by Eric Rutkow
By midcentury, the disease’s triumph over the American chestnut was effectively complete, the scope of the damage difficult to comprehend. The merciless fungus had traversed some 200 million acres, wiping out virtually every mature specimen along the way. Scientists estimated that it killed between three and four billion American chestnut trees. When every mature tree had fallen, all that remained were the ever-persistent stump sprouts, which would grow for several years until the blight inevitably struck, a cycle that continued until the rootstock was finally exhausted. The American chestnut became, in effect, an understory shrub. The regal species that once lorded over the eastern forests had all but disappeared, gone from the mountains, gone from the woodlots, gone from the parks and gardens, gone from the life of a nation.
America slowly adjusted to this new reality. Industries turned to new tree species or new materials altogether. The same was true of residential construction and furniture making. The Appalachian inhabitants that had depended on their once-glorious trees were thrust further into poverty, and the chestnut vendors who once sold the Appalachian harvests switched to other varieties, many imported from overseas, none quite as flavorful. The eastern forests adapted to the incommensurable loss as well. Much of the chestnut territory yielded to oaks and a mix of other hardwoods that varied by region. But none of these trees could match the chestnut for mast or timber production. And none could offer the same midsummer blossom display that had once so enthralled President Roosevelt.
The destructiveness of chestnut blight marked it as one of the worst ecological disasters in the nation’s history. But in the popular consciousness, it was not necessarily the most devastating tree plague. That honor belonged to a disease that first appeared in America at the height of the chestnut rampage. This time the concern was the eradication of a species prized not for its remarkable utility, but for its unmatched beauty.
“The Most Magnificent Vegetable of the Temperate Zone”
UNLIKE THE AMERICAN CHESTNUT, the American elm was never prized for its wood. If anything, the situation was the precise opposite. A letter published in the Atlantic Monthly once declared, “[American elms] are the most useless piece of vegetation in our forests.” It went on to explain, “They cannot be used for firewood because they cannot be split. The wood cannot be burned because it is full of water. It cannot be used for posts because it rots in a short time. It can be sawed into lumber but it warps and twists into corkscrews.”
With all of these shortcomings, the species should have been little more than an afterthought in the national catalogue of trees. But what the American elm lacked in utility it overcame with elegance and grace. Charles Sprague Sargent once described the tree as follows: “[It] suggests a fountain in its manner of growth. . . . The massive shaft bursts into a sheaf of springing boughs, which again break into a shower of branches, with a spray of twigs. . . . [It] produces at all seasons an architectural effect of permanent beauty by the arched interlacings of the great bending boughs.” The botanist François André Michaux (son of the French botanist André Michaux, who had collected American plants for France in the 1780s and 1790s) was more direct than Sargent in his praise. He simply dubbed the species “the most magnificent vegetable of the temperate zone.”
This magnificent vegetable tended to grow along river bottoms and on low fertile hills. Though the trees were less abundant than chestnuts, their native range was much broader. With the exception of southern Florida, American elms covered the entire eastern United States, as far west as the region once known as the Great American Desert.
When the early British colonists arrived in America, they already possessed a special fondness for elms—many Massachusetts Bay settlers had emigrated from parts of England where English elms, a close relative of the American variety, had been a popular fixture of hedgerows and village greens since the late Middle Ages. According to Sargent, the colonists’ “remembrance of the Elm-trees” hastened their embrace of the magnificent new species that they discovered along the moist bottomlands of New England forests. American elms were thus quickly cultivated as house trees—Sargent asserted that they were “the oldest and noblest trees . . . planted by man in North America.” Many of these initial plantings developed into grand monarchs of the landscape, subjects of legend and veneration. One of these mighty specimens would mature into the famous Liberty Tree of Boston.
By the time of the Revolution, some wealthy individuals in larger Yankee communities, especially along the Connecticut River Valley, started to fund expansive elm plantings in their respective downtowns as a philanthropic gesture. Foremost among this group was James Hillhouse of New Haven, Connecticut, an officer in the Revolutionary War and later a U.S. senator. In 1786, he orchestrated a subscription campaign to bring a “Row of Elms” to a street that passed through his city’s central green (and, conveniently, also through undeveloped property that he controlled). The Hillhouse trees were planted in double rows, spaced out at forty-foot intervals, creating the effect of an outdoor cathedral. Hillhouse worked tirelessly throughout his life to increase his city’s elm canopy. When Charles Dickens passed through Connecticut during his famous 1842 trip to America, he marveled at the results of Hillhouse’s labors, writing,
New Haven, known also as the City of Elms, is a fine town. Many of its streets . . . are planted with rows of grand old elm-trees. . . . The effect is very like that of an old cathedral yard in England. . . . [The trees] seem to bring about a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other halfway, and shaken hands upon it; which is at once novel and pleasant.
The elm canopy that so enchanted Dickens soon expanded across most of New England. Towns and villages throughout the region, following the example set by population centers like New Haven, lined their greens and streets with endless rows of lofty elms. The plantings increased dramatically in the 1840s with the arrival of what one historian described as “a new longing for spatial beauty” that swept the region. Yankees seeking improved townscapes subsequently began to form village improvement societies, most of which placed their emphasis on encouraging elm introductions—the first such organization, founded in Sheffield, Massachusetts, was simply called the Elm Tree Association. The rows of elms springing up across these countless towns helped to counteract the denuded landscape that centuries of deforestation had produced, the same ecological degradation that had driven Thoreau to his seclusion in Walden Woods. In some respects, the widespread planting of American elms was a Yankee response to similar proto-environmentalist forces that helped inspire the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, the painters of the Hudson River School, the landscaped cemeteries of eastern cities, and the wilderness resorts of the Catskills and Saratoga.
The elm’s popularity in this period owed a further debt to a new, fervent nationalism that was sweeping through Jacksonian America. Native trees were in vogue. Foreign trees, like the previously favored Lombardy poplar and Chinese ailanthus, were out. Andrew Jackson Downing, the famed landscape architect and tireless promoter of street-tree plantings, routinely cursed the ailanthus tree but described the elm in 1841 as “one of the most generally esteemed of our native trees for ornamental purposes, . . . for planting in public squares, and along the highways.”
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the elm had completely colonized New England. In the popular consciousness the tree and the region were inseparable. “The peculiar glory of New England—its Elm-trees!” wrote Henry Ward Beecher, the esteemed Yankee preacher, in his 1867 novel Norwood; or, Village Life in New England. He continued: “The Elms of New England! They are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.”
The Yankee region, however, did not control a monopoly on American elms. As eastern settlers relocated west during the nineteenth century, the trees began to appear in homesteads across the country. Thoreau, in comparing the species’ expansion to that of the abolitionist movement, once described elms as “free-so
ilers in their own broad sense [that] send their roots north and south and east and west into many a conservative’s Kansas and Carolina.” One can imagine that lofty elms might have stood guard over the home of Frederick Weyerhaeuser in Rock Island, Illinois, or of J. Sterling Morton in Nebraska City, Nebraska, or of a teenage David Fairchild in Manhattan, Kansas.
Almost anywhere that a settler planted an American elm, the tree seemed to thrive. This was part of its charm—it was among the hardiest of species. Drought, salt, ice, mild flooding, heavy foot traffic, inconsiderate horses, none of it seemed to trouble the unflappable trees. Elms also endured air pollution, including the particulate matter that coal-burning factories were generating in ever-rising quantities. As a New Yorker article once observed, “It can live in almost any filth of smoke and soot and noxious fumes that man himself can tolerate.”
During the late nineteenth century, as progressive reformers nationwide began to agitate for wider metropolitan tree planting, the resilient elm expanded its dominion into many of the nation’s burgeoning cities. Urban areas from coast to coast were soon filled with broad avenues shaded by elms. The streets of Minneapolis featured 600,000 specimens. Detroit and Cincinnati each hosted 400,000 trees. Dallas added another 150,000. Sacramento, California, possessed as many elms as New Haven. There were clusters of 10,000 or more ornamental elms in every state. The total number planted nationally by the 1930s exceeded 25 million—according to one contemporary report, “$650,000,000 would be a nominal estimate of what their owners think the trees are worth.”
America’s urban regions, like all of New England, were now bound by a great, unbroken chain of American elms, a remarkable canopy that shaded an ever-growing percentage of the nation’s populace. But this sylvan situation, so central to American culture, was far more vulnerable than anyone had realized.
THE CRISIS FIRST APPEARED in Europe during the closing months of World War I. Elm trees near Rotterdam, Holland, were exhibiting leaf browning and bark die-back at an epidemic rate. Similar problems were soon reported in parts of France and the other Low Countries. No one had any idea what was going on or where the problem had come from. A preliminary theory blamed the war: Since all of the affected regions had fallen in the conflict’s destructive path, it seemed possible that the mysterious plague was nothing more than the aftereffects of nerve gas and extensive artillery fire. But the trouble continued to spread, radiating outward in all directions, ruining thousands of trees. The European scientific community began to suspect that something else was to blame, but no one was sure what.
The answer came in 1922 from a young Dutch graduate student named Maria Beatrice Schwarz. She determined—in a manner similar to Murrill’s 1906 identification of the chestnut blight—that a fungus unknown to science, Ophiostoma ulmi (then called Graphium ulmi), was behind the rampaging elm plague. It entered the trees through wounds, expanded into the water-conducting tissues, plugged and poisoned these channels, and finally killed the host. Subsequent studies determined that the fungus was spread by the elm-bark beetle, a tiny, tree-boring insect—this distinguished the fungus from chestnut blight, whose spores traveled by air and infected new trees directly. Schwarz’s discovery was eventually dubbed Dutch elm disease (DED).
Europeans were slow to accept Schwarz’s conclusions (in part because of a prejudice against female scientists). This delayed control efforts for nearly a decade. In the meantime, the fungus marched along through Europe like an invincible army. It appeared in Germany in 1921; shortly thereafter it surfaced in Scandinavia; and in 1926 it finally hopped the Channel into England. The ancestral elms of the British countryside began to fall like so many dominoes.
American plant pathologists watched this scene with horror. They were already fighting a losing battle against the relentless chestnut blight. The thought of waging a new war against an equally merciless enemy was terrifying. There was, however, a defense shield in place: In 1918, partly in reaction to the chestnut blight, the USDA—under the guidance of Marlatt—had enacted a general quarantine on the importation of all nursery stock. This decree had dramatically curtailed the introduction of new plant pests (and, to Fairchild’s consternation, new flora) from abroad, but most American scientists feared that it was only a matter of time before DED crossed the Atlantic and penetrated the quarantine.
The first scare came in the summer of 1930 when an arborist noticed a strange disease on an American elm in Cleveland. He brought his concern to an Ohio plant pathologist, Dr. Curtis May, who identified the problem as DED. Upon learning of this incident, the USDA’s Division of Forest Pathology authorized funds to search for, identify, and destroy any additional cases. Eight infected trees were discovered over the next three years. They were all destroyed, and the outbreak seemed contained.
But many plant pathologists worried that the worst was yet to come. After all, if the disease had reached Ohio, it should have also surfaced along the East Coast, the entry point for commerce from Europe.
In June 1933, a park foreman in Maplewood, New Jersey, found several trees suffering from what appeared to be DED. This quickly proved to be a much broader infestation than the earlier scare in Cleveland. Within weeks the number of infected trees in New Jersey spiraled up to 361. Laboratory tests simultaneously confirmed thirteen cases scattered across southeastern New York. The nation now had a full-scale outbreak on its hands, but without knowing how the fungus was crossing the quarantine it was difficult to design a counteroffensive.
In August, a federal plant inspector at the port of Baltimore finally discovered the breach. A French shipment of elm burls—fancy-grained growths used for furniture veneers—contained both the elm-bark beetle and the deadly fungus. These burls had fallen outside the blanket quarantine. Further investigation determined that infected shipments had been entering America since 1926. The prized elm wood was routinely transported to furniture manufacturers located far inland—this helped explain the mysterious initial DED outbreak in Cleveland.
Now that the disease had established a beachhead in America, the federal government faced a difficult choice: Should DED be allowed to run its course and replicate the devastation in Europe or should resources be marshaled to combat the threat? The backdrop to this debate was, of course, the doomed operation against chestnut blight, a campaign that many felt had wasted large sums of money with few results. But the American elm was too integral to national life for authorities to fold their hands. According to George Hepting, former chief plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, “There was a general agreement that the values at stake were worth the try.”
The USDA’s authority and jurisdiction had greatly increased since the days of the sakura shipment or the chestnut blight. In late October 1933, the department used its power under the Plant Quarantine Act to institute a supplemental quarantine on all European burl elm logs, largely stanching the flow of new infections. A DED laboratory was then established in Morristown, New Jersey, under the direction of Curtis May, the scientist who had first identified the disease in Cleveland. By early 1934, more than three hundred thousand dollars in federal funds had been issued to finance an eradication campaign.
For many of the people who had tried and failed to save the American chestnut, this initial federal action was reassuring but dangerously insufficient. An editorial in American Forests from November 1934 declared, “A half a million dollars is immediately needed and another half million next spring. For want of a million dollars, the American elm may be sacrificed on the altar of chance and official complacency.” The American Forestry Association (AFA), which published American Forests, worked tirelessly to generate public pressure for greater funding. In December 1934, their campaign finally paid dividends: The federal government issued a grant of $527,000 from the Public Works Administration (PWA), a massive New Deal program tasked with directing funds toward worthy public initiatives. This grant, along with supplemental funds from the federal government and from the governments of New Jersey, New York, and Con
necticut (the three affected states), brought the total amount of resources for 1935 above $900,000, more than three times the initial amount.
The eradication program, in response to this infusion of resources, expanded dramatically. Several thousand DED agents fanned out across the tristate region in search of infected trees. They marched through town and city and forest, authorized to destroy all trees that already harbored the infection as well as any whose decrepit condition made them susceptible. By the spring of 1935, American Forests was able to proudly declare, “The first phase of the fight against the Dutch elm disease was concluded . . . with the destruction of the last of 7,786 trees known to have been infected.” That July, President Roosevelt supplemented the initial PWA allotment with a further commitment of $2.5 million.
The fight against DED, however, was much broader than the USDA-led eradication campaign. The American elm had become an integral part of towns and cities throughout the nation. The dappled shade under an elm canopy was the defining feature of New England, of many downtowns, and of the nation’s innumerable Elm Streets. Communities depended on their elms, and many joined in the fight, not necessarily in order to curb the spread of the disease but simply to preserve the trees already in place—well-cared-for elms had a much greater chance of enduring. The soldiers on this front of the DED battle were not only government agents but arborists, men whose full-time job was to take care of trees. The DED epidemic happened to arrive in America just as the profession of arboriculture was coming into its own after years of growing in conjunction with America’s increasing preference for shade and ornamental tree plantings—the profession’s 1928 National Shade Tree Conference, according to historian Richard Campana, had marked “the formal beginning of a new era in the history of arboriculture.”