The Government Promised to Eradicate Dutch Elm Disease. It Never Spent a Dollar.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Main St., elms, Stockbridge, Mass., c1905 · LOC P&P. View the original.

In 1935 the United States promised to wipe a disease off this continent.

Forty-two years later it told the President it had never spent a dollar trying.

Between those two sentences, forty-three million trees died. More than half the elms standing in every town in America.

In 1952 it printed the DDT recipe on one page, and a warning about where the birds drink on the facing page.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Elm Street, Manchester, N.H., c1908 · LOC P&P. View the original.

Start with what was there. These street views are Detroit Publishing negatives, about 1900 to 1910.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Elm Street, Manchester, N.H., c1908 · LOC P&P. View the original.

They are not pictures of the disease. They are twenty and thirty years too early for it. They are what the country looked like before.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Main St., elms, Stockbridge, Mass., c1905 · LOC P&P. View the original.

Main Street, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The negative is catalogued, plainly, as "Main St., elms."

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Elm Street, Manchester, N.H., c1908 · LOC P&P. View the original.

Elm Street, Manchester, New Hampshire. Clark Brothers sold beer under them.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Elm Street, Holyoke, Mass., c1908 · LOC P&P. View the original.

The American elm was planted for one reason. It throws its limbs up and out in the shape of a vase, so a row of them meets over the middle of a street and holds.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · East Street from the park, Pittsfield, Mass., c1910 · LOC P&P. View the original.

East Street, Pittsfield. Holyoke. Northampton. Towns chose it because it made a roof.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · East Street from the park, Pittsfield, Mass., c1910 · LOC P&P. View the original.

The Forest Service later put a number on how many there were. Seventy-seven million, inside the limits of incorporated towns alone.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Elm Street, Holyoke, Mass., c1908 · LOC P&P. View the original.

That count does not include a single elm on a farm, a roadside or a woodlot.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · The Old elm, Westover, Va., c1900 · LOC P&P. View the original.

Then, in 1930, a fungus came in on a shipment of logs.

The Department of Agriculture set out the route five years later, in a circular for property owners.

"The disease entered this country probably in elm-burl logs imported from Europe."

The logs landed at New York, Baltimore, Norfolk and New Orleans. Then the circular lists where they went.

Cleveland. Cincinnati. Dayton. Indianapolis. Chicago. Kansas City. Louisville. Knoxville. And other cities.

The wood was going to veneer mills, to be sliced thin for furniture. The beetles came with it.

The beetle is the carrier. It breeds under the bark of dead and dying elm, and when the adults fly they carry the fungus in the twig crotches of healthy trees.

The fungus does something simple. It plugs the vessels that carry water up the trunk, and the tree dies of thirst with its roots in wet ground.

In March 1935 the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine stated the objective.

"The immediate control and ultimate eradication of the Dutch elm disease in the United States is the primary objective of the governmental agencies engaged in the work."

Eradication. Not management. Not slowing it down. The word the government chose was the one that means finished.

The method was scouting. Men walked assigned areas every summer and examined elms one at a time for wilting leaves.

Where a scout found the brown streaking under the bark, he cut specimens and filled out a card. It had a name: a Graphium suspect card.

The laboratory grew the fungus out on a culture plate. Four days. Then a list of confirmed trees went to the state.

"Because the wood from these trees is infected with the fungus that causes the disease, all wood must be burned immediately."

And not only the sick ones. The program also removed elms that had died of anything at all, and elms merely in decline, because beetles breed in those too.

The circular calls that part sanitation. It asked the public to help — to clean up and burn every piece of cut elm on their own land before the first of May, every year.

In 1935 the shape of the infection was already lopsided. Around the port of New York, over seven thousand six hundred infected trees had been found within fifty miles.

Everywhere else in the country: six areas, eighteen trees. Cleveland ten. Indianapolis four. One apiece in Cincinnati, Baltimore, Old Lyme and Norfolk.

One enormous infection, and eighteen sparks. That is what the eradication program was built to put out.

By 1952 the Department of Agriculture printed a map of where the disease had reached.

A dark patch over the mid-Atlantic and New England, and a second one across the middle of the country. Still a patch.

The same leaflet told a homeowner what the symptoms looked like, and what to do about them.

The Forest Service would put it more bluntly a few years later. "There is no cure for elm trees once they become infected with Dutch elm disease."

So the fight moved to the beetle. And in 1952 the way you fought a beetle was DDT.

Page nine of the leaflet is the recipe.

"Prepare a DDT emulsifiable concentrate by dissolving two hundred and ninety-four pounds of technical DDT in seventy-four gallons of xylene, and adding nineteen pints of Triton X-100."

That is a municipal quantity. This was written for the man who sprayed a town.

Turn the page.

"DDT can also poison wildlife, such as birds and fishes. Do not let the spray get into bird baths or fish pools."

"Do not let it form puddles beneath the trees or along street curbs where birds may come to drink."

That is 1952. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is ten years away. The federal government has already written down where the birds drink.

Five years later the Forest Service published a control handbook out of its Central States station, in Columbus, Ohio.

Its territory was Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio — and Kentucky.

Page seven sets out which insecticide to buy.

"DDT has been found to be more effective in elm-disease-carrier control than chlordane, BHC, Heptachlor, and many of the older insecticides."

Then, in the same paragraph: "Methoxychlor, a more costly material, is as effective as DDT, and much less toxic to birds."

Read that again. As effective. Much less toxic to birds. The only difference the sentence offers is the price.

And directly beneath it, the mixing table. DDT, twenty-seven percent by weight.

The handbook notes, in passing, that elm work needs much higher dosages than are normally used on other tree insects.

It also says the sprays sometimes destroy the beneficial insects, and that spider mites and aphids then break out in the trees you just sprayed.

Hydraulic sprayer on the left, mist blower on the right. A hundred feet high, and the observer stands off to watch how much is landing.

Storm-damaged trees, the handbook notes, make ideal breeding places for bark beetles. So the cutting went on alongside the spraying.

Destroy all infested material no later than April fifteenth. Search regularly and systematically for breeding places.

Burn it, or remove the bark, or wet every surface with eight pounds of DDT in a hundred gallons.

Towns did this for forty years.

In July 1977 the Forest Service delivered a report to the President and Congress, required by the National Forest Management Act.

It opens with a table nobody would want to sign. Elms remaining, against the number of years since the disease reached that state.

In states that had it ten years or less, ninety-five percent of the elms were still standing.

Eleven to twenty years: sixty-eight percent. Twenty-one to thirty: thirty-two. Thirty-one to forty-seven years: twenty-three percent left.

The table is not a warning. It is a schedule.

And here is the map that goes with it.

Everything east of the hundredth meridian, filled in solid. Forty-one states.

Put it beside the patch from 1952. Twenty-four years.

"There were an estimated seventy-seven million elms in incorporated areas of all States just prior to introduction of the disease into the United States in 1930."

"By 1976, however, an estimated thirty-four million remained. A reduction of fifty-six percent."

Forty-three million trees, out of the towns alone.

Then, on page twenty-four, under the heading Federal Role, the report explains what the United States had actually been doing.

"The Federal role in dealing with the Dutch elm disease is, under current policy, limited to carrying out research, publishing findings, conducting educational programs, and providing technical advice on control strategies to those who seek it."

"Efforts to halt the spread of the disease by quarantine were abandoned on the basis that the natural spread could not be practically prevented."

And then the last sentence of the paragraph. "Financial assistance for control projects has never been offered."

Never. Not in 1935, when the objective was eradication. Not in 1952, when the recipe called for two hundred and ninety-four pounds. Not once in forty-seven years.

The report is careful about why. A federal role has to satisfy criteria — international consequences, interstate coordination, threat to federal lands.

Shade trees on a city street satisfy none of them. The elm was, administratively, a local matter. Every town paid for its own.

Thirty million dollars a year, the report estimates, spent by municipalities. Protecting one-point-eight million elms out of twenty-four million that could have been protected.

So the shape of it is this. The federal government named the objective, wrote the manuals, mixed the formula, and sent the bill to the county.

It also, twice in print and years apart, said there was a safer chemical that worked just as well and cost more.

DDT was cancelled for most uses in 1972 — by the Environmental Protection Agency, not by the Department of Agriculture, and not on account of the elms.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Main St., elms, Stockbridge, Mass., c1905 · LOC P&P. View the original.

By then the trees on these streets were gone, and the men who sprayed them were retired.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · The Old elm, Westover, Va., c1900 · LOC P&P. View the original.

The elm is not extinct. There are old survivors standing in fields where no other elm was close enough to pass it on, and there are resistant cultivars planted since.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Main St., elms, Stockbridge, Mass., c1905 · LOC P&P. View the original.

What is gone is the thing the trees made together. The roof over the street.

Eighteen trees in 1935. Forty-three million by 1976. And a sentence in a report to the President saying the money was never offered.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · East Street from the park, Pittsfield, Mass., c1910 · LOC P&P. View the original.

If your town had elms, somebody in your family watched the crews take them down — and somebody kept a piece of the wood.

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Detroit Publishing Co. · Elm Street, Manchester, N.H., c1908 · LOC P&P. View the original.