by Daniel Stone
For all this he remained humble—often soft-spoken and reluctant to accept credit. But in rare moments of guarded comfort with Fairchild, Meyer exhibited a healthy sense of self, an ego that had powered him through cold, dark, and thankless months, amid fights with attackers and arguments with translators and rumors of his impending death at the hands of lawless gangs. He kept his confidence hidden, but inside, he had grown proud of his growing record as botanical daredevil. “I will be famous,” he once said. “Just wait a century or two.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Outlaws, Brigands, and Murderers
Frank Meyer’s success wasn’t enough to appease Charles Marlatt. In fact, it made him even more suspicious. By 1909, Marlatt had converted his wariness of Meyer into outright disdain.
If not for his childhood friendship with Fairchild, Marlatt might have taken Meyer to court, or worse, a dark alley. His anger often verged on spite. When government entomologists discovered a new Chinese insect in America, Marlatt, whose government duties also included naming new things, vindictively tagged the pesky bug Dynaspidiotus meyeri.
Marlatt felt only slightly warmer toward Fairchild. Their wives were friendly—they took weaving classes together—and outwardly, the men were cordial and polite. But in the private conversations they shared with close colleagues, each complained about the other’s ineptitude. Marlatt’s crime was hysteria, and Fairchild’s naïveté.
Marlatt’s stubbornness was a sign of panic, not reason. It was based on fear and on the idea that the very act of exploring opened oneself to unnecessary risk. Organisms perfectly normal in their natural setting could be dangerous somewhere else, and with no warning. “The greatest danger is often from something you do not know about,” Marlatt warned. “It is the unknown things that you cannot find that we have to protect this country from.” The best example he offered was the chestnut blight fungus that was strangling American chestnut trees, great icons of the frontier. The blight originated somewhere in China, where it was innocuous, but became dangerous when it entered American borders.
This was insane to Fairchild. To be scared of unknown things based on a few cherry-picked examples wasn’t a policy; it was an impulse, and a foolish one. For every evil that Marlatt illuminated, Fairchild found something good that had come of it. The Chinese chestnut blight that apparently kept Marlatt awake at night had also brought Americans new varieties of Oriental pears and Chinese chestnuts, both resistant to the rust, and thus, advantageous for America to produce. “It would be eminently unfair to assume that because we do not know that little apple seedlings from the old world or from Japan are as clean and free from disease as any which we can produce in America, they represent undesirable immigrants and should be excluded from the country,” Fairchild argued one day to a group of forestry officials, some of whom sympathized with Marlatt.
Still, Marlatt banged his drum louder and more forcefully. The threat of insects was growing more dangerous every day. The boll weevil, which had come to the United States ten years earlier and tended to feast on cotton flowers and buds, was now beginning its eventual wipeout of the cotton industry, which had just barely regained its footing after the Civil War. Marlatt claimed the invasive insect was responsible for the spread of typhus, yellow fever, and malaria. These claims weren’t backed up by science, but that hardly mattered. Marlatt was simply raising awareness and, in the process, taking little pain to drop frightening words—“dirty,” “destroy,” “dangerous.” If he could have changed government policy himself, he would have. But he and his like-minded colleagues knew that in a representative democracy, lasting change comes not by personal fiat but from Congress.
One of the reasons Marlatt was so angry during the cherry blossom episode was because his first attempt to shut down reckless plant imports by legislative vote blew up in his face. He had drafted a bill for Congress that called for inspection of all nursery stock at all American entry points. It wouldn’t have ended plant imports, but would have made the process so onerous that Fairchild and his band of explorers would be driven to quit. Marlatt found a sympathetic congressman from Kansas to introduce the bill—quietly and during the lethargic lame-duck session of 1910. It passed through committee, then through the full House of Representatives, and then through a committee on the Senate side. The penultimate step, before the president signed it into law, would have been passage by the full Senate. But the night before the vote, a group of legislators sympathetic to the nurserymen caught wind of Marlatt’s idea of “national safety.” Marlatt’s proposal, in addition to slowing the activities of Fairchild’s office, would have tightened a noose around an entire industry of people who grew plants with imported rootstock. The lawmakers blocked the bill, and Marlatt lost.
Marlatt’s boss told him, “Now that you have had your fingers burned, drop the effort.” But Marlatt refused, vowing that he would immediately engineer a new bill.
Four months after the first defeat, he tried again, this time with another bill, and, rather than attempt in secret, he decided to act in full view of the public. In April of 1910, Marlatt testified in front of Congress that the United States needed a “Chinese Wall” of its own to keep out so-called “plant enemies.” The testimony was almost theater. Marlatt dropped scary terms and chilling statistics, to the point that William Pitkin, Fairchild’s friend who happened to be head of the American Association of Nurserymen, called his bluffs distortions or, even worse, pure lies.
The rationale that fueled the nurserymen—and Fairchild, too—was that America shouldn’t act in fear. Most incoming plants from around the world were fine, and responsible inspections of suspicious loads were sufficient. What the nurserymen didn’t say, but was certainly true, was that Marlatt’s quarantine proposal would cost nursery growers billions, plus the incalculable loss of American economic growth. The nurserymen had a powerful voice, but not as powerful as the Ladies’ Garden Clubs of America, with membership in the thousands. The women opposed any change in the plants available for their use, many of them from abroad.
Perhaps as a result, Congress didn’t act that year, nor the year after. Impatient, Marlatt instead took his zeal for change to state governments. States had the power to police anything entering their borders, and no state had more plants coming in than California, mostly owing to the Hawaiian Islands. After the islands’ 1898 annexation to the United States, ships shuttled between Honolulu and San Francisco, carrying sugar, pineapples, and the occasional crate of guavas. Marlatt asked California officials in Sacramento if they were aware that the Mediterranean fruit fly—also known as both the West Australian fruit fly and the Bermuda peach maggot—had recently been spotted on Oahu. And did they also know that steamships from Hawaii were arriving weekly, almost entirely uninspected, in San Francisco?
Technically, it was illegal for California to act on its own. Its jurisdiction extended to its borders, not over them; only the federal government could regulate between states. And yet, Marlatt’s fear campaign had whipped up such frenzy on the West Coast that California’s governor, Hiram Johnson, the man who would be Teddy Roosevelt’s failed running mate a year later, decided to act unilaterally.
Governor Johnson was a grouchy, impatient man. He had no interest in waiting for Congress to protect his state from impending attack. His administration created a Quarantine Division, which, almost overnight, began to prohibit the shipment of all fruits from Hawaii, inspected or not. When it came to travelers themselves, who were guaranteed a measure of protection against searches of their shoes, bags, and bodies, Johnson leaned on the steamship companies that operated between Hawaii and California. Faced with the threat of losing access to California ports, the companies forced passengers to sign a waiver consenting to a body search. If it meant a safer country, travelers were glad to oblige.
Fairchild, however, was incensed. Marlatt had drummed up overblown fear. And then, in an affront to Thomas Jefferson’s framework of a federal republic,
egged on a state to thumb its nose at the federal government. Fairchild took this personally. He marched to Marlatt’s office, where the two got into a shouting match.
Both men yelled past each other, as though arguing over a wide ravine.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part hadn’t happened yet. The worst part would wait until Frank Meyer began sending plants from his second expedition, in 1911, not long after California instituted its new policy. Meyer shipped material from eastern China while he continued to walk across the Caucasus, Russian Turkestan, Chinese Turkestan, and a new part of Siberia.
Fairchild had mostly shielded Meyer from the public feud with Marlatt, so Meyer couldn’t have known what would happen when his heaping pile of cuttings, suckers, and seeds finally landed in San Francisco.
Meyer’s shipment contained thirty tons of Asiatic plants, meticulously packed, labeled, and organized. The contents may have yielded the key to a new industry of citrus, new apple varieties that would one day be American heirlooms, or grapes that would elevate America’s wine producers decades ahead of schedule. The world would never know.
Even Meyer, a man who had faced the gravest indignities on a continent that seemed to ooze with disease, crime, and death; even Meyer, who had seen all the horrors humans were capable of, froze in eye-bulging disbelief when he learned that as soon as his crates reached San Francisco, they were seized, fumigated, and burned to ashes.
* * *
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That summer, Fairchild took a break from the feud. He wanted to escape the tension, and the scorching heat of Washington. The ill-ventilated Department of Agriculture was only habitable in the early morning, so Fairchild had adopted the habit of arriving at dawn and staying inside the steamy building as long as he could bear it, dashing off correspondence by hand to save the time it would take to type. When he’d had enough of it, he suggested to Marian that they go see her parents in Nova Scotia.
Mr. and Mrs. Bell always loved seeing the Fairchilds, and particularly the pair of rascals known as the Fairchildren. David and Marian now had two; their second, a daughter, had come that spring. To the great delight of Barbour Lathrop, they named her Barbara Lathrop Fairchild.
When the Fairchilds landed in Canada, Mrs. Hubbard, Marian’s grandmother on her mother’s side, urged David and Marian to extend their trip to come visit her in England, where she summered each year. The Fairchilds didn’t object to traveling even farther from Washington. The same type of transatlantic steamer that once shuttled Fairchild across the ocean on his first overseas trip now carried him, his wife, and their two young children. The voyage was unremarkable compared to the life-changing ocean crossing when Fairchild met Lathrop, their arrival left them perfectly punctual to have tea with Mrs. Hubbard at her English estate near the border of Scotland.
Fairchild and Marian wandered through the cool, damp air visiting the gardens of Mrs. Hubbard’s neighbors. He marveled at the large conifers, many of which had not long before been introduced to the United States. He visited Murthly Castle, constructed in the fifteenth century. He was in a daze from the piercing debate in Washington, and in a sort of denial that plant introduction, to which he had devoted his life, was at risk of withering away.
* * *
—
The fight over foreign plants didn’t stop while Fairchild was abroad. But it did escalate when he returned. What had begun at the Department of Agriculture and had then risen to the halls of Congress and the California statehouse would now be brought to the people—a war for public opinion.
Fairchild mapped out a plan. He proposed speeches to the scientific societies in Washington. He submitted an article to the Youth’s Companion magazine of his childhood, hoping inspired kids could convince their parents that exploration was good and exciting. He asked his friend Edward Clark, a writer, to contribute an article for the influential Technical World magazine, a feeder of news and commentary to newspapers across the country. Fairchild provided Clark with the stacks of letters Meyer had written from Asia, each of which had come with a new shipment of seeds and cuttings. Fairchild couldn’t believe that anyone who learned of Meyer, a man cheating death for farmers he didn’t even know, could oppose the type of plant introduction that, for over a decade, had enriched America.
“Explorer Meyer,” Clark would write, “has frozen and melted alternately as the altitudes have changed; he has encountered wild beasts and men nearly as wild; he has . . . been the subject of the always alert suspicions of government officials and of strange peoples jealous of intrusions into their land—but he has found what he was sent for.” In the package of materials Fairchild sent Clark, he included articles that demonstrated the popular appeal of Meyer’s work, including one from the Los Angeles Times in 1908 detailing how Meyer, with just “coolies and carts,” set off to cow a region of “outlaws, brigands and murderers.”
Fairchild urged Clark to underscore the success of plant introduction, many exciting foods made possible by Fairchild’s hands and virtually all under his watch. The thick alfalfas from the Andes that had “radically” extended the range of American alfalfa. The dates from the Middle East that had yielded, just that year, “five tons” of fruit in Southern California and Arizona. The mango industry in Florida that had grown from nothing to a commercial behemoth. The list continued with the same pace as one imagines Fairchild banging his head against a wall. Seedless persimmons, new cherries, ten forms of olives, apples, pomegranates, wild peas, hardy oranges.
None of this was to diminish the danger of invading pests. But Fairchild lobbied Clark—and anyone else who would listen in a country increasingly fearful of the outside—that there were protection measures already in place. Rooting out the threat of foreign invaders should be the work of government scientists, not of untrained port workers around the country. As Fairchild expected, Clark’s essay would run in many newspapers, in agricultural hotspots like Duluth, Minnesota; Sandusky, Ohio; and Corning, Iowa, where agricultural sympathy could go far.
Marlatt, meanwhile, had decided on a different strategy for his campaign. Why kowtow to farmers when the people making policy decisions were on the locomotive corridor between Washington and New York? The better strategy was the undemocratic one: to lobby the influential eggheads in Washington, who could then push Congress to pass a law for plant quarantines. Who cared if farmers liked it?
Mostly out of strategy and a little out of spite, Marlatt hit Fairchild in the most sensitive of places: his family. Marlatt pitched an article about the dangers of plant invaders to the National Geographic, the same magazine that listed Fairchild and Swingle as associate editors. Gilbert Grosvenor, the chief editor, and Alexander Graham Bell, the society’s erstwhile president, were partial to Fairchild, but neither could deny that Marlatt had the credentials to make his argument. The magazine was a journal of science, not a family mouthpiece.
In May of 1911, one month after Clark’s essay defending Fairchild (and glorifying Meyer) was published around the country, Marlatt’s article was awarded top billing in National Geographic, the lead story with a forceful cover line.
PESTS AND PARASITES
WHY WE NEED A NATIONAL LAW TO PREVENT THE IMPORTATION OF INSECT-INFESTED AND DISEASED PLANTS
By Charles Lester Marlatt
Marlatt’s report was breathless and hysterical. But it was compelling. The magazine, which now regularly published photographs, ran thirty-one images with Marlatt’s story, nearly all of them showing trees crawling with colonies of vermin. These pests had caused great damage, Marlatt said. The Argentine ant was “destroying” citrus in Louisiana. The alfalfa-leaf weevil had already decimated “hundreds of fields of alfalfa in Utah, and is spreading to adjacent States.” To say nothing of all the diseases still to be discovered—ones that could kill the sprawling fields of potatoes, corn, and wheat.
Fully 50 per cent of the important injurious insect pests in this country are of forei
gn origin. Among these are the codling moth, the Hessian fly, the asparagus beetles, the hop-plant louse, the cabbage worm, the wheat-plant louse, oyster-shell bark louse, pea weevil, the Croton bug, the Angoumois grain moth, the horn fly of cattle, and in comparatively recent years have been introduced such important pests as the cotton-boll weevil, the San José scale, the gypsy and brown-tail moths into New England, the Argentine ant into New Orleans, and the alfalfa-leaf weevil into Utah. . . . A properly enforced quarantine inspection law in the past would have excluded many, if not most, of the foreign insect enemies which are now levying an enormous annual tax on the products of the farms and orchards and forests of this country.
Without providing evidence, Marlatt claimed the annual loss due to pests could be as “inconceivable” as one billion dollars. The number made Fairchild’s small-scale boasts of industry growth (five tons! dozens of trees!) look quaint by comparison. Marlatt also laid blame for the obstinacy. “This effort has been blocked very largely by a small body [of people] who, careless of the consequences to the country at large, feared some slight check on freedom of their operations,” Marlatt wrote, speaking squarely at those who imported plants, like Fairchild and his star explorer, Meyer.
The story made valid points. A changing world had spread disease faster than ever in history. The golden age of travel had also been the golden age of transport, moving everything—good and bad—across oceans with unprecedented volume and speed. Moreover, Marlatt’s photos weren’t doctored. They were taken with the intention to shock, but all were based on things that were in fact happening in the United States. Swarms of moth larvae or blister rust were real problems, causing towns in some places to chop down full groves of pine.