Books
How a small fish is tied to our fate
Who cares about the fate of a bony, stinky, oily fish?
H. Bruce Franklin does, and so will anyone who reads his latest book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (Island Press, 2007), which describes how our own fates – and the future of our seas – are tied, to a degree, to the fate of menhaden, a species in danger of being fished into extinction.
Franklin is no biologist; he is a cultural historian and the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies on the Newark Campus, where he has taught American literature, science fiction, and American studies since 1975. But he is a saltwater angler, and it was while fishing in southern New Jersey’s Raritan Bay that he became aware of the menhaden plight. Franklin saw a plane fly over a school of menhaden; a fishing boat soon appeared, netting up the entire school. He noticed that for days afterwards the bay was devoid not only of menhaden but of bluefish and weakfish as well.
That curiosity prompted him to launch his painstaking investigation into menhaden – also known as bunker fish – and their key role in American history, including the fish’s surprising relation to the Pilgrims and Native Americans. (Native Americans taught the Colonials to plant corn using menhaden as fertilizer.) Franklin found that historically menhaden have provided the largest catch of America’s fishing industry. They are converted into animal feed, fertilizer, and oils used in manufacturing everything from soap to linoleum, but they also are the favorite food of other fish, as well as seals, whales, and seabirds, such as loon, herons, ospreys, and egrets. In areas where menhaden are overfished, Franklin explains, the populations of other fish have diminished greatly.
Almost as alarming is the correlation Franklin reports between the diminishing numbers of menhaden and algae blooms and red and brown tides. Menhaden eat algae; the fewer menhaden to eat the algae, the more algae survive, leading to toxic blooms that kill massive numbers of fish. 
Franklin will present some of the historical and ecological findings from his book during the Third Annual Rutgers–Newark Distinguished Faculty Lecture, October 18 from 4 to 7 p.m., in the Paul Robeson Campus Center Multipurpose Room. Franklin was named the 2006/2007 Provost’s Distinguished Research Scholar by Rutgers–Newark Provost Steven J. Diner in recognition of “exceptional scholarly work on a subject of fundamental intellectual importance.”
Franklin also co-authored “The Fate of the Ocean,” in the March/April 2006 issue of Mother Jones, which won the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism. He was recently recognized by the American Studies Association at its annual convention, with the ASA holding a special session devoted to Franklin’s lifetime achievements.
Franklin is the author or editor of hundreds of articles and reviews that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Science, Discover, Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation, and has written books on topics ranging from Melville and Vietnam to prison writing in 20th-century America.
The Brooklyn native has excellent credentials for his role has a cultural historian. He has been a factory worker, a tugboat deck hand, and a navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command (1956 to 1959). Franklin earned his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1961. In 1966, in protest against the Vietnam War, he resigned his commission as a captain in the U.S. Air Force Reserves.
Franklin’s first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology, has been continuously in print since 1963 and is used in many college courses. He also pioneered the academic study of science fiction, teaching one of the nation’s first university courses in science fiction in 1961 at Stanford. In 1991 Franklin was the guest curator for the National Air and Space Museum’s exhibition, “Star Trek and the Sixties,” which became the most popular show in the museum’s history.