The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  Probably not, was his conclusion, and so he sent only a few dozen cuttings to officials in California, who were so confused when the branches and roots turned up in 1903 that they neglected them in the broiling sun of California’s Central Valley. Only years later would it dawn on Fairchild that the United States’ East Coast would be best for flowering cherries, and specifically Washington, D.C.

  For most of the stay in Japan that summer, Lathrop was too worn-out to explore, so Fairchild continued the type of solo adventuring that he enjoyed. Of all the countries Fairchild had visited, Japan struck him as the most advanced on matters of horticulture. He learned about Japanese miniature gardens, the art of Japanese papermaking, and the superior qualities of Japanese fruits and vegetables that didn’t grow anywhere else in the world. Wealthy people introduced him to foods of affluence, like raw fish, seaweed, and a bean cheese they called tofu. He thought it impossible to eat with two narrow sticks held in one hand, but after a few tries, he got the feel for it.

  It was in Japan that Fairchild picked up a yellow plum known as a loquat and an asparagus-like vegetable called udo. And a so-called puckerless persimmon that turned sweet in sake wine casks. One of the most unrecognized discoveries of Fairchild, a man drawn to edible fruits and vegetables, was zoysia grass, a rich green lawn specimen attractive for the thickness of its blades and its slow growth, which meant it required infrequent cutting.

  And then there was wasabi, a plant growing along streambeds in the mountains near Osaka. It had edible leaves, but wasabi’s stronger quality was its bitter root’s uncanny ability to burn one’s nose. Wasabi only lasted in America until farmers realized that its close relative the horseradish root grew faster and larger and was more pungent than the delicate wasabi (which tends to stay pungent only fifteen minutes after it’s cut). Small American farms still grow Fairchild’s wasabi, but most of the accompaniment to modern sushi is in fact horseradish—mashed, colored, and called something it’s not.

  As weeks fell by, Fairchild found that he enjoyed the horticultural lessons Japan had to teach. Not to mention the social discipline lacking in the hurried avenues of the United States. The quietest days of Fairchild’s life were spent in bamboo gardens near Tokyo. One afternoon in the late golden light, amid tall green stalks and the soft rustle of leaves in the wind, Fairchild took an hour, maybe even two, to sit silently and meditate.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bell’s Grand Plan

  In August of 1903, upon his return to Washington, Fairchild’s reputation preceded him and he received an invitation to speak to the National Geographic Society. Fairchild had heard of the elite club that fancied itself the headquarters of well-traveled and adventurous men. He had offhandedly written a story in 1898 about his travels in Java for the society’s struggling journal. But to be invited into the lion’s den filled with the country’s most learned, wealthy, and well-connected men was an honor extended to few. The invitation came from Gilbert Grosvenor one evening in the parlor of the Cosmos Club. Grosvenor remarked that, considering all he had heard, he thought Fairchild would have a white beard. It was a polite way of saying Fairchild looked young.

  Grosvenor, with slick black hair parted on his left, wasn’t old, either—just twenty-eight—nor was he worldly. His job as editor of the National Geographic magazine had come from a series of nepotistic favors. Alexander Graham Bell, the famed inventor and one of the bearded men who unquestionably belonged in the Geographic’s marbled meetinghouse, had gotten Grosvenor the job. Grosvenor had married Bell’s daughter Elsie, and not long after, Bell lobbied the society’s council to secure his new son-in-law a stable income. Grosvenor had no experience running a magazine, but he was given the keys to the publication with the imperative to build it, or at the very least, to keep it alive.

  Fairchild had a healthy ego by now, letting his head grow with his reputation as “one of the most extensively traveled men in the world,” according to a 1904 profile in The Houston Post. He spent evenings in all-male clubs, chiefly the Cosmos, which one historian later called “the closest thing to a social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual elite.” He was regularly quoted in newspapers and fielded frequent questions as a horticultural authority.

  One reason for Fairchild’s inflated confidence may have been his obliviousness about social Washington. Except for a few weeks of respite, Fairchild had been absent from the city nearly half a decade, during which Washington bloomed with the youthful energy of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt approached governing with the same force he once brought to battle in Cuba, evading any attack thrown at him. He courted members of Congress on long horseback rides. He built a briefing room near his office to curry favor with journalists. He renamed the executive mansion the “White House” and got rid of its passé Victorian décor. Then he started to invite young people inside for dances and social events.

  Fairchild missed all of it and knew virtually no one. If the sage men of the National Geographic Society had wide renown, Fairchild knew almost nothing about them.

  That was especially true of Bell, the burly and whiskered Scottish-American inventor. Even in 1904, Alexander Graham Bell was a household name, the kind that made audiences applaud and cheer in appreciation for his magical creation that transmitted a human voice by electrical current. Three decades after its invention, very few houses had a telephone, but everyone knew about it.

  Standing before a roomful of white beards and puffed mustaches, Fairchild hadn’t the slightest idea what Bell looked like. Every man in the audience looked the same. So he tailored his speech to no one in particular.

  Fairchild delivered the pitch that he had by now refined over thousands of conversations. “The government enterprise of Plant Introduction [is] to introduce and establish in America as many of the valuable crops of the world as can be grown here. [It’s] to educate the farmer in their culture and the public in their use—to increase by this, one of the most powerful means, the agricultural wealth of the country.” He detailed the greatest successes—the Japanese rice, the Corsican citron, the tropical mango. He explained how importing dates had created a new industry in California, with millions of dollars at stake. His presentation demonstrated the kind of political awareness that most men never find, the clairvoyance to understand when the government must invest before profit-driven companies can rush in and improve.

  [Acquiring plants and producing food] are problems that private enterprise will not naturally undertake; they are problems that concern the wealth-producing power of American soil; they are problems that the government has shown its ability to solve in a manner involving an insignificant outlay of the public funds. They encourage the production of food and other products that we now import from other lands, and they concern the establishment of farm industries which, for generations to come, will support hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of American citizens.

  When he finished, the men lined up to shake Fairchild’s hand and tell him how their lives once intersected with the contents of his remarks. The line slowly grew shorter until, at the end, Grosvenor approached him with news that Bell had invited Fairchild to his weekly Wednesday gathering at his home in Dupont Circle. “Wednesday Evenings” were shorthand for Bell’s private salons, which some believed held more prestige than a visit to the White House. In the moments after he accepted the invitation, Fairchild had the impulse to buy a new suit and visit a barber.

  * * *

  —

  Fairchild’s return to Washington was different this time, primarily in how it formed a punctuation mark at the end of his lengthy travels. He was tired and longed for consistency. He wanted to sleep in a bed where the horizon didn’t shift. Almost penniless, he needed a regular salary. And at thirty-four, he wondered whether he might spend less time searching for plants and more time finding a wife.

  Fairchild didn’t cower when he visited Secretary Wilson. It was his third return to Washington, his t
hird time unemployed. Wilson had so benefited from Fairchild’s fearless and pro bono work on behalf of the Department that he couldn’t possibly refuse Fairchild’s request for a job. But he did reveal his slight but still unquenchable resentment for Fairchild’s unprofessional departure in 1898. When it was time to discuss Fairchild’s salary, Wilson offered one thousand dollars per year, the equivalent of a paltry fifty thousand dollars today for a man of lofty education and worldly experience. Even less flattering, Wilson assigned Fairchild the cumbersome work of compiling an inventory of all plants imported into the United States since 1900.

  The Department of Agriculture had ballooned since the early days when Fairchild was a junior botanist. A few dozen employees had become four thousand. “This branch of our government had become one of the greatest research centers in the world,” Fairchild noticed. The Department had outgrown its offices so frequently that agriculture officials overflowed into the Treasury and State offices. At this pace, the Department of Agriculture’s modest redbrick headquarters would be demolished and replaced in the 1930s with a vast marble complex, sprawling in its reach and purpose, with more than four thousand rooms. It was, at that time, the largest office building in the world.

  Four months passed before Fairchild could arrange the scattered memos and mailing labels for the inventory, which together amounted to 4,396 introduced plants. In his introduction to the inventory, Fairchild thanked everyone who had contributed seeds, eleven people in all. Yet he also puffed his well-formed ego. He made clear that most items tallied had come from “the writer” of the document—himself.

  Meanwhile, the enduring feud between Wilson and Lathrop, now just embers from an earlier flame, still left Lathrop unpaid the full recognition he thought himself owed. Fairchild’s new position provided him the full means to thank his benefactor himself. “Of the nearly 4,400 new introductions, a very large number represent work accomplished by the explorations of Mr. Barbour Lathrop of Chicago, with whom [I] had the pleasure of being associated as Agricultural Explorer,” Fairchild wrote in the report—a copy of which was sent to the president. “Mr. Lathrop’s explorations, which have required about four years of travel abroad, were carried out with the one practical object of making a reconnaissance of the useful plant possibilities of the world, and have successfully covered every continent and touched every important archipelago.” He called Lathrop a “public-spirited man,” further tipping the government’s hat to Lathrop’s philanthropy, and knowing how satisfying Lathrop would find it.

  The assertion of “every continent” made Fairchild especially proud. No one counted Antarctica—barely had Ernest Shackleton even embarked south of the eighty-second parallel—but the boast did include Africa. Despite having visited, Fairchild knew much remained on the vast continent to be explored. Egypt was a cosmopolitan meeting place, yet below the Sahara Desert, the land remained largely untouched except by European colonists. Lathrop had urged Fairchild to visit Africa before settling down, not only because he believed it would have new plants, but because Lathrop was a man known to do things solely to brag about them later. So Fairchild’s final trip before he returned to Washington, before he spoke to the National Geographic Society, and before he met a woman who would captivate him, was, as he put it, to “circumnavigate Africa.”

  * * *

  —

  Visiting Africa was indeed boastworthy. Few Westerners went, most kept away by racist caricatures of uncivilized tribespeople. In 1898, the Royal Geographical Society had sent the British explorer Ewart Grogan to walk from Cape Town to Cairo, along the way exploring what he called the “pygmies” of uncontacted tribes. “This obviously entails a great risk,” Grogan wrote. His widely published dispatches compared the tribal men to “dog-faced baboons.” Grogan, himself neither an anthropologist nor a biologist, showed little shame in questioning whether the “savage” people of Africa were in fact the missing link of Darwinism, the bridge between wild primates and modern humans.

  Fairchild avoided drawing this conclusion—which he would have found scientifically suspect if not intuitively far-fetched—in part because he didn’t venture too far inland. An ocean-based voyage wasn’t the best way to discover a wide piece of land, but it did allow expedience and safety. “I was much disappointed, for I had hoped to find something worthwhile, and felt sure that there would be many things if we had time enough to get into the interior,” Fairchild recalled. The coast was made even less remarkable by the fact that most shoreline had been colonized in Europe’s power struggles between Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, which were really a fight over the continent’s commodities, including palm oil, rubber, and cotton. The bickering over land had become so heated that in 1894 the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a summit in Berlin to divide up Africa and its resources. Everyone was invited, except for any Africans themselves.

  1903. Undeveloped harbors on the east coast of Africa meant large steamships couldn’t dock. Passengers venturing ashore, like Fairchild, had to be loaded into wicker baskets and lowered into smaller boats.

  There were other barriers to plant collecting in Africa for Fairchild. East Africa had few harbors, and landing required an unreliable method of being lowered in a clothes basket into a small dinghy next to a ship—which was especially perilous in choppy seas. In Mozambique, Fairchild picked up a small, perfectly round fruit. It was a Kaffir orange, named for the pejorative term for black Africans who ate it. Only one orange made it back to the ship, where it hardened like a rock; Fairchild had to use a hatchet to break open its dried-solid skin. Inside was brown flesh with the taste of a ripe banana.

  Farther south, Durban yielded the carissa plum, deep red in color and with white leaves that resembled those of a tropical plumeria. Fairchild sent a case to Florida, believing the mix of foliage and fruit would prove an attractive combination (he was right). A chef in Cape Town delighted Fairchild with an outlandish fruit—a personal-sized pineapple, no bigger than a drinking glass—that he believed could change the world. “We tore the pineapples to pieces with our forks, and, to our astonishment, found scarcely any core. Also they were far sweeter than any we had ever tasted, and had practically no fiber,” he wrote. He saved the tops and sent them in.

  Wouldn’t every American want a pint-sized pineapple all to themselves, the way they were used to eating a banana or apple with no need to share? No was the answer. Growers in Florida and Hawaii weren’t interested in small; the people wanted big, even bigger pineapples than already grown, no matter the weight or the cost of shipping. So Fairchild’s giddiness, the kind a grown man could find only from a personal-sized pineapple, was brashly extinguished.

  * * *

  —

  Alexander Graham Bell’s home was located just south of Dupont Circle, at 1331 Connecticut Avenue. One of the most elegant in Washington, it was a house befitting a man of Bell’s prestige: a bespoke three-story redbrick mansion, angular and boxy, with a circular staircase, a grand parlor lined with fine oak, and pregnant windows that swelled out toward the street on every floor—all in the precise taste of Bell and his wife, Mabel, for an immodest thirty-one-thousand dollars. Money flowed freely in the years after Bell demonstrated the telephone, which contributed to America’s growing reputation as a land of opportunity for immigrants. The inventor had risen from tragic circumstances: tuberculosis killed his two brothers, which spurred the family to move from the United Kingdom to Canada, and then to America. The move to North America opened a path for young Bell to soar higher than Great Britain would allow. The most remarkable thing about Bell wasn’t his famous inventions, but that in thirty years he rose from frazzled immigrant to denizen of the highest level of America’s intellectual elite.

  In a way, Bell was one of many. In the years around the turn of the century, men of science found Washington to be a city in renaissance, a place where casual conversations among a roomful of men could yield dramatic expansions
of government. One effect of reconstruction after the Civil War had been the government’s eagerness to rebuild, which it did by funding scientific associations. Around the same time men were inking the charter for the National Geographic Society, other scientific societies sprouted, including the American Biological Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Anthropological Association, and a society for entomology enthusiasts. By 1900, there were too few men to sustain the profusion of societies, on whose rosters, one after another, often appeared the same names, leaving one to wonder if the few hundred men needed an excuse to escape their families two, three, even four nights a week.

  Each Wednesday evening at seven o’clock, twenty men in three-piece suits would gather in Bell’s downstairs parlor, where they would mingle until their host escorted his aged father, Alexander Melville Bell, a man born in 1819, to a chair in the center of the room. Bell would make opening remarks, perhaps giving the evening a theme such as “exploration” or “curiosity.” Then he’d invite one man to speak about science or the arts. The senior Bell was unquestionably proud to see his son the nucleus of such cerebral energy. Melville had provided the inspiration for his son’s inventiveness, even though Alexander’s father-in-law provided the push. Gardiner Hubbard wouldn’t permit his daughter Mabel to marry the scatterbrained inventor until Bell got serious about a single project. Only after Bell patented the telephone in 1876 did Hubbard allow the wedding to proceed.