The fire ant wars: Solenopsis and the nature of the American state, 1918–1982

In the wake of the introduction of DDT in the years after World War II, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) undertook numerous attempts to eradicate insects. This dissertation analyzes the controversy surrounding the largest, longest, and most costly eradication campaign: the attempt to eradicate the imported fire ants from the American South, begun in 1957 and ended in 1978. The attempt sparked protests from the nascent environmental community that culminated in the banning of all insecticides used against the ants. I use archival materials to piece together the story, examining how the country came to engage in what was known as the fire ant wars, what was at stake in these wars, and how the battles of the 1950s limited future activities by both sides. The imported fire ants, I show, were constructed as a threat due to changes in the ecology of the American South, changes in the way Americans understood ants, and changes in the structure of American entomology. USDA entomologists constructed the ants as communist subversives that only they could stop. Environmentalists, on the contrary, argued that the ants were not threats—the USDA was: the federal agency was the seed of a garrison state. Thus, the fire ant wars were a battle over the meaning of American democracy in the Cold War. This construction of the problem limited future federal policies, for the controversy boiled down to using the pesticides or not. Because neither side examined the changes in the Southern ecosystem, however, neither side noticed that either choice—using pesticides or banning them—allowed the ants to continue to spread. I conclude by arguing three points: land use management and environmental regulation should not be separated; the growth of the environmental movement was firmly rooted in the concerns of 1950s America; and that while the understanding of an environmental problem relies on cultural categories created by particular social groups at particular times, material changes in the environment are also important