WAR: THE HOME FRONT

T

he profound influence of German science and textbooks on American veterinary medicine that had lasted for seventy-five years — from 1860 to 1935 — ended when the European War began in 1939. Nazi Germany’s multifront exploding war in Europe was making it increasingly difficult to communicate.

It was clear to most reasonable citizens that the nation would have to deal with Germany or with Japanese expansion, or both. A national survey in summer 1940 reported that 67 percent of Americans believed that a German victory would endanger the U.S., and if that happened, 88 percent supported the nation being “armed to the teeth.” The Lend-Lease bill was passed in early 1941, allow-ing President Roosevelt “to lend, lease, sell, or barter arms, ammunition, food or any defense article to the government of any country whose defense the

president deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Congress and citi-zens began to think about military preparedness.

As folks were settling in for a rest after Sunday dinner on December 7 — many had been tuned to NBC Radio, where the program Sammy Kaye’s Sunday Serenade was just finishing up — regular programming was broken by a tense one-liner: “FLASH: Washington. President Roosevelt has just announced that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air.” Some had the habit of listening to the CBS Sunday afternoon concert by the New York Philharmonic — they were playing Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1, which had been interrupted by the same message.

The Associated Press had put out the first bulletin on President Roosevelt’s message at 2:22 p.m. EST, and it had gone into every network, breaking into all regular programming. In New York City, station WOR interrupted the broad-cast of the Giants and Dodgers football game. Soon, another bulletin broke in, in the midst of an advertisement for Jell-O Pudding, that Army and Navy bases around Manila in the Philippines had been bombed. NBC Radio put on the familiar H. V. Kaltenborn, summing up with his rapid-fire delivery what was known about the bombing. Kaltenborn, the best-known newscaster of the day, was a Milwaukee native with a crisp Wisconsin-Germanic dialect tempered by days at Harvard. He made it clear that the nation was at war. His program concluded with the messages that “Sheriff and Police personnel stand-by for notice” and that “citizen volunteers go quietly to their assigned area.” The next day, President Roosevelt gave his inspiring “Day of Infamy” speech to the combined joint session of the U.S. Congress, which thirty-three minutes later formally declared war on Japan.

There had been thousands of deaths in Pearl Harbor, but none more tragic than that of William Ball, a sailor from Fredericksburg, Iowa. The sorrowful chain of events that followed his death was set in motion when Ball’s boyhood buddies, five brothers from nearby Waterloo, Iowa, heard of his death and walked out together to avenge their friend’s death by enlisting in the Navy.

They requested that they remain together, and the Navy granted their wish. On November 14, 1942, the cruiser the brothers were serving on, the USSJuneau, was sunk by the Japanese in a battle off the coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Two months later, Mrs. Tom Sullivan received the news, not by the usual telegram but by a special courier, telling her that all five of her boys had been lost at sea. The tragedy of the Sullivan brothers became a national symbol

of heroic sacrifice, and their parents toured the country to promote patriotism and bond sales.

Six months later, another grievous loss: 1939 Heisman Trophy winner Nile Clarke Kinnick Jr. was killed in a Navy training flight. Downed in the Gulf of Paria between Trinidad and the east coast of Venezuela, he had flown off the carrier USS Lexington and crashed-landed into the water when his engine devel-oped a massive oil leak. Kinnick was a 5ʹ8″ 167-pound dynamo halfback on the State University of Iowa football team — All-American, Male Athlete of the Year, he played it by the flight book to the end. His body was never recovered.

In the weeks after Pearl Harbor there were more scares. The most serious threats in the early days of the war had been the German submarines sinking Allied freighters within sight of the Atlantic beaches. In June of 1942, there was the bombardment of Fort Stevens in Oregon by a Japanese submarine that had moved up the Columbia River. The fort commander ordered lights out, and there was no damage to the fort and there were no injuries. Nonetheless, it caused defensive moves up and down the northwest coastline and a general uneasiness among us all.

Oregon had another distinction. During the war, the Japanese sent thousands of balloon-borne bombs to the west coasts of the U.S. and Canada, and a few drifted as far as Iowa and Kansas. Large paper balloons, each carrying several thirty-pound bombs timed to explode from three to five days after launching, were released in Japan to ride the high-velocity stratospheric air currents across the Pacific. Most failed to go off, and only one caused casualties. The fatal bomb landed on Oregon’s Mount Gearhart, where the Reverend Archie Mitchell drove with his wife and five parish kids for a vacation. Searching for a campsite while Mitchell parked the car, the wife and youngsters discovered the bomb on the ground. It exploded, killing all six.

As the war got underway, food rationing for civilians was begun. Meat and butter restrictions were severe. To overcome rationing on meat, some funky industries developed. Horsemeat consumption increased during the war, espe-cially in the eastern U.S. It did not require meat ration points, and most people could not distinguish between beef and horsemeat. The muscle fibers are finer than beef, and the glycogen deposited in muscle makes it sweeter. The Davis Packing Company in Estherville, Iowa, began operating in January 1940 under the USDA Meat Inspection Service and slaughtered up to seventy-five horses

per day.¹ The veterinary inspector, O. W. Anderson, was responsible to ensure that all horsemeat was conspicuously labeled using a six-sided stamp with light green ink, in contrast to the round stamp and purple ink used on cattle, swine, and sheep carcasses.

Rationing of butter caused people on the home front to seek alternatives.

In 1943, Wisconsin was first and Iowa second in the nation in dairy produc-tion. Despite increased production, veterinary food inspectors in the Army Quartermaster Corps were having difficulty getting enough butter. At Iowa State College, food experts were working overtime to support the war effort.

Economics professor Theodore Schultz organized a series of pamphlets on emer-gency food strategies, the first appearing in January of 1943. Shultz’s research focused on ways that powerful interest groups distort economic inefficiency in tariff policy, tax systems, and agricultural production. At Iowa State for only five years, he was head of the Department of Economics and Sociology, and support from President Friley had allowed the department to flourish.

Pamphlet #5, Putting Dairying on a War Footing, appeared in April 1943.

Produced by a doctoral student in economics, O. H. Brownlee, it analyzed conditions that had resulted in a shortage of dairy products for soldiers and recommended rationing and shifting milk to the most productive uses. Among other solutions, it recommended that American households substitute marga-rine for butter. Dairy industry leaders went ballistic. Their goal was clearly to achieve “complete extermination of oleo,” and they ferociously descended on Iowa State president Friley with pressure to retract the pamphlet. Finding Friley consistently unavailable for meetings, they took their complaints to the press.

The adverse reaction in Iowa to Brownlee’s pamphlet #5 was prompt, vocifer-ous, and vehement for Iowa State to retract it.²

But Schultz was supported nationally. Time published an article of support,

“The Butter Atheist,” and Newsweek facetiously reported that Iowa’s dairy lead-ers had “found a traitor in their ranks,” a reference to Iowa State College. An economist from Harvard praised the pamphlet, and an assistant to the U.S.

secretary of agriculture, Iowa State alumnus Carl Hamilton, reported to Friley that the pamphlet had been well received in Washington.³

Rural legislators and financial donors were insisting that science be devoid of policy arguments. President Friley began a series of deflecting actions — commit-tees formed to study the matter. Agriculture Experiment Station director and Graduate College deanRobert Buchanan announced that Iowa State needed

to “tighten its definition of allowed social science reports.” When things were not resolved, Friley moved to replace Collegiate Press editors whose reviews had supported the pamphlet and appointed a committee to reorganize the Department of Economics and Sociology.

That was the last straw, and Schultz unexpectedly resigned from Iowa State College. He accepted a position at the University of Chicago as chair of the Department of Economics, where he would lay the groundwork for what would become known internationally as the Chicago school of economics. Schultz would win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979 for his work in agricultural policy. The moves of President Friley and Dean Buchanan presaged a post-war pattern of administration that succumbed to political pressure, easing the discomfort of the day instead of laying groundwork for long-term policy for independence and truth in science.

Unlike today there was no faculty tenure, and many land grant universities were not viewed as sources of innovative machines or as business incubators;

several lost prestige and dollars for not pursuing patents on products they produced. At Iowa State College, the first computer was built during 1939–1942 in the basement of the Physics Building. Mathematician and physicist John Vincent Atanasoff, with his graduate student Clifford Berry, built a success-ful automatic electronic digital computer. The first of its kind, it used binary digits to represent numbers and data, did calculations electronically (not by wheels or mechanical switches), and had a system that kept computation and memory separate. No one applied for a patent; Atanasoff moved, and the work was discontinued. When the war ended, the ENIAC computer, which had a changeable stored program, was patented and millions of dollars went to corporations. But in 1973, in the case of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand in a suit on patent rights for the ENIAC computer, the U.S. District Court for Minnesota ruled — based largely on the inventors of ENIAC having visited Atanasoff — that the ENIAC patent was invalid and the computer had been a derivative of the Atanasoff invention.

Midwest farms in the wet summers of the war years were plagued by an increased loss of livestock to anthrax. Rotating through the Iowa State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, senior student Vaylord Ladwig studied tissue specimens from an anthrax outbreak in cattle. The disease had occurred on four farms in central Iowa, three of which were in the same drainage area. On the

original farm in the outbreak, the first death occurred without the farmer notic-ing signs of disease; the deaths were thought to have been due to a lightnnotic-ing strike. During the next week six more steers died, and when autopsies were done there were the unmistakable signs of anthrax: swollen hemorrhagic tissues, massive bloody engorgement of the spleen, and blood in the intestine. The report on specimens that had been sent to the diagnostic laboratory in Ames stated that the blood smears, bacterial cultures, and animal inoculations all revealed Bacillus anthracis. Microscopically, billions of bacteria in the blood-stream had obliterated the liver and spleen.

On the anthrax farms contaminated areas were cleansed, with attention to preventing the spread of bacteria. Iowa Code regulation 22 required that “all carcasses of anthrax-infected animals must be burned within 24 hours intact without removal of the hide” and that contaminated flooring, mangers, feed racks, watering troughs, buckets, litter, soil, and miscellaneous utensils must be burned, and if made of metal must be disinfected with “Cresolis Compound, U.S.P. or any reliable disinfectant recommended by the Bureau of Animal Industry, or a regularly qualified veterinarian.” The first case had been sent to the rendering plant, the operator of which developed cutaneous anthrax around a trivial wound he had received the previous day. The remaining herd was given anthrax antiserum and anthrax bacterin, both available commercially.

Vaylord Ladwig published the results of his clinical case in the student jour-nal The Veterinary Student in the fall of 1943.⁴ He graduated that year in the new fall class and was immediately commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. The Army had fulfilled its quota for veterinarians by 1943, and Ladwig took the offer of an immediate discharge to serve the farm econ-omy, desperately in need of large animal veterinarians. He returned to Iowa and a veterinary practice. Upon graduation, these students, when approved by their local draft board, were given a certificate of graduation stating that they had served in the Army of the United States and had been discharged to return to rural practice, an essential occupation. And as requested by the War Department, Professor Packer sent tubes of his cultures of Bacillus anthracis to the new biowarfare laboratory at Camp Detrick.

In 1944, the doors opened for a new veterinary school at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The pioneering force behind the plan was an extraordinary African American. Frederick D. Patterson, born in Washington D.C., attended Prairie

View Normal School in Texas, where he was mentored by an Iowa State College veterinary school graduate — Class of 1918 — Edward B. Evans. On Evans’s advice, Patterson enrolled at Iowa State College and graduated with the DVM degree in 1923; it was the same year that African American football player Jack Trice — for whom the Iowa State University stadium is named — died after inju-ries he received in a football game with Minnesota. Offered a position as meat inspector, Patterson was influenced by Dean Stange, who cautioned that it should be only a temporary one — that as a graduate of Iowa State College more was expected of him. Patterson took a teaching position at Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia. He returned to Iowa State College for the MS degree in pathology in 1927. He was supported by the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose goal was to improve the quality of teaching in the South’s black colleges. He worked under E. A. Benbrook’s tutelage in the Veterinary Research Institute.⁵ Offered a position to teach veterinary science and bacteriology at Tuskegee Institute, Patterson left for Alabama in 1928. A second GEB grant got him to Cornell University for a PhD in bacteriology.

Patterson would become the pioneering and most prominent African American veterinarian in the nation. In his career, he was president of Tuskegee Institute for twenty years, a driving force behind the formation of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Patterson wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles of Faith: “The absence of animosity encouraged me to see veterinary medicine as a field in which I could practice without being hampered by the racial stereotypes and obstacles that would confront me as a medical doctor, for example. I found the teachers of Iowa State helpful whenever I approached them. Educationally, it was a fine experience.”

But there was subtle racism during his veterinary school years. Listed simply as Fred Patterson in the 1923 Bomb yearbook, he had been a member of the YMCA and the Veterinary Society — but not of the Dixie Club, an official college club composed of “students and faculty from southern states.” Perhaps Patterson’s greatest legacy was his ability to use his intelligence and logic to rise above any insult from local popinjays, all the while maintaining his demands for perfection and equality. Of all the pioneering struggles for science in veter-inary medicine, those of Frederick Patterson required the most devotion. Not all obstacles came from white Americans; one black critic allowed as how the

Tuskegee statue of Booker T. Washington, Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, really was education covering the eyes of blacks to the real problems of racism.

Frederick Patterson left Iowa to earn the PhD degree at Cornell University, joined the faculty of Virginia State College as head of their School of Agriculture, and was appointed the third president of Tuskegee Institute at age thirty-four

First faculty at Tuskegee School of Veterinary Medicine, 1945. Front row (left to right): William H. Waddell (Ambulatory Clinic), Edward B. Evans (dean), Frederick D. Patterson (president, Tuskegee Institute), Edward G. Tripp (Bacteriology and Public Health). Back row (left to right): George W. Coopers (Large Animal Medicine), Lloyd B. Mobiley (Anatomy), Thomas G. Perry (Small Animal Medicine). Background:

Lifting the Veil of Ignorance statue of Booker T. Washington; artist:

Charles Keck; dedicated 1922.

in 1935. During the war years of the early 1940s he worked tirelessly to create educational opportunities for black youth. In 1942, the Tuskegee Institute Board of Trustees approved a program of cooperation with the State of Alabama to create a school of veterinary medicine at Tuskegee. Patterson opened the School of Veterinary Medicine in 1944, the same year he established the United Negro College Fund that today awards scholarship for students in thirty-seven private black colleges and universities. The first dean, Edward B. Evans, had been Patterson’s mentor at Prairie View Normal School. Three department heads at Tuskegee were Kansas State College graduates: Lloyd B. Mobiley (Anatomy), Thomas G. Perry (Small Animal Medicine), and Theodore S. Williams (Pathology).⁶ When Evans resigned in 1946, Williams transformed Tuske gee into a competitive veterinary college with demanding courses and graduate programs. Williams earned his MS degree in veterinary pathology under E. A.

Benbrook in Iowa.

Im Dokument AND THE GREAT PLAGUES (Seite 178-186)