Writer, nuclear opponent, and environmental activist.
Elise Jerard (1903-1977)
Elise Jerard, an acquaintance once wrote, “didn’t react in a pale-gray way to anything. She felt strongly about all kinds of subjects … There was a vivid quality about her mind, which was quite obviously the cause of the vivid quality in her writing.”
Under the bylines “Elise Jean Jerard” and “Elise Jerard,” she wrote plays, short stories, poems, and magazine articles for Harper’s, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s, and The New Yorker.
Elise Jean Jacobs was born in Manhattan in 1903, the only child of William Jacobs and the former Florence Ottenheimer, immigrants from Germany. She attended the elite, all-girls school, Hunter College High School, and the then all-women’s Hunter College, where she was editor of the literary magazine, The Echo, and, according to a newspaper of the time, “brought that organ to the highest type of excellence it had yet attained.” At Hunter College, she edited two school newspapers, wrote class shows and a college musical comedy, and won three playwriting prizes and a songwriting prize. She was second in her class of 287, graduating in 1922.
In 1927, she married Herbert Marks Lippmann, a painter and architect and a Columbia University graduate. They married in the Manhattan Family Courthouse on Lafayette Street, which had just been constructed.
In 1938, they began vacationing in Maine—in Readfield, Wayne, and Center Lovell, where they lived on a large estate in a house built by the artist Douglas Volk. These summers were a source of creative inspiration for them both. She told the Lewiston Sun-Journal that she had been in poor health but got better due to the Maine environment. By 1944, two of her plays had been produced and she had written for television and film. During World War II, she taught languages other than English to WACs and WAVES who were going into overseas service.
In the 1970s, she was an early opponent of nuclear power. She founded and chaired the Independent Phi Beta Kappa Environmental Study Group made up of scholars and researchers. She criticized the use of nuclear power as dangerous and an example of the misuse of technology. In articles, letters, and talks, she urged that emphasis be placed on the development of solar energy. In testimony she submitted to a House appropriations subcommittee, she opposed companies stockpiling plutonium, calling this “the prospect of the blackest market on record.”
She opposed fluoridation because she believed fluoride in the water supply would accumulate in the human body and environment and lead to long-term health problems. She wrote important works on the subject and called fluoride a “protected pollutant,” the quote for which she is most well-known.
She had a master’s degree in public health, and pursued a PhD in the biological sciences. She was elected to the Hall of Fame at the City University of New York.
She served on the board of The National Intervenors, a coalition representing 60 citizen environmental groups that challenged the Atomic Energy Commission to proof-test reactors. She was an advisor to the Environmental Defense Fund, the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, and the Citizens Committee for the Protection of the Environment, with participants in 31 states.
She died June 17, 1977, at her home on Central Park West. She was 74. Her husband died in January 1979.
Her funds at The Trust support humanitarian and environmental purposes, and have helped redevelop brownfields, map waterfront greenway segments in Brooklyn, reduce indoor air pollutants in public housing, and support effective implementation of statewide climate legislation.