Earth Day

Speaker 1: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story. Welcome to Back Story, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and along with Joanne Freeman, we explore a different aspect of American history each show.

Nathan Connolly: We’re going to start this week by going back in time to April 22nd 1970.

Narrator: Earth Day, a question of survival. Fairmount Park in Philadelphia today. As much like a rock music festival as a teach-in on the environment. A few older people, a few blacks, and some of the poor, but mainly white middle-class young people. As much aroused by the music as by the damage done to the environment by pollution. This is Philadelphia …

Ed Ayers: Oh, it was huge. There are estimates of 20 million participants. They were 10 thousand schools, and 2000 universities and colleges.

Nathan Connolly: The first Earth Day isn’t exactly how we remember the presidency of Richard Milhous Nixon, but historian J. Brooks Flippen says the president, ever the pragmatist, was an unlikely environmentalist. He saw the environment as a way to court young votes, and divert attention from the Vietnam war.

Ed Ayers: It was all across the land. Communities large and small, and you’d have businessmen and housewives, college students, children, workers, anti-establishment radicals. It really represented every strata of American society. It grew generically. There was a movement in San Francisco with an activist named John McConnell, and he had been pushing for Earth Day on March 21st every year. Which was the annual time when the sun crossed the equator, and to him it symbolized the harmony and balance in nature.

Nathan Connolly: Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, built on McConnell’s idea, and turned Earth Day into a national event intended to bring awareness to pollution and the rapid destruction of the environment. Earth Day was part protest, part celebration.

Ed Ayers: A lot of the official agenda of these meetings were speeches or petitions and displays, there was some music, but it’s funny to look at some of what individual people were doing. For example, at the University of Minnesota members of the Students for Environmental Defense had a mock funereal service for the internal combustion engine, complete with putting an engine in a coffin and lowering it into the ground. People would wear gas masks to protest pollution. A New Jersey housewife hung a banner with a black skull and crossbones on dredging equipment, and people were throwing out birth control pills. It’s pretty amazing given the breadth of this that there weren’t really wasn’t that much trouble.
13 people were arrested for blocking access to Logan Airport, and several self-styled Yippies at Indiana University plugged municipal sewage pipes with concrete. There was a Florida man who was arrested for violating sanitary codes presenting a local utility company with a bunch of decaying fish. Little things like that, but they were all geared to getting the attention, and they did.

Brian Balogh: Earth Day U.S.A., happy time for many. Conservatives were for it. left liberals were for it. Democrats, Republicans, and independents were for it. So were the ins, the outs, the executive, and the legislative branches of government. It was Earth Day, and like Mother’s day, no one in public office could be against it. President Nixon, through a White House spokesman, said he had earlier expressed his concern about pollution, and hoped yesterday’s events would be the start of a continuing campaign against it. Arizona Republic, Thursday April 23rd 1970.

Ed Ayers: There were a number of people in the Nixon White House which worried that if Nixon came out strongly for Earth Day, it might degenerate into one gigantic criticism of the administration, or it might be a venue of radicals of one sort or another. It could even result in violence.

Nathan Connolly: But Nixon had appointed some staunch environmental advocates in his administration. Chief among them were John Whitaker, Deputy Assistant for domestic affairs, and Christopher DeMuth, Staff Assistant. Together, they were the loudest voices pushing Nixon to get involved with Earth Day. A great debate ensued within the White House between Nixon’s environmental and economic advisors. Ultimately Nixon settled on a middle-of-the-road approach.

Ed Ayers: Nixon, what he decided to do on Earth Day was to have his administration appear very pro-environment, pro-Earth Day, in many respects. He ended up dispatching a lot of officials about, and Whitaker and DeMuth worked up a plan for inside the White House for each department to develop a way to show that they were involved, but Nixon himself refused to issue an Executive Order directing federal workers to participate. They didn’t declare a national holiday, although Whitaker and DeMuth really wanted him to. They figured that if the day appeared to be going well, he could issue a press release later in the day, he could sort of tag on if it was going well, and if it didn’t go well then he wasn’t too involved.
Nixon had coordinated White House cleanup of the Potomac River the week of Earth Day, and Nixon was hoping something like that would mute some of the criticism that he himself, Nixon as president, did not personally get involved. So Nixon wants to win this constituency, but it’s a political consideration for him. He’s not really concerned about the core issues, but he doesn’t want to appear that he’s anti-environment, he’s sort of treading water, he’s going go where the political winds seem to take him.

Nathan Connolly: By any measure, Earth Day was huge success. It was the largest mass demonstration in American history to date, with minimal instances of violence, but Nixon drew criticism for his tepid support of Earth Day. He was frustrated that the media didn’t give him the credit he thought he deserved, and so as the years went by, the Nixon administration drew back from subsequent Earth Days.

Ed Ayers: Dan Rather called the administration’s response to Earth Day “Benign neglect.” Earth Day remained very strong in the early 70s. 1971 Gaylord Nelson returned to have the first anniversary of Earth Day, and actually proclaimed an Earth Week. The administration was still trying to tread water here, they were still involved but not wanting to become too involved. In 1972 there was on June 5th a World Environmental Day at Stockholm in the U.N. conference on the environment. 74, there was a notable Earth Day, but with the exceptions of the anniversary years, like 1990, or 1995, Earth Day has begun to fade as a national celebration, and today, for many people, it goes unnoticed. Even when it is noticed, it’s kind of ironic, because Earth Day has been many, many companies have turned Earth Day into a marketing phenomenon. It’s been ironic when you consider how it began.

Brian Balogh: So today on the show, Richard Nixon without Watergate. We’ll explore the legacy of a man whose presidency tends to be reduced to impeachment.

Ed Ayers: You’ll hear about Nixon’s embrace of an economic idea popular in Silicon Valley today.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll learn how a man who hated the great outdoors signed more environmental legislation than any other U.S. president.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll discuss how Nixon’s constant obsession with his image in the media forever changed how we relate to politicians today.