The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests by Amy Hay (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests by Amy Hay
• Elena Conis

Amy Hay. The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 328 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-0-8173-2108-6).

Amy Hay's Defoliation of America is an argument for greater attention to the history of anti-toxic protest in twentieth-century U.S. history. In nine novel chapters, Hay reveals what comes into view when the ways in which citizens and scientists protest against the (known and unknown) toxic hazards of synthetic chemicals are traced and contextualized over time. Hay's specific focus is the Agent Orange herbicides, which include the two compounds notoriously combined to make the potent Vietnam War–era weed killer Agent Orange, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, as well as the "rainbow" herbicides made with one or the other of these.

The Agent Orange herbicides, also known as phenoxy herbicides, work, paradoxically, by accelerating plant growth—"to the point of death" (p. 16). When the chemicals were first developed, in the 1940s, they were quickly put to nonmilitary use: on agricultural fields, weed-choked urban lots, fire-prone forests, and prized suburban lawns. Protest of a sort immediately ensued; early scientific [End Page 167] writings readily sounded notes of caution. But it wasn't until the chemicals were deployed by the U.S. military in Vietnam to decimate enemy routes and destroy crops that their application became "visible to the world" (p. 220). And eventually, with countercultural and veteran opposition, their objectionable qualities, long known to few, became more widely visible too. Today, they're still best known for their use over vast swaths of the Vietnamese landscape and for claims of toxicity among war veterans and civilians.

For Hay, this is just part of the Agent Orange herbicides' story. Her book is divided into three chronologically arranged parts, each of them featuring stories of opposition in dramatically different settings. In part I, the book moves swiftly from the herbicides' creation to the first protests launched by the Catholic left, other religious groups, college students, and pacifists. The book's second part offers three case studies of women in the western United States who fought the herbicides' use in their home communities or states. The final section follows the protests of countercultural activists, Vietnam veterans, and parents of children exposed in utero.

What these stories demonstrate is the varied routes the rainbow herbicides followed from manufacturing plants, through landscapes, and into bodies. Hay swiftly moves through the familiar narrative of wartime defoliation so vast it affected "more than half of South Vietnam's arable land" (p. 35) to show what protests this use elicited on the ground, from the North Vietnam government, the National Liberation Front, and international observers, who characterized defoliation as a war crime. Hay proceeds to connect this familiar story to another familiar narrative not always tied to the story of the war: that of American citizens encountering chemicals in their home environments, only to learn after their widespread application (and often by direct experience of acute symptoms) that they were more harmful than officials had admitted.

In this way Hay relates those protesting spraying in Vietnam to, for example, the residents of sprayed areas of the Tonto National Forest watershed in Arizona, whose headaches, rashes, shortness of breath, and chest pain were dismissed as "malarkey" (p. 87) by a forest ranger at a city council meeting. Over the course of the book, the reader sees what binds protesters in radically different geopolitical, economic, and material contexts together. They all grappled with scientific uncertainty over the relationship between chemical exposures and health outcomes. They rejected political consensus of the Cold War, which, Hay argues, has long gone underrecognized. They articulated citizen demand for corporate accountability for product safety and government allegiance to citizens over companies. They show the myriad and unexpected ways chemicals of unknown consequence made their ways into people's communities and bodies: in California, officials sprayed them to reduce kindling that might spark wildfires; in Arizona, the Forest Service sprayed them to facilitate runoff to boost water supplies for metropolitan Phoenix...