Looking for Organic America: J. I. Rodale, The Rodale Press, and the Popular Culture of Environmentalism in the Postwar United States

This dissertation is a cultural history of natural health and organic food in the postwar United States. It uses the life of J.I. Rodale and the history of the Rodale Press as a lens for exploring ideas about the body, health, and nature that fell outside of mainstream scientific and medical thinking. Moreover, it tracks the shifting practices of publishing and marketing in the postwar years to show the importance of popular culture as a site for the emergence of environmentalism.;J.I. Rodale---a publisher and promoter of organic food and natural health beginning in the 1940s---created publications from which consumers learned about the changing material ecology of daily life in the postwar world. Practices like organic gardening and the use of natural food supplements became ways consumers sought to protect their bodies from perceived threats of chemicals in food, medicine, and the wider environment. Actively cultivating a relationship with readers, Rodale used his magazines as sites for collecting empirical evidence that ran counter to orthodox scientific and medical thinking, and for creating a market for natural-health products. The Rodale Press responded to its readers concerns about issues like pollution in the 1950s and 1960s by creating a clearing house for subscribers to share information and experiences. At the same time, the press carefully curated its publications to reach the growing number of environmentally-conscious consumers and their interests. With the help of the Rodale Press, by the early 1970s organic and natural health practices defined not only gardens and health food stores, but a "lifestyle" consumer niche in the broader mass market.;Rodale's texts acted as sites where contested knowledge about science, the body, and the environment could be produced, distributed, and consumed. These texts circulated by means of a market that targeted subscribers directly, and a market which became increasingly skilled at addressing changing consumer interests. While commercial culture sometimes seemed at odds with environmental sentiment during this period, the Rodale Press demonstrated that the consumer marketplace of late twentieth-century American life could also be a place for unorthodox ideas and practices to take root.