by Eric Rutkow
Fairchild’s newfound philosophy was, in most respects, nothing revolutionary in American thought. The idea of open commerce in flora had helped to fuel the colonial-era trade between John Bartram in Philadelphia and Peter Collinson in London. Thomas Jefferson once claimed, “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is, to add [a] useful plant to its culture.” And this attitude persisted among many botanists and horticulturists throughout the nineteenth century. Recall that the Washington Navel orange, linchpin of the California citrus industry, was introduced from trees discovered by an American living in Brazil.
But Fairchild’s vision differed from these antecedents in a crucial way. Like his contemporaries Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt, Fairchild possessed a turn-of-the-century faith in the power of the federal government to address large challenges, specifically through the use of agencies. Thus he wanted to build a federal institution to formalize his philosophy regarding botanical exploration and exchange. In 1898, upon returning to the States after four years abroad, he helped convince the USDA to create a new Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction (FSPI). Its job was to coordinate and manage nonnative plant introductions and to support a roster of plant explorers, foremost among them Fairchild himself.
It was in his new capacity as official government plant explorer that Fairchild first encountered the sakura. He had journeyed to Japan in 1902 as part of a collecting mission. Travel delays had forced him to miss the legendary springtime festivals, but he nonetheless arranged to meet a Japanese horticulturist and artist renowned for his work both in raising and in drawing sakuras. Upon seeing this man’s depictions of the famous trees, Fairchild experienced a level of wonder reminiscent of Scidmore’s a generation earlier. He wrote, “I have rarely been so thrilled, for I had had no idea of the wealth of beauty, form, and color of the flowering cherries.”
Fairchild and Scidmore almost certainly knew each other before this point. Both of them were active members of the prestigious National Geographic Society (NGS) in Washington, D.C. Scidmore, for her part, had been appointed the organization’s first female board member. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a favorite of the NGS’s ex-president, Alexander Graham Bell, the world-famous inventor of the telephone—Bell’s youngest daughter, Marian, would soon marry the plant explorer. In the wake of Fairchild’s trip to Japan, he and Scidmore likely began to discuss their mutual love of sakura trees and to talk about the possibilities of bringing them to America.
In 1905, Fairchild took the first major step. He and his new wife purchased a forty-acre property in Maryland with plans to turn the grounds into the nation’s first sakura grove. It was, according to Fairchild, “one of our chief preoccupations.” He used his influence as head of the FSPI and his connections from his earlier trip to arrange for the importation of 125 trees representing 25 varieties. Some questioned whether the specimens would be hardy enough to survive American winters, but proof came the following spring: a brilliant display of cherry flowers, the likes of which had never been witnessed in the United States.
After concluding that sakuras could survive in the region, Fairchild and his wife determined “to do something towards making them better known in Washington.” They devised a plan to provide every public school in the city with one sakura, all to be planted on Arbor Day 1908. Funds were raised from among their social circle, and Fairchild placed a new order for three hundred trees.
On the day before the proposed plantings, an energized Scidmore met with Fairchild and spoke at length about a potential next step: creating a grand field of cherry trees along the Speedway (what is now the corridor of Independence Avenue in West Potomac Park). This idea impressed Fairchild, and he invited Scidmore as a distinguished guest to the ceremonial planting being held the next day. During his keynote speech, he told the large audience about the need for a sakura field on the Speedway, the first time someone had publicly advocated Scidmore’s plan. The Washington Star, which covered the event, wrote that he further “aroused the enthusiasm of his audience by telling them that Washington would one day be famous for its flowering cherry trees.” Fairchild’s prediction was bold and, for the most part, unsupported by evidence, but circumstances were about to shift in his favor.
The 1908 election that gave the country President William Howard Taft had also produced a new First Lady. Nellie Taft was strong-willed, intelligent, outgoing, and unconventional, the sort of sure-footed person who openly opposed Prohibition at a time when the nation was tottering toward teetotaling. The arc of President Taft’s political ascent had turned Nellie, like Scidmore and Fairchild, into a traveler and admirer of Asia. She had first spent several years in the Philippines—a territory the United States acquired during the Spanish-American War—after her husband took charge of its civil government in 1900. During that time, Mrs. Taft grew to admire the Luneta, a tree-lined riverside park that overlooked Manila Bay. A subsequent diplomatic trip to Japan introduced her to the sakuras.
Shortly after Nellie arrived at the White House, she began to receive appeals from both Fairchild and Scidmore regarding the plan to bring sakura trees to the Speedway. Their requests seemed to dovetail with ideas that the First Lady had already been considering—as she later explained, “I [had] determined, if possible, to convert Potomac Park into a glorified Luneta where all Washington could meet.” The indomitable First Lady moved quickly to advance the Scidmore/Fairchild plan, pushing through the bureaucratic red tape and opposition that had tripped up Scidmore for more than twenty years. By April 7, 1909, barely one month after the inauguration celebration, she was able to write to Scidmore, “I have taken the matter up and am promised the trees.”
The plan then seemed to grow of its own momentum. The week after Nellie sent her letter to Scidmore, a Japanese delegation arrived at the White House as part of a celebration of Japanese-American relations. Among the delegates was Dr. Jokichi Takamine, a chemist best known for the discovery of adrenaline. When he learned of Mrs. Taft’s plan, he offered to supplement the project with a gift of two thousand additional sakuras. Other Japanese diplomats endorsed Takamine’s gesture but preferred that the trees be offered through public channels. The deal was quickly repackaged as coming directly from the city of Tokyo, and everyone found this plan satisfactory. The State Department confirmed the arrangement with Japanese diplomats over the summer months. By November President Taft was personally working to direct the removal from Potomac Park of recently planted elms in order to make room for the sakuras.
For many of those involved, the importance of the sakura project expanded far beyond a straightforward cultural bequest. The political overtones were difficult to avoid. Japan had recently established itself as a serious international power through its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). The U.S. government under Roosevelt had helped to negotiate that war’s peace treaty and hosted a conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the final documents were signed. However, the attitude of many Americans toward the Japanese was far from cordial. In the West, especially in cities like San Francisco, people were agitating for legislation to exclude the Japanese (as had already occurred with the Chinese through a set of Exclusion Acts in the 1880s). The newly empowered Empire of Japan felt that such an outcome would be an intolerable offense. This issue became so incendiary that Roosevelt, who held a positive view of Japan, was forced in 1907 to accept an informal arrangement, known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, whereby the United States promised not to impose any immigration restrictions and Japan agreed to curb further emigration. Seen in this light, the proposed gift of sakuras was an informal diplomatic action that offered an avenue to help strengthen tense bilateral relations.
The shipment of two thousand flowering cherry trees departed on a steamer from Japan in mid-November 1909 and reached Seattle, Washington, on December 10. The sakuras were then loaded onto refrigerated railcars and transported across the country. On January 6, the trees arrived at the capital, where Fairchild received them. The plan was for a
ceremonial planting that would receive national media attention. But before any of that could happen, the project hit an unforeseen snag. The same U.S. government that had arranged for the sakuras’ importation suddenly proclaimed that the trees represented an unacceptable threat to national safety.
FAIRCHILD’S PHILOSOPHY OF open and frequent plant exchanges represented only one perspective. The same flora that he felt offered economic opportunity also could threaten the ecological stability of established species or could harbor harmful pests. Investigations early in the twentieth century had shown that at least 50 percent of the insects classified as injurious to American flora originated in other countries. And some estimated that imported pests were costing the United States up to one billion dollars annually.
European nations had been the first to take up the issue of plant control. The need for such legislation had arisen largely in reaction to an American pest that had arrived during the mid-nineteenth century and proceeded to devastate vineyards across the Continent. In 1881, an international conference to address the matter was finally convened at Bern, Switzerland, and this produced a wave of plant quarantine restrictions.
Around the same time as the Bern conference, some individual states within America started moving to implement stronger controls. California fruit growers, for instance, had lobbied successfully for statewide quarantine legislation in 1881.
The federal government, however, only started to address the matter seriously in the early twentieth century. The USDA, as an initial step, developed inspection protocols by 1906 for materials that its own agents, such as Fairchild, arranged to import—the sakura shipment would fall within this category.
The most zealous proponent for stricter federal plant controls in this period was Charles Marlatt, then assistant chief of the Bureau of Entomology at the USDA. Though he held views diametrically opposed to those of Fairchild, the two men were, remarkably, the closest of friends. They had both grown up in Kansas and had a similar fascination with plant diseases. Marlatt had even been the best man at Fairchild’s wedding. But such amity did little to dissuade Marlatt.
In 1909, he took control of the USDA’s campaign to tighten plant importation. His initial strategy was to quietly shepherd a bill through Congress that gave the USDA a general quarantine power as well as the right to wage campaigns against emerging pest menaces. Marlatt’s effort, however, collapsed when the American Association of Nursery Men learned about the proposed bill and marshaled resources to slow its progress. According to historian Philip Pauly, Marlatt in reaction “determined to raise the consciousness of both influential elements of the public and forces in the government about the danger posed by infested nursery stock.”
At roughly that moment arrived the celebrated shipment of two thousand flowering cherry trees from Japan. The USDA’s inspection team, with Marlatt overseeing, determined that the sakuras were a hotbed of potential threats. According to the findings, nearly every tree hosted a scale insect pest known as Chinese Diaspis; several specimens were infested with San Jose scale, an insect that had already wreaked havoc in the western states; others contained wood-boring Lepidopterous larvae, hitherto unknown in America and flagged by Marlatt as potentially “a source of tremendous loss in later years to fruit interests”; more than 70 percent of the trees displayed root gall worm and 45 percent crown gall. Marlatt, temporarily serving as chief of the Bureau of Entomology, wrote to the secretary of agriculture on January 19 that “[t]he recommendation for the destruction of these trees is thoroughly merited.” He pegged much of the problem on “the fact that very old stock ha[d] been sent, the object being to give large, showy trees.”
While the scientific findings seemed sound, some questioned their validity. The New York Times issued a sharp editorial when the news became public, writing: “We have been importing ornamental plants from Japan for years, and by the shipload, and it is remarkable that this particular invoice should have contained any new infections—or any at all, for that matter.” Fairchild raised concerns as well. Reflecting on the situation years later, he described the inspection process with a tinge of incredulity: “[A]lmost every sort of pest imaginable was discovered.” But even Fairchild conceded that the size and condition of the trees meant that “the greater number of them would have perished in the raw soil of the Speedway.”
The inspection team’s uncomfortable findings rattled their way upward through the political and diplomatic ranks in the closing weeks of January. By the time the news reached Taft, it was all but a foregone conclusion that the trees would be destroyed. And on January 28, a team of USDA technicians, with presidential authorization in hand, set the entire shipment of sakuras on fire, the symbol of friendship suddenly nothing more than a pile of ashes.
Stoking the flames of bilateral tension was Colonel Richmond Hobson, a U.S. congressman from Alabama and one of the nation’s premier anti-Japanese agitators. He had recently taken to the floor of Congress to rail against the Japanese threat, declaring, “[T]he only way to solve the race problem of the Pacific coast is to segregate all the yellow people there.” His incendiary comments were almost certainly unrelated to the sakuras, but the timing couldn’t be worse.
Top American diplomats scrambled to smooth over the embarrassing but seemingly unavoidable destruction of Japan’s prized trees. Members of the State Department, including Secretary of State Philander Knox, reached out to their various analogues in Japan. Colonel Spencer Cosby, the superintendent for public buildings and grounds in Washington, D.C., wrote to Mayor Ozaki of Tokyo personally to express his regret and attached to his letter a copy of the USDA’s final report. The awkwardness extended beyond international relations: the March issue of the Century Magazine ran a lead article by Scidmore celebrating the arrival of the sakuras. A footnote on the first page of the issue declared: “As this paper goes to press it is announced that the experts in Washington have found it necessary to destroy the cherry-trees which have arrived, as a protection against certain kinds of infection attaching to them. This disappointment, which will be national in extent, does not impair the graciousness of the gift.”
To everyone’s relief, Japanese officials reacted, for lack of a better term, diplomatically. Mayor Ozaki, who had overseen the delivery, quipped: “To be honest about it, it has been an American tradition to destroy cherry trees ever since your first president, George Washington! So there’s nothing to worry about. In fact you should be feeling proud!” He added, on a more sincere note, “[W]e are more than satisfied that you dealt with them as you did; for it would have pained us endlessly to have them remain a permanent source of trouble.” Ozaki proposed that his city undertake whatever actions were necessary to rectify the situation. New sakura scions were quickly selected and propagated under the strictest conditions of sterility. By late January 1912, they were ready for shipment to America. This time, when the trees arrived, they passed Marlatt’s inspection.
On March 27, a small group of people, carrying a solitary shovel, walked into Potomac Park. There were no media, no cameras, no fanfare, only the First Lady, Eliza Scidmore, Spencer Cosby, and the Japanese ambassador and his wife. (Fairchild was unable to attend.) In the time since Mrs. Taft had first orchestrated plans for the sakura grove, she had suffered a stroke and now moved with greater difficulty. Nonetheless, she took hold of the shovel and planted the first of some three thousand sakura seedlings. Scidmore looked on, watching the realization of a vision almost thirty years in the making.
What Fairchild had proclaimed on Arbor Day 1908 soon came to pass: The capital became “famous for its flowering cherry trees.” The city’s inaugural “Cherry Blossom Festival,” which numerous civic groups cosponsored, took place in 1935—it has continued every year since, bolstering the stature of the sakuras as one of Washington’s premier attractions. By 1938, barely twenty-five years after the first planting, the flowering cherry trees had become so beloved that, when rumors swirled that some would be destroyed to make space for the Jefferson Memor
ial, a group of women chained themselves together among the trees in protest and received national media coverage—a compromise was eventually reached. Today, to the delight of thousands of locals and tourists, the sakuras in Potomac Park continue to make their grand displays every spring, though all but two of the original plantings have needed to be replaced.
The triumph of the cherry trees, however, was something of a Pyrrhic victory, at least for Fairchild. The same year that the second shipment arrived, Marlatt successfully guided a legislative effort that produced the Plant Quarantine Act. This new law tracked his earlier effort from 1909 and gave the USDA broad powers to inspect plant importations, target suspected threats, and issue quarantines as needed. Marlatt’s bureau subsequently gained increasing power over the nation’s trade in plants, hampering the work of cosmopolitan plant explorers. When Fairchild retired from the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction in 1928, he was fighting a losing battle against the expansion of quarantines.
But the world’s pests proved much tougher foes for Marlatt than his old friend Fairchild. The quickening pace of global and domestic trade hastened the opportunities for new threats to pierce the control system. And the USDA’s inspection protocols themselves often came up short. This was, predictably, the situation with the second shipment of sakuras that Marlatt had personally approved—in 1919, during hearings before the House Committee on Agriculture, he lamented, “This second sending . . . looked perfectly clean, but years afterwards these trees proved to be infested with a borer. . . . The insect brought in with this importation has spread from the District into Maryland and into Virginia.”
Marlatt also had to contend with countless dangers that had traversed the nation’s borders and established residence long before any federal controls had been implemented. The worst of these was already well known to plant pathologists by the time the initial quarantine legislation took effect. Soon it would be familiar to almost all Americans, for this invader was systematically and ruthlessly eliminating one of the country’s most important trees.