by Daniel Stone
After this find, Fairchild, too, was feeling the growing confidence of a man well-traveled, well-read, and learned. Conversations with strangers brought the pleasure of learning something new, and occasionally, showing off the sheen of worldliness he’d acquired from Lathrop.
One night in Trieste, he joined a group of street men, so-called “boulevardiers,” drinking coffee and gossiping about women. Fairchild judged their lives provincial and sad. “I could not understand why they were content to live such utterly aimless lives,” he wrote later. He must have showed his hand, because when one of the men asked Fairchild what was so exciting about his life, Fairchild wagered that he could cram more romantic glamour into a week of travel than the small-minded man could find in a year of late-night prattle.
It would take less than two days for Fairchild to win the bet. A storm struck the steamer Fairchild boarded to leave Italy. The wind battered the hull and, in the fog of night, another boat nearly crashed into it, its bowsprit sweeping over the steamer’s deck. Fairchild jumped to avoid being mauled and when he sought shelter in the dining room, a pretty woman fainted into his arms. Rarely did Fairchild find the occasion to behold a woman, and particularly one so vulnerable. What came next was so novel and pleasurable that it remained salient in his memory for decades, a vignette in his abridged memoirs of his lengthy travels. The woman would turn out to be an Austrian countess, young and with turquoise blue eyes. He would learn their color later, as he laid the listless woman on a sofa, sat beside her, and fanned her gently back to consciousness.
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In February of 1901, the prospect of dried table grapes led Fairchild to Greece, where he watched, repulsed, as grapes were laid on slabs of dried manure, believed to be more absorbent than dirt, and baked under the sun until they became raisins. Large melons hung in greenhouses. Fairchild tasted one and was underwhelmed, but when someone assured him a sweet winter melon would last until spring, he arranged a shipment to Washington.
In Greece, Fairchild met with the German botanist Theodor von Heldreich, who showed him tiny green beans known as lentils, and beige pistachios, the most tender of nuts (even though they’re not nuts but, in a convoluted way, fruits). Pistachios had already been tasted in America, their delicate taste finely suited for confectionary flavoring in foods like ice cream. But all pistachios in the States were imported. Fairchild hesitated before buying the trees—a stunning fifteen dollars apiece—but he plunked down one hundred dollars to send half a dozen fully grown pistachio trees across the Atlantic. No one objected back at headquarters, for the simple reason that, as far as the Department knew, the trees were the first budded pistachio trees ever to exist in America.
Heldreich, a week away from his seventy-ninth birthday and a year away from his death, saw in Fairchild the same youthful energy he once possessed when, with the influence of his scientific friend and mentor Charles Darwin, he first moved to Greece in the 1850s to study plants in a place more fertile than Germany. Now it was Heldreich’s turn to pass wisdom of scientific exploration, and it would be to Fairchild.
Like an Arabian genie, he offered Fairchild three paths. “[He said that] I would find seedless lemons on the island of Poros; walnuts with shells almost as thin as paper on the island of Naxos; and the famous Valonia oak on the island of Crete,” Fairchild recalled. He only had the authorization to continue in a straight line, and in the direction of Egypt. Walnuts were grand, and Fairchild loved the imposing grandeur of oak trees. But a seedless lemon had the potential to be transformative back home.
He found the precise orchard Heldreich had mentioned on the island of Poros, near the southern tip of Greece, and there, holding his suitcase, he sunk his teeth into the tart, seedless fruit. Unlike the haste and angst he felt stealing citron from Corsica, he now felt the indifference of confidence. He tasted one lemon after another, inspecting each for seeds, the juice running down his chin until his mouth stung with acid.
Fairchild operated with the professional demeanor of a man now granted government funds to do crucial work. But for a rare occasion in his work as an agricultural explorer, he considered picking fruit for himself, simply to enjoy, whether it helped anyone or not. So he filled his suitcase with lemons. Some would make it back to America. The rest would be the small and tart pleasure of the man, alone in the orchard and alone in the world, who had picked them.
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The new man in Washington, Jared Smith, was overwhelmed by the pace at which seeds were arriving, even though he couldn’t have been surprised. In addition to Fairchild and Swingle—who was hunting for figs in Algeria—there were now three other explorers in the field. One searched for stronger forms of wheat in Russia, another man for rice in Japan, and a third explored the South Pacific on the off chance that the Philippines were finally pacified and could start growing sugar for the United States. When the South Pacific explorer discovered the fighting was still fierce, he turned instead to Chinese ports and collected seeds of cucumber, squash, and eggplant.
More than ten new plants were arriving in America each day, a jarring pace and quantity. The ones marked “urgent” had come from Fairchild, who knew how to win attention amid an influx of botanical competition. One of his time-sensitive parcels yielded a yellow fruit called a cashew. The fruit looked like a mix between a mango and an apple, and Fairchild cautioned in all capital letters that the fruit was very poisonous. But from the cashew fruit grew an elbow-shaped nut. If smoked to remove the poisonous oil coating, cashew nuts were suitable to eat. And indeed, Americans have Fairchild to thank for what became a beloved confectionary treat, the demand for cashews rising steadily through the twentieth century. Fairchild was responsible for bringing cashew nuts to American eaters, but not to American farmers, who couldn’t handle the crop. Cashews’ genetic similarity to mangoes left them unable to withstand even a minor frost, and thus suitable for Florida only. But farmers there just shrugged. The fruit demanded too much land, buckets of water, and relentless labor, all for a small nut. It was cheaper to import cashews from places like India, which became (and remains) America’s long-standing supplier.
Cashew nuts, however, did illustrate an important lesson in plant espionage. And not because Fairchild acquired them, but because people liked them. Food introduction has two distinct phases. The first is farming: Will people with land agree to grow a new crop and produce it at a large-enough scale to make it a viable food? But the second phase—the one that questioned whether people would actually like a new food—was beginning to occupy more and more of Fairchild’s thinking. In fact, anyone involved in food introduction in 1901 had started to see the transition from exploration and cuttings to markets and consumption.
Buffalo, New York, wasn’t anyone’s first choice for a place to answer the question, What would Americans want to eat? But Buffalo would end up being the host of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, where visitors could drink in the sight of Niagara, the grandest of all waterfalls. The fact that America was willing to host a world’s fair so soon after its success in Chicago in 1893 showed that the nation was a lasting player of ingenuity. And at the center of the 1901 fair stood two large pavilions, each showcasing America’s proudest industries: electricity and agriculture.
A Boston architecture firm designed the seventy-five-thousand-square-foot palace of agriculture flanked with semicircular arches and cylindrical columns. If visitors could be lured away from the bright lights of the electricity pavilion, they found hanging above the doorway of the agriculture palace plaster moldings of the United States’ new acquisitions like grapevines and coconut palms. Inside was a cornucopia featuring fruits like watermelons, cauliflowers, and new varieties of tomatoes that were stacked on tables. It was the biggest agricultural trade show America had ever held, and every day, farmers and their helpers brought armloads of celery, potatoes, cabbage, and onions to replace the five thousand crop samples on the tables.
Whether the discarded ones were old, or simply ugly, was irrelevant. How the items looked mattered most, followed close behind by the burst of their flavor.
Farmers took turns wandering the rows, stopping to grope squashes and tomatoes, and jotting down the names of the men who grew them, for later correspondence. Mary Bronson Hartt, a food reporter, watched this activity for hours before penning a dispatch for the popular Everybody’s Magazine about the free exchange of crops and ideas, all in the pursuit of growing American agriculture to a scale that could benefit everyone. A tour of the pavilion of crops, Hartt wrote, “serves to deepen your faith in the enterprise and progressiveness of the great American farmer.”
Fairchild had helped build an appetite for this display of new crops. A world’s fair accentuated such excitement for novel crops, particularly when one compared the United States to Europe. In 1900, the other side of the Atlantic was entering a steep agricultural stall. Global shipping—especially since the invention of the steamship in the 1870s—had opened new routes to Europe, and with them, an influx of grain, meat, and fruit from overseas that undercut European prices year after year. New refrigerator ships made the problem worse; bananas sent daily from the tropics demonstrated that Europe was simply too rich to compete with more upstart countries.
It wasn’t that France, England, Germany, and Spain couldn’t use their wealth to experiment. For centuries explorers had delivered to these countries foods from the most remote places on earth. But self-sufficiency had eclipsed innovation. Europe’s patchwork of small countries separated by different laws and governments left little land to experiment on. That, and little energy for reinvention. Countries that built themselves as social democracies offered less incentive for their people to create things new and dynamic. At least compared to a young nation like the United States, whose past was far less interesting than its future.
Unfortunately, Fairchild never made it to the Buffalo exposition. He was in Europe at the time, which left him oblivious to what these farmers were saying about his crops, and about their appetites in general. This information would have been exceedingly valuable in helping him choose where to go next and what kinds of crops to prioritize.
Even more unfortunate: news of the agricultural bounty in Buffalo would not be the most-remembered part of the fair.
One warm day in early September, as the summer slowly turned to fall, President McKinley visited the fairgrounds in Buffalo. He wanted to see the agriculture hall for himself, and to crow in a grand speech about America on the rise. “This country is in a state of unexampled prosperity,” he said, and then rattled off all the ways the railroads, the telegraph, and the steamships were connecting America to the world as never before. As it happened, it was the last speech McKinley would ever give. While shaking hands afterward, McKinley came face-to-face with a man who fired two bullets into the president’s chest. The man was a disturbed anarchist who believed America was benefiting only the rich, and that McKinley was as good as anyone to blame.
The president lived for another week, alert and joking (“How did they like my speech?”). But when the gangrene set in, the first president of the twentieth century, a man enthusiastic about American prosperity and unapologetic about whom it clobbered along the way, fell asleep and never woke up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On the Banks of the Tigris
Fairchild took several months off from traveling after McKinley’s death. The country was in grief, and he needed rest. He had been in near motion for three years.
The majority of those years he had spent with Barbour Lathrop. But his last trip to Germany and through Europe had been entirely on his own. Fairchild didn’t seem to mind the solitude, but the sudden absence of companionship had stung Lathrop like a ripped-off bandage. Lathrop practically demanded that Fairchild return to the United States via Maine (rather than Washington), where Lathrop’s sister, Florence, owned property in Bar Harbor. The town had grown into one of America’s most stylish resorts, the summer home of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Pulitzer, the latter of whom built a hundred-thousand-dollar “cottage” there with modern plumbing. Fairchild obliged, and he and Lathrop spent a week together on Florence’s land in a bungalow beside the water. The two had developed a habit of talking late into the night—sharing travel stories and jokes. One evening, sometime between when the sun went down and when it came up, they planned another jaunt to the other side of the world.
Not long after, Fairchild left for Los Angeles. The Office of Seed and Plant Introduction had grown into a premier government office, so important that more people—eventually twenty-four—had been hired to do the work, receiving and distributing seeds, that Fairchild once did alone. He was in demand.
The hunt for plants started as philanthropy. But by 1902, finding ways to help farmers had become a top government priority. Still, despite the impressive display in Buffalo, people whose livelihoods relied on growing food weren’t entirely content. Seeds had helped diversify fields and raise incomes, but farmers were facing new problems. In Washington, groups of farmers protested at the Capitol against mechanized farm equipment that saved time and reduced labor, like the combined harvester-thresher (also known as the combine) and the gasoline-powered tractor. So what if they made farming easier? New machines cost money, eliminated jobs, and gave early adopters a leg up. Everyone else wished such innovations didn’t exist.
These types of advances in farming, crops, and equipment pushed people out. When Fairchild was born in 1869, one in four American workers farmed. A generation later, it was one in five. What would normally be good news instead laid bare a pesky side effect of innovation: greater efficiency requires fewer workers, leaving rural communities with little to support themselves. The irony was that the fewer people who remained on farms were producing more food of greater variety than any generation before them.
The Los Angeles where Fairchild arrived was a city of dairy and citrusmen. Before movie stars or pop musicians, the most notable people in Los Angeles seemed to be land developers, who had visions for how Southern California could take advantage of its temperate climate and more natural resources than one hundred thousand people could possibly need. The 1890s had revealed, miraculously, that there was oil under Los Angeles.
The real estate developers were in the business of marketing land, and that required endorsements. Southern California newspapers had publicized the government’s plant-hunting success, crediting Fairchild, Swingle, and his colleagues with new strains of wheat, barley, and dates.
This made Fairchild a sort of celebrity. He wrote of his arrival, “They were soon at my heels begging for favorable comparisons between the fertility of the Nile Valley and the fertility of the land which composed their particular holdings, notwithstanding the fact that much of their land was white with alkali.” To someone trying to sell land, the Nile Valley in Egypt meant soil fertility the same way Paris stood for love and Bavaria for beer. Fairchild explained repeatedly that fertility isn’t innate, but a product of regular flooding that renews nutrients. When the Nile floods, the influx of water brings new phosphorus and nitrogen, both fuel for plant growth. But he left with the impression that the developers either didn’t understand, or didn’t care to.
From California, Fairchild crossed the Pacific. His ship stopped briefly in Hawaii, the island kingdom that, since his last visit, had become a territory of the United States, taken by force against the wishes of forty thousand native Hawaiians, who signed two petitions—one for men and the other for women—protesting United States annexation. A Nevada congressman responded to the documents by introducing a resolution declaring, dishonestly, that the Hawaiian government wanted to cede its rights of sovereignty to the United States. If Guam and the Philippines were examples of America humbly supporting the abandoned lands of a former colonizer, Hawaii was evidence of America’s brash bullying, taking something valuable without bothering to ask anyone’s permission.
History remembers this era as a period of national bombast, when America’s polar political parties united to make bold demands of the world, and if denied, to press forward anyway. But that attitude wasn’t shared by everyone. In pockets of America’s large and small towns, it wasn’t hard to see irony in how the United States, a former colony that rebelled against mistreatment, seemed eager to act as a colonial bully itself. And as much as Fairchild benefited from a world suddenly open to America’s hunger, he found deep discomfort watching indigenous people steamrollered by imperial lust. “I cannot but be sad that such a happy people, living in peace and plenty, should ever have been discovered by the white man and decimated by his diseases and civilization,” Fairchild later remarked about the Hawaiian Islands. “I am glad that I saw a few of the quiet places of the world before the coming of automobiles and jazz.”
Fairchild secured lines of communication in Hawaii, which was easier this time (with his government endorsement) than his last attempt, when he was a free agent. On account of Fairchild’s success, Secretary Wilson had ordered a new experiment station on Oahu and another in Puerto Rico, to receive tropical plants deemed too fragile for a detour through Washington. Wilson was especially interested in coffee, spices, and rubber, all tropical products Americans were increasingly using, but that no American farm had yet been able to harvest at scale.
As the boat continued farther west across the Pacific, Fairchild used the long voyage to ask questions of fellow passengers. He would often ask, “What is the most remarkable fruit you’ve ever eaten?” and then scribble furiously as the person pulled up some recollection from their childhood. A Chinese minister’s wife told him about two new fruits, the Chinese bayberry and the longan, both walnut-sized fruits that, thanks to this conversation, would end up growing in Florida.