American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  But what was lost in the lumbering process was only a portion of the problem. Decay claimed untold millions of rail ties, fence posts, and utility poles. Aggressive turpentine-harvesting techniques cut short the lives of yellow pines across the southern forests. Inefficient designs for countless types of wooden crates and other forms of packaging frittered away enormous quantities of timber. Irrational prejudices led loggers to ignore whole species of useful trees. The list went on and on, and the sum total of all this inefficiency, ignorance, and waste was billions of board feet per year.

  The private sector, for the most part, lacked incentives to address these shortcomings. They were simply a cost of doing business; the amount of capital necessary to investigate any of these questions was prohibitive. The various tree-related industries would have liked better information and cost-saving innovations, they just didn’t want to pay for the privilege.

  The members of the emerging Forest Service, however, took a different view. For them, these problems were almost as important as the need to protect the nation’s trees directly. Increased information and efficiency, after all, offered a second, indirect method to conserve vital tree resources. William Greeley, the third head of the Forest Service, explained,

  To make the most of our forest resources Mr. Pinchot and his associates foresaw that knowledge of the use of wood must progress hand in hand with the national movement to assure a sufficient supply of this essential raw material. Each had an integral part in forest conservation. It was not enough to create National Forests in which the Federal Government might embark on the business of timber production and to assist the private owner in keeping his woodlands productive. It was equally necessary to build up a practical science of wood use.

  The federal government’s interest in tree research actually predated Pinchot and his acolytes. Throughout the late nineteenth century, Bernhard Fernow, Pinchot’s predecessor at the Division of Forestry, had championed the issue personally. In 1887, he wrote, “The properties upon which the use of wood, its technology, is based, should be well known. . . . Our ignorance in this direction has been most fruitful in fostering a wasteful use of our natural forests. . . . Crude ‘experience’ has been our guide, and ‘crude’ has remained our knowledge.” Under Fernow’s direction, the early Division of Forestry devoted much of its resources to the study of “timber physics,” as the field was then known. These investigations flourished for the better part of a decade until the program was terminated in 1896 as “not germane to the subject of the Division”—the man who gave this order, ironically, was J. Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day, then serving as secretary of agriculture.

  While Pinchot, after taking control of the Division of Forestry, did not initially make wood research a priority, he reintroduced some testing in 1901 as part of his general program of expansion. It began with small investigations into wood preservation and turpentine production techniques. Then, in 1902, the division organized its first timber-testing laboratory in Washington, D.C., and it quickly expanded the testing program through affiliations with Purdue University, Yale University, and the universities of California, Oregon, and Washington. Early payoffs from this work included studies proving that both the longleaf pine and the Douglas fir produced superior timber for structural uses. The Forest Service’s head of forest products observed that this resulted “in bringing in to use a lot of timbers which before were considered absolutely worthless.”

  These testing laboratories initially operated independently, with no coordination in methodology. But such variability became a hindrance as more tests poured forth. In 1906, the task of promulgating a system of standards was given to McGarvey Cline, a young engineer who worked for the Forest Service. He visited each of the testing facilities over the course of a year and determined that uniform practices alone would not be sufficient to meet the Forest Service’s growing research requirements. What was needed, he explained, was “the consolidation of these laboratories . . . into one overall laboratory where central supervision could be carried on.”

  The idea of a centralized research facility proved popular not only among the Forest Service higher-ups but also with the wood-using industries. They had already benefited enormously from the initial round of timber testing and were eager to capitalize on further government-subsidized investigations. In November 1906, the Forest Service hosted a conference to discuss the issue and invited delegates from major industry players, such as the National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association. The conference concluded with a unanimously approved resolution: “[T]hat a laboratory for testing the strength and other characteristics of wood, and for solving problems connected with its economic use, is absolutely essential to the manufacturers and users of forest products of this country.”

  The matter quickly ended up before Congress. The Forest Service’s proposal was a onetime two-hundred-thousand-dollar allocation for the construction of a building and the purchasing of specialized testing equipment. At the congressional hearing, however, things quickly deteriorated. A recalcitrant (and very uninformed) committee chair asserted: “It can not take you more than a few years longer to thoroughly test these woods and give the public the results. There is no use in building a permanent building.” Pinchot, exasperated, attempted to convince the committee that the proposed laboratory “will save many, many times its cost every year,” but no one budged and, for the moment, the project was dead.

  McGarvey Cline, the man who first conceived the plan, was not so easily defeated. Congressional funding was only one solution; surely other avenues existed. For nearly a year he struggled without any progress, but then he stumbled upon a possible answer. As Howard Weiss, another member of the Forest Service, explained, “Cline conceived a brilliant idea. It was to secure the cooperation of some university.” This was simply an extension of the earlier model of testing laboratories, but on a grander, unprecedented scale: The university would need to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars up front and then provide an annual facilities budget indefinitely.

  When Cline’s idea reached Pinchot, the chief forester dismissed it as impractical. Nevertheless, the young engineer persisted, and in October 1908 Pinchot sent out an appeal to a list of schools that Cline had preselected.

  Pinchot’s request proved more popular than he had anticipated. Nearly every school contacted was interested, and the universities of both Michigan and Wisconsin—two states with long histories of dependence on forest products—submitted detailed proposals. Cline suggested that the Wisconsin proposal was superior and Pinchot concurred, but when the Forest Service sent out its official answer, a senior Michigan congressman nearly flew into a rage. Suddenly, both states were vigorously competing against each other. A Wisconsin delegation that included the inimitable Senator Robert La Follette and all the state’s congressmen supposedly confronted Pinchot personally to ensure that he stayed true to his word. In early 1909, the chief forester reaffirmed the initial determination, declaring in a subsequent press release: “I have had few decisions to make which were so difficult or which have had such prolonged and careful consideration.”

  Construction began almost immediately on a fifty-five-thousand-dollar facility, and on June 4, 1910, the doors were formally opened to the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL). It was the first institution in the world to conduct generalized research into the nature of wood and its use, a major step forward in understanding trees and their role in society. The facilities were state of the art, with much of the equipment built specifically for use at the FPL. Highlights in the early years would include a machine capable of exerting one million pounds of pressure as well as a special fungus room used to study decay.

  At the head of the FPL was McGarvey Cline, whose tenacity had allowed for the organization’s creation. He hired an original staff of fifty-five, thirty-three of whom were technical men, primarily from the professions of chemistry, engineering, and forestry. Their work was much broader than the timber tests of the predecessor laborato
ries and was initially divided among six departments: timber physics; timber tests; wood preservation; wood distillation; wood pulp; and chemistry. The idea was to address every aspect of industrial wood use. Experiments rapidly stacked up by the tens of thousands.

  As Pinchot had earlier assured Congress, the benefits of the FPL arrived with little delay. Early discoveries (far too numerous to cover adequately) included: improving hardwood distillation from the refuse of lumber manufacturing; finding new species of trees besides spruce for groundwood pulp; refining a process that allowed for the production of high-quality kraft paper using southern pines; crafting more efficient turpentine collection processes; identifying the molecular structure of wood; designing shipping containers that required less wood but possessed greater strength; and developing new kiln drying techniques to better season lumber. In 1920, Carlisle “Cap” Winslow, the third director of the FPL, attempted to translate a few of the laboratory’s accomplishments into concrete figures and determined conservatively “a combined annual increase in production and decrease in waste aggregating $30,000,000.”

  While the FPL was founded primarily to increase knowledge and eliminate waste, it also produced a stream of discoveries allowing for the use of wood in ways never before recognized. For instance, researchers identified ever-expanding roles for cellulose, the most abundant component in wood and the basis of pulp and paper production—cellulose-based products included cellophane, gunpowder, photographic films, and rayon. Additionally, experiments with sawdust processed under heat generated an inexpensive, sheetlike material usable as floor tiles and wallboards. FPL chemists also learned ways to derive sugar from wood and turn sawdust into cattle feed. These types of discoveries were welcome news to a host of tree-dependent industries facing competition from newer industrial materials like steel and plastic.

  The FPL led the way in these investigations but it was not acting wholly alone. For example, masonite, a type of hardboard composed of sawmill refuse from southern pines, was patented in the 1920s by William H. Mason, an independent inventor. The Weyerhaeuser Timber Company founded its own research arm in 1920, and numerous large companies soon followed. Several other nations also began to fund copycat institutions.

  By the mid-1920s, Congress finally awoke to the benefits of wood research as well. In May 1928, it passed the McSweeney-McNary Act, a landmark law that identified research as an essential component of the national forestry program. The law even made a special provision for the FPL, more than twenty years after the chair of the congressional committee on agriculture had declared that wood research couldn’t possibly justify a building. The FPL still exists in Madison, Wisconsin, center of a national network of tree research.

  While the facility’s early research program was remarkably broad, it was not, in fact, comprehensive. In particular, the laboratory paid relatively little attention to issues of tree diseases. This aspect of tree culture had traditionally generated much less concern than the risk of forest fires or the dangers of profligate waste. But in some ways it was more powerful than either of those. Diseases could wipe out entire species, changing the forest forever. Up until the twentieth century, the nation had largely avoided such catastrophes, but luck was fast running out.

  7

  Under Attack

  The Saga of the Sakura

  IN LATE JANUARY I9I0, President Taft received an unusual communication from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His direct authorization was sought for an action never before taken in American history: the wholesale destruction of an imported plant shipment. The request had come from the USDA’s top scientists. They had identified a score of insects and other hostile pests that, according to their report, presented an “extreme danger” to the ecological safety of the United States. Their reluctant conclusion was “that the entire shipment be burned as soon as possible.”

  Normally, this matter might have remained within the USDA, but this was no routine overseas delivery. The intended recipient was the president’s wife, First Lady Helen “Nellie” Taft. And the sender was the mayor of Tokyo, acting on behalf of Japan, the fast-rising Eastern power with imperial ambitions. The shipment at issue contained two thousand hand-selected flowering cherry trees, also known as sakuras, the most venerated trees of Japan, meant to serve as “a perpetual reminder of the friendship of the two people.” Any decision to burn the trees thus carried diplomatic consequences, a potential international incident that few wished to see materialize. But there was even more at stake than that, more than Taft likely realized. The question of what to do with these Japanese imports stood at the center of a bitter fight within the USDA over the ecological future of the nation—would it have open borders or not? And beyond that issue, there was also a personal crusade to bring sakuras to America’s capital, a struggle with roots that reached back over twenty-five years.

  By most accounts, the effort to introduce flowering cherry trees to Washington, D.C., began with Eliza Scidmore, one of America’s foremost travel writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She had first traveled to Japan in 1884, when she was twenty-eight years old and still little known. Much about that country’s culture impressed her, but nothing captivated her quite like the flower festivals that took place during the spring months. In Jinrikisha Days in Japan, a book she later wrote describing this first trip, Scidmore proclaimed, “The miracles of Japanese floriculture presently exhaust the capacity of wonder.”

  For Scidmore, one flower outshone all others: the sakura, blossom of the Japanese cherry tree. It was a marvel of horticultural wizardry, each bloom a universe built from hundreds of smaller flowers, all bundled together in delicate harmony, swollen rosettes that ranged in color from pure white to deep crimson. Sakura trees had been bred over countless generations to devote all their energy to flower production—unlike most cherry trees, their fruit was either tiny or absent altogether. The beauty of these blossoms made sakuras one of the most popular tree species in Japan, planted widely in public spaces and sacred sites.

  Scidmore quickly learned that sakuras were not merely objects of aesthetic perfection for the Japanese, but also symbols rife with meaning and power. In an article that she subsequently wrote for the Century Magazine, she attempted to explain the importance of sakuras to an American audience:

  It is not only the national flower, but the symbol of purity, the emblem of chivalry and knightly honor, the crest of a cult the vernal celebration of which has been observed with unflagging zeal for at least two thousand years. . . . Except Fuji-yama [Mount Fuji] and the moon, no other object has been theme and inspiration of so many millions of Japanese poems as the cherry blossom.

  When Scidmore returned from Japan in 1885, she brought with her visions of an American sakura grove. It seemed like the perfect tree to adorn the parks and pleasure grounds that were proliferating during the late nineteenth century. Her specific plan was for a field of sakuras in Washington, D.C., where she resided. She thought that they would be an ideal adornment for a stretch of swampland along the Potomac River that had been recently reclaimed and rehabilitated through an Army Corps of Engineers project. As she later argued, “[S]ince they had to plant something, they might as well plant trees that would afford an annual flower-show at the season when . . . the city receives its greatest number of visitors and sight-seers.” Scidmore quickly brought her proposal to the superintendent of public buildings and grounds for Washington, D.C., but was summarily rebuffed. She pressed her case anew with each successive superintendent, but always with the same result. It appeared hopeless, and would remain that way for more than twenty years.

  At the time Scidmore began her sakura campaign, David Fairchild, her future partner in the fight, was still a teenager, unaware of the remarkable direction his life would soon take. Born in 1869 and raised in Michigan and Kansas, Fairchild described himself as “a prairie boy who had never seen the waves of the sea.” He was a gifted student, scion of a family that had long prized education—his grandf
ather helped found Oberlin College; his father served as the president of the Kansas State College of Agriculture. As an undergraduate at Kansas State, Fairchild first discovered a love of botany, which he called “a turning point in my life.” His particular interest was the incipient field of plant diseases, soon to be known as plant pathology.

  In 1893, Fairchild encountered Barbour Lathrop, a wealthy world traveler in his midforties who, in Fairchild’s words, “was to ‘direct my destiny.’” For the next several years, the two men roamed around the world by steamship with Lathrop footing the bill. And it was during one of these voyages, on New Year’s Eve 1897, that Fairchild experienced the second turning point in his life (one that would eventually lead him to the sakuras). As he later wrote,

  [Lathrop] began to lay before me his ideas of what a botanist could do if he were given an opportunity to travel and collect the native vegetables, fruits, drug plants, grains and all the other types of useful plants as yet unknown in America.

  By the time midnight struck and the New Year began, Fairchild had decided to abandon plant pathology in favor of plant exploration. He was now committed to what he described as a “philosophy of a free exchange of plant varieties between different nations of the world.”