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The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 Wreaks Havoc at Thanksgiving

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Seventeen days before Thanksgiving in 1959, a government bureaucrat set off the great cranberry scare with a warning: The iconic holiday fruit could be contaminated with a weed killer that caused cancer in rats.

Overnight, the American public turned on the iconic holiday fruit with a vengeance. Supermarket chains took cranberries off their shelves, restaurants crossed them off their menus and governors banned their sale within their state. The news media stoked the cranberry scare with unrelenting coverage. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a housewife who dumped her cranberry jelly into the garbage can. She then “sat down and smoked a cigarette in relief at having just been saved from cancer,” the story read.

Cranberry harvest near Buzzards Bay, Mass.

It was the first major food scare since 1906, when Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry in his book The Jungle. President Teddy Roosevelt, reading it at breakfast, supposedly threw his sausage out the window.

The cranberry scare of 1959 was a little different. It was the first of many food scares that involved carcinogenic chemicals, and it almost destroyed the cranberry industry.

In the end, it changed the way we eat cranberries for good. And it set a precedent that resulted in the repeal of a 1958 law that prevented cancer-causing chemicals in foods.

The Great Cranberry Scare of 1959

Nov. 9, 1959, goes down as Black Monday in cranberry history. On that day, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming held a well-attended press conference in Washington, D.C.

Arthur Flemming

“The Food and Drug Administration today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959,” he said. The reason: possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroids of rats.

Cancer in 1959 amounted to a death sentence, and one that people were increasingly aware of. Medical science had developed more accurate diagnostic techniques, finding cancers unnoticed in the past. Most cancers develop after age 45, and life expectancy had steadily increased since 1900. Men lived to an average age of 67, up from 46 in 1900.. Women lived to an average age of 78, up from 43.

Scientists, though, didn’t understand the disease in 1959. Radiation and chemotherapy were still experimental, and surgery was the only way to cure it. Early detection was the main weapon against cancer, so the medical community went all out to educate people about the early warning signs. It worked all too well.

In 1958, Congress passed a law called the Delaney Clause. It allowed zero tolerance for cancer-causing agents in foods. The clause said the mere possibility that an additive could cause cancer was the same as actually causing the disease.

Arthur Flemming

Arthur Flemming, the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving from the cranberry industry, had a long and distinguished career. President Eisenhower gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1957; President Clinton gave it to him in 1996.

In 1959, Arthur Flemming didn’t think he had much choice in setting off the cranberry scare. The Delaney Clause allowed him no discretion. He didn’t ban the sale of cranberries, but he may as well have.

On that November day he told the press that unless the American housewife knew where cranberries came from, he said, “to be on the safe side, she doesn’t buy.” But there was no way for her to know.

The next day, most major newspapers featured headlines that screamed, “Northwest Cranberries Ordered Off Market‖” “Some of Cranberry Crop Tainted by Weed-Killer, U.S. Warns.”

Suddenly, the cranberry was the second red menace facing U.S. consumers. Sales screeched to a complete halt.

No Berries

John Decas had just started working for the family cranberry business in Carver, Mass., when the cranberry scare started. “We had 40 trailer loads of cranberries canceled within one hour after that announcement,” he told WBUR in 2019.

“My reaction at the beginning was, ‘Oh my god. It’s over. This cannot be my career’,” For the rest of the year, the Decas family sold not one berry.

cranberry-bogs-harvesting

Old-school cranberry harvest

This Just In

Press coverage continued well into December. One newspaper reported

Iowa church ladies were warned from the pulpit to wear rubber gloves and face masks if they had to touch the berries.

According to another,

A hysterical woman in Mobile, Alabama, called an ambulance after washing cranberries to make her family’s chutney recipe.

Oregon Gov. Mark Hatfield ordered cranberries off the commissary shelves of prisons, fearing riots. The military stopped shipping cranberries to servicemen overseas.

Nevada made it illegal to carry any cranberry product on a retail shelf. Health boards conducted dragnets confiscating cranberries in Ohio, New York, California, and Michigan.

Robert Williams & The Groovers hit the pop charts with their rockabilly hit, Cranberry Blues.

There’s a brand new word all over the nation
All cranberries have contamination
If you want to be sure to not get sick
Don’t touch a cranberry with a 10-foot stick.

The Cranberry Industry

Flemming’s bombshell couldn’t come at a worse time. Most cranberries then were sold around Thanksgiving and Christmas. On Black Monday, growers were in the midst of harvesting, sorting or warehousing more than half the crop. Processing halted completely as supermarket chains canceled order after order.

A cranberry bog

Cranberry growers had expected a record harvest of 1.273 barrels of cranberries that year. But that wasn’t necessarily a good thing because the growers couldn’t sell them all. Several hundred thousand barrels had been carried over from the previous year because of flat demand, increased productivity and improvements in storage and transportation.

The cranberry scare hit Massachusetts hardest. The tart little berries thrived in the bogs, peatlands and sandy soil in the southeastern corner of the state, on Cape Cod and on Nantucket. Massachusetts growers cultivated 12,800 acres of cranberry bogs, 60 percent of the national total. By 1959, some bogs had been in families for well over a century.

Fighting Back

The cranberry industry fought back. Cranberries were “pure and wholesome and untainted by any dangerous substance,” said Ambrose Stevens, general manager of the Ocean Spray cooperative in Plymouth County in a press release.

Scientists testified before Congress and spoke to editorial boards , stressing the minuscule danger – if any – of aminotriazole. The New York Times opined. “…even if humans should be as susceptible to the drug as rats, people would have to consume fantastic quantities of contaminated berries to suffer any such ill effects.”

Cranberry growers tried other PR ploys. In Plymouth, radio station WPLM held a party for 5,000 children and served cranberry juice.

He drinks cranberry juice, too!

Two presidential candidates took the cranberry industry’s side. U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts drank a tall glass of cranberry juice in front of reporters and asked for more. Vice President Richard Nixon downed four helpings of cranberry sauce at a campaign stop in Wisconsin.

From the White House, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower claimed she’d served cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. That backfired when the actress Rosalind Russell, a guest at the presidential table, let slip that she’d actually served applesauce instead of the poisonous relish.

Cranberry Ban

The cranberry scare didn’t come as a complete surprise to the cranberry industry. The USDA had approved the weed-killer aminotriazole in 1953, but only for use after the cranberry harvest. The FDA also said it would not allow any residue whatsoever on any cranberry shipment.

Then in 1957 the FDA seized three million pounds of contaminated cranberries from Oregon. The agency didn’t bother to test the fruit in 1958 because it thought growers had gotten the message.

cranberry-bogs-ocean-spray-can

Didn’t sell in 1959

The Ocean Spray cooperative, which represented three out of four growers, warned of the dangers of the zero tolerance policy. The industry could not afford even one violation, the cooperative said.

Then on September 18, 1959, Ocean Spray sent a letter to its members banning the use of aminotriazole in cranberry bogs.

Ending the Cranberry Scare

After Flemming ignited the red scare, cranberry growers did what they had to do. On November 18, nine days after his first press conference, industry groups met publicly with Flemming to find a solution. Rachel Carson, who would publish Silent Spring two years later, attended that meeting.

The FDA and cranberry industry laboratories agreed to test batches of cranberries. They’d then label them as safe, announce them as safe and return them to the shelves.

Better days

State agricultural departments, agricultural experiment stations and universities pitched in with the time-consuming process of detecting aminotriazole in cranberries.

In the end, the government ended up seizing only eight shipments of cranberries, two percent of the batches tested.

By Thanksgiving, shoppers could buy cranberries labeled as untainted in most regions of the country.

“Plenty of Safe Cranberries Here‖” proclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle.

Still, the damage was done. Cranberry sales fell to 20 percent of normal.

Two packers in Wareham, Mass., shut down, and in the spring of 1960 Ocean Spray announced it would lay off a third of its workers because of government interference. The cranberry scare wiped out hundreds of small growers. The large growers then snapped up their bogs, which consolidated power among the bigger operations.

Aftermath of the Cranberry Scare

Some newspaper editorials touted Arthur Flemming as a candidate for vice president. Other asked President Eisenhower fire him. Mail to the U.S. Government ran seven-to-one in his favor.

Flemming went on to chair the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and to serve as president of Ohio Wesleyan University, Oregon State University and Macalaster College. He died in 1996 at 91.

The cranberry industry ultimately recovered, with help from the government. It indemnified growers for their losses to the tune of $10 million. They’d asked for $27 million, though.

Cranberry juice for sale in Israel in 2016.

The industry also tinkered with the cranberry and came up with new products that could be sold year-round. Ocean Spray added water and sugar to cranberry juice, making it more appealing to the American palate. Then it blended cranberry juice with apple and grape juice, sold dried cranberries as craisins and put it in trail mix.

In 1996, Congress repealed the Delaney Clause as part of the 1996 Food Quality and Protection Act.

Mark Ryan Janzen in his dissertation on the cranberry scare, noted that Silent Spring has often been cited as the beginning of the environmental movement. But, he wrote, “the cranberry scare led the way in demonstrating that chemical regulation was a serious problem needing a solution.”

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to Mark Ryan Janzen, “The Cranberry Scare of 1959: The Beginning of the End of the Delaney Clause.”

Images: Buzzards Bay cranberry harvest by By -jkb- – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8426443. Housewife By Tetra Pak – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tetrapak/6498149947/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17737480. Cranberry bog By Photo by Keith Weller – Image Number K4414-14 ( http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/k4414-14.htm ), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146690. Cranberry juice in Israel By Nizzan Zvi Cohen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50876824. This story updated in 2022.

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Dutch Elm Disease, the Nightmare on Elm Street

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When Dutch elm disease first appeared in southwestern Connecticut, horrified New Englanders responded immediately to save their beloved elms, state agriculture experts wrote in 1935.

“Any disease that threatens the existence of the American elm strikes very deeply in the hearts of all New Englanders,” begins a 1935 pamphlet about the disease published by the Connecticut Agricultural Station.

elm-new-haven

A surviving New Haven elm

New Englanders have cherished the elm ever since Connecticut and Massachusetts colonists began planting rows of them in the 1750s.

In the mid-19th century, village improvement societies planted thousands of the stately, fast growing trees. In the summer, their leafy branches formed a cathedral-like canopy over village greens and city streets.

But planting so many of one kind of tree created a monoculture that carried the seeds of its own destruction. The long rows of trees could not resist the pests and diseases that lurked in logs that came from overseas. So when Dutch elm disease arrived, it spread rapidly through those long lines of elms.

The Noble Elm

The map of New England is full of reminders of the elm’s glory days. Three cities – New Haven, Keene, N.H., and Waterville, Maine – call themselves Elm City. Worcester, Mass., has Elm Park. Elm Street in Manchester, N.H., functions as the city’s main thoroughfare. More towns in New England probably have an Elm Street than don’t.

elms

Elm-lined street in Salem, Mass.

And it wasn’t just the manmade elm forests New Englanders loved. Individual trees reached iconic status, most notably, Boston’s Liberty Tree, a white elm. Massachusetts also had the Knight elm in Newburyport, the Howard elm in Ware and the Washington elm in Cambridge.

liberty-tree

The Liberty Tree was an elm

In Providence, Elmo stood in front of Brown University’s Watson Institute until Dutch elm disease got it in 2003.  Yarmouth, Maine, had a beloved champion elm called Herbie, which succumbed to the disease in 2010.

In 1758, an elm tree was planted in Wethersfield, Conn., which grew into the ‘most magnificent tree east of the Rockies.’

Writers waxed elegiac. New England’s elms, wrote Henry Ward Beecher, are ‘as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.’’ Even the American Forestry Association found its poetic voice in a pamphlet: “On the rockbound coast of New England was founded a friendship between tree and man that has endured for more than three hundred years.

“…So deep became this companionship that when the settlers moved westward beyond the natural range of the elm, they took the tree with them to share their fortunes.”

Towns began naming Elm streets all the way to California.

The Enemy Within

At the height of their glory in 1937, America had 25 million elm trees. But their enemy — Dutch elm disease — had already begun burrowing beneath the bark. The trees just couldn’t resist them.

Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus that attacks the tree’s circulatory system. Certain kinds of elm bark beetle spread it, mostly through the root systems.

Dutch Elm Disease

By the time America sank into the Great Depression, Dutch elm disease had struck in Cleveland. The silent killer had arrived in 1930 on a shipment of logs destined for an Ohio furniture factory. Within two years, Dutch elm disease was killing elm trees in New Jersey.

Connecticut, the gateway to New England, stood between the elm belt to the north and east and the territory where Dutch elm disease started to spread.

The first case of Dutch elm disease appeared in Connecticut in November 1933 in Glenville, where Westchester County in New York joins Fairfield County.

herbie

Herbie

Fearing the tree’s extinction, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quickly set up an office to fight the enemy in Stamford. USDA scouts hired men from President Franklin Roosevelt’s new Civil Works Administration to survey elms in Fairfield County.

FDR to the Rescue

Roosevelt, an ardent dendrophile, eventually put thousands of young men to work planting and saving trees as part of his New Deal. Later the Civilian Conservation Corps took part in the fight against Dutch elm disease.

In the fall of 1934 Connecticut began its own survey. Six men traveled the main highways into every town in the state. They inspected 90,000 trees and designated 1,977 as possible victims of Dutch elm disease. Only one had it. However, many of the trees were in poor health and thus susceptible to infestation.

The New England states formed committees to rouse public sentiment on Dutch elm disease. They advised citizens to cut dead or dying parts of trees and burn them, while keeping their healthy trees in good condition by watering, fertilizing and spraying them.

The Hurricane of 1938

For the next few years, federal workers employed by New Deal agencies scouted diseased trees, cut them down and burned them. But Congress only funded the fight against Dutch elm disease in fits and starts, so the disease spread whenever funding dried up.

The disease found another ally when the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 wiped out millions of trees. The storm barreled through New Haven, Hartford, Springfield and Keene. The storm blew down millions of trees, and for years the elm bark beetles feasted and multiplied on the elm blowdowns.

Woodpile cut from blowdowns from the 1938 hurricane.
Photo courtesy National Archives.

In 1941, Massachusetts reported its first case of Dutch elm disease.

World War II

But then the United States entered World War II, and fighting the Axis powers took priority over fighting Dutch elm disease.

new-haven-green

New Haven Green. A 1900 guide, Trolley trips through New England, takes the reader to the corner of New Haven Green. “This plot, with its old elms, fluttering doves, three church spires, and the half-hidden rampart of the college beyond, lends to the city an unforgettable note of peace. It is the most characteristic public square in New England.”

By 1952, the disease had spread throughout New England. Nearly all of New Haven’s elms had died. The Wethersfield elm succumbed in 1953 after reaching 30 feet in circumference and a height of 100 feet.

During the war, however, the U.S. military discovered a nifty new pesticide called DDT.  It sprayed the stuff on South Pacific islands to kill malaria-breeding mosquitos. After the war, municipalities began to spray DDT on elm trees to try to save them.

Silent Spring

But then in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out. In the book, she not only warned of the dangers of DDT, she showed it didn’t kill the elm bark beetle.

“Hundreds of towns were killing thousands or millions of birds while not protecting their elms,” wrote Charles F. Wurster, founder of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Silent Spring had a huge impact, especially on New England’s college campuses, according to Thomas Campanella in Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm. When the Williamstown, Mass., tree warden tried to spray the town’s elms, Amherst students rocked his spray truck or lay down in front of it.

Silent Spring is still in pr int

In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT. By the end of the 1970s, Dutch elm disease had wiped out much of New England’s manmade elm forest. According to one estimate, the disease had killed 40 million elms since its arrival in Cleveland in 1930.

Some towns, like Castine and Blue Hill in Maine, were lucky. For some reason, their elm trees escaped the blight.

The Liberty Elm

The elm needed a new approach if it was to survive. In 1967, the Elm Research Institute formed to ‘rally support from the private sector’ for Dutch elm disease research in Keene. The ERI, one of several organizations dedicated to saving the elm, has developed varieties of the tree it calls Liberty elms, more resistant to Dutch elm disease. By 2000, it had planted 250,000 Liberty elms.

Several other varieties and hybrids that resist Dutch elm disease are being developed. The USDA has found people can sometimes save infected trees by pruning and burning infected areas and injecting the tree with a fungicide.

Dutch elm disease, however, is still a threat today.

Surviving New Haven elm: By Msact – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65161929; New Haven Green By Internet Archive Book Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14592924868/Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/trolleytripsthro01hart/trolleytripsthro01hart#page/n19/mode/1up, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43213194. Herbie, By Dudesleeper – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3924123. Silent Spring By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48694009. This story was updated in 2023.

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George Perkins Marsh, The Vermont Farmer Who Founded the Environmental Movement

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George Perkins Marsh, a little-known Congressman from Vermont, gave birth to the environmental movement in September 1847. On that day he gave a speech to farmers at the Rutland County Agricultural Fair after judging oxen, swine and maple sugar.

In his talk, Marsh previewed his now-forgotten book, Man and Nature, or Physical geography as modified by human action.  Modern environmental historians compare it with Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.

They were the two big books of the 19th century that demonstrated connections between humans and other forms of life.

View of Woodstock, Vt., from Mount Tom

View of Woodstock, Vt., from Mount Tom

“It takes a real act of historical imagination to understand just how profoundly Man and Nature reshaped American attitudes toward the environment,” wrote environmental historian William Cronon.

George Perkins Marsh

Marsh ushered in a new way of looking at the world, one that understood humans don’t really dominate nature. He inspired the reforesting of the Northeast. He did it by showing how denuded hills and dammed rivers caused erosion and flooding and depleted fisheries.

In his book, Marsh demonstrated how humans connect with nature in unexpected ways. He described how wetlands increased in North America because of a new Parisian fashion. Beavers were nearly extinct on the continent because of the popularity of beaver hats. But then a Parisian manufacturer came up with silk hats, which quickly became the rage. Demand for beaver fur fell off and the beaver population came back. More beavers meant more dams – and more wetlands.

Perhaps of all the people in the world in the mid-18th century, George Perkins Marsh was uniquely qualified to connect Parisian fashions with the American environment. He was at once a cosmopolitan world traveler and a Vermont farm boy, a scholar immersed in abstractions and a businessman (although not a very good one).

Mount Tom

He was born March 15, 1801, to a wealthy landowner in Woodstock, Vt. His father owned much of Mount Tom. As a boy, George Perkins Marsh watched the clearing and planting of the hills around Woodstock for pasture and fuel. He noticed the erosion, the increased flooding; later in life, he wrote a report about the depleted fisheries.

George Perkins Marsh

George Perkins Marsh

As an adult, he tried his hand at businesses that interfered with the environment: a woolen mill that depended on dammed streams, a marble quarry that cut stone from the earth, a farm with sheep that cropped the grass, a lumber dealership. He made a failed investment in a railroad that stripped the land of trees.

Perkins was more successful at politics. He was elected to the first of thee terms in Congress in 1843, where he helped create the Smithsonian Institution. Later he was appointed minister to the Ottoman Empire. During his five years living in and touring the Middle East he observed how man had made barren the once-lush region. He also sent samples of fish, flora, fauna and rock to his friend Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian Institution.

Man and Nature

In 1864, he wrote Man and Nature with little expectation it would be noticed. He was wrong.  It was the Silent Spring of the 19th century, a book that launched the environmental movement. Man and Nature led to passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act, which encouraged homesteaders on the Great Plains to plant trees. It laid the groundwork for the creation of Adirondack Park and the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. It also had a profound influence on environmentalists such as John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

Marsh revised his book several times while serving as a diplomat to the Kingdom of Italy. He spent 21 years in that post, the longest serving chief of ministers in U.S. history.

Today, you can visit his boyhood home in Woodstock at the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller State Park. You can appreciate his legacy at the Smithsonian Institution – or simply by enjoying the fall colors of the trees in New England.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy The Birds Best Friend: How Ernest Baynes Saved the Animals and Winnepesaukee Water Wars: Fighting for NH Property Rights in 1859.

We are indebted to George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Book) by David Lowenthal and William Cronon for this article. This story was updated in 2022. 

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