by Daniel Stone
Page’s larger point—that a city’s capital is symbolic of its stability and aspirations—had for years distracted the ego of America’s proudest supporters, none more than Teddy Roosevelt. In his second term, Roosevelt prioritized giving Washington the stately facade afforded the shiny capitals of Europe. He urged Congress to fortify the raw land around the Washington Monument with sediment to transform it into a park. Ideas poured in from visionaries who imagined a future of beaches, polo fields, baseball diamonds, paths for walking and bicycling, and a separate road for automobiles to pass at greater speed. This area would come to be called the speedway, and it struck several people that the flowering cherry trees could lend the tidal basin an elegant visage.
Fairchild wasn’t the first person to think downtown Washington and the cherry trees could make a dignified pair. Eliza Scidmore, a journalist and Washington networker, one of the few women involved in the National Geographic Society, had been enchanted by flowering cherries for years. Her brother was a consular officer in Japan, which brought her regularly across the Pacific, most memorably in 1887, when she first saw the trees. But in Washington, her exuberance was lost in translation. It was perhaps because the political environment wasn’t right, or because she was an eccentric woman in a town of self-admiring men, that her pleas were answered with cynical questions. People wondered, “Why bother with cherry trees that don’t produce cherries?”
Fairchild’s trees, however, had proved the draw of cherry blossoms, not for their fruit but for their annual pink bursts. Every tree Fairchild imported brought demand for two or three more. For a time, he nearly became a plant importer filling personal orders. Still, delighted by the interest, Fairchild saw the cherry trees as an opportunity to inspire young kids into botany. On Friday, March 27, 1908, which happened to be Arbor Day, he invited one boy from each school to visit his home, which he and Marian had begun to call “In the Woods,” to receive a tree and planting instructions for his school yard.
The next day, a Saturday, Marian drove Fairchild into town to give a lecture to students and parents from all over Washington at the Franklin School at Thirteenth and K streets. Fairchild invited Scidmore, whom he introduced as “the most noted writer on Japan.” He described his travels, as had now become a popular part of any speech he gave, and recalled his first view of the sakura in Japan. He ended his lecture by displaying a photograph of the unsightly speedway near the Washington Monument. What an excellent place, he mused, to plant cherry blossom trees.
The next morning in the Washington Star, Fairchild’s parting thought was given front-page treatment. If the trees were planted soon around the tidal basin’s speedway, they could bloom the following spring, and not long after, the newspaper reported, “Washington would one day be famous for its flowering cherry trees.”
Here was an example of Fairchild’s suddenly high standing as a member of the Bell and Grosvenor families. What Scidmore had tried to accomplish for decades, Fairchild influenced with the lightest of touches. It wouldn’t be long before the United States had a new president, William Howard Taft, and as the people of Washington were starting to like the idea of bringing cherry blossom trees to the capital city, America’s first lady, Helen Taft, was warming to it, too.
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While Mrs. Taft marveled over their beauty, her husband saw a diplomatic tool. America was a Western country born from the influence and customs of Europe, and Americans saw Asia as foreign, in both distance and concept, and had long rejected elements of its cryptic culture.
It would be easy to dismiss this attitude as ethnocentrism: Americans shunning foreign people less for who they were than how they looked, faulting them for taking American jobs, as labor leaders did in San Francisco in 1905. In 1907, Japanese and Korean people in some cities were forced into segregated schools, and elsewhere, attacked on the street. Japan had been at war with Russia over land in Manchuria and Korea. Giddy newspaper editors in New York ran headlines about the prospect of war in the Pacific if the conflict escalated.
To defuse this tension, Taft’s predecessor, Roosevelt, had thought a truce was the most sensible solution. In the agreement, America would stop mistreating Japanese people and Japan would stop sending immigrants to America. The agreement was childish, effectively a time-out separation that reflected poorly on everyone, most of all the United States. It was clear to anyone who bothered to look that the country that had built its foundation on being open to everyone had become racially selective in deciding who was welcome.
But President Taft knew the Japanese better. As secretary of war in 1905, the same year Fairchild got married, Taft had visited the imperial country, where he was welcomed to the harbor of Yokohama with a fireworks display in his honor. Now as president and motivated to smooth over relations, Taft quickly realized that the cherry trees could be the perfect way to quell the antagonism. Importing trees was more palatable than importing people, especially ones vying for jobs. To Japan, it was an opportunity to show off a beautiful piece of itself in America’s capital. Japanese officials also enjoyed the tacit admission that despite America’s larger size, population, and economy, the countries were, in a way, equals. An editorial in The New York Times saw planting Japanese trees in the heart of America as an extraordinary opportunity for Japan.
There is nothing in the American life to illustrate just what the cherry means to the Japanese people. But suppose we had some symbol of nature that would embody all that Plymouth Rock, all that the Declaration of Independence, all that the Emancipation Proclamation means, of liberty, patriotism, union; and then, suppose our President should on some occasion, with the greatest care, select 300 of the choicest specimens of this emblem and officially send them as representing the felicitations of the American people to a friendly power, at the time of some important celebration—can you imagine what such a gift would mean?
So when the mayor of Tokyo was tasked with finding the three hundred finest cherry blossom trees in the city to be uprooted and shipped to America, it became his top priority. The agreement, it appeared, had something to please everyone.
Everyone except Charles Marlatt, who didn’t want foreign plants in the first place, and would see to it that even one damaging insect would leave him no choice but to march up the steps of the White House and make it his mission to undo everything his childhood friend was trying to accomplish.
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The initial plan for three hundred trees turned into two thousand. Tokyo’s mayor, Yukio Ozaki, was so excited about playing a part in high-level diplomatic relations that he continued selecting trees until the steamer that would sail across the Pacific was so full it couldn’t hold another twig. The trees were selected young to ensure a long life in Washington, and their roots cut short to conserve space on the ship.
A year had passed since Fairchild brokered the gift between the State Department and Kogoro Takahira, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, and the paperwork had involved the extended bureaucracies of both governments. Fairchild had begun the negotiations, but when they rose to the highest levels of government, the lead person became James Wilson, now in his twelfth year as secretary of agriculture. On November 13, 1909, Wilson notified the plant industry office in Seattle that a shipment of high importance would be arriving on December 10. There were many reasons to be excited about the shipment. There was the diplomatic success politicians imagined when the trees would be photographed near the Washington Monument. For ordinary people, there was the anticipation of something new and beautiful coming to town. And for the botanically minded like Fairchild, there was the promise of biological exchange enriching both countries.
The trees reached Seattle as expected. Port workers packed them onto temperature-controlled railcars and cleared the track ahead for the thirteen-day trip to Washington.
Fairchild saw little reason to worry about something as innocuous as cherry tree
s. Hundreds had already been planted in the United States, most on his personal orders. Compared to the invasive plants and animals that had wrought damage on United States soil—honeysuckle, water hyacinth, tumbleweeds—flowering cherry trees seemed as harmless as field mice. But this exchange wasn’t his alone to handle. While Fairchild had helped generate support and excitement for the exchange, Marlatt had visited the same government officials to caution of the dangers. Marlatt had even walked across the National Mall to the State Department, where he argued to Secretary of State Philander Knox that the whole idea was poorly thought out. The trees hadn’t yet arrived, which to an ordinary person might have granted them the benefit of the doubt that they were clean. But to Marlatt, the fact that no one had yet certified the trees clean was almost definitive proof that they were dirty. Secretary Knox believed the diplomatic benefits outweighed any biological risks, but to be safe Knox took Marlatt’s warning to Taft anyway.
Taft was the kind of man who had trouble making up his mind. Broad shouldered and powerfully built, Taft had been the hand-picked choice to succeed Roosevelt, who left office so popular his endorsement for president could have gotten a fern tree elected. The support allowed Taft to avoid the slugfest and maneuvering required in a typical election, which might have proven to the public—as it did four years later when he lost in a historic landslide—his shortcomings as an executive.
In some ways, Roosevelt and Taft were similar, both progressive and averse to corporate power, but Taft was cautious and careful, less out of thoughtfulness than nerves. He doubted his decisions and, when challenged, allowed his mind to be easily changed. He had enjoyed the nitty-gritty of being a lawyer who served as solicitor general, governor of the Philippines, and secretary of war, all positions that allowed him to obsess over fine points of policy and law. He hated granting interviews or being photographed, in part due to his three-hundred-pound heft. Roosevelt had once offered Taft an appointment to the Supreme Court, but Helen Taft had urged her husband to finish his work in the Philippines and leave open the prospect of his own presidency. Roosevelt liked that idea better and began to tout Taft as the torchbearer for a third Roosevelt term. Taft, however, showed that to be an imperfect promise. While Roosevelt had been a charismatic barnstormer eager to create new things, Taft was a stodgy introvert, burdened by the demands of the presidency and insecure in his capacity to fill it.
Marlatt, by way of Secretary of State Knox, had not been able to change Taft’s mind. But the prospect of catastrophe did give Taft some pause. He ordered the trees inspected thoroughly at the garden storehouse near the Washington Monument before they were planted. Fairchild, who was by now America’s leading expert in Japanese flowering cherries, was asked to complete the initial inspection. Marlatt insisted on being present, too.
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When the two pried open a crate, Fairchild’s first thought was that the trees were too big and their roots cut too short. This left them vulnerable to corrosion on the monthlong voyage from Japan.
The Japanese had sent large trees not out of spite but out of generosity, for mature trees would show vibrant blossoms the fastest. Fairchild believed they could be salvaged. Perhaps the tops could be pruned to reduce stress and allow the trees to recover from the trauma of transport. “Young stock would undoubtedly be in a much more healthy condition, and the importation of it would have been accompanied with much less risk,” Marlatt would later write.
But Marlatt had bigger concerns than the health of a single shipment. The trees didn’t look right. And when he closely examined the roots, he noticed small insects, “serious infestations,” he wrote, his words almost dripping in I-told-you-so glee. The roots were plagued with root gall, two kinds of scale, a curious new species of borer, and six other dangerous insects. Marlatt could make out the Chinese Diaspis, a white scale insect known to kill trees by ruthlessly feeding on fruit. He spotted the wood-boring lepidopterus larvae that survive by gnawing on trees’ woody insides. And there was the well-known and unwelcome San Jose scale, which Marlatt noted, despite its name, originated somewhere in China.
In spite of his enthusiasm, Fairchild was forced to agree with Marlatt that insects could present a risk to American soil. He was accustomed to unusable crop. Not every seed or cutting had to be treasured. But what worried him most was how to break the news to the president that the trees, the symbol of friendship in a fraught diplomatic relationship, were faulty. And that America, which had already rejected so much about Japan, would have to reject its trees, too.
There was no delicate way to handle this. And the situation brought Fairchild anxiety. “Every sort of pest imaginable was discovered, and I found myself in a hornet’s nest of protesting pathologists and entomologists, who were all demanding the destruction of the entire shipment,” he wrote.
It wasn’t hard to foresee a surge of support for people like Marlatt, the nativists who wondered whether it was worth it to import plants at all. Farmers across the United States had enjoyed the benefits of plant exploration, but newspaper reports tended to focus on the hazards. The same kind of hysteria that pushed the United States into Cuba, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands now fueled frenzy over the costs of imperialism. Were the benefits of a few novel fruits worth the possibility that new pests could take down America’s entire agricultural system? Editorials quoted past examples of the Hessian fly that “demolished” cereals or the rude English sparrow that “fought” native bluebirds for space and food. All did damage, but the implication was that their biggest sin was that they sounded foreign, unwelcome in an ego-boosted country that fancied itself superior and, in every way, exceptional.
Really, though, this sort of country-to-country contamination was largely inevitable, particularly amid globalization. Doors were open, and it was better to deal with invaders that entered the United States in government labs than on the shoe tread of future travelers. The United States couldn’t build a wall to keep out unwanted things any more than places like Egypt or China could prevent their prized crops from being taken by David Fairchild.
But what made this unfortunate situation worse was the potential for agriculture to affect other issues of diplomacy, like trade, tourism, and military alliances. A foreign country could easily interpret the American aversion to natural diseases not as a prudent protection of its natural assets, but as hardened xenophobia.
Marlatt’s report about the trees’ infestations gave Taft little choice, and on January 28, 1910, the president ordered the trees burned. Fairchild thought of making one last attempt to save the trees, to prune them himself and spend several days tediously combing the roots of six-legged intruders. But it was no use.
Everyone familiar with Japan’s sharpened sense of cultural pride braced for Tokyo’s reaction, and the likelihood that America’s attempt to bridge relations with the Japanese had been sullied, perhaps forever. As Marlatt and his team propped the trees together like a teepee, someone invited reporters to watch them be lit aflame. A news item appeared on the front page of the next day’s New York Times. The Washington Post ran a two-page article about foreign plant danger. See? Marlatt and his henchmen effectively told the public. Thank goodness we were on the case.
And yet, the overall reaction wasn’t one of satisfaction. America may have sharpened its ego, but it hadn’t lost its sense of decency. Did the destruction have to be so public, so transparent? Couldn’t America with its outsized creativity have imagined a way for everyone to save face? Someone wrote an anonymous letter to several different East Coast newspapers questioning what good the rebuke to the Japanese had done.
To destroy the cherry trees, to tell the . . . Japanese government that it had been done and why, and to let the story get out—well, that, to transpose a familiar phrase, was more wise than nice. Perhaps it wasn’t even wise. The thing to have done was to have some carefully arranged accident happen to those trees before the time came for setting them
out—an accident of the obviously unavoidable sort, a clear “act of Providence.” Then the needful number of departmental Secretaries could have told Japan how sorry we all were, and the incident would have passed without embarrassment or humiliation for anybody.
The letter might have been written by Fairchild, angry and sad, yet with enough scientific sense to know there wasn’t much choice. More stinging was that the blaze of trees had granted fuel to those fearful of the unknown. An unfortunate mistake by the Japanese gardeners offered American xenophobes something to point to as proof that the world really was out to contaminate the shiny armor of the great United States. The trees and their crates burned for a little over an hour, and when their embers died, so did much hope of patching relations with the most developed country in Asia.
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Yukio Ozaki, the mayor of Tokyo, happened to be visiting Washington when word got out about the bonfire of cherry trees. He had come several weeks prior to witness the reception of Japan’s prized symbol in America’s capital.
Not long after the trees were burned, Ozaki received David Fairchild in his hotel. Fairchild had come to apologize, or in a less dignified way, to grovel for the biological blunder. No one was at fault, he explained, even though a man of his experience could certainly have packed the shipment from Japan with more diligence and finesse to improve its chances of arriving healthy.
But Ozaki had a different reaction than anyone expected, illuminating just how little American leaders understood foreign relations and cross-cultural diplomacy, particularly with the poorly understood Far East.
In reality, Fairchild’s apologies were dwarfed by Ozaki’s. While Washington cringed at the insulting gesture of burning a gift, Tokyo had apparently viewed the problem as having given a faulty present, as though its token of kindness had turned out to be a bouquet of disease. “We are more satisfied that you dealt with [the trees] as you did, for it would have pained us endlessly to have them remain a permanent source of trouble,” Ozaki explained.