CHAPTER TWO: One Thousand Dollars

CHAPTER TWO

One Thousand Dollars

There was a time in North America before people ate fruits or vegetables, a time before people ate anything at all, because far

enough back, there was no North America.

Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and life for at least 3.7

billion of them. The planet of that era would be unrecognizable to

anyone alive today. Early life was almost entirely aquatic, and a few billion years passed before, about 450 million years ago, creatures

started to creep onto land. Time has long ago swept away any record

of what these early animals looked like, but they weren’t much to

look at, nor could they see very well, and, perhaps as a result, they lived short lives. A hundred million years after that, the planet for the first time had seeds—a part of an evolving form of reproduction

in which female spores held their eggs in their outer tissue for the best odds of getting fertilized by male spores.

The planet circled the sun millions more times before two big

things happened. One was the arrival of flowering plants, and the

other was the arrival of dinosaurs. The asteroid that hit the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-six million years ago was brutal to the dinosaurs, and it was equally cruel to plants. The ash and smoke cloud cut off

photosynthesis worldwide and effectively starved the majority of

plant species into extinction.

Earth, as we know, is resilient, and once the cloud settled,

mammals, birds, and plants began to evolve again, except this time,

in a new way: in relation to one another. Plants developed showy

flowers—the ones we’re used to seeing—largely as a ploy to attract

butterflies, moths, and bees. The success of plants led to more of

them, and they spread everywhere that wasn’t too cold.

Such botanical dexterity helped make human life possible. The earliest primates based part of their diets on plants. And plants, in turn, evolved to make themselves attractive (or repulsive), depending on how much they wanted to be eaten (or left alone). The truly wise

ones—wise in the judgment of humans—are the plants that made

themselves edible. Those include the plants that produce fruit, and

often, their sweet flesh is a devious lure to attract something to hunt it, eat it, and spread it.

In a biological sense, a fruit is the developed ovary of a plant (the vessel that holds the plant’s eggs), and examining a fruit gives clues about its past struggles. Before humans, the red flesh of strawberries was a decoy for flyby nibbles from birds. Avocados appealed to

elephant-like creatures called gomphotheres, which had intestines

wide enough for the animals to swallow the fruit and excrete its hefty seed somewhere else. The day gomphotheres went extinct, thankfully

no one told avocados. Nine thousand years passed before the Aztecs

invented guacamole.

As for what constitutes a fruit in 2018, sweetness has little to do

with it. Tomatoes are fruits, but so are eggplants, peppers, and olives.

Peanuts and almonds and walnuts are fruits. So are parts of the

world’s six top crops—wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and soy.

Oftentimes, things that masquerade as vegetables, like pea pods, are technically fruits. Which is not to cast shade at vegetables; they are, by definition, almost fruits. To botanists, vegetables are any other edible part of the plant that doesn’t contain seeds. Roots, such as

carrots, potatoes, and parsnips, are vegetables. Lettuces are seedless, so they’re vegetables, too, as is garlic.

Chefs and bakers have their own definitions for what separates a

fruit (something sweet or sour) from a vegetable (everything else).

But there’s no central authority to keep things consistent—no

Supreme Court of Plants. Federal judges have tried to give vegetables their day in court. In 1893, the United States Supreme Court

classified tomatoes as a vegetable so the government could collect

higher tariffs than if they were fruit (which they are). If judges can change botanical laws, then anyone can. Spend an afternoon

plucking every speck off a strawberry, and your fruit just became a

vegetable.

Once North America became known as North America, the

continent had rich botanical diversity. Yet such success was again

interrupted. Glaciers of the last ice age, eighteen thousand years ago, pushed life south. When they retreated, the ice rivers left behind a chilled land mass slow to repopulate itself. Just as two people would take longer than one hundred to grow a civilization, North America

took longer to botanically rebound than a bigger continent like Asia.

For a long time, wherever animals pooped out seeds, unique

things grew. But that changed when modern humans arrived.

Agriculture was the greatest advance in human history, but until it

had a name, it was simply the process of domestication, of taming a

wild species to help humans. Domestication let people produce food

for unfavorable seasons and form a steady source of nutrition that

allowed them to settle down and form villages. In places like North

America with few humans, however, hunting and gathering was

easier than organized domestication. The earliest North Americans

rarely domesticated crops, leaving the continent a disorganized

patchwork of loosely related plants.

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the

West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States

and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods—strawberries,

pecans, blueberries, and some squashes—that had the durability to

survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable

collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes,

pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to

what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands

more that endure today.

If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring

out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend

to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces

flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from

other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was

inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific

food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to

realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants

vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it’ll produce perfectly identical apples. Millennia before humans

learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants,

and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you’ve ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who

figured that out.

Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of

agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent,

which had all the qualities of a farmer’s dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around

ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught

themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

The next seismic era comes with Christopher Columbus. Credited

and cursed for stumbling upon the Western Hemisphere, the Italian

explorer had a little-known side gig as the father of globalized

agriculture. Until the 1490s, the Western and Eastern hemispheres

hadn’t formally met. And Columbus’ arrival on a Caribbean island in

1492 led to a frenzied exchange of crops. Potatoes, tomatoes, and

corn from Central and South America became staples in Europe and

Asia. Crops from the Old World, like bananas, coffee, sugar, and

citrus, found fertile growing conditions in the New World, so much

so that within a few hundred years, the Americas became top

producers of them all. Historians call that period the Columbian

Exchange and mark it the official bridge to modern times, when two

worlds fused into one.

Technically, Columbus never set foot in North America, nor did he

do any agricultural swapping himself. And many of the people living

there, the Native Americans that he believed were Indians, benefited little from the agricultural exchange. There were relatively few

people on so much land—around fifty million on six billion acres.

While Europeans were busy introducing to the New World foods that

they thought would improve the native people’s lives, they were also importing new diseases that ended them, such as smallpox, measles,

cholera, and influenza. Smallpox alone is thought to have diminished Native American populations with horrific devastation rarely seen in history.

When English colonists landed, they found a heavily wooded

continent, overgrown and underused, prime for them to create a

portrait of their former lives. They brought carrots and, not long

after, barley, wheat, and peaches. By the 1730s, the process of

building a new colony meant building a sustainable system for growing food. James Oglethorpe, the British general keen to develop

a colony called Georgia, split his time between governing and

innovating food. He experimented with how weather affected crops,

believing Georgia’s winters were too cold for cotton. They could,

however, support silk, hemp, and flax. The peach that made Georgia

famous didn’t arrive for another hundred years.

George Washington, too, realized he was best at waging revolt

when he took breaks to hoe the soil. Before he was president, the

general studied subtropical agriculture, pleading frequently to

London for seeds. Tobacco did well under his watch, but there was

more money in wheat. To Mrs. Washington’s horror, he spent early

mornings investigating the optimal fertilizer, mixing oddities like

animal manure, mud, and black mold that grew on a hillside near his

house. Count among Washington’s gifts to his future nation his

revelation that cows, rather than horses or sheep, provide the most

potent dung.

Thomas Jefferson, president number three, spent America’s early

days in France. When he returned, he had the foresight to know that

for a new nation to survive, it needed more food. “The greatest

service which can be rendered any country is to add [a] useful plant to [its] culture,” Jefferson wrote in 1800. He particularly liked grain, which was second in value only to oil, but he knew self-sufficiency

required diversity. If the newly created foreign consuls were good for anything, they could send seeds—and consuls in France, England,

Italy, and the Netherlands did. Thomas Jefferson loved fruits of the earth as much as he loved liberty. Which is why, for all his efforts, he sits beside Willie Nelson, crooner of the heartland, in the National Agricultural Hall of Fame.

In America’s infancy, food wasn’t a sector—it was almost the

whole economy. Farmers accounted for 90 percent of the United

States’ labor force in 1790. Fifty years later, they were 60 percent.

And a generation after that, they were just over half (today they’re less than 2 percent). Accounting for America’s swelling population

during that time, from four million to thirty-one million, there were more individual farmers in the late nineteenth century than ever

before (or again) in American history. Because of this, the

government focused an extraordinary amount of attention and

money on agrarian matters. In the years following Abraham

Lincoln’s presidency, courses on horticulture—the era’s equivalent to modern biotechnology—were taught in nearly every university.

Federal officials gave land to states to analyze crops, their diseases, and how to grow them at large scale.

Compared to today’s political campaigns that rise and fall on

money, media, and messaging, the first campaigns were a calculation

of food. The earliest pork from Washington wasn’t pork; it was seeds for corn, wheat, and barley in small envelopes that congressmen

would stuff in their pockets and, when home in their districts, hand out with a wink. In 1881, William G. LeDuc, the agriculture

commissioner, wrote to his boss, Rutherford B. Hayes, that the seed

distribution program was a resounding success. “It is now generally

conceded that the distribution of seeds from this department is doing incalculable good.” It was one way Washington worked directly for

the people, and for a congressman with deep pockets, reason enough

to vote for him again.

—

When Fairchild arrived in December of 1893, Naples greeted him

with an assault on the senses. Loud voices pierced the streets. Horses trotted along, their ankles crusted in dung. To be a foreigner was

distressing. When his steamship, the Fulda, docked, a group of burly men, sweaty, with shimmering muscles, came to unload the baggage,

fighting with one another over every item, and, with grand gestures, demanding tips for their service. “The high-pitched, screaming

voices, the continual gesticulations, and the insistent demands for

money, made it a nightmare to me,” Fairchild recalled.

Outside the port, Naples was filled with an air of laziness that no

breeze could arouse. People walked during the day, sidestepping

piles of uncollected garbage, to sit on the grand seawall that

protected the city from the dull waves of the Mediterranean. A

traveling reporter for the Chicago Sunday Tribune found the city lethargic, lacking drive and passion, as if hung over from the grand centuries of artistic titans and extraordinary scholars of theology.

“Sitting on the sea-wall [in Naples] and dangling one’s legs is not a very remunerative employment, and yet crowds of able-bodied men

spend day after day in this easy occupation and in others that are like it,” he reported to readers back home, many of whom had taken

backbreaking roles in America’s industrial revolution. Italy would

soon experience its own rapid economic growth as a result of advances in steelmaking and cotton milling, but that spurt hadn’t

arrived, and certainly not in Naples. There were hordes of lazzaroni, people who spent their days cooking atop stoves in the street, putting in enough work each week to afford only the macaroni they ate, the

rest of the time filled with smoke, gossip, and catcalls.

Fairchild had gone to Naples without a place to live. Arranging a

room in advance would have required a correspondent, and

corresponding would have required a basic knowledge of Italian. An

Italian painter on board the Fulda returning from America, where he’d exhibited paintings at the World’s Fair in Chicago, sensed

Fairchild’s shock, took pity, and invited Fairchild to join him in a horse-drawn carrozza that clopped through the narrow streets, depositing him at the apartment of the artist’s brother, who

conveniently needed a boarder. The room had a view of Mount

Vesuvius near a new funicular that carried a steam-powered railcar

up a hill.

There was a fascination in the young man, the type one finds when

landing in a foreign place, and he had to remind himself not to gawk at foreign peculiarities: the writing on signs; the sounds of an

unfamiliar language; the people, how they dressed and looked, and

how they seemed not to notice him. Fairchild filled his notebooks

with fits and starts, giving the impression that he stopped every few feet to jot observations. The city was full of “pestiferous

ragamuffins.” His meals of hard bread were “disappointing” and his

silverware “only sketchily washed.” These small snubs were both

memorable and insignificant. What truly delighted him was that, all

around, he could hear nothing but Italian.

He spent the first few nights wandering the streets, first by himself and then with his landlord’s son. They attempted to communicate in

Italian until Fairchild’s piecemeal vocabulary would sputter, and

then they would slip into a theater for an inexpensive play, the kind where people stood and heckled the melodramatic actors. One play

that particularly struck Fairchild had thirteen characters who were

all killed scene by scene in increasingly gruesome ways, until only

two were left, a pair of lovers who declared their devotion in a

horrific double suicide.

The first day Fairchild reported for work, people were expecting

someone older. The Smithsonian’s Zoological Station was a place

where men of science worked in secluded silence, unraveling the great mysteries of biological life. Fairchild, however, had come

without a research goal. He had already achieved his principal

objective, which was to travel somewhere outside the bounds of his

country. All he had when he arrived in Italy was the eagerness of a

twenty-four-year-old ready to stand over a microscope and help

wherever needed.

When his adviser, Paul Mayer, a marine biologist, asked about his

interests, Fairchild told him, “As a boy I watched termites build

nests. But at the department we studied crop diseases.” Mayer

suggested that Fairchild study the cells of algae that grew in the Bay of Naples. Only recently had cells piqued the interest of scientists, particularly how cells divide, seemingly endlessly, suggesting they

could perpetuate infinite life. Every morning, the station’s head

boatman dredged the bay and filled balloons with water that glowed

green in the sunlight. Fairchild spent each afternoon and evening on the highest setting of his microscope, watching the process known as karyokinesis as the cells split.

Meanwhile, outside the lab were unlimited opportunities for

distraction. He spent his evenings watching people in the city’s

Piazza del Plebiscito or wandering to the coast for a view across the water to the island of Capri. In Naples, where pizza was invented,

Fairchild tasted his first cheesy flatbread, a punishing food for first-timers, whose mouths could be scorched with hot, lavalike cheese.

He was enchanted by the various shapes of macaroni. And pastries

were works of history. Naples’ mixed heritage over several centuries from the French, Spanish, and Austrians resulted in flaky, sweet

pastries, yeast cakes drowned in rum, and deep-fried doughballs

known as zeppole, each one an ancestor of the modern doughnut.

Despite the contagion of indolence, there were few places more

picturesque than Naples for one’s first taste of foreign charm. Four thousand years of continuous history left deep footprints in art and culture. The bronze statues; the marble sculptures; the paintings that hadn’t made it to New York City, let alone Manhattan, Kansas. In an

old Bourbon palace known as the Capodimonte, the masterpieces of

artists Fairchild had only read about—Michelangelo, Raphael,

Botticelli—were on display in their original and full-color glory. Art was art, but no twenty-four-year-old could ignore that, often, the

people in the paintings weren’t wearing any clothes.

—

There was seaweed on his desk rotting and stinking the morning

someone knocked on Fairchild’s door. The person walked in with two

thick pieces of paper—calling cards, each engraved with a name.

BARBOUR LATHROP

Chicago, Illinois

RAPHAEL PUMPELLY

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Fairchild first thought the men had left their cards, terrifying in

itself. But there they were, climbing the stairs, at a moment when his room smelled of ocean bacteria and his shirt was stained green with

chlorophyll. He hadn’t remembered Lathrop’s behavior: blustery,

unpredictable, and apathetic of his breach in etiquette at arriving

unannounced. Lathrop answered only to Lathrop, and after his

detour in Morocco, he’d asked Pumpelly, the professor from the

boat, to help him find that young man who wanted to travel.

“The professor and I thought we’d come to see how you were

getting along,” Lathrop said as he mounted the last step and invited himself into the room.

With his military posture and gray mustache, Lathrop impressed

Fairchild anew. Next to Lathrop, Pumpelly somehow looked more

official, standing erect with piercing eyes—a jacket, a vest, a cane.

Fairchild didn’t speak. He had neither time nor anything to say, just the instinct that he had done something wrong, or was about to.

“I’ve been below here many times, but never knew there was anything like this in the upper story,” Lathrop said, answering a

question no one had asked.

He sat. Then took out his cigarette holder and lit a cigarette before asking, “One is allowed to smoke here?”

Lathrop asked him what he was working on.

“Karyokinesis,” Fairchild said, pleased that his first word could be a large one.

“The what?” Lathrop cut in sharply.

“Karyokinesis. The way that a cell divides. I’m trying to observe

the nuclei. I’ve been using the cells of green seaweed from—”

“You told me on the boat that you wanted to go to Java,” Lathrop

interrupted. “Have you given up that idea?”

“For now. The trip is beyond my means.”

“Well, I’ve decided to give you a thousand dollars with which to go

to Java,” Lathrop said before inhaling deeply. “I want you to

understand that I look upon this thousand dollars as an investment,

nothing more. I have had you looked up, and you seem to be all right.

You must understand that this is no personal matter. I want that

clearly understood. It is merely my idea of making an investment in

science.”

Fairchild said nothing. Lathrop inhaled again, sat for another

moment, and then he rose. Before he slipped through the doorway,

he turned around again.

“Oh, and I’d like to have you lunch with me at the Tivoli Hotel at

one o’clock.”

Less than three minutes had passed and the men were descending

the steps.

Fairchild’s head was in a whirl. He tried to make sense of what

had happened. He marveled first at the money, and then at the

reality that he might actually see Java, and then back to the money.

One thousand dollars, the modern equivalent of twenty thousand,

was more than he had ever seen, twice the era’s average salary for a full year. One Christmas, his aunt and uncle had given him fifty

dollars, which to any young man would have felt like a fortune.

Lunch passed quickly, for much of it Lathrop recalling stories

about his travels and triumphs, amusing himself more than anyone

else, pausing characteristically for breaks from chewing to squint his eyes and nod slowly as though dusting off a distant memory.

Fairchild understood his role was to listen, and for that Lathrop enjoyed his company.

After lunch, Lathrop suggested they see Carmen, a French opera about an undisciplined soldier lured away from his wife by a gypsy.

The performance started at nine and lasted five hours, during which

Fairchild was less entertained by the actors than by Lathrop’s

knowing sighs at turns in the plot.

It was three in the morning when they arrived at Fairchild’s house.

In the carrozza, Fairchild waited for Lathrop to finish his final story about the last time he had visited Naples. Lathrop seemed a peculiar man, talking in a flow of running consciousness, unconcerned about

whether he retained his listener’s attention.

Fairchild thanked Lathrop for the evening, then climbed down to

the street.

“Well, don’t you think you’d better have my address?” Lathrop

called after him.

For the money. In Fairchild’s attempt to remain polite, to come

across as deferential and courteous, the money had slipped his mind.

He took out his red notebook and, as Lathrop dictated, wrote the

older man’s address. Barbour Lathrop Esquire. Bank of Scotland, 19

Bishopsgate Street Within, London. E, period, C, period.

Although it had been longer, the second meeting of the two men

confused Fairchild more than the first. It still wasn’t clear whether Lathrop actually liked David Fairchild, or simply saw in him an opportunity to cure his glamorous boredom. And there was the

matter of the money, which Lathrop emphasized was neither a gift

nor a favor, but an investment that he expected to pay off.

How, he didn’t say, because he didn’t know. But as a millionaire,

he could afford to find out later. The transaction would soon turn out to be wise, both for the men and for their country, but it would be

some time before either man knew. As Fairchild turned toward the

door to the house, Lathrop yelled, “Avanti,” and the coachman cracked his whip and whisked the carriage away.