by Daniel Stone
This imbalance of knowledge and experience fashioned Fairchild a little like Lathrop, the mentor wise in the world who had seen and experienced all that the young man before him dreamed of. Fairchild seemed to relish the opportunity to pay forward what Lathrop had once given him, a leg up in a world where not having one would’ve spelled a dramatically different fate. “The chief tried always to help me as ‘Uncle Barbour’ had helped him,” Popenoe would later tell people. Fairchild egged Popenoe on, he chastised him, he urged him to get his hair cut. Just as Lathrop had done at the beginning of their travel together, Fairchild, only half joking, made Popenoe promise that as long as he was doing the work of plant introduction, he wouldn’t get married. “Keep away from the girls,” Fairchild told the junior explorer. “Wait awhile and you can have anything you want. If you settle down now it’ll greatly interfere with your career.” Even so, Fairchild remained worried that Popenoe would become restless and, as the boss put it, “fly the coop.”
Lathrop, meanwhile, continued to reappear on occasional visits to the office or in letters from around the world. Without Fairchild, Lathrop was aimless, wandering tropical ports, drawn to warm locales where his arthritis wouldn’t flare up. When bored, he would talk up nursery growers in the tropics and ask questions Fairchild had given him, or convince them to send stock to Washington, attention David Fairchild. In exchange for Lathrop’s efforts, Fairchild granted him the title “special agent” for the Department of Agriculture, with an annual salary of one dollar, although Lathrop would never cash the checks.
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When it came time for Popenoe’s first assignment, Fairchild thought of a task with relatively low risk and high potential. He wanted Popenoe to investigate the popular navel orange and scour Brazil, where it was rumored to have originated, for a better variety to boost farmers in a flooded citrus market.
Fairchild deemed the mission worthwhile because the navel had been one of the few plant introductions to have occurred by accident, by a series of such lucky coincidences it almost defied belief. In 1869, William Saunders, the American government’s chief horticulturist, asked American consuls to contribute valuable seeds from their countries. One consul in Brazil sent twigs from a sweet seedless orange that grew near the port of Salvador, but the cutting died en route. He then sent a shipment of buds from Brazil, which Saunders propagated onto rootstock and then sent to Florida, where they, too, died.
By a stroke of incredible luck, Saunders had also given two trees to his former neighbor in Washington, a woman who had moved to California. She planted the trees “in her doorway,” lore would relay, and then watered them by hand (her husband was too cheap for formal irrigation). In 1879, she entered into a state horticultural contest a seedless orange with an odd indentation in its bottom—a navel, someone would call it. It won first prize and carried the humble orange from obscurity to ubiquity.
Fairchild was skeptical that it happened so conveniently. Having made plant introductions for decades, he knew the road was paved with pitfalls and failure. He knew what kind of expertise, growing conditions, and gardening finesse were required to recreate the precise fruit someone saw in a faraway country. A dominant orange grown by accident seemed as far-fetched as a man one day walking on the moon.
But if the navel was, in fact, a stroke of luck from a charmed consular official, Fairchild imagined that even better fruit could be found by a professional trained to know what to look for. Fairchild paired Popenoe, the adventurer, with two citrus experts for a three-man expedition to Brazil. In the weeks before they left, Fairchild was impressed to see Popenoe studying Portuguese, preparing himself with the skills and knowledge to do a thorough job.
Popenoe and the pair of citrusmen departed New York on October 4, 1913, aboard the SS Vandyck, which, to their surprise, was also carrying Theodore Roosevelt. The former president, out of office and bored with his post-presidency, had decided to embark on a punishing and dangerous adventure.
Popenoe, ever the opportunist, stood next to Roosevelt as reporters on deck yelled questions and flashed bursts of light. Roosevelt and his son Kermit would leave the boat at the Amazon to explore the River of Doubt. Popenoe wrote in his trip report that while standing next to Roosevelt, he put on “a dignified look” and tried to appear like he was meant to be there all along.
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In the spring of 1914, Fairchild had never been busier. The Quarantine Act constrained the work of plant introduction. The new law had made it impossible for private nurseries to import their own plant material. His office had become a bottleneck, in many ways drained by the imperative that all American plant activity was subject to his office’s oversight.
When he wasn’t in the greenhouse supervising the receiving and unpacking of material, his office overflowed with visitors, many unannounced. A man who had once enjoyed the meditative silence of weeks-long sea voyages and wandering alone from field to field, he hated the constant activity. “Carrying on profound research in the hubbub that prevails in most government offices is as difficult and rare as composing good poetry on a noisy street corner,” he wrote.
Fairchild was putting in the same long hours he had as a young bachelor when he had no one waiting at home. But now he had three children; his third, Nancy Bell Fairchild, was born in 1912. He sometimes slept in his office to avoid the long commute to Maryland and back. For this, his mother-in-law, Mrs. Bell, complained he was neglecting the kids. She had a way of using generosity to cloak her nagging. If money was the problem, she offered innocently, she could help.
Money wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Fairchild could feel the pyramid that had taken his entire life to build slipping like sand through his fingers, rejected by an oblivious nation that didn’t understand what effect its ignorance was having on its agricultural growth. He stayed in his office long into the night devising ideas. As he saw it, the way the law was implemented was costing enormous sums of money that might otherwise have gone toward research on plant diseases, or better yet, means of disinfecting contaminated crops. Fairchild became angry every time he thought about how the law would deter young people like he had been, who might choose a career in botany or horticulture if the road were smoother.
Moreover, Fairchild could see ways that the Quarantine Act was beginning to hamstring farmers. They didn’t need novel crops quite like they did in the 1890s, but now, a generation later, they needed better versions of their existing crops. “I . . . felt strongly that when the quarantine . . . discouraged private initiative, the government was obligated to develop its own methods of introduction and dissemination for their benefit,” he wrote. By this he meant breeding seeds together. Hybridizing. Creating new forms of fruits and vegetables in labs. This was supposed to be private-sector work, the type of research that gives one farm a leg up over competitors. As the United States marched toward war, there would be more ill-conceived efforts by the government—rather than private companies—to solve societal problems. Many of the directives would land on the desk of Fairchild, now by default one of the country’s most senior food experts. People asked him how to grow more food on a fixed amount of land, how to conserve food that already existed, and how to create drugs and oil in case of disruptions to foreign supplies.
The biotechnology America developed over the next century could have easily solved these problems, particularly how to grow more corn per acre, ship bread longer distances, and create canned fruit that would last months on the shelf. There would be large agribusiness companies to research these questions, first motivated by the threat of war, and later by the promise of profit. The Monsantos, Syngentas, DuPonts. On the eve of world war, however, America, largely unprepared for a global conflict, didn’t have time to experiment or to hope that men like Meyer or Popenoe could solve sweeping problems on their faraway expeditions.
One early idea found its way to Fairchild’s desk and seemed so simp
le, so obvious, that he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it first. If fruits and vegetables could be dehydrated, they could be stockpiled with no risk of spoiling. They would be lighter to transport and edible for years. Soaking them in water would allow them to be “brought back” overnight, as if nothing had happened to them. Would people even notice?
Advances in this field had come from George Washington Carver, a black man who had been born into slavery in Missouri but rose to become a respected botanist and inventor. Carver visited Fairchild’s office one afternoon in January 1918 to discuss vegetable drying. Carver was a pioneer in the same way as Fairchild: both men empowered farmers to diversify. Fairchild’s strategy had been through exploration; Carver’s was via research. Carver wanted to find other uses for common foods like peanuts and sweet potatoes, in hopes they would expand the market and help farmers sell more. He demonstrated how potatoes could be turned into flour, and thus, a substitute for wheat. At the USDA, he baked a loaf of bread using potatoes. The method required dehydrating the potato before grinding it into fine dust.
The next day, Carver returned to the Department to talk details with Fairchild, specifically about starting a pilot project to dehydrate ten thousand bushels of potatoes. At the end of the meeting, Fairchild was so impressed, he slammed his closed fist on the desk. “We must do something now, we have fooled [around] long enough,” he declared.
The logic was sound. But the culinary implementation was not. Fairchild should have known by now that people wouldn’t eat something new just because someone suggested it. Food introduction required cajoling and persuading, and a generous helping of luck.
Despite Carver’s grand plan, and even though Fairchild built a kiln at home to personally experiment to find the optimal temperature and duration to dehydrate foods, and even though he and Marian enjoyed seeing which type of dried and rejuvenated vegetables would pass muster with the kids, few people found the idea appetizing, and even fewer ate the vegetables. Least of all the soldiers who might have benefited from the culinary convenience as they prepared to fight in Europe. The War Department shielded them from the unsavory indignity.
One day, Fairchild schemed with an old friend, Emil Clemens Horst, to convince military leaders that dried vegetables weren’t as bad as they sounded. Horst brought twenty-six types of vegetables, including dried corn, potatoes, beets, carrots, spinach, and more—enough for forty people to sample—from California to Washington. Stripped of their water, the dried vegetables were light enough for him to carry on the train.
At the Willard Hotel, where Fairchild had a decade earlier first courted his wife, he and Horst watched from the side of the room as an assembled crowd of army men, chemists, dietitians, and Red Cross officials politely chewed the samples with pursed lips and squinting eyes. “Most of the guests politely lied about it,” Fairchild remarked later. “But some of them disappeared without saying anything.”
That included one senior official for the United States Food Administration, who would give her official report of dried vegetables to the agency’s chief, Herbert Hoover. After the luncheon, the woman returned to her apartment, and vomited them all out.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sad and Mad and So Utterly Unnecessary
The day Popenoe and his citrusmen returned from Brazil was not a happy occasion. Fairchild tried to mask this fact with a barbecue at his house in Maryland to honor their homecoming, and he described their return as “thrilling,” but still, anyone could easily tell that after months of walking, Popenoe ended the Brazilian expedition with little more than a shrug. He had collected several odds and ends, including Brazilian cherries, cashew wine, guava jelly, translucent apricot-like fruit, and Brazilian grapes known as jaboticaba. Even though the men packed their cuttings meticulously and took great pains to ensure they were clean, only a fraction passed inspection.
The navel orange that monopolized California soil apparently had no equal, and there was nothing better to be found. In a country where the introduction of new plants was becoming harder and harder, confirming the superiority of an existing one was reason enough to celebrate.
While Popenoe had been gone, his small office at the Department had been turned into a quarantine station for the entomology department, another step in the slow creep to extinguish plant hunting entirely. Fairchild schemed for several months to arrange a new assignment for Popenoe, perhaps one on his own where he could emulate Meyer. But few options remained in a world becoming skeptical of outsiders, and with America wary of the unknown.
Two months after Popenoe’s return, events that unfolded across the ocean trivialized the hand-wringing in Fairchild’s office, and it happened faster than anyone could’ve foreseen. In Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, a Serbian dissident pointed a gun at a man in a car who was in line to be the head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a man named Franz Ferdinand. Such an event normally wouldn’t have made international news, except that the bullet was fatal, and another bullet killed the man’s wife, who was riding next to him. The incident led to riots, and then crackdowns in the streets, and then a diplomatic crisis that devolved so quickly that militaries around the world either rushed to declare neutrality or readied for battle.
The event that sparked the Great War, later known as World War I, was only a surprise to anyone who hadn’t noticed the rising tides of nationalism, xenophobia, and cultural insecurity brought on by a more connected world. Within five weeks, German troops began crossing the border into Belgium for the first battle in what would amount to the biggest and deadliest global conflict in human history.
The United States wouldn’t enter this war until 1917. The country lacked a strong military—in numbers and passion. Americans were divided, almost equally, about whether to get involved in Europe. The most consequential opinion belonged to Woodrow Wilson, who explained that war would distract the country from all of the progressive advances it had made: breaking apart monopolies, leveling a modest income tax to strengthen the government, creating a government bank called the Federal Reserve to manage the country’s money. Wilson vowed, “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war.” War wasn’t glamorous, either. Older Americans still reliving Civil War deaths didn’t want another round of loss, nor were younger parents moved by the promise of valor. This was demonstrated by one of 1915’s most popular songs, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”: “Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder / To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?”
Popenoe was one of those darling boys. He didn’t want to fight. His hunting career was only just beginning. Fairchild put him to work collecting avocados in Guatemala—a part of the world that, at least for the moment, remained safe. Popenoe spent three years there, riding thousands of miles on horseback, living on beans, avocados, and chayotes. He wandered from field to field, and when he found avocado varieties he liked, he would take notes and return again and again to taste them in minute detail. After studying thousands of trees, he returned with twenty-three varieties (“the best ones”) to introduce into America. He sent them in tin tubes with oiled paper, having inspected each meticulously to ensure they’d clear quarantine.
Considering the circumstances, Fairchild was pleased with the work. So was Popenoe’s father, Fred, who gloated that between his selling and his son’s hunting, avocados had become the Popenoe family business.
And yet, only one opinion truly mattered to Popenoe, and it came in a letter to Fairchild in early 1917. Wilson Popenoe had “captured the field,” Meyer wrote from China. He conceded that the young man who once fawned over him now shared the same stage. “It will be a race between [him] and me to see who will leave to posterity the greater number of introductions.”
It was a race an aging Fairchild was proud to see his explorers compete in. So long as Meyer could stay hunting, or at the very least, remain alive.
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Frank Meyer had started a
s a happy man, eager to have a job that let him walk and explore. But after three expeditions, he was becoming despondent. Each successive trip had resulted in more drama and fewer plants, cresting with his third expedition, on which he shoved an interpreter down a flight of stairs after the man suggested Meyer was crazy for continuing to walk into rebel-held territory. He was drawn into a fistfight with Chinese officers who suspected he was smuggling opium in his trunk of seeds and plants—a charge Meyer’s response didn’t disprove. One guard roughed him up, then spit in his face.
On the other side of the world, Charles Marlatt was escalating his assault on Meyer’s work. Marlatt watched as one of Meyer’s shipments, on its way from China to Washington, was hit by a hurricane and destroyed in Galveston, Texas. That shipment had been in Texas because of the quarantine. If not for Marlatt’s laws, the seeds could have gone straightaway to experiment stations. Meyer was shocked and riled. To Marlatt, it was a righteous stroke of luck.
The only thing Frank Meyer really enjoyed was walking across landscapes and hunting plants, and in 1915 that was becoming more arduous every day. If the Washington fights and the conflict in Asia weren’t enough, Meyer felt the weight of loneliness after so many years hiking alone through mountains and barren fields. He admitted to a case of Heimweh, the German word for homesickness. He once promised himself—and Fairchild—that at forty, he’d retire and slow down, but he had already ceased being thirty-nine. “The specter of a lonely old age looms up larger and larger, and the spectacular office of an agricultural explorer does not hold it down any longer,” he wrote. “At eighteen one thinks that one can see everything. At forty, you know that the world is too big and life is too short. You reduce your plans and wishes.”