by Daniel Stone
Fairchild’s response to Meyer’s despondence was that it might be good for him to keep exploring, or at least, to spend some time with a fellow Westerner. His entire identity was defined by plant exploration—the hunt, the chase, the conquest. People had read his name in newspapers and his work had inspired a younger generation. Perhaps what he needed most was to keep moving through fields, perhaps in the wild pear forests in the region of Jehol, north of Peking.
Meyer agreed, but he had come to resent Fairchild’s tone. It was more often nagging than friendly. An earlier Meyer would have let it roll off his back. But he had grown bolder and into a man who urged his boss to “put a little less officialness in your letters and a little more warmth, for I am all alone here and am not much in conversation with my fellow men so one needs a little sympathy in his letters.”
Fairchild replied that he understood, that he, too, had experienced that loneliness. Although Meyer’s circumstances, amid hostility, mistrust, and extreme weather, were undoubtedly worse.
One reason Fairchild pushed so hard for his beleaguered explorer to return to the job may have been that Fairchild was pleading for Meyer’s sanity as much as for his own. Meyer’s slow breakdown was coinciding with a similar collapse of plant introduction, dragged down by Washington drama. Whether to comfort Meyer or himself, Fairchild wrote his explorer a motivational screed in hopes of reminding Meyer what he had signed up for, the job he had loved, and the service to his adopted country, whether anyone thanked him or not.
“We have only one life to live and we want to spend it enriching our own country with the plants of the world which produce good things to eat and to look at,” Fairchild wrote. Fairchild insisted to Meyer that if he didn’t feel well, he should return to America. But it came across as insincere. Fairchild filled the rest of the letter with plant talk and suggestions for Meyer’s route.
The harder Fairchild pushed, the deeper Meyer sank. Fairchild requested that Meyer acquire one hundred pounds of opium poppy seeds. Securing them would provide an opportunity for American farmers, given China’s crackdown on the crop, and the threat to behead any farmer growing it. This assignment would require permission from the president of China himself, whom Meyer couldn’t get to, let alone convince. On this and Fairchild’s other requests—to get fifty kilos of mustard seeds, dozens of samples of papeda citrus, and scores of shade trees for American cities—he began to fall short, hampered by limits on access and his own energy. “The loneliness and the hardships of life here are beginning to be more and more distasteful to me,” he wrote to Fairchild.
This distaste began to manifest into physical symptoms. He experienced digestive trouble, insomnia, and bouts of fever. The immediate cause was his “nervous sleeplessness.” Between the civil war in China and the larger war raging in Europe, Meyer’s larger problem was “the paralyzing effect of this never-ending horrible war.” He openly wondered if humanity had hit its peak in 1914, believing that so much fighting had set off the slow collapse of the world.
Leaving China and returning to Washington wouldn’t have been difficult. Meyer could have caught a steamer down the Yangtze to Shanghai, and then to Hawaii or California, effectively aborting his trip. No one could’ve blamed him, considering the circumstances. Meyer even wrote to Fairchild that he had imagined soon leaving plant collecting to younger men.
But for some reason, Meyer couldn’t let himself quit. It was an indication that despite his sorrow, the quest for plant exploration still burned inside him, however dimly. He also pondered the notion of what he might return to in America. He could expect safety in Washington, but the threats of world war couldn’t guarantee security anywhere. Instead of following the Yangtze to Shanghai, he decided to go the other way, deeper into central China, in search of wild peaches.
Fifty pieces of mail were waiting for him when he reached Hankow, a city in central China on the Yangtze River. Many of the missives were from Fairchild and had been delayed months by incessant forwarding. Fairchild seemed oblivious to Meyer’s hardships, and his mental state. “It is difficult to imagine just what conditions surround you, and I imagine it is more difficult even for you to imagine what changes are taking place here in America,” Fairchild wrote Meyer on May 2, 1917.
It was. And as several months passed, the chasm between Meyer and Fairchild continued to grow with the distance and time it would take for letters to be delivered. If Meyer was crying for help with his anxiety or state of hopelessness, Fairchild missed the request completely, repeatedly filling letters with botanical suggestions and chatty encouragement.
Limits on Meyer’s ability to move freely began to fray him. “I tried to write for a few nights and days in succession, so as to finish all of this troublesome correspondence.” But, he continued, “nature stepped in and I got an attack of nervous prostration and could not sleep, rest or eat any more.”
A doctor told Meyer the ailments were caused by overwork, loneliness, and worry. Added to that was the fact that a man prone to boundless wandering had been given constraints, and that the voices in his head had no escape valve. He began to refer to himself in the third person, feeling removed even from his own body. He observed, “The change from ‘roughing it’ to sedentary work seems harder and harder to over-bridge as a person gets older. . . . If one only could have a congenial fellow white man with one, it would not be so hard on one.”
The letters piling up only added to Meyer’s deepening anxiety. If he had kept moving as he had on his prior expeditions, he could have outrun them. But as he stayed still, they caught him and delivered more requests than he could handle. A millionaire farmer in Beijing wanted his advice. American experiment stations wanted help with crops Meyer had picked up years earlier. One letter in April 1917 broke the dismaying news that the United States had entered the Great War. The news was especially troubling to a man who had grown up with dreams of utopia and harmony.
Around this time, when Meyer was running out of hope, he was also short on paper. One evening in a moment of introspection, one of many with no one around to talk to and with his anguished mind retreating to a place of darkness, he taped three envelopes together to make a list. He titled it “Proposed Resignation” and filled it with ten reasons why he might finally quit:
Not feeling as well as formerly—sleeplessness—less energy
Mentally soon tired: not being able to do as much work as formerly
Paralyzing effect of this terrible everlasting war
Loneliness of life and very few congenial people to associate with
Travel with all this enormous amount of baggage
So much squalor and dirt in China
The destruction of my one and one-half years’ work over herbarium material has given me a much deeper blow than I ever admitted
The new plant quarantine laws; the difficulties of shipping
No garden to study the plants one has collected
Assistants have no real interest in this work
All of these factors weighed on him like a ship taking on water. He thought one evening, “Is it strange that a man at times gets very tired? And the more so now, since my adopted country has seen fit to join in with others in this monstrous world war and we will get our lists of wounded and killed from now on regularly in our lopsided and misinformation-giving daily and other papers.”
Meyer spent his lonely nights thinking about the war, his days so empty that his thoughts routinely turned macabre. When Fairchild asked him to brainstorm new ways for the United States at war to produce more food, he responded that America might kill all unnecessary animals, and put incurable criminals and insane people “out of the way.”
To anyone reading these thoughts on the other side of the world, this seemed highly unlike Meyer. A man who had overcome so many physical evils had been weakened by vague events far away from him. People shown Meyer’s letters thought they came from a differen
t man. Fairchild again dismissed the gravity of Meyer’s deterioration. His response to Meyer, while gentle, reflected an era before depression meant more than temporary sadness or had a clinical diagnosis as a mental disorder.
June 29, 1917:
We are all much grieved to hear that you have had a nervous breakdown. We can none of us believe but that with your unusual physique you will rally from your nervousness and get back on your feet in a short time, providing you can shake off your worries with regard to things to be done, responsibilities that have come as a result of the war, etc. . . . Do not forget that we consider the knowledge which you have accumulated a most valuable asset. You have begun a great work, and it would be a tremendous pity not to carry it further, particularly during these strenuous times. . . . Everyone in the Office sends hearty greetings to you and warmest sympathy. I remain,
Very sincerely yours,
David Fairchild
Agricultural Explorer in Charge
* * *
—
The reason for increasing pressure on Meyer was that the war had begun to fill Washington with anxiety across every federal agency. President Wilson increased the war budget, which brought nearly fifty thousand new residents into the capital, many in automobiles that congested the streets with black clouds and traffic. In August of 1917, a month normally dormant, with congressmen fleeing the humidity, the city buzzed with frenetic energy. Few people knew how to help but everyone bounced around anyway.
Attention to the war took top priority. To make room for military planners, the Department of Agriculture moved its offices up the street to an office building with more space but less light. Meyer, when he received this news, called this “a bad piece of business” that took the staff “further away from plants and the out-of-doors than ever before.” Fairchild, however, saw the move as a positive, likely because he had no other choice. A new office would shield his work from visitors, at least temporarily, to let him get back to “the serious questions of plant introduction work.”
In truth, however, there wasn’t much work to do. Marlatt had sown concern about the unknown, but the war brought fear of death and destruction—specifically in anticipation of a German invasion. The media fed these fears. In 1915, a bestselling book, Defenseless America by Hudson Maxim, the man who invented smokeless gunpowder, fictionalized a German attack on the United States. The same year, it became a motion picture, which showed Washington laid waste by German bombs. Government posters urged people to buy as many war bonds as they could manage.
In April of 1917, the same month Meyer was emotionally breaking down in Yichang, President Wilson ordered the creation of a Committee on Public Information, charged with demonizing the enemy and whipping up patriotic obligations to convince people to fight the war however they could. The Department of Agriculture created its own propaganda, including posters calling people to help harvest corn, and another to cut waste:
FOOD
Buy it with thought
Cook it with care
Serve just enough
Save what will keep
Eat what would spoil
Home grown is best.
DON’T WASTE IT
Trying to introduce plants amid the flurry of war was like trying to sell petunias in a hurricane. People’s interest in new foods, or foods at all, had to do only with whether they were cheaper than before, or whether they lasted longer. “No one can adequately describe the confusion of those early days [of the war], nor can I look back at them without a shudder,” Fairchild later wrote.
In the winter between 1917 and 1918, while Fairchild paced around the office considering the latest harebrained schemes to feed American soldiers in Europe (grow more beans! eat cornmeal to preserve flour!), Marian started driving an ambulance. She was qualified because she could drive. The woman who had once been forbidden by her father to assist Clara Barton in Cuba now worked for the Women’s Red Cross Motor Corps of Washington, taking shifts around the clock.
The Fairchilds’ Maryland estate, meanwhile, became a retreat for peaceful thinking. Woodrow Wilson used the Fairchilds’ property to escape tightly wound Washington and occasionally brought his secretary of war, Newton Baker, for frank and classified discussions about the war. While Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Baker admired the cherry blossom trees, the president and Baker wandered the estate discussing plans for America’s entrance into the war.
At least until they sat on a bench fastened between two trees. The flimsy board snapped, dropping the two men on the ground. They might have laughed in a different context. Baker later told Fairchild, “I thought for a moment we had been bombed!”
* * *
—
During all this, Frank Meyer sat alone. His only news came from Fairchild in Washington, and occasionally, from his friends in Holland. Fairchild had become too stressed to attend to Meyer’s increasingly erratic emotions. He also admitted he didn’t know what to say.
You speak in one of your recent letters of wishing you had someone to advise you. My dear Meyer, these are times when we all need advice, but unfortunately there are times when those who try to advise feel peculiarly incompetent to do so. I might easily advise you to come back to this country and take up the breeding of plants, but I do not feel sure that a man of your restless disposition will be contented with the necessarily quiet life of a plant breeder. . . . I must now stop and take up other pressing duties. Hoping that you are recovering from your temporary indisposition, and with kindest regards, I remain,
David Fairchild
Agricultural Explorer in Charge
It seemed as if Meyer couldn’t deteriorate more. But he did. His interpreter in Hankow, where he stayed amid the ongoing fighting, quit after becoming impatient with the hot climate and the food. “What would become of our social structure if we all did the same?” Meyer asked, utterly frustrated. This incident had been the final test of Meyer’s racial tolerance. He wrote to Washington to describe unabashedly how difficult it was to deal with a “non-intellectual race”:
I have become so calloused to opinions of Chinese, that it matters but mighty little what they think, the whole race has become too weedy for lack of healthy contact with outside people during all of these past centuries. With the exception of a few they are quite satisfied with the ways their forefathers did things . . .”
Like the West, China was marching further and further into troubling times, with new rebellions that fueled the bands of robbers and outlaws that tormented Meyer. Rebels looted and started fires. Soldiers stormed towns indiscriminately to impose martial law, often shooting machine guns loudly into the ground. Floods from the Yellow and North rivers washed out fields and displaced people, exacerbating confusion and chaos.
Meyer was at particular risk. An outsider could be easily accused of trying to quash the rebellion, or worse, trying to help it. His movement remained slow for the following months. His mood changed with the weather. At times he’d find the energy to return to spurts of plant hunting, but with a sluggishness as though wearing cement boots, constantly paranoid and suspicious of his surroundings.
He tried to put this sentiment into words for Fairchild. He described how food supplies were running low and fighting raged around the clock. “As I am writing we hear the rickety noise of rifle fire, for the Northern and Southern troops are at battle only a mile or so north of the city,” he wrote Fairchild. “That we do not live ‘at ease,’ you can easily imagine.” In the Yangtze Valley, a sense of depression hung in the air, which affected Meyer so deeply, he began to question his life.
“I feel the evening of life slowly descending upon me,” he wrote, “and the fearful sorrow which hangs all over the earth does not make life the same it once used to be.”
Meyer kept receiving letters from Washington, many delivering the dispiriting news that his earlier seeds had arrived in poor condition, or worse, not at all.
Fairchild checked in with him periodically. Mail service was already slow, but the war made it even slower, delaying letters up to three months by the time they’d reach China and chase Meyer from inn to inn.
In March of 1918, nearly a year after Meyer’s nervous breakdown, Fairchild wrote him a long letter about plants. Its length revealed as much about Fairchild’s esteem of Meyer as it did about Fairchild’s loosening grip on his own work. He closed it with a tender sentiment shared between two men whose worlds had been shaken beyond recognition.
Do not become despondent in any case, for, regardless of the fearful sorrows and the horrible features of the life which is around us, we must push on to bigger and grander things before life really closes in on us.
In the heat of war, and amid his ongoing collapse, Meyer summoned the strength for one more bout of collecting; the resulting crops his final contributions to his adopted country. Near Hsing-shan-hsien, he came across a ginkgo biloba tree with edible seeds that Americans would later find useful for boosting brain function and treating high blood pressure. A few days later he filled his trunk one last time, with Ichang lemons, a hardy type of citrus from the region where citrons and papedas originated. He sent them to Swingle, who was back in Washington studying how to make citrus hybrids stronger for farmers, shippers, and eaters.
Once that was finished, Meyer entered a tailspin. Sleeping went from difficult to impossible. Revolution filled every street with looting and burning. Soldiers fired guns into crowds. When the bullets killed people, Meyer watched as the soldiers mutilated the corpses, digging out the hearts and passing them around for bites of courage. His inns, which began to host the dirtiest people lacking anyplace else to seek refuge, were filled with lice so thick he could see them scurrying across the sheets. “China is surely in a sad plight now” was all that he concluded, as anyone might have. “Oriental character and republicanism do not seem to agree.”