When Congress rejected President Lyndon Johnson’s Rat Extermination and Control Bill in the summer of 1967, in a mood of growing conservatism, it inadvertently sparked a heated political controversy that brought the desperate conditions of life in inner-city America into sharp focus. This article focuses on the issue of rat infestation to explore the conditions of “urban blight” that disproportionately afflicted ghetto communities in the United States during the 1960s and that represented a form of environmental inequality linked to racial marginalization and poverty. It is suggested that a growing awareness of environmental aspects of inequality increasingly fueled ghetto discontent, feeding the outbreak of riots during the “long, hot summers,” and spurring liberals to think of new ways to understand the problems of inner-city poverty.
"Special Message to the Congress: America’s Unfinished Business, Urban and Rural Poverty," March 14, 1967, in Public Papers of the President of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson. Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1967, Book I, January 1 to June 30, 1967 (Washington, DC, 1968), 342.
2.
Cities of 500,000 people or larger would be eligible to apply for grants covering two thirds of the cost of a sustainable program in its first three years and one third of the cost to cover the fourth and fifth years. (90)H2278-1, "To Amend and Extend Laws Relating to Housing and Urban Development," Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Housing of the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC, 1967), 2-3.
3.
See: Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, VA, and London, 1995); Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1989).
4.
For the riots and the backlash, see Kenneth O’Reilly, "The FBI and the Politics of the Riots, 1964-1968," Journal of American History 75:1 (June 1988): 91-114. See especially 93-4. See also Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995), 245-47. More broadly, see Irving Bernstein, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (New York and Oxford, 1996), 82-113, 156-244, 437, 458-67.
5.
"Spreading Fire," Time 90 (July 28, 1967), 9.
6.
Joseph A.Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York and London, 1991), 211.
7.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969 (London, 1972), 84. See also Califano, Triumph and Tragedy, 212; Irwin Unger, The Best of Intentions: The Triumphs and Failures of the Great Society under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (New York & London, 1996), 250. The bill was defeated 207 to 176. For a report of the vote in the House, including the great humor with which the bill was dismissed, see Marjorie Hunter, "Bill to Fight Rats Is Killed in House," New York Times, July 21, 1967, 1, 12. By the end of 1967 the New York Times could report that the "G.O.P.-Southern Coalition" in the House had won more roll-call votes during the year than in any session over the previous ten years. See John Herbert, "G.O.P.-Southern Coalition in House Won Most Votes in Decade this Year," New York Times, December 19, 1967, 32.
8.
"Spreading Fire."
9.
Johnson, Vantage Point, 85.
10.
Robert Dallek , Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (New York and Oxford, 1998). Dallek quotes Lyndon Johnson. Dallek, Flawed Giant, 417. Italics added for emphasis.
11.
Unger, Best of Intentions, 248.
12.
Tom Wicker, "In the Nation: Flip-Flop on Rats," New York Times , September 21, 1967, 46.
13.
There has been a terminological dispute within environmental scholarship. This article follows Martin Melosi in adopting the term environmental justice, accepting it as broader than environmental equality- often taken to refer to legal equality-and "less incendiary" (also less narrow) than "environmental racism". Martin V. Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, and the Environment (Pittsburgh, PA, 2001), 238. For a useful summary of debates surrounding terminology, see Tina Loos, "Disturbing the Peace: Environmental Change and the Scales of Justice on a Northern River," Environmental History 12:4 (October 2007), 895-919.
14.
A useful summary is provided in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), 8-10. For further examples, see: Bullard, "Environmental Justice for All," 3-22; Melosi, Effluent America, 242; Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2007); David Naguib Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Laura Westra, "The Faces of Environmental Racism: Titusville, Alabama, and BFI," in Laura Westra and Bill E. Wentz, eds., Faces of Environmental Racism (New York, 2001), 113-33; Laura Pulido, "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90:1 (March 2000), 12-40; Revathi I. Hines, "African Americans’ Struggle for Environmental Justice and the Case of the Shintech Plant: Lessons Learned from a War Waged," Journal of Black Studies 31:6 (July 2001), 777-89; Regina Austin and Michael Schill, "Black, Brown, Red, and Poisoned," in Robert D. Bullard, ed., Unequal Protection (New York, 1994), 53-73. See also Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO, 1994); Laura Westra and Peter S. Wentz, eds., Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice (Lanham, MD, 1995); James P. Lester, David W. Allen, and Kelly M. Hill, Environmental Injustice in the United States: Myths and Realities (Boulder, CO, 2001).
15.
The rat bill receives only passing reference in Unger, Best of Intentions, 9-10, 16-7; Bernstein, Guns or Butter, especially 261-306; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 401, 415-17; Unger, Best of Intentions, 248. The episode receives no mention in Katz, Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1990) or Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1986).
16.
Melosi, Effluent America, 255.
17.
114. Special Message to the Congress: America’s Unfinished Business, Urban and Rural Poverty. March 14, 1967. (pp. 331-46). Public Papers of the President of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson. Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1967, Book I, January 1 to June 30, 1967 (Washington, DC, 1968).
18.
Melosi, Effluent America, 238, 255.
19.
See: Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge and New York, 1983); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ, 1996), especially 211-29; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford, 1985), especially 196-203.
20.
Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 25.
21.
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC, 1968), 118. Henceforth, Kerner Report. This was the report of the so-called Kerner Commission, named after the governor of Illinois who chaired it, charged by LBJ with investigating the causes of the long, hot summers.
22.
Kerner Report, 118-19, 121. Arnold Hirsch has pointed out, in respect of Chicago, that the second ghetto was substantially the outcome of government policy from the 1930s onwards. Urban renewal programs consolidated the Black Belt in Chicago as "vertical ghetto" of high-rise towers "supplemented the old." See Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 9-10. For discussion of white resistance against housing integration during this period, see: Arnold R. Hirsch, "Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953-1966," Journal of American History 82:2 (September 1995), 522-50; Thomas J. Sugrue, "Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964," Journal of American History 82:2 (September 1995), 551-78.
23.
Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 92-121.
24.
See W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor, "A Sharper Look at Unemployment in U.S. Cities and Slums," March 15, 1967, Exhibit 261, attached to (90)S1866-3-B, "Federal Role in Urban Affairs," Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session, May 16, 1967, part 19 (Washington, DC, 1967), 3929-933.
25.
Kerner Report, 127-30.
26.
Bruce H. Douglas, "Post-War Public Health Problems in a Large American City," American Journal of Public Health 38 (February, 1948), 214-18. Through the 1960s, African Americans accounted for 88.9 percent of urban population growth. Kerner Report, 215; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 274-75.
27.
Kerner Report, 259.
28.
Little surprise, for during the postwar era, "practically all new construction was in lily-white suburbs." See Robert C. Weaver, The Urban Complex: Human Values in Urban Life (Garden City, NY, 1964), 60.
29.
Kerner Report, 257.
30.
Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (London, 1965), 27.
31.
Clark, Dark Ghetto, 12, 27-31.
32.
James M. Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," Public Health Reports 84:1 (January, 1969), 1, 2; Harold George Scott, "Rat Bite: Epidemiology and Control," Journal of Environmental Health 27:6 (May-June, 1965), 900-02.
33.
James M. Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," 4; Graham Twigg, The Brown Rat (Newton Abbot and London, 1975), 82.
34.
Walter J. Weber, Diseases Transmitted by Rats and Mice (Fresno, CA, 1982), 8, 10. For corroboration of the claim, often assumed to be urban myth, that rats can enter a home via a toilet, see Richard A. Mackie, "Three Years of Roof Rat Control in the Sewers of San Diego," Journal of Environmental Health 27:1 (July-August, 1964), 482-86; A. P. Meehan, Rats and Mice: Their Biology and Control (East Grinstead, 1984), 38; Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," 4.
35.
Martin W. Schein and Holmes Orgain, "A Preliminary Analysis of Garbage as Food for the Norway Rat," American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 2:6 (November, 1953), 1117-130. See especially 1117-118, 1123, 1129.
36.
Schein and Orgain, "A Preliminary Analysis," 1118.
37.
See Martin V. Melosi’s brief but helpful essay, "Lyndon Johnson and Environmental Policy," in Robert A. Divine, ed., The Johnson Years: Vietnam, the Environment, and Science (Lawrence, KS, 1987), 113-49. See especially 139. Additionally see Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2000), 339-40. See also Pellow, Garbage Wars, 44.
38.
Committee on Solid Wastes, American Public Works Association, Refuse Collection, 3rd edition (Chicago, 1966), 25-6. It is worth noting that the Committee on Solid Wastes estimated that food and fat composed 12 percent of all refuse. However, since the Baltimore study surveyed a residential block specifically, its findings are preferred by the present article.
39.
In Congressional hearings about the rat control bill, Robert C. Weaver of HUD stated that: "sanitation conditions have seriously deteriorated in many areas of the country in recent years. In many communities refuse and garbage collection service is far better in higher income areas than in more densely populated slums." See statement of Robert C. Weaver, Secretary of HUD, (90)H2278-1, 10-1.
40.
See Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880-1980 ( College Station, TX, 1981).
41.
Testimony of Mr. Clyde Fehn, Sanitary Engineer, US Public Health Service, "Hearing before the United States Commission on Civil Rights; Hearing Held in Cleveland, Ohio, April 1-7, 1966," in U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, Cleveland, Ohio (Washington, DC, 1966), 140.
42.
Fehn, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 140-43.
43.
Fehn, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 137-38.
44.
Committee on Solid Wastes, Refuse Collection, 24-5.
45.
Kerner Report, 138-39.
46.
Fehn, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 140.
47.
Clark, Dark Ghetto, 30.
48.
Testimony of Mrs. Hattie Mae Dugan, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 25.
49.
Fehn, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 137-38, 146. For quote, see 146.
50.
The Congressional Subcommittee on Housing concluded, after considering the rat control bill, "voluntary citizen participation alone will not be sufficient for a continuing and effective program. There are always a few persons in each neighborhood who will not cooperate. A necessary part of a local program must, therefore, be the enforcement of adequate building and sanitation codes with respect to such matters as trash receptacles, debris removal, and ratproofing of buildings." See "Rat Extermination Act of 1967" (Report 474), in House Reports, 90th Congress, 1st Session (beginning 10 January 1967), Vols. 1-3, Miscellaneous Reports on Public Bills, III (Washington, DC, 1967), 5.
51.
Fehn, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 145.
52.
Dugan, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 23-5.
53.
(90)S1823-2-C, "Federal Role in Urban Affairs," Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session, 20 and 21 April 1967, part 17 (Washington, DC, 1967), 3503.
54.
(90)S1823-2-C, 3503. For rates of rat infestation, which remained around the same level until the introduction of the rat control bill, see Will Lissner, "Many on Welfare Complain of Rats," New York Times, December 29, 1967, 16. For a report almost a decade earlier, see "City Reports Count of Rats in Harlem," New York Times, September 16, 1959, 34.
Scott, "Rat Bite," 900-01. Additionally, see F. S. Lisella, R. L. Mullen, and E. P. Savage, "A Review of the Rat-Bite Problem in Tampa, Florida," Journal of Environmental Health 29:4 (January-February, 1967), 322-28. See also Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," 1-7. For the proportion of children under two years of age, see Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," 5. See also Weber, Diseases Transmitted by Rats and Mice, 43.
62.
Scott, "Rat Bite," 901. For a report of the deaths of two children from rat bite injuries in New York, see Edith Evans Asbery, "272 Slum Owners Given Summonses on Rat Infestation," New York Times, December 5, 1959, 24.
63.
Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," 3.
64.
Draws upon the following sources: Editorial, "The Public Health Problem of Spirochetal Jaundice (Weil’s Disease) in American Cities," American Journal of Public Health 27 (October, 1937), 1039-040, 1039; Douglas, "Post-War Public Health Problems in a Large American City," 217; J. M. Alston and J. C. Broom, Leptospirosis in Man and Animals (Edinburgh and London, 1958), 6, 12-3, 54, 67, 71; Weber, Diseases Transmitted by Rats and Mice, 9; Meehan, Rats and Mice, 128; Clinton, "Rats in Urban America," 4. For a firsthand description of the symptoms of Weil’s disease, see S. Anthony Barnett, The Story of Rats: Their Impact on Us, Our Impact on Them (Crows Nest, NSW, 2001), 26. Norman Gratz suggests that "In 85-90% of patients the disease is self-limited and mild" and that the disease is probably underrecorded. See Norman Gratz, Vector- and Rodent-Borne Diseases in Europe and North America: Distribution, Public Health Burden and Control (Cambridge and New York, 2006), 290. In patients over the age of 60 a mortality rate of 30 percent was described by Alston and Broom, Leptospirosis, 116-17.
65.
Robert F. Kennedy, address to Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Spring Valley, New York, August 18, 1965, as cited in Palermo, in His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy (New York, 2001), 301.
66.
Statement of Mrs. Gracie Comacho, trainee of the health occupation program, Mobilization for Youth, New York City, (90)S1819-3-C, "Examination of the War on Poverty," Hearings before the Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC, 1967), 1958.
67.
Dugan, U.S. Civil Rights Commission Hearings, 23-5.
68.
"Negroes Protest in House Gallery," New York Times, August 8, 1967, 23; Howard Rusk, M.D., "Poverty and Health," New York Times, August 13, 1967, 69. Jesse Gray headed the Community Council on Housing. See (90) H2351-1-B: "Subversive Influences in Riots, Looting, and Burning," part 2, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 1st Session, October 31 and November 1, 1967 (Washington, DC, 1968), 1078-079.
69.
Julie Sze, Noxious New York, 50.
70.
For Tennessee A&I, see copy of undated student flier, Jones v. State Board of Education-General Case Material, February-April 1968: Group V, Legal Department Case Files cont. (Tennessee). Group V, Box 2281 (reel 7, frame 0802 of U.P.A. microfilm collection, Papers of the NAACP, Supplement to Part 23, Legal Department Case Files, 1960-1972; Series A: The South, Section III: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas) (Bethesda, MD, 2004). For Houston, see Lester et al., Environmental Injustice in the United States, 25. Lastly, Bailus Walker, Jr., "Environmental Quality and the Local Health Agency-A Re-Examination," American Journal of Public Health 63:4 (April 1973), 353-57, 354. Walker originally wrote his paper in 1971 as an address; it was later reprinted in the AJPH.
71.
For Watts, see Raymond J. Murphy and James M. Watson, "The Structure of Discontent: The Relationship between Social Structure, Grievance, and Support for the Los Angeles Riot," Los Angeles Riot Study Institute of Government and Public Affairs, UCLA, June 1, 1967. Copy used here found in (90)S1866-3-A, 3806-3857. For Detroit, see "Memorandum Citing Police and Ghetto Housing as Possible Causes of Detroit Riot," January 3, 1968. Subject Files of the Office of the Executive Director (Series 46), Box 6, "Office of Research Data" (reel 18, frame 452 of U.P.A. microfilm collection Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, part v, "Records of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), (Frederick, MD, 1987).
72.
Robert E. Patricelli, Memorandum to National Commission on Civil Disorders, November 16, 1967. Subject Files of the Deputy Executive Director (Series 48), Box 2, "Ghetto" (reel 21, frames 151-57, Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, part v).
73.
Patricelli, Memorandum, November 16, 1967 (reel 21, frames 151-157, Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, part v).
74.
Field Team Interview, Malcolm Talbott, Vice-President, Rutgers University, October 2, 1967, 3a. Subject Files of Robert Conot (Series 59), Box 4, "Newark, New Jersey" (reel 25, frame 787, Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, part v).
75.
For "housing and rats," see Field Team Interview, Rev. Dennis A. Westbrooks, Director of Newark Churches Volunteer Service Program, October 6, 1967, 1. Subject Files of Robert Conot (Series 59), Box 4, "Newark, New Jersey" (reel 25, frame 816, Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, part v).
76.
(90)S1866-3-A, "Federal Role in Urban Affairs," Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, US Senate, 90th Congress, 1st Session, 26 April 1967, part 18 (Washington, DC, 1967), 3638.
77.
Robert Dallek cites report by Harry McPherson in Flawed Giant, 417.
78.
Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (New York and London, 1997), 245-46.
79.
Robert F. Kennedy, (89)S1779-3-A, 187.
80.
Unger, Best of Intentions, 229.
81.
(89)S1779-3-A, 188.
82.
Abraham Ribicoff, (89)S1779-3-A, 95.
83.
(89)S1779-3-A, 190.
84.
Much of the pioneering work was carried out in Baltimore, Maryland, supported by the city council and the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. See "We Pay The Pied Piper," Editorial, American Journal of Public Health 38 (November, 1948), 1576-578; John T. Emlen, "Baltimore’s Community Rat Control Program," American Journal of Public Health 37 (June, 1947), 721-27; John A. Childs, Chief, Division of Rodent Control, Baltimore, MD, Letter to the Editor, American Journal of Public Health 52:5 (May 1962), 850-52.
85.
For New York, see the following, all from New York Times over successive years: Farnsworth Fowle, "Campaign on Rats Starts in Harlem," September 15, 1959, 26; "City’s Rat Drive Cuts Infestation," May 24, 1960; "Landlords Fined $700," October 14, 1961, 46; "2 Landlords Are Fined in Rat Infestation Cases," June 27, 1962, 71. For Milwaukee, see (90)H2278-1, 77-78.
86.
"Rat Extermination Act of 1967," House Reports (474), 6.
87.
The most influential work was Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York, 1997). See Katz, Undeserving Poor, 24-8; Unger, Best of Intentions, 66. It was the same line of thinking that led Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his controversial report The Negro Family, to describe black ghetto society as a "tangle of pathology." See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, March 1965), 29-30. Reproduced in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1967), 75, 76.
88.
Clark, Dark Ghetto, 32-3.
89.
See Katz, Undeserving Poor, 17. See also Unger, Best of Intentions, 32.
90.
Johnson, Vantage Point, 84-5.
91.
Robert C. Weaver , interview with Joe B. Frantz, 19 November 1968 (tape 2), Lyndon B. Johnson Library Oral History, 16. Available at http://webstorage4.mcpa.virginia.edu/lbj/oralhistory/weaver_robert_1968_1119.pdf.
92.
Robert C. Weaver, (90)H2278-1, 44.
93.
Sze, Noxious New York, 27-48.
94.
Paul Delaney , "Urban Officials Hail Year-Old U.S. Rat-Control Drive,"New York Times, June 14, 1970 , 40.
95.
"Rat Control Program Cuts Incidence of Bites Here," November 7, 1971, 70. New York’s Health Department reported that a concerted rat control campaign had succeeded in cutting the incidence of rat bite by 30 percent in a year, from 317 cases to 218. Results were most impressive in the five target areas, Harlem, Lower East Side, South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville. A fivefold increase in garbage removal was largely credited for the success. For a report on the launch of the campaign, see Martin Arnold, "When the ‘Pied Pipers’ Came to Harlem," New York Times, December 27, 1967, 124.
96.
Walker, "Environmental Quality," 354.
97.
Joe E. Brooks, New York State Department of Health, "A Review of Rodent Control Programs in New York State," Proceedings of the 6th Vertebrate Pest Conference ( 1974), 135, 138. Available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/vpc6/5 (April 3, 2008).
98.
Harry L. Margulis, "Rat Fields, Neighborhood Sanitation, and Rat Complaints in Newark, New Jersey,"Geographical Review67:2 (April, 1977), 221-31. For the number of cities participating in federally funded rat control programs, see 221.
99.
See Delaney, "Urban Officials Hail Year-Old U.S. Rat-Control Drive," 40. See also Arnold, "When the ‘Pied Pipers’ Came to Harlem," 124.
100.
Timothy J. Conlan , "The Politics of Federal Block Grants: From Nixon to Reagan,"Political Science Quarterly99:2 (Summer 1984), 247-70, 261.
101.
Robert Browning, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin."
102.
Kirsty Sucato , "ENVIRONMENT; As Aid Is Reduced, the Rodent Problem Explodes in Urban Areas,"New York Times, January 31, 1999, 6. For Camden’s participation in the program, see Margulis, "Rat Fields,"221.
103.
Sucato, "ENVIRONMENT,"6.
104.
As Martin Melosi has noted, the order was not uncontroversial-some, distrustful of the government, have argued that it was intended to split the grassroots movement-yet it nevertheless represented a new stage in the development of a national discourse about environmental justice. Melosi, Effluent America, 238, 245-46.
