY JON LEWIS, 1965 © YALE UNIVERSITY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COURTESY OF YA