by Daniel Stone
Inspired by the possibilities, Swingle envisioned the two of them, and maybe a third, forming a coterie that would travel the globe and administer the introduction of plants. Two would search full-time, and the third—the three might rotate—would remain in Washington to receive cuttings. They fancied their title as “agricultural explorer”—a term so whimsical, so obvious, that it came out of their mouths at the same time.
The brainstorming was based less on youthful naïveté than on a thoughtful budgeting of time, money, and human energy. They drafted a memo that alternated each man’s handwriting, and they devised a hierarchy. The program would need structure. Both men understood how the world worked and knew the value of being sponsored by a government as powerful as America’s. Rather than just send someone to travel aimlessly, they would make decisions based on fact, not merely hope. As botanists, they debated which families of crops would be the easiest to transport, and which could produce new crops the fastest.
One night, Swingle sat reading about Egypt. “My god,” he said, “it takes date palms fifteen years to bear fruit. If this book tells the truth, we’ll be old before we get anywhere in the date business.”
Fairchild, without looking up, responded that the book was wrong.
* * *
—
On the evening of July 3, 1898, the street below Fairchild and Swingle’s window filled with a raucous crowd. Newsboys yelled, “Extra Star!” hawking late-run broadsheets that reported the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, a naval clash just off the south coast of Florida.
On that very day, the eve of the anniversary of America’s independence, the United States locked horns with a different colonizing superpower—Spain. Four centuries earlier, Christopher Columbus had claimed Cuba for the Spanish monarchy, which would eventually build an empire from the Colorado River to Tierra del Fuego. But gradually, the land was dismantled piece by piece until Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only Western Hemisphere possessions Spain had left. Now Cuba wanted independence. America was sympathetic to a colonized people hungry for liberty.
Americans had sided with the Cubans with surprising unity, not least because helping the island offered a chance to neutralize a Spanish perch so close to American shores. The conflict was the first major opportunity for America, not far past its hundredth birthday, to fight a long-standing bull of global dominance. If there was debate about the conflict, journalists didn’t spend much time covering dissent. The Chicago Tribune included in each day’s newspaper an above-the-fold etching of the American flag and the slogan “ONE FLAG, ONE CAUSE, ONE COUNTRY.”
Even William Jennings Bryan, the man who lost the 1896 election on a platform of avoiding international skirmishes, supported the cause of Cuba libre with such enthusiasm that he publicly told President William McKinley, the man who beat him, “I hereby place my services at your command.” More than freeing a colonized people, politicians also knew that siding with the Cuban insurrection would help protect trade routes for valuable commodities such as sugar and tobacco.
To flex its muscle in Cuba, the United States ordered the construction of a great battleship, the USS Maine. America’s shipbuilding prowess fell far short of Spain’s, so the top-heavy and poorly armed Maine was no match for vessels in the Spanish fleet, but that turned out not to matter. Its purpose in Cuba was to beef up America’s image—effectively a pair of shoulder pads for the scrawny United States Navy. Yet not long after it left Key West in January of 1898, when the ship exploded with a window-breaking boom and sank to the bottom of the Havana harbor, it became a different kind of symbol.
What came next was one of the clearest examples of America’s growing ingenuity, particularly the formation of the long-standing ethos that there was always money to be made, especially amid crisis. The journalism barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, locked in battle to outsell each other’s New York newspapers, used the public frenzy for war—which each man’s paper enflamed—to sell more papers. Both the New York World and the New York Journal ran banner headlines above breathless reports of the fighting in Cuba, containing every detail except Spain’s flat denial that it was responsible for the Maine explosion (a claim modern forensics have mostly held up). The hysteria made its way to Congress, which voted 311 to 6 to declare war on Spain, along with an allocation of fifty million dollars for President McKinley to spend how he pleased. Whether the war was warranted, or arrived at honestly, turned out to be irrelevant. Hearst would go on to serve in Congress. Pulitzer’s name became shorthand for superb journalism.
Everyone in Washington was wrapped up in the war, America’s biggest foreign conflict since its 1848 duel with Mexico. Politicians were at the same time delighted at the prospect of a fight—one American diplomat called it a “splendid little war”—and also wary at what they had started. Members of Congress worried they’d be foolish to send too many soldiers to Cuba, leaving Washington unguarded in case a Spanish warship sailed up the Potomac. In the days before radar, sonar, or reliable spatial monitoring, a surprise attack of this sort would have ended the war, and America not long after.
Fairchild seemed to be everywhere his fraught country needed him. After months of unemployment, he signed up to mine the Potomac with remote-activated bombs in case the Spanish invaded. He partnered with Frank Hitchcock—who would later become chairman of the Republican National Committee and, ultimately, postmaster general—and the two rowed around the river, stopping every few feet to drop a bomb and then activate it with a small wire that, when triggered, would blow apart the hull of a Spanish ship. Hitchcock struck Fairchild as featherbrained and clumsy, which worried him every time he connected the wiring to a bomb. Hitchcock always seemed to be the one holding the battery pack some distance away, not the one at risk of being blown to the clouds.
The Spanish never came to Washington. After the Maine explosion, Spanish officials tried to bypass America’s overheating temper and sent a fleet directly to Cuba. When it got there, U.S. Navy ships blockaded Spain’s incursion. On land, a volunteer horseback cavalry called the Rough Riders, led by forty-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, waged battle. The combination of land and sea warfare was a show of newfound American strength, so much that within days, much of Spain’s fleet was either badly damaged or sitting underwater.
When Spain conceded defeat—after just 113 days—the United States, a nation on the rise, had for the first time eclipsed one of the world’s top powers. Men like Hearst and Pulitzer, who had benefited from swells in newspaper sales, took the occasion to declare America an emerging force in its own right. They gloated that in just over a century, America had gone from mistreated colony to a nation of great confidence, military clout, and moral superiority.
The U.S. victory also turned out to be a victory for food. American soldiers had been sent to Cuba with rations of canned beef, a foodstuff so sordid and foul that after the war, Congress investigated why so many soldiers got sick. Sick soldiers might have lost the war for the United States, if not for the way they supplemented their diet with tropical fruits they picked up in Cuba. Soldiers marveled at new types of bananas, juicy limes and pineapples, and strange specimens many soldiers had never seen, such as the yellow carambola, also known as star fruit, with five perfectly symmetrical ridges. In a way, fruit had given America its edge in victory. And when soldiers returned, stories of these novelties awakened the American public, its palate stimulated by the diversity of new things obtainable in the tropics.
* * *
—
Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson was a tall, thin man whose gray beard, deep-set eyes, and receding hairline suggested constant concern over large matters. Behind his old desk, made of knotted oak with carvings of flowers and vines, he peered through wire spectacles at the three men who sat before him. Accompanying Fairchild and Swingle was Doctor A. C. True, head of the experiment stations and Fairchild’s former boss at the Department, who the young botanist hoped would add
credibility to the request he was about to make.
James Wilson was a savvy man of politics who, owing to his character and shrewdness, had been President McKinley’s choice to head the Department of Agriculture. A Scotsman, Wilson had emigrated to Iowa in 1852 in hopes of farming in a country that was economically ascendant. He hadn’t sought out higher office; he was drafted by a neighbor who appreciated the way Wilson spoke, peppering his speech with biblical allusions. Wilson had built one of the strangest résumés in American history: he won a seat in Congress in 1882, was sworn into office, then learned after a recount that he had actually lost the election. Defiant, he used parliamentary procedures for two years to silence the other party’s objection to his legitimacy. Then, with just minutes left in the congressional term, he resigned his seat to his opponent.
In Wilson’s wood-paneled office at 1400 Independence Avenue, just steps from the Washington Monument, Fairchild explained that since the USDA was formed in 1862, its primary role had been to dispense seeds. But by 1898, the congressional seed program struck many people (farmers included) as laughable graft, a Gilded Age boondoggle that benefited politicians and no one else. It wasn’t uncommon for packets specifying round pansies to yield horn-shaped foxgloves, and purple petunias came up looking like pink hollyhocks. When the packets were accurately marked, farmers were happy to take free seeds of corn and potatoes, but they didn’t need them. The program, with an annual budget of two hundred thousand dollars, amounted to an entitlement relic from an era when farmers were starting their businesses, not expanding them.
But now farmers had a different kind of need. As fertile land was opening in the West and South, settlers were appealing almost daily, less for the Department of Agriculture’s money than for its wisdom on what crops could be grown and how to fight pests. Fairchild had heard stories of farmers in the Upper Mississippi Valley who wanted hardier plants than the apples of the eastern states. Settlers in the Southwest needed drought-resistant plants and help with irrigation.
Fairchild argued to Wilson that the answers weren’t inside the Department of Agriculture; they were across the oceans in places like China and Egypt where people had learned over millennia to farm in tough conditions. Fairchild told Wilson of his association with Barbour Lathrop, and of their attempts to introduce plants. He had become accustomed to describing the flavor of the wampi and the durian and the mangosteen, each enticing, worthwhile, and completely unknown in the United States. But beyond his personal tastes, wasn’t it strange, Fairchild observed, man’s propensity to be satisfied with so little when so much was available? Fairchild wrote a lengthy memo to organize his thoughts.
To the most casual observer it must be apparent that the number of useful plants, compared with those of which man makes no use, is very small. The menu of an average American dinner includes the product of scarcely a dozen plants, and yet the number which could be grown for the table would reach into the hundreds. There are several reasons why the number of plants upon which we depend for subsistence remains small, and the competition between producers of the same plant product continues fierce, but the most potent one lies in a persistent conservatism of taste, which is both unreasoning and uncontrollable. That the German peasant should look on Indian corn meal as fit only for his live stock, or the inhabitants of some portions of Holland consider the sheep raised along their canals for the English market in the same light as Americans do horse flesh, are facts which must be reckoned with, however unreasonable they may appear, in any attempts at plant introduction.
Fairchild wasn’t bold enough to think he could change human nature. But there was reason to believe Americans were more susceptible to expanding their palates than were people in other countries. As a symptom of its youth, he argued, the United States was impressionable.
Stretching some three thousand miles from coast to coast, from the cold winters of upland Maine to the sweltering summers along the Rio Grande, the United States enjoyed more climatic diversity than anywhere else on the planet. What if the Department started a pilot program to learn about those other crops? Fairchild asked. If it failed, the program could be killed. But if it worked, the benefits to American food could be infinite.
Fairchild wasn’t asking to travel. He was suggesting that he run such a program from Washington. Swingle could go to Europe, and perhaps, he argued, they could fund the travels of another man, too. The whole operation could get by with a few thousand dollars and a little office space. Fairchild had even thought of a name to put on the door. He had scrawled it in his notes: The Office of Plant Introduction.
While Fairchild spoke, Secretary Wilson leaned back with an expression that betrayed he was impressed. His spectacles twirled between his fingers. He emptied his mouth into a spittoon.
Fairchild had come prepared. He also had good timing. The year 1898 was only half over, but it had already proved consequential—a year that revealed substantial stress on America’s agricultural economy. Wilson’s boss, President McKinley, had narrowly won election two years prior over William Jennings Bryan, whose populist campaign had riled farmers, especially ones who felt squeezed by advances in mechanization that they couldn’t afford. McKinley was lucky, especially considering that Bryan’s support had actually started as far back as the 1880s when farmers began to assemble into a group called the Farmers’ Alliance. The group became fervent enough by the early 1890s to launch its own political party, the Populists, which, led by Bryan in 1896, came within six hundred thousand votes of winning the presidency. If McKinley wanted to keep his job, he’d have to address farmers’ angst. Not with tired old ideas, but with inventive new ones.
Wilson spat in the spittoon again.
He called for a man outside the office, who came in a moment later.
Wilson recounted the outlines of the idea.
The man, the Department’s disbursing officer, thought for a moment, then admitted that, yes, if the secretary wanted it, money could be procured.
Wilson looked back at Fairchild. He’d be an employee again at the Department, giving him the credibility of government backing.
All Wilson wanted, however, were two changes to the plan.
One was to expand the plant-collecting team from a triad of young men to include anyone currently abroad on government business. They would be encouraged to contribute seeds, and, provided they be sensible, their expenses would be paid. Wilson believed this would widen the reach of the new section from a handful of hunters to potentially dozens.
The other change became apparent two days later. Wilson summoned Fairchild to tell him he had found office space. Fairchild and the secretary marched up four flights, to where the rafters nearly touched their heads. Wilson pointed to a small nameplate on the wall. The Office of Plant Introduction had become:
The Office of Seed and Plant Introduction
The title was obtuse. Seeds were part of plants. But Fairchild knew seeds were the currency of Congress, and if it helped convince Wilson and the Department’s bean counters, Fairchild could look past the redundancy. Wilson had also procured an old carriage house for Fairchild to store plant material in—a pitiful greenhouse, but it would have to work. He walked outside with Fairchild to see it.
“Don’t let them crowd you out, my boy,” he said. The secretary stood for a moment, then turned and disappeared back inside.
* * *
—
Seeds began to pour in immediately. Durum wheats from Russia. Grapes, mushrooms, and pomegranates from Europe. Fairchild’s initial ambition to start a plant introduction program was replaced by the urgency to find a place to put them all. The greenhouse, overflowing with papers and boxes from other sections, wasn’t big enough.
Fairchild spent his days shuttling seeds to and from the greenhouse and returning in the heat of the afternoon to his desk to write. The majority of the job wasn’t botany but correspondence. Explorers needed assignments; experimenters wante
d samples; farmers were desperate for seeds.
To investigate how to expand the reach of the section, Fairchild decided to take a trip. Hawaii was too far, and his recent failure too fresh, so the only remaining place suitable for tropical botany was Florida, an area of remarkable heat and humidity and hardly any people. In 1898, there were just 1,600 people who lived on either side of the Miami River, which bisected the town of Miami like a pageant sash. No one prized Florida for its potential, least of all farmers. Salt-blasted land couldn’t support wheat or corn.
This Fairchild knew. He was also aware that Florida’s last experiment with food introduction had ended in spectacular failure. In 1829, Henry Perrine, United States consul in Campeche, Mexico, was one of the few men to answer Washington’s request for useful plants. He became so interested in America’s botany that he left his post to start an experimentation garden in south Florida. Perrine asked Congress for land in the region, but was denied due to hostility from the Seminole Indians. When he insisted that it was Florida or nowhere, Congress granted Perrine thirty-six square miles at the southern end of the peninsula. Cautious of the Indians, he moved his wife and three kids to Indian Key, a small island accessible only by boat.
The water, however, couldn’t protect him. In August of 1840, a group of Seminoles raided Indian Key with torches and arrows. Perrine helped his family escape by boat to be rescued by the navy, and then he went back to battle with the Seminoles. Eventually, his limp body was discovered, charred by fire. After Congress passed a resolution honoring Perrine, the idea of plant experimentation went unmentioned for the next half century.
Another reason for Fairchild’s visit to Florida was the rumor of a land donation on the south banks of the Miami River, where newly introduced plants might thrive. Florida hardly compared with the East Indies—its trees were short and their greens all the same hue. But it was dense enough to be jungle, and more important, it had tropical character. Plants like coconut palms and the occasional mango had already begun arriving, carried by birds, travelers, or soldiers returning from Cuba.