Man of Faith

BOARDS & BUREAUS

The old man leaned back in his rocker, his bald head resting against the white embroidered antimacassar. His shirt was open at the neck, his belt loosened, his black shoes unlaced. His grey eyes peered through the windows of his comfortable house to the shade trees on Washington's drowsy Hobart Street. Now, he thought, there would be time to dabble in the tiny home laboratory, to spade and weed the small backyard garden.

Such was retirement last week for John Robbins Mohler, 68, head of the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry, a man who never wanted another title but that of public servant. An OWI announcement merely said that John Mohler had succeeded in his work "in spite of many obstacles." Yet in his 46 years with BAI, John Mohler had" become the archetype of thousands of Government workers who serve their country well, grinding away at their jobs, oblivious of politicians and political upheavals. He had done more than any other American to rid the country of the dread diseases that plague livestock-bovine tuberculosis, foot-& -mouth disease, cattle tick fever and Bang's disease. So doing he had helped raise the whole standard of health in the U.S.

Ticks and Prejudice. As a young BAI inspector in the early 1900s, John Mohler set out to rid the U.S. of cattle tick fever.

Science had proved that ticks carried the fever germs; the obvious remedy was to dip the cattle in great vats of arsenic and kill the ticks. In the South, John Mohler ran smack into cow-pasture prejudice.

South Carolina's demagogic "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, U.S. Senator and self-appointed farmers' friend, met him with bluster: "You're going against the laws of God. My grandfather's cattle had ticks and my father's cattle had ticks. . . ." Long and loud Pitchfork Ben argued for the inalienable right of his cattle to have ticks. John Mohler countered with logic. Said he: "Your grandfather also had rattlesnakes." After untold arsenic baths, the South was free of tick fever.

Garlic and Tuberculosis. Far more serious than tick fever was bovine tuber culosis. For years it had plagued farmers, killing their cattle. Worse yet, tuberculosis germs were transmitted to humans through cows' milk. The year he became bureau chief (1917) John Mohler swung out against bovine tuberculosis. There was only one cure for it : killing all cattle who had it. John Mohler traipsed across the land, pleading with farmers to allow tuberculin tests ; ruthlessly ordering the cattle shot when the tests were positive. In those days U.S. farmers resented Federal interference heartily; no dang Gov'ment man was going to shoot their cows.

In Iowa, farmers refused the tests. They argued: If a cow eats garlic, it shows up within half an hour in the cow's milk; surely the tuberculin injection would contaminate the milk. John Mohler pleaded the logic of science, finally won out. He ran 232,000,000 tests, slaughtered 3,800,000 tuberculous cows.

When he began his campaign, there was bovine TB in all states; it ran as high as 80% to 100%. Today there is less than .5% in any state. In the same period the human mortality rate from TB has drop ped from 144 to 44 per 100,000.

Rifles and Quicklime. John Mohler's most dramatic battles were fought against foot-& -mouth disease. When a tuberculous cow is dead, the chief danger of spreading TB is past. Not so with foot-& -mouth disease, which is caused by a nonfilterable virus carried from place to place by cattle or humans, by flying crows, by a piece of barnyard straw wafted in the wind.

The two great U.S. foot-&-mouth epidemics, in 1914 and 1924, made John Mohler a hated man among many U.S. farmers. A man of stubborn faith, he argued that the only way to get rid of an epidemic is to stamp it out. When farmers came to hear his case, he first made them bathe their feet in disinfectant. His doctor's tools were trench-digging machines and rifles, crowbars and pickaxes, vats of formaldehyde and carloads of quicklime. His white-suited crews moved across the country, singling out the infected herds. Wherever there was a cow with ropy spittle, dollar-size blisters in its mouth and rotting hoofs, the whole herd was liquidated. Trench diggers dug the graves, the cattle were herded in, the rifles crackled. When the cows were dead their hides were slashed, the bodies covered with lime, the graves covered up. Not a trace of the infected cows must remain.

Cattlemen protested, got out their rifles again, but to no avail. John Mohler moved ruthlessly on, stamping out every trace of the disease. It spread to the mountains of California, where no graves could be dug. John Mohler herded the cattle into canyons, blasted rock from the hillsides to cover their carcasses. It spread to deer in the Stanislaus National Forest. For twelve months, John Mohler's patient men stalked the forest, using rifles with silencers to avoid scattering the deer, killed every member of a herd of 22,000. In the two epidemics, 280,000 cattle, swine, sheep and goats were destroyed.

Medical Historian Paul de Kruif called it a "grand shambles of an experiment," remarked that it unquestionably accomplished "the greatest good for the greatest number." Foot-&-mouth disease has scourged Europe for centuries; in the U.S. it is now nonexistent, thanks to John Mohler, who rocked comfortably on his Washington porch this week, unmedaled, unsung and content.

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