Velsicol, another major pesticide manufacturer, threatened Houghton Mifflin directly, promising litigation if they didn’t stop the publication of Silent Spring or publish it only without any negative mention of their products. They went as far as to claim that criticism of pesticides was part of a Communist conspiracy. A man from California echoed these accusations in a letter to The New Yorker, then added in complete seriousness: “We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business.”
