Sailors in the Royal Navy had to put up with what one article on “sea-fare” described as “an unvaried diet of salt beef and salt pork, accompanied by hard biscuit or dried peas.”194 Through the latter part of the nineteenth century, British naval vessels unable to obtain fresh meat typically issued salt pork every other day and salt beef on the alternate day.195 Long after refrigerators had become common on passenger liners, the sailors on Her Majesty’s ships continued to eat “salt junk” except for a day or two after calling at port.196
In the early 1840s, British naval contracts stipulated that the salt meat should be the cure of the United Kingdom. But following the repeal of the Corn Laws, its contractors sold the Admiralty U.S. pork, which they had repacked and branded as Irish. Upon discovering this deception, the Admiralty “immediately gave directions to their officers at the different depots, to be very particular in the examination of this meat.” The resulting investigation confirmed that “a great quantity” of it was American.197 This discovery struck Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as scandalous. “We believe that the British navy, which is victualed by contract, is at this moment supplied from foreign, and not British produce!”198 Following further discoveries that “American cured salt meat” had been passed off as Irish, the navy authorized the purchase of some American pork for experiment. The meat experts at the Deptford depot found it to be of “a superior quality.”199 The Admiralty rewrote the contracts so that the salt meat need not be British cured.200
The legalization of American meat makes it harder to trace its consumption, since nobody needed to file reports. Yet passing references to American pork continued to surface in parliamentary papers. Navy doctors attributed the diarrhea that “prevailed almost epidemically” on a ship stationed in the tropical division of the Pacific station (along the west coast of the Americas) in 1869 to the “coarse character of some American pork which had been supplied to the ship.”201 The Admiralty reported in 1873 that its store receivers opened 10 percent of the casks of American salt pork, to examine them for weight, quality, and cure.202 By the 1880s, however, the director of victualing for the Admiralty reported that although its beef came mostly from America, the navy had stopped purchasing American pork. “They found that it was not so good, so I was told.”203
Despite this official shift away from the American product, it is still probable that some made its way into shipboard messes, due to inappropriate marking (as in passing off the U.S. product as Irish) and the reliance on contractors, who were frequently charged with dishonest reporting.204 The need for resupply while en route makes the presence of American pork on British naval vessels seem all the more likely. At each port of call, ships took on more provisions, including live animals, “dead-meat,” and tinned meats.205 Naval officials admitted that they could not identify the origins of the meat loaded onto British vessels in colonial ports.206 But if they had read U.S. export records, they might have ventured some guesses.
In 1870, the United States exported over 6.3 million pounds of pork to the British West Indies (Jamaica and Barbados), over 142,000 pounds to British possessions in Africa, and over 59,000 pounds to China (including Hong Kong) and Singapore.207 In the year ending June 30, 1883, it exported over 244,000 pounds of bacon to the British West Indies and lesser amounts to British Guiana, British Honduras, Hong Kong, and “British Possessions in Africa and adjacent islands.”208 In 1897, the Cape Colony imported over two million pounds of preserved meats from the United States and another 220,000 pounds of salted and canned meat.209 Treasury Department records list other British imperial destinations for U.S. pork, bacon, and hams, among them Gibraltar, ten Canadian provinces, the British East Indies, “British possessions in Australasia,” and “British Possessions, all other.”210
If it was true, as the military commonplace had it, that the success of a campaign depended on the feeding of the forces, then the hog farmers of Champaign County deserved some of the laurels of war.211 They were from the start agents of empire, if not always directly their own.
LARDING IT OVER THE BRITISH EMPIRE
The U.S. agricultural press followed British imperial affairs with an eye on the bottom line. When Britain went to war with Egypt in 1882, the Breeder’s Gazette anticipated a rising demand for American farm products. It claimed that although Egypt was a “comparatively unimportant country,” it might yet become a significant factor in the lives of its readers.212 “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” observed the Illinois Agriculturist. “American farmers generally receive their share of the spoils from foreign wars.”213
Midwestern farmers’ tendency to profit economically from imperial wars held true for World War I. After peaking in 1900 and 1903, U.S. pork exports had declined almost continuously from 1903 to 1913, due to the demands of the domestic market and the resulting spike in prices that U.S. pork products commanded. The world war reversed this course. Not only did the war cut Britain off from some of its staple providers—including Russia—but the shift of labor from the field to the trench reduced its domestic production.214 Wartime demand caused pork production to shoot upward and European exports to rebound.215
The increased pork exports of the World War I era helped the Allies win the war. In contrast to Germany, which suffered from demoralizing shortages of food, most notably a food crisis in the winter of 1916–1917, the British people and military did not go hungry. The United States was the main provisioner, supplying over half of Britain’s flour and about 80 percent of its fats and meats—primarily from pigs—from 1917 to 1918.216
Food exports helped Britain win the war in a second way as well: they helped turn the United States into an ally. In the early years of the war, American exporters tried to make the most of neutrality by selling to all parties. The more they sold, the more difficult it became to stay neutral. Food exports led to conflict with Britain when the British navy detained U.S. ships carrying food to Germany and to neighboring countries (the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) that reexported goods to Germany. Representatives from the U.S. meat industry joined the chorus against British interference in neutral shipping, calling on Secretary of State Robert Lansing and the British embassy to protest.217 Yet food exports led to even greater conflict with Germany, which let its U-boats loose on merchant vessels bound for Britain. Realizing the importance of grain imports for British food security, the Germans continued their U-boat campaign even in the face of heated U.S. denunciations. Their efforts to starve their enemy into submission failed. The United States continued to ship food to Britain, and ongoing German predations brought the United States into the war.218
As a belligerent, the United States upped its efforts to keep Britain from hunger. In response to the Allies’ calls for lard and meat, and recognizing that pork production could be ramped up more quickly than beef, the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to raise more hogs. The Food Administration, established following the United States’ entry into the war in 1917, set a minimum price of $15.50 per hundred pounds (later raised to $17.50) for droves of hogs in Chicago. These measures produced the desired result: hog production skyrocketed. In February 1918 the Allies urgently demanded more pork shipments, claiming that the further prosecution of the war depended on immediate shipments of meat and wheat. The following month, the United States shipped over ten million pounds of pork daily, a figure equivalent to 66,000 hogs.219 Exports of pork and lard rose from a prewar annual average of slightly under a billion pounds to over 2.2 billion pounds in 1918.220
The sheer magnitude of these exports seems to substantiate claims that U.S. food mattered more to the Allies than U.S. troops, munitions, and ships. Yet regardless of their comparative significance, it is clear that U.S. grain and pork exports contributed to the Allied victory. This, in turn, helped preserve the British Empire, which extended its reach even farther through the mandate system established by the League of Nations at war’s end.221
The recognition that Br
itain relied on U.S. pork and other food products led to very different assessments of British-American relations than those concerned with U.S. dependency. Even before World War I, U.S. farmers pointed out that Britain could not feed her own people without imports.222 Agreeing with this assessment, the British Navy League had clamored for a stronger navy to protect Britain’s food supply.223 Much of the talk about food security focused on grain, but pork also merited mention. As one article in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society phrased the matter: “It has become an accepted truth that we in England cannot produce enough bacon to supply our demand.”224 One turn-of-the century investigation characterized around 90 percent of the bacon sold in Bristol as the U.S. product.225 After noting that Britain had imported over 200 million pounds sterling of food in 1898, the British publication Mark Lane Express and Agricultural Journal remarked: “We are to depend on the eternal friendship of the United States.” This struck the author as a dangerous prospect. If Britain were ever in a tight corner, the United States might make a grab for Canada and the West Indies, and hungry Britain would be in a pinch.226
Such assessments provided a very different perspective on dependency, one in which the power relationships were reversed. Illinois farmers fueled such anxieties by alluding to their own growing power. As early as 1856, the Illinois Farmer pointed out that war with Britain would be “fratricidal.” Yet much as U.S. farmers would suffer from their loss of markets, Britain would suffer even more because it “depends on foreign countries for many of her necessities.”227 As they provided vital foodstuffs to the British Empire, U.S. pork producers often concluded that the greatest accrual of power was to themselves. Britain might still be the greatest empire on earth, but well before World War I, midwestern pork producers had begun to assert that British strength and vitality came from the United States.
PIGGYBACKED POWER
The heartland is certainly not the only brick in the edifice of U.S. imperial denial, but it has occupied a central, keystone role. William Appleman Williams recognized as much when he trained his sights on midwestern farmers. His Roots of the Modern American Empire was never just about export markets—its larger goal was to critique exceptionalist claims of anti-imperial virtue. By aiming at the American pastoral, Williams intended to take down the myth of an innocent heart. But in insisting that the United States was thoroughly imperial, Williams suggested that it was exceptionally so. In dismantling one conceit, he laid the foundation for another.
The United States did not become imperial by expanding its markets in Latin America and Asia, as Williams claimed, because the United States had been imperial all along. Not only did midwestern farmers—many of them emigrants from Great Britain and its Irish colony—advance settler colonialism, they were also deeply entangled in British imperialism. Whereas U.S. manufacturers pushed for anti-British tariffs and U.S. cotton and wheat producers complained that Britain kept them in a condition of colonial subordination, akin to those of Ireland and India, the hog farmers of the Corn Belt piggybacked on the British Empire.228 Through their livestock investments, connections, and values, they revealed a sense of affiliation with the leading empire of the day. By exporting cheap and durable pork products, they fed the British Empire, most notably in time of war. The tale of the Berkshire hog reveals that roots of the American empire were not as exceptional as Williams suggested—nor were these roots even always American.
To the extent that the United States was beginning to surpass the British Empire by the early twentieth century, it was in part because of its long history of connections to that empire.229 Midwestern pork producers depended on British genetic material, British capital, British goods, British know-how, British transportation infrastructures, and British export markets. Those who pushed for naval building did so not only to open up new markets, but also to protect their shipping lanes to their leading customer, Great Britain.230 When they joined with other midwestern farmers to pursue economic empire in Asia and Latin America, they built literally and figuratively on their British ties.
Williams missed out on the wider imperial context, in which the United States simultaneously benefited from and supported the British Empire, because of the tendency to see empires more as rivals than as interconnected and mutually supporting entities. This view of imperial rivalries explains why the shooting of a pig on a disputed island in Puget Sound in 1859 has received far more attention in historical accounts than the tale of the Berkshire hog. Whereas the 1859 pig imbroglio nearly led to an interimperial war over the U.S.-Canadian border, the Berkshire hog reveals interimperial solidarities well before the fabled Anglo-American rapprochement of the 1890s.231 Although the decolonization struggles of Williams’s time had made it clear that a nation could be seen as imperial because of the company it kept, the Cold War context did not invite much thought on the ways that competing empires might have owed great debts to each other or that rising empires might be less exceptional than they liked to think.
If the post in postcolonial can be construed as referring to a place (as in an outpost or a base) as well as a time and a politics, then the heartland can be seen as unexceptionally postcolonial indeed.
ARCHIVAL TRACES
A missionary among her own people
New Guide for Emigrants to the West, 1836: “Probably one half of the earth’s surface, in a state of nature, was prairies or barrens. . . . Mesopotamia, Syria, and Judea had their ancient prairies, in which the patriarchs fed their flocks. Missionaries in Burmah, and travellers in the interior of Africa, mention the same description of country.”1
H. J. Dunlap Scrapbook, 1890: The clock in Strasbourg is “wholly unworthy its great notoriety. The model of it shown in Champaign a few years ago was a much finer thing than the real. In the audience to see it strike, the day of my visit, there were Caucasians, Japanese and Indians, these latter a part of our celebrated fellow citizen’s show, Buffalo Bill . . . Strange, yet true, a young lady of my party, born in Champaign, had never seen an Indian until that day, and also saw a buffalo for the first time a few months ago at Breslau.”2
History of Champaign County, 1905: “Mrs. Mary Elizabeth (Bowen) Busey, wife of Gen. Samuel T. Busey, Urbana, Ill., was born in Delphi, Ind. June 21, 1854, the daughter of Aber H. and Catherine J. (Trawin) Bowen, the former born in Dayton, Ohio, and the latter in Calcutta, India.”3
Urbana Courier, 1912: On the Busey family’s trip to Cuba: “Mr. and Mrs. F. E. Earle were the hosts of the Buseys, their friendship dating back to the days when Mr. Busey was on an Indian reservation as an Indian agent. Mr. Earle is a former college professor having held chairs in several American institutions and went to Cuba on the invitation of ex-president Palma for the purpose of making certain agricultural experiments.”4
Urbana Courier, 1915: “Word has been received of the death from heart disease of Andrew Rutherford, a graduate student of this University in 1911. Mr. Rutherford was a graduate of Edinburgh university, and spent the years 1911 and 1912 in this country as a Carnegie fellow on entomology. In 1913 he was appointed as Governmental Entomologist of Ceylon, one of the most important positions in the English entomological service.”5
Urbana Courier, 1915: Miss Mali Lee will return to China after her graduation to “become a missionary among her own people.” Had it not been for Christian missionaries in China, “she would no doubt still be living in China the way many other Chinese girls do.”6
Urbana Courier, 1916: “Dr. Fanny C. Gates, former dean of women at Grinnell college, will succeed Martha Kyle as dean of women at the university . . . From 1895 to 1896 she was a graduate scholar at Bryn Mawr college and a graduate fellow in 1896 and 1897. She then accepted an appointment of European fellow in the association of collegiate alumnae at the University of Gottingen, Germany and Zurich Polytechnic. Moreover she has studied at the University of Chicago, McGill university, Canada, and received a Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Cambridge she studied in
the celebrated Cavendish laboratories.”7
4
THE ISOLATIONIST CAPITAL OF AMERICA
Hotbed of Alliance Politics
DOWN ON THE MIDWESTERN FARM
Although many urban legends sprout from urban concerns, they are not all about urban places. This can be seen in the most stubborn urban legend of all, one that still circulates today, though debunked from the time of its creation: the legend of American isolationism.
This legend took root at the end of World War II. For evidence, its proponents sometimes reach back to George Washington’s warnings against entangling alliances, but they more commonly alluded to noninterventionist sentiments espoused in the interwar years.8 From the beginning, critics pointed out that, apt as characterizations such as “anti-League” might be, the blanket term isolationism misleadingly implied a desire to cut ties with the rest of the world. Turning the League of Nations vote into an “ism” was more than an exaggeration, it was a distortion, for it deflected attention from interventions in the Caribbean, involvement in European affairs, participation in international organizations, and cross-border mobility, culture, and commerce.9 In dismissing isolationism as “no more than a legend,” diplomatic historians have pointed out that the United States actually expanded its reach in the 1920s and 1930s. Bankers, sales reps, purchasing agents, diplomats, marines, missionaries, tourists, and workers continued to cross U.S. borders in significant ways even after the Senate had nixed membership in the League.10
The Heartland Page 14