The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  Yet Marlatt’s argument fractured where it assigned blame. If small-scale imports of lemons, apricots, or cherries could be linked to outbreaks and field wipeouts, Marlatt couldn’t show it. He bore the burden of proof to rationalize a new law, and he fell short.

  This nuance wasn’t lost on Fairchild, who was himself guilty of having an overly idealistic view of nature, believing that diseases could be stamped out easily and that the benefits of research always outweighed the risks. But Fairchild’s opinion fit within the idea of globalization—building a wall of isolation wouldn’t give America an advantage; it would hamstring its efforts to remain competitive. “The whole trend of the world is toward greater intercourse, more frequent exchange of commodities, less isolation, and a greater mixture of the plants and plant products over the face of the globe,” he would argue. Closing America’s borders would render the country a little like the cannibalistic tribes of Fiji, isolated from the world and forced to adopt unseemly habits to sustain itself.

  When Fairchild saw Marlatt’s essay in National Geographic, the first impulse for a man not prone to impulsiveness was to resign from the board. It surprised him that Bell and Grosvenor, who ran the magazine, would give unsubstantiated hysterics such a high platform. But Marian, who was befuddled that the dispute had become so personal, and so quickly, urged her husband to combat words with better words. A bit like Lathrop in earlier days, she encouraged Fairchild to continue the argument, to win at any rhetorical cost, rather than walk away pouting. Resigning would have turned Fairchild into a small scientist, she believed, easily dismissed as a man of ego over fact.

  So Fairchild lobbed the shuttlecock back. Five months after Marlatt’s 1911 essay in National Geographic, Fairchild penned the October issue’s leading story. With it, Fairchild attempted to soften the debate, to remove the drama he sensed was putting off the casual reader, and to reframe a scary topic as something almost humanitarian.

  NEW PLANT IMMIGRANTS

  By David Fairchild

  Plant exploration, he explained, had “barely touched the fringe of its possibilities.” Thirty-one thousand different plants had come into the country by now, and that quantity represented only a small fraction of the bounty still waiting to be discovered. Together, he said, they demonstrated the “greatness of the possibilities which progress in agricultural research is creating.”

  A point of particular pride was that, compared to Marlatt’s thirty-one photographs showing gruesome scenes of vermin, decay, and neglect, Fairchild’s photos showed delectable specimens. Robust forests of bamboo. Bunches of ripened dates. Swollen alfalfa. A bulging persimmon. It was subtle, and perhaps no one but Fairchild noticed, but there were thirty-three in all.

  * * *

  —

  In reality, dueling magazine articles amounted to small megaphones at a time when it seemed like everyone was shouting. For in the early months of 1913, the earth shifted again for plant introduction. Woodrow Wilson became president on March 4, and with his arrival came the end of James Wilson’s sixteen-year stretch as secretary of agriculture. It was (and remains) the longest tenure for any cabinet secretary in American history. Counting the days he spent clearing his desk after Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, James Wilson held the office under four presidents. In that time, he expanded the Department of Agriculture’s staff and expenditures sixfold.

  Secretary Wilson wasn’t sad to go. Rising from a poor Scottish immigrant to United States secretary of agriculture had been one of the world’s most meteoric paths, living proof that America was committed to building itself with the best people from around the world. Once a ruthless political manipulator, Wilson in his later years had mellowed, even humbled. It genuinely surprised him that each president had decided to keep him in the job, a sign of his capability and how little McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft had trusted their own expertise on matters of food and soil.

  President Wilson’s victory had come largely on domestic issues. Campaign contribution limits were too high; the federal government was too poor not to levy an income tax on every person; the weakest Americans needed help. The implication had been that foreign policy could wait, or, depending on the day someone asked, it didn’t matter. The imperialist policy that men like McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft had built for decades, the one whose centerpiece was a world for America to exploit, now seemed foolish in a world full of danger and mistrust. While McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft had spread America’s reach by collecting colonies (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines) and protecting others (Cuba, Panama), Wilson believed America could make do with its assets at home, not expensive and hard-to-reach ones abroad. Part of his platform called for the independence of the Philippines, less out of moral responsibility than because of a why bother? approach to a territory that had soaked up so much American treasure for a decade and yielded little in return.

  And so, with his right hand raised, Wilson’s oath of office ended America’s fourteen-year stretch of imperialism.

  Fairchild found 1912, the year of Woodrow Wilson’s election, lamentable in other ways, too. The president’s inward-not-outward policy about America’s place in the world would also extend to agriculture. Wilson believed that the future of American farms wasn’t in novel foods but in “efficiency.” Farming more by farming smarter. It was a worthwhile goal for a country trying to build itself, but Fairchild was as familiar with large-scale farming as he was with Parcheesi. His expertise was in botany, not running a farm, and this ineptitude cost him—and his office—relevance.

  Worse, one of the last acts of Congress before Wilson’s election had come at great cost to Fairchild. The long-standing feud between him and Marlatt boiled over on August 20, 1912, when one of them was declared the winner. Marlatt prevailed when Congress passed the Plant Quarantine Act, a name as blunt as the action it required: to regulate the entrance of all foreign plants into the United States.

  After years of advocating for America to close its doors, Marlatt had bested Fairchild. The law wasn’t the “Chinese Wall” Marlatt once proposed that America build around itself. But the Quarantine Act halted the unrestricted flow nonetheless.

  Even having won, Marlatt couldn’t stop fighting. When he learned that the secretary of agriculture would have the power to clear plants for entry, he argued that such discretion was too specific for a man of such generalized power. The bill was eventually amended to give authority to a new agency called the Federal Horticultural Board, which, conveniently, Marlatt controlled.

  Despite Secretary Wilson’s former jousts with Fairchild, the outgoing secretary would have been a robust ally of Fairchild’s now-widespread program of plant introduction. Wilson had benefited from Fairchild’s success; it was at least one reason he kept his job so long. And Wilson had loved Frank Meyer, reading with enthusiasm the letters that came from China. The James Wilson skeptical of plant introduction in the 1890s had become a devoted apostle of adventure and horticultural modernity. Secretary Wilson’s departure meant a less sympathetic new secretary would take the job, one who shared President Wilson’s view that America didn’t need foreign things.

  If there was a bright spot among the disheartening prognosis, it was that Frank Meyer kept exploring. Even though Meyer had to subject his findings to more and more inspection and scrutiny, there remained at least one narrow avenue still open for importing plant material. The new secretary of agriculture, David Houston, a university president with no farm experience, asked Fairchild to turn Meyer into something of a double agent—exploring to find useful plants (that would have to pass inspection) and to investigate plant diseases infecting the United States whose antidote could be found abroad. The mandate allowed Meyer to depart on a third expedition, a proposed journey through northwestern China, through Gansu Province to the border of Tibet.

  * * *

  —

  Houston asked Meyer to investigate whether the blight poisoning America’s chestnut trees w
as of Chinese origin, and if so, how the Chinese people, with their centuries’ worth of farming experience, had stopped it.

  To find out, Meyer sailed first to Beijing. He found the fungus and, to everyone’s surprise but his, that the Chinese had long before bred trees resistant to the fungus. Meyer took cuttings of these trees. When his shipment was received, a group of pathologists told Fairchild that Meyer’s work was the most meaningful accomplishment in a decade of pathology research. This pleased Fairchild, who had grown accustomed to Meyer working miracles. It also showed in one example how plant exploration offered not only problems but solutions.

  Fairchild was satisfied seeing Meyer’s eventual shipments home, all inspected carefully. He sent new varieties of walnuts, hazelnuts, and chestnuts, and new seeds of jujubes, pears, apples, peaches, and a small, red, berrylike fruit known as haw. His shipment set a new record for quantity of plant material ever shipped from China to Washington. All of it passed quarantine.

  When Meyer was in the field, this type of abundance was normal. But it had a side effect that Fairchild couldn’t have expected.

  The dispatches that The Los Angeles Times had been publishing about Meyer’s adventures, the ones that detailed his harrowing tales of near-death encounters and Hollywood-style evils, had attracted the attention of a young man in Altadena, California, who had grown up gardening and then run a commercial nursery.

  Wilson Popenoe, twenty-one years old and easily excited, wrote to Fairchild that he had a particular fascination with avocados and wanted to explore like the gun-toting, road-hardened, danger-seeking Meyer. Popenoe said in his letter that he had already been around the world once, hunting for dates for his father, who ran a commercial nursery. But now Popenoe wanted to be a real plant hunter, a government agent. The job would bring an upgrade in budget, adventure, and, if he could emulate Meyer, glory.

  Fairchild wrote back to Popenoe and explained that plant exploration was detailed and tedious work, newly subject to rules and obstacles, and even during the best day exploring still required substantial expertise and immeasurable danger.

  Popenoe assured him he had what it took. He explained that he had wandered the same streets of Baghdad Fairchild had once risked his life to reach. He had caught malaria in a foreign port, and had been holed up with dysentery for weeks. Wilson Popenoe, at just twenty-one, knew what seed hunting entailed. And after he gave it some thought, Fairchild, now forty-four, agreed. Finding skilled young men to continue the burdensome job of plant exploration had now become his life’s work.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Fly the Coop

  Under the new rules of the Quarantine Act, introducing plants wasn’t illegal, just much harder. Any plant that entered the United States had to be brought directly to Washington, D.C., no detours like the cross-country trips that Meyer was making with cargo from the West Coast. Fairchild was ordered to build a receiving center on the National Mall and was given five thousand dollars for it, a sum large enough for only a modest shack one fire away from wiping out the entire program. Entomologists would pick up the new samples every week, put them in a queue for testing, test them, and if they passed, return them to Fairchild’s scientists, who would propagate them into seeds and send them out to farmers. Introducing plants was still possible, but the new obstacles effectively covered what was once an open highway with red lights and stop signs.

  Fairchild couldn’t restrain Meyer even if he wanted to. Meyer continued to explore, but with increasingly erratic emotions. He was everywhere, all at once, and accelerated both his collecting of plants and his intensity for the world. He showed up in places nobody suspected. He visited his family in Holland, and then Saint Petersburg, and in the months that followed, ventured to Chinese Turkestan and remote Mongolia. His letters to Fairchild showed the miraculous way Meyer cheated death, sometimes daily, as he was continuously robbed, threatened, and warned not to enter areas rich in useful crops that he visited anyway. He covered icy terrain and emerged atop mountains only to keep walking down the other side. He truly hated staying still.

  On this, his second expedition, he clipped cuttings of wild apricots and asparagus that he would send back to Washington. Both found their way into the hands of nurserymen, and eventually farmers; this had become the usual process for Meyer’s findings. He mailed back the newest and most durable varieties of plums and cherries that grew abundantly in high temperatures. He picked up soybeans, which he now had studied in volume so great he could spot tiny nuances in their appearance and how they grew. Constantly afraid of being poisoned in a culture where he stood out, he ate only bread and sausage, and drank only tea, the only vitamins he consumed coming from the fruits and vegetables he chewed for study.

  Very few things could have stopped Meyer. He was reckless and ruthless, and had seen such horrors that warnings of mountain gangs or animal attacks were as good as fiction to him until they actually happened. But Meyer had heard reliable reports about fighting in the Chinese territory. There was a rebellion afoot in 1912 that had started a year earlier to overthrow the Qing Empire, China’s last imperial dynasty. Despite the setbacks and institutional roadblocks, the threat of revolution and the new rules that covered his work in Washington, his luck never ran out. “It seems as if the good wishes from so many people who take an interest in my work keep some sort of protective atmosphere around me,” he wrote to Fairchild in the months before he came back.

  Indeed. Meyer returned to Europe before crossing the Atlantic. Again he averted tragedy with the blind luck that had become his signature.

  Around 1911. Meyer covered thousands of miles on foot, constantly looking for clues that might yield new foods. In the town of Aksu in Chinese Turkestan, Meyer marveled at a strange sunken valley carved by the Aksu River. “It would be strange indeed if in so peculiar a civilization as this there should not be found new food plants,” he wrote. He asked the owners of these houses if he could inspect their kitchens. He sampled their foods and collected seeds of the ones he liked.

  In April 1912, Meyer held a ticket to return to America on a majestic new ocean liner, the RMS Titanic, the most impressive and durable ship ever built. If he hadn’t become ill the day before the voyage and traded his ticket for one on the next ship, the RMS Mauretania departing four days later, he, a grown man unqualified for a lifeboat, would have perished in the cold Atlantic.

  * * *

  —

  Meyer lasted just a few months in Washington before he itched to return to Asia. Something about the continent and its endless plants called to him, and with such ferocity he quickly forgot about the fighting that had only months before driven him away.

  His short stay in Washington, however, meant he could meet Wilson Popenoe, the young man who looked at Meyer with such fawning admiration it left Meyer speechless. He was used to people eyeing him suspiciously and threatening to break his neck, not admirers staring glassy-eyed with a goofy smile. Meyer didn’t want to mentor anyone. He had too much work to do. “I wish I had seven bodies,” he would later tell Fairchild, complaining that he didn’t have enough time to complete the work he found so urgent.

  Indeed, if Meyer had had six assistants, he could have used them. Because what Meyer lacked most wasn’t money or energy; it was time. China’s unrest was only a small matter compared to the larger war the world was poised to fight. America hadn’t yet entered the conflict that would be known as the Great War, the first war to drag together all of the globe’s major powers, but it was heading in that direction, and the prospect of a changing world effectively put Meyer on a deadline.

  Before returning to Asia, he decided to make a tour of the United States. It wasn’t for tourism but for research. He wanted to go to Gansu Province, an area believed to be insulated from much of the fighting. It also stood to reason that, being so scarcely visited, it was full of plants that no Westerner had seen. If this was true, it would be impossible for Meyer to bring them all b
ack. He needed to understand which kinds of things farmers wanted, and what kinds of growing conditions they could provide. He visited farms along the northern United States, traveling from Boston nearly to Seattle, popping in on men in their fields. Often, they emerged from their barns curious why a sloppy, bearded man was chewing on their plants.

  Around 1916. Popenoe followed the advice and the literal footsteps of Fairchild, including making an early trip to Guatemala to search for better avocado varieties. Popenoe came to like avocados so much that he spent the next decade on assignment in Central and South America devoted solely to avocados.

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, having been rebuffed by Meyer, Popenoe became the protégé of David Fairchild instead. Fairchild was his boss, and also his landlord. Popenoe rented a room in the Fairchilds’ home in Maryland and paid for it with the generous eight-thousand-dollar-a-year salary that Fairchild granted him. Such a large sum likely reflected Fairchild’s former budget, designed to sustain a dozen plant explorers. The new quarantine rules and bad publicity had made the work so arduous and prone to inducing hysteria that many of the former contractors had quit. By 1915, Fairchild’s best hopes had almost entirely narrowed to Meyer and Popenoe alone.

  Popenoe was eager to return to traveling after the trip to Baghdad he’d described in his pitch letter to Fairchild. He had a singular focus to board a boat, to go somewhere unknown. He wore the same pair of torn pants day after day and only barely combed his hair. He was, in almost every way, like David Fairchild had once been, full of passion but empty in direction, a man who wanted to go somewhere but oblivious to how to get moving. The only difference was that Popenoe lacked self-doubt, the crippling overanalysis that kept Fairchild away from Java long after Lathrop had given him the means to get there. Popenoe was ready to leave at a moment’s notice, provided someone first told him where to go.