by Daniel Stone
Technically, Columbus never set foot in North America, nor did he do any agricultural swapping himself. And many of the people living there, the Native Americans that he believed were Indians, benefited little from the agricultural exchange. There were relatively few people on so much land—around fifty million on six billion acres. While Europeans were busy introducing to the New World foods that they thought would improve the native people’s lives, they were also importing new diseases that ended them, such as smallpox, measles, cholera, and influenza. Smallpox alone is thought to have diminished Native American populations with horrific devastation rarely seen in history.
When English colonists landed, they found a heavily wooded continent, overgrown and underused, prime for them to create a portrait of their former lives. They brought carrots and, not long after, barley, wheat, and peaches. By the 1730s, the process of building a new colony meant building a sustainable system for growing food. James Oglethorpe, the British general keen to develop a colony called Georgia, split his time between governing and innovating food. He experimented with how weather affected crops, believing Georgia’s winters were too cold for cotton. They could, however, support silk, hemp, and flax. The peach that made Georgia famous didn’t arrive for another hundred years.
George Washington, too, realized he was best at waging revolt when he took breaks to hoe the soil. Before he was president, the general studied subtropical agriculture, pleading frequently to London for seeds. Tobacco did well under his watch, but there was more money in wheat. To Mrs. Washington’s horror, he spent early mornings investigating the optimal fertilizer, mixing oddities like animal manure, mud, and black mold that grew on a hillside near his house. Count among Washington’s gifts to his future nation his revelation that cows, rather than horses or sheep, provide the most potent dung.
Thomas Jefferson, president number three, spent America’s early days in France. When he returned, he had the foresight to know that for a new nation to survive, it needed more food. “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add [a] useful plant to [its] culture,” Jefferson wrote in 1800. He particularly liked grain, which was second in value only to oil, but he knew self-sufficiency required diversity. If the newly created foreign consuls were good for anything, they could send seeds—and consuls in France, England, Italy, and the Netherlands did. Thomas Jefferson loved fruits of the earth as much as he loved liberty. Which is why, for all his efforts, he sits beside Willie Nelson, crooner of the heartland, in the National Agricultural Hall of Fame.
In America’s infancy, food wasn’t a sector—it was almost the whole economy. Farmers accounted for 90 percent of the United States’ labor force in 1790. Fifty years later, they were 60 percent. And a generation after that, they were just over half (today they’re less than 2 percent). Accounting for America’s swelling population during that time, from four million to thirty-one million, there were more individual farmers in the late nineteenth century than ever before (or again) in American history. Because of this, the government focused an extraordinary amount of attention and money on agrarian matters. In the years following Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, courses on horticulture—the era’s equivalent to modern biotechnology—were taught in nearly every university. Federal officials gave land to states to analyze crops, their diseases, and how to grow them at large scale.
Compared to today’s political campaigns that rise and fall on money, media, and messaging, the first campaigns were a calculation of food. The earliest pork from Washington wasn’t pork; it was seeds for corn, wheat, and barley in small envelopes that congressmen would stuff in their pockets and, when home in their districts, hand out with a wink. In 1881, William G. LeDuc, the agriculture commissioner, wrote to his boss, Rutherford B. Hayes, that the seed distribution program was a resounding success. “It is now generally conceded that the distribution of seeds from this department is doing incalculable good.” It was one way Washington worked directly for the people, and for a congressman with deep pockets, reason enough to vote for him again.
* * *
—
When Fairchild arrived in December of 1893, Naples greeted him with an assault on the senses. Loud voices pierced the streets. Horses trotted along, their ankles crusted in dung. To be a foreigner was distressing. When his steamship, the Fulda, docked, a group of burly men, sweaty, with shimmering muscles, came to unload the baggage, fighting with one another over every item, and, with grand gestures, demanding tips for their service. “The high-pitched, screaming voices, the continual gesticulations, and the insistent demands for money, made it a nightmare to me,” Fairchild recalled.
Outside the port, Naples was filled with an air of laziness that no breeze could arouse. People walked during the day, sidestepping piles of uncollected garbage, to sit on the grand seawall that protected the city from the dull waves of the Mediterranean. A traveling reporter for the Chicago Sunday Tribune found the city lethargic, lacking drive and passion, as if hung over from the grand centuries of artistic titans and extraordinary scholars of theology. “Sitting on the sea-wall [in Naples] and dangling one’s legs is not a very remunerative employment, and yet crowds of able-bodied men spend day after day in this easy occupation and in others that are like it,” he reported to readers back home, many of whom had taken backbreaking roles in America’s industrial revolution. Italy would soon experience its own rapid economic growth as a result of advances in steelmaking and cotton milling, but that spurt hadn’t arrived, and certainly not in Naples. There were hordes of lazzaroni, people who spent their days cooking atop stoves in the street, putting in enough work each week to afford only the macaroni they ate, the rest of the time filled with smoke, gossip, and catcalls.
Fairchild had gone to Naples without a place to live. Arranging a room in advance would have required a correspondent, and corresponding would have required a basic knowledge of Italian. An Italian painter on board the Fulda returning from America, where he’d exhibited paintings at the World’s Fair in Chicago, sensed Fairchild’s shock, took pity, and invited Fairchild to join him in a horse-drawn carrozza that clopped through the narrow streets, depositing him at the apartment of the artist’s brother, who conveniently needed a boarder. The room had a view of Mount Vesuvius near a new funicular that carried a steam-powered railcar up a hill.
There was a fascination in the young man, the type one finds when landing in a foreign place, and he had to remind himself not to gawk at foreign peculiarities: the writing on signs; the sounds of an unfamiliar language; the people, how they dressed and looked, and how they seemed not to notice him. Fairchild filled his notebooks with fits and starts, giving the impression that he stopped every few feet to jot observations. The city was full of “pestiferous ragamuffins.” His meals of hard bread were “disappointing” and his silverware “only sketchily washed.” These small snubs were both memorable and insignificant. What truly delighted him was that, all around, he could hear nothing but Italian.
He spent the first few nights wandering the streets, first by himself and then with his landlord’s son. They attempted to communicate in Italian until Fairchild’s piecemeal vocabulary would sputter, and then they would slip into a theater for an inexpensive play, the kind where people stood and heckled the melodramatic actors. One play that particularly struck Fairchild had thirteen characters who were all killed scene by scene in increasingly gruesome ways, until only two were left, a pair of lovers who declared their devotion in a horrific double suicide.
The first day Fairchild reported for work, people were expecting someone older. The Smithsonian’s Zoological Station was a place where men of science worked in secluded silence, unraveling the great mysteries of biological life. Fairchild, however, had come without a research goal. He had already achieved his principal objective, which was to travel somewhere outside the bounds of his country. All he had when he arrived in Italy was the eagerness of a twenty-four-year-old ready to stand over a microsc
ope and help wherever needed.
When his adviser, Paul Mayer, a marine biologist, asked about his interests, Fairchild told him, “As a boy I watched termites build nests. But at the department we studied crop diseases.” Mayer suggested that Fairchild study the cells of algae that grew in the Bay of Naples. Only recently had cells piqued the interest of scientists, particularly how cells divide, seemingly endlessly, suggesting they could perpetuate infinite life. Every morning, the station’s head boatman dredged the bay and filled balloons with water that glowed green in the sunlight. Fairchild spent each afternoon and evening on the highest setting of his microscope, watching the process known as karyokinesis as the cells split.
Meanwhile, outside the lab were unlimited opportunities for distraction. He spent his evenings watching people in the city’s Piazza del Plebiscito or wandering to the coast for a view across the water to the island of Capri. In Naples, where pizza was invented, Fairchild tasted his first cheesy flatbread, a punishing food for first-timers, whose mouths could be scorched with hot, lavalike cheese. He was enchanted by the various shapes of macaroni. And pastries were works of history. Naples’ mixed heritage over several centuries from the French, Spanish, and Austrians resulted in flaky, sweet pastries, yeast cakes drowned in rum, and deep-fried doughballs known as zeppole, each one an ancestor of the modern doughnut.
Despite the contagion of indolence, there were few places more picturesque than Naples for one’s first taste of foreign charm. Four thousand years of continuous history left deep footprints in art and culture. The bronze statues; the marble sculptures; the paintings that hadn’t made it to New York City, let alone Manhattan, Kansas. In an old Bourbon palace known as the Capodimonte, the masterpieces of artists Fairchild had only read about—Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli—were on display in their original and full-color glory. Art was art, but no twenty-four-year-old could ignore that, often, the people in the paintings weren’t wearing any clothes.
* * *
—
There was seaweed on his desk rotting and stinking the morning someone knocked on Fairchild’s door. The person walked in with two thick pieces of paper—calling cards, each engraved with a name.
BARBOUR LATHROP
Chicago, Illinois
RAPHAEL PUMPELLY
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Fairchild first thought the men had left their cards, terrifying in itself. But there they were, climbing the stairs, at a moment when his room smelled of ocean bacteria and his shirt was stained green with chlorophyll. He hadn’t remembered Lathrop’s behavior: blustery, unpredictable, and apathetic of his breach in etiquette at arriving unannounced. Lathrop answered only to Lathrop, and after his detour in Morocco, he’d asked Pumpelly, the professor from the boat, to help him find that young man who wanted to travel.
“The professor and I thought we’d come to see how you were getting along,” Lathrop said as he mounted the last step and invited himself into the room.
With his military posture and gray mustache, Lathrop impressed Fairchild anew. Next to Lathrop, Pumpelly somehow looked more official, standing erect with piercing eyes—a jacket, a vest, a cane. Fairchild didn’t speak. He had neither time nor anything to say, just the instinct that he had done something wrong, or was about to.
“I’ve been below here many times, but never knew there was anything like this in the upper story,” Lathrop said, answering a question no one had asked.
He sat. Then took out his cigarette holder and lit a cigarette before asking, “One is allowed to smoke here?”
Lathrop asked him what he was working on.
“Karyokinesis,” Fairchild said, pleased that his first word could be a large one.
“The what?” Lathrop cut in sharply.
“Karyokinesis. The way that a cell divides. I’m trying to observe the nuclei. I’ve been using the cells of green seaweed from—”
“You told me on the boat that you wanted to go to Java,” Lathrop interrupted. “Have you given up that idea?”
“For now. The trip is beyond my means.”
“Well, I’ve decided to give you a thousand dollars with which to go to Java,” Lathrop said before inhaling deeply. “I want you to understand that I look upon this thousand dollars as an investment, nothing more. I have had you looked up, and you seem to be all right. You must understand that this is no personal matter. I want that clearly understood. It is merely my idea of making an investment in science.”
Fairchild said nothing. Lathrop inhaled again, sat for another moment, and then he rose. Before he slipped through the doorway, he turned around again.
“Oh, and I’d like to have you lunch with me at the Tivoli Hotel at one o’clock.”
Less than three minutes had passed and the men were descending the steps.
Fairchild’s head was in a whirl. He tried to make sense of what had happened. He marveled first at the money, and then at the reality that he might actually see Java, and then back to the money. One thousand dollars, the modern equivalent of twenty thousand, was more than he had ever seen, twice the era’s average salary for a full year. One Christmas, his aunt and uncle had given him fifty dollars, which to any young man would have felt like a fortune.
Lunch passed quickly, for much of it Lathrop recalling stories about his travels and triumphs, amusing himself more than anyone else, pausing characteristically for breaks from chewing to squint his eyes and nod slowly as though dusting off a distant memory. Fairchild understood his role was to listen, and for that Lathrop enjoyed his company.
After lunch, Lathrop suggested they see Carmen, a French opera about an undisciplined soldier lured away from his wife by a gypsy. The performance started at nine and lasted five hours, during which Fairchild was less entertained by the actors than by Lathrop’s knowing sighs at turns in the plot.
It was three in the morning when they arrived at Fairchild’s house. In the carrozza, Fairchild waited for Lathrop to finish his final story about the last time he had visited Naples. Lathrop seemed a peculiar man, talking in a flow of running consciousness, unconcerned about whether he retained his listener’s attention.
Fairchild thanked Lathrop for the evening, then climbed down to the street.
“Well, don’t you think you’d better have my address?” Lathrop called after him.
For the money. In Fairchild’s attempt to remain polite, to come across as deferential and courteous, the money had slipped his mind. He took out his red notebook and, as Lathrop dictated, wrote the older man’s address. Barbour Lathrop Esquire. Bank of Scotland, 19 Bishopsgate Street Within, London. E, period, C, period.
Although it had been longer, the second meeting of the two men confused Fairchild more than the first. It still wasn’t clear whether Lathrop actually liked David Fairchild, or simply saw in him an opportunity to cure his glamorous boredom. And there was the matter of the money, which Lathrop emphasized was neither a gift nor a favor, but an investment that he expected to pay off.
How, he didn’t say, because he didn’t know. But as a millionaire, he could afford to find out later. The transaction would soon turn out to be wise, both for the men and for their country, but it would be some time before either man knew. As Fairchild turned toward the door to the house, Lathrop yelled, “Avanti,” and the coachman cracked his whip and whisked the carriage away.
CHAPTER THREE
East of Suez
The letters arrived with foreign postmarks. Cape Town, Singapore, Hong Kong, Oahu. In each one Lathrop was baffled by how long it was taking his young “investment” to get to Java. Over a year had passed since the meeting on the boat, and eleven months since Lathrop’s surprise visit in Naples to discuss the particulars of the deal. To Lathrop, a man restless enough to circle the globe every year, Fairchild’s foot-dragging was maddening at best, and at worst, just rude.
Fairchild had received Lathrop’s letters, but despi
te the unsubtle push to get moving, he spent a year convincing himself that he wasn’t ready for Java. An opportunity as big as what Lathrop offered shouldn’t be squandered by insufficient preparation. “How foolish I would be to go to Java without a better training!” Fairchild wrote. The boyhood dream of seeing the Malay Islands at any cost had been replaced by the sensible reality that he had little to offer South Asia. Until he did, he’d keep the offer, and the money, on ice.
Fairchild was puzzled by Lathrop’s demeanor. There was the older man’s generosity, but Lathrop made it clear that his niceties were not nice. He called the money a business transaction but didn’t specify what he expected from his investment. Lathrop seemed more personally interested in Fairchild, as if taking on a mentee, or a son, or something different entirely. Their age difference was curious, just twenty-two years—shorter, and they might be peers; longer, perhaps father-son. It surprised Fairchild, as it would most people, to receive such sudden and aggressive attention from an older man.
He wrote back to Lathrop telling him of his new work in Naples, and of the grand scientists he was meeting and valuable work they were doing, with each letter hoping to convince Lathrop that his grant was paying off even before a dime was exchanged. But Fairchild hesitated before sliding each note in the postbox, wary that the contents would aggravate Lathrop to the point that he’d revoke the offer altogether.
Fairchild’s confidence grew after his heart-stopping trip to Corsica in pursuit of citron. While he was in Naples, a request had come from W. A. Taylor, assistant pomologist for the Department of Agriculture, who, with the endorsement of the secretary of agriculture, asked Fairchild to visit Corsica to acquire citron cuttings. The fruit itself was larger and more potent than most lemons, particularly because it existed first. Citrons were one of four major original citrus fruits, along with pomelos, mandarins, and papedas. The four mixed their genes together to make the modern orange, lemon, and grapefruit—each one eventually reproduced in the trillions. Future archaeologists would discover citrus to be among the most popular human foods, the rare mix of sweet, tart, and sumptuous, the centerpiece of American fruit salads, breakfast juice, and the all-American lemonade stand. All giving little credit to the fruits’ hardy Asian ancestors.