The third and most immediate legacy was agricultural. In all, speculators scraped some four hundred thousand tons of rock guano off of U.S. appurtenances.38 That fell short of speculators’ wildest hopes, but it was nevertheless a significant haul.
Guano didn’t solve the soil exhaustion crisis, but combined with Chilean sodium nitrates, which companies started selling later in the century, it held it at bay. Mined fertilizers kept industrial agriculture sustainable long enough for scientists to devise a more permanent solution: manufacturing fertilizer from the unreactive N2 in the atmosphere.
The breakthrough came in 1909, when Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, developed a technique for synthesizing ammonia, a nitrogen compound. By 1914,39 the experimental technique had become industrially viable, and in that year Haber’s method, called the Haber–Bosch process, yielded as much reactive nitrogen as the entire Peruvian guano trade. The difference was that Haber–Bosch, unlike guano mining, was infinitely expandable.40 It also didn’t require scouring the seas for uninhabited islands.
In a single stroke, Haber had opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life. The Malthusian logic was repealed. Soil exhaustion ceased to be an existential threat; you could just add more chemicals. Without Haber–Bosch, the earth could sustain, at present rates of consumption, only about 2.4 billion people.41 That is well under half of today’s population.
By inventing ammonia synthesis, Fritz Haber became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet. The toll on his personal life, however, was heavy. His wife, Clara, was herself a promising German-Jewish chemist, indeed the first woman ever to receive a doctorate from the University of Breslau. Local women had crowded there to see her get her degree—“seldom has the awarding of a doctorate been attended by so many,”42 reported the newspaper. But after her marriage, Clara had abandoned her research and become a hausfrau, dedicating her life to supporting Fritz.
It was a Picture of Dorian Gray marriage: the more Fritz flourished, the more Clara withered. Just as her husband was honing his invention, Clara wrote an anguished letter to her former scientific mentor: “What Fritz has gained in these last eight years,43 that—and even more—I have lost, and what is left of me fills with the deepest dissatisfaction.”
Fritz had gained quite a lot. His invention won him the directorship of a new institute in Berlin and a central place within the German scientific establishment (a position he used to promote the career of a gifted young Jewish physicist named Albert Einstein). When World War I erupted, Haber volunteered his services. He suggested that the ammonia now pouring out of German fertilizer plants could be repurposed as explosives to bolster Germany’s dwindling munitions supplies. Since the war had cut Germany off from imported nitrates, this was an essential contribution. The president of the American Chemical Society calculated that Germany would have lost the war by early 1916 had Haber not replenished its stocks of nitrate explosives.44
Nor did Haber stop there. He assembled a supergroup of German scientists, four of whom, like he, would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Overseeing their efforts, he introduced his second great invention: poison gas.
Not only did Haber invent it, he personally supervised its debut in 1915, releasing four hundred thousand tons of chlorine gas upwind of some Algerian troops at the Battle of Ypres. In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
For this, Haber won still more honors: a military commission, the Iron Cross, and an audience with the emperor. The only one who didn’t appear to be celebrating was Clara. Right after gassing the Algerians at Ypres, Fritz returned home for a quick visit. What transpired between husband and wife during that visit is lost to history, but after Fritz went to sleep, Clara went into the garden with his service revolver and shot herself in the heart. The next day, Fritz returned to the front.
There is great interest in Clara today, especially in Germany, where she is celebrated as a martyr to science. No note from Clara survives, and Fritz refused to speak about the subject, so it is impossible to say with certainty why she killed herself. Surely, she had many reasons. But the timing of her suicide and some of the testimony from those who knew her have led many to interpret it as a protest of her husband’s invention.45
If it was, it was a prescient act. After the war, Fritz continued his work, and his institute developed a promising insecticide called Zyklon A. In slightly modified form, under the name Zyklon B, it would be deployed on Fritz and Clara’s fellow Jews, though this time not on the battlefield, but in gas chambers. Clara’s relatives were among those who died in the camps.
Luckily, not all of them perished. Although Clara’s married name was Haber, she is today known by her maiden name, the name under which she defended her dissertation: Clara Immerwahr.
Her cousin Max was my great-grandfather.
4
TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S VERY GOOD DAY
If there was one symbol that defined the presidency in the age of the settlement boom, it was the log cabin. Voters delighted in imagining their leaders as cider-swilling men of the people, dwelling in rude houses, swinging axes, and fighting bears on the frontier. Candidates were only too happy to oblige, hyping their backcountry roots in their stump speeches.
It was largely show, though. Powerful men usually come from powerful places.1 There has never been a president born in a U.S. territory, and though a few spent time in the territories, they were rarely there for long. Young Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor moved with their families to western territories, but only just before those territories became states (within months, in Lincoln’s case). Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison worked in the territories later in life but in the service of the federally appointed territorial governments, not as settlers. Harrison, for whom the myth of the “log cabin” was invented, spent his childhood on a lavish Virginia plantation and lived in the Northwest Territory not in a cabin, but in the governor’s residence.
Few leading politicians, in other words, actually participated in the settlement boom. Few, that is, except for Theodore Roosevelt.
As his five-dollar name suggests, Roosevelt was the scion of the Atlantic elite. He was born into the New York aristocracy—his father helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Educated at Harvard and a rising star in the world of reform politics, “Thee,” as he signed his letters, was as pedigreed an eastern thoroughbred as the country could produce.
Yet there was something of the western mustang in him, too. In 1883 Roosevelt left New York for Dakota Territory, where he established a ranch on the border of the Badlands. There, he threw himself into frontier life with a convert’s zeal. Unlike Harrison, he lived in a log cabin. For four years, punctuated by trips back east, Roosevelt felled trees, rounded up bandits, hunted, and braved the elements. His friends included the Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody; Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid; and Seth Bullock, the famous sheriff of Deadwood.
These were glory days, which Roosevelt was only too happy to chronicle at length in a series of books: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), The Wilderness Hunter (1893), and so on. They are tedious, repetitive volumes, largely concerned with his confrontations with wolves, deer, bobcats, and bears (in one retrospectively unsettling episode, Roosevelt shoots an eagle). Light on plot, the books contain mainly rustic wisdom from the trail: “The best way to kill whitetail is to still-hunt carefully through their haunts at dusk,”2 or, “Antelope are very tough, and will carry off a great deal of lead unless struck in exactly the right place.”
For the novice, the future president had words of encouragement. “A bear’s brain is about the size of a pint bottle,”3 he wrote. “Any one can hit a pint bottle offhand at thirty or forty feet.”
Admittedly, there was something buffoonish about Thee’s mountain-man routine—an overgrown boy playi
ng cowboys and Indians. The makebelieve element reached its peak in his Boone and Crockett Club, a national organization that championed “manliness, self-reliance,4 and a capacity for self-help” by promoting hunting. It principally drew eastern men of affairs—the banker J. P. Morgan, the politicians Elihu Root and Henry Stimson, and the Philadelphia-born, Paris- and Harvard-educated author Owen Wister, whose cowboy novel The Virginian (dedicated to Roosevelt) established the genre of the “Western.”
Usually, the club met in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. In a gesture toward the strenuous life, though, Roosevelt arranged for a log cabin to be constructed for it amid the grand classical architecture at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. There, surrounded by guns,5 knives, playing cards, and lariats, he and his fellow Boone and Crocketteers dined and drank champagne on the dirt floor.
Go west, young Theodore: Posing in his Dakota garb in a New York studio, 1885
For Roosevelt, this went far beyond playacting. He really believed the stuff. Like no president before or after, Roosevelt identified, viscerally, with the historical forces that had extended the borders of the country west and filled it with white settlers.
*
Roosevelt’s frontier-centered view of the United States found expression in The Winning of the West, his scholarly exploration of the “great deeds of the border people” in four volumes.6 It was history red in tooth and claw. Roosevelt showed little patience for the “statesmen of the Atlantic sea-board” who were congenitally “unable to fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the west.”7 In his telling, not George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett—fighting Indians, hacking their way through the woods—were the true authors of the nation’s history.
The frontier skirmishes such men started were rough business, Roosevelt conceded, “peculiarly revolting and barbarous.”8 But they were necessary. “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,” he wrote. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”9
Roosevelt styled himself as one of those rude, fierce settlers. Yet he didn’t drive any savages from the land. He couldn’t—he had come west too late. The “bloody fighting and protracted campaigns” were over,10 he noted with barely concealed regret. The closest he got was when he encountered a party of four or five armed Sioux on the hunting trail.11 They assured him that they were peaceful, he aimed his rifle at them, and they fled, swearing at him.
“The frontier proper has come to an end,”12 mused a dejected Roosevelt in 1892.
He wasn’t the only one to have that thought. A year later, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner offered a similar reflection, stating it as a hypothesis, known today as the massively influential “frontier thesis.”13 The frontier, Turner argued, had been the great regenerating force in U.S. life—the source of democracy, individualism, practicality, and freedom. And yet, Turner noted, according to the census, the frontier had disappeared as of 1890. The obvious danger was that the national character would die with it.
“I think you have struck some first class ideas,”14 Roosevelt told Turner.
What Roosevelt and Turner had noticed was a fact not just about the United States, but about the world. For industrializing societies, the nineteenth century had been one of relatively easy expansion. The United States spread west, Russia spread east, and the European powers turned south, toward colonies in Asia and Africa.
Yet by the century’s end, it looked finished. Indian Country had been ground down to a small nub, Africa was carved up, and even the Pacific islands, save some in the far south, were under the flag of distant governments. Add into the accounting such areas as Latin America, the Middle East, and China, which had been partitioned into spheres of influence and commercial control, and it was hard to see where future expansion might take place.
“The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up,15 conquered, and colonised,” lamented the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The global frontiers had been closed.
*
Roosevelt might have taken this as cause for despair. Yet just as he was reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s warnings about the end of the frontier, he was also studying the work of another historian, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Naval War College. Mahan’s lengthy 1890 treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, was hardly a page-turner, but it contained a powerful suggestion. If, according to Turner, the land was closed, Mahan noted that the seas were open.
Mahan didn’t care about democracy or individualism, as Turner did. His concern was trade. The wealth of nations, he argued, came from maritime commerce. Yet ships could not simply cast off for distant lands. They needed ports, coaling stations, warehouses, and other way stations along their paths. They also needed naval protection, which required still more overseas bases.
Technically, a country needn’t have its own bases. It could borrow them from friendly powers, as indeed the United States had done. But this worked only in peacetime—and in an age of closing frontiers, the peace among great powers had grown fragile. Mahan warned that war might close the seas to the United States. Its ships would then be “like land birds,16 unable to fly far from their own shores.”
That was a serious matter. The more that countries industrialized, the more they depended on the produce of distant locales. They found themselves needing rubber from Southeast Asia, jute from India (for packaging), palm oil from West Africa (an industrial lubricant), tungsten from Korea (for lightbulb filaments), and copper from South America. At times, the Industrial Revolution could look like a worldwide scavenger hunt for obscure tropical products.
The United States got its first taste of this in the 1840s, when it realized that it couldn’t run its farms without guano, which was available nowhere within its borders. One option would have been to buy it from abroad. But the machinations of the British-Peruvian guano monopoly inspired another solution: the United States could adjust its borders. That would give the country a measure of security. Even in war, the guano would keep flowing.
The point was general, applying far beyond guano. Annexing territory was a way to secure both sea routes and the vital tropical materials that one could reach by them.
As a naval theorist, Mahan was more concerned with the routes than with their destinations. He envisioned the ocean as a “great highway” and was determined to keep the United States on it.17 Technically, protecting and provisioning sea-lanes required only a series of points—safe harbors—along the way. But as Mahan recognized, to hold even a point in the face of hostile onslaught, you had to hold the territory around it. Hence the tendency of bases to bloom into full-fledged colonies.18
Despite having written a long and dry historical work, Mahan found his ideas received with wild enthusiasm.19 The Influence of Sea Power was speedily translated into the major languages. Mahan dined with Queen Victoria and accepted honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. Kaiser Wilhelm II, with whom Mahan also dined, wrote Mahan to say he was “devouring” the book; he ordered copies for every ship in the German fleet. Japan’s naval academy adopted The Influence of Sea Power as a textbook.
In the United States, Mahan had an eager reader in Theodore Roosevelt. “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am,20 in reading your book,” he wrote to Mahan. “I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.”
It was, in Roosevelt’s eyes, more than a naval classic. It was a playbook for a dynamic country that had just encountered the limits to its growth. The United States must seize an empire. And if it had to carve it out of existing empires, so be it.
“I should welcome almost any war,”21 Roosevelt declared in 1897, “for I think this country needs one.”
*
It wasn’t hard to guess where. In a world of rising empires, one was conspicuousl
y faltering: Spain’s. Once a vast imperium extending from California to Buenos Aires, it had been reduced, in the Western Hemisphere, to Cuba and Puerto Rico and, in the Pacific, to the Philippines and a set of Micronesian islands.
Even these, Spain could barely hold. The late nineteenth century had brought waves of rebellion to Cuba, the Philippines, and, to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico. Spain’s grip was slipping most visibly in Cuba,22 which had seen the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), the “Guerra Chiquita” (1879–1880), and smaller insurrections in 1883, 1885, 1892, and 1893 (two that year). In 1895, exiled Cuban rebels returned for yet another major war. The Philippines had its own series of uprisings, culminating in an all-out war in 1896.
There are two ways to respond to rebellion: with reforms or force. Madrid tried both. Cuba and Puerto Rico received new measures of political autonomy. But at the same time, Spain made war on Cuba’s rebels—forcing the bulk of the rural population into fortified towns and turning the countryside into a free-fire zone. The predictable result was mass illness, starvation, and death. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans died.
In the Philippines, Spain’s confusion about whether to conciliate or conquer found expression in its treatment of nationalist leaders. Spain executed the reformer Jose Rizal, a highly educated novelist and doctor whose modest goals fell short of full independence. The young revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo, who called for guerrilla warfare, was paid off and sent to a cushy, voluntary exile in Hong Kong.
None of it worked. The rebellions continued, and as the body count in Cuba mounted, the whole thing became an international scandal. This was not “civilized warfare,”23 scolded President William McKinley as he watched Spain massacre its Cuban subjects. “It was extermination.”
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