Most of the seeds brought ashore in this wave did not take hold, due to differences in soil and climate. Quality, too, played a role. As members of Congress passed out ever more packages of free seeds to their constituents—as many as forty-nine million packets of vegetable seeds in a year—the reputation of those seeds declined.54 Though many seeds did not catch on, those that did provided the foundations of modern American agriculture, with later introductions being used mainly to improve particular characteristics of established varieties.55 Some nineteenth-century importations now carry on of their own accord, such as the chicory (imported as a coffee substitute) that now graces the margins of rural roads.56 Yet to understand why so many seeds took root in this period, we need to look beyond their adaptive capacity. So many seeds took root because so many were planted. Farmers willingly took a chance on the next big thing, encouraged by the burgeoning agricultural press.
Between 1819 and 1860, at least 259 agricultural magazines were published in the United States. Much of the writing in these publications focused on exciting new seeds and plants.57 The Prairie Farmer ran many such articles, including one recommending Japan as a good place to look for “tender varieties of fruits,” because the Japanese had been working for more than two thousand years to bring southern varieties “degree by degree to their northern limit.”58 The Illinois Farmer also saw a bright future for European plants such as Red Dutch currants and English Red Cane raspberries.59
Government-supported exhibitions and fairs underscored the prospecting message of the agricultural press. The 1876 International Exposition at Philadelphia yielded a variety of foreign seeds for the Agricultural Museum in Springfield. Official reports boastfully alluded to the wide range of places that had yielded seeds: Canada, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Italy, Egypt, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, and New South Wales.60
The search for the next big thing grew so frenzied that some novelty seekers urged caution, Matthias Lane Dunlap among them. Dunlap was a fruit grower in Champaign County who wrote under the pen name Rural. After expressing some skepticism on the virtues of Dioscorea batatas—a Chinese yam said to have roots two feet long and two inches wide—Rural got a suspicious pine box in the mail in 1856.61 “We debated some time, considering whether it was safe to open it. It was too light to contain fire-arms, and had too expensive a finish to contain plants.” Curiosity overcame prudence, and Rural opened the lid. He found, nestled in moss, “a vegetable product twenty-two inches long.” After cutting off the last six inches, he boiled and ate it. Rural reported that it was “equal to the common potato in some respects” but not as good as the sweet potato. Though still skeptical of claims that the yam would someday equal cotton in value, that in fifty years its roots would be so huge that they would have to be “excavated by steam,” Rural planted some sets, which he promised to distribute gratis to his readers.62 Three years later he concluded his report: the “celestial plant” was a bust. Despite its reported success in Europe, it had flopped on his farm. There was no need to “raise a monument to the memory of those great men who have rescued this plant from the Chinese.”63
Dunlap’s dismissive report may have downed the prospects of the Chinese yam, but it did not put a stopper on the larger pattern of biological innovation. Commercial nurseries joined the agricultural press and exhibition circuit in stoking interest in new plants. Especially after the spread of rural delivery services after the Civil War, commercial purveyors hawked their wares through illustrated catalogs.64 These tempted readers with drawings of shiny peppers and luscious tomatoes and exotic names such as Asiatic cauliflowers and Belgian green top carrots.65
Although most of the catalogs that circulated through the rural Midwest came from U.S. nurseries, farmers in search of a competitive edge could buy their seeds direct from Europe. The British seed purveyor William Bull claimed to send its product “to any part of the world,” using the best routes, mail steamers, clipper ships, and railways.66 German companies likewise published English-language catalogs with shipping information for American customers.67
By the late nineteenth century, the agricultural programs and extension offices of land-grant universities had become leading champions of agricultural innovation.68 Pathbreaking though these institutions were, they built on the prior efforts of government prospectors, publicly supported expositions, the agricultural press, and commercial nurseries. By persuading farmers to adopt a wide variety of exogenous plants, these plant purveyors served as nonnativist development agencies. Thanks to their efforts, the roots of midwestern prosperity could be traced to far corners of the world.
Seed catalogs often heralded foreign origins, as seen in this ad for the “Silver King” onion, an Italian onion promised to “mature as early as the large white Italian, or the large Mexican.” The company claimed to have tested it widely on its own ground as well as in “various parts of the United States and Canada,” finding that it did “uniformly well in almost every climate, both warm and cold.”
Wilson’s Seed Catalogue for 1885 (Mechanicsville, Pa., 1885), 9.
The Briggs and Bro’s. seed company of Chicago and Rochester marketed its beets with allusions to Egypt, Erfurt, and France. Horticultural experts would have recognized Erfurt as a major center for German seed production and its export-oriented nurseries as the sources for many imported seeds.
Briggs and Bro’s. Quarterly Illustrated Floral Work (Chicago and Rochester, Jan. 1876), 65.
H. Cannell and Sons of Kent, England, hawked its product through imperial imagery. To buy its seeds meant to be world-class, to share in the laurels (and other plants) offered to England by diminutive and seemingly more localized peoples.
H. Cannell and Sons, Complete Catalogue of Golden Seeds (Swanley, Kent: H. Cannell and Sons, 1898).
ECOLOGICAL UN-AMERICANISM
The alacrity with which the pioneers introduced new plants should not come as a complete surprise because they had, after all, transplanted themselves. For newcomers from Europe, the truly foreign plants were the American ones they discovered on arrival, not the ones that were being introduced. And yet these newcomers also experimented with plants such as imphee and sorgo that they did not know from home. As newcomers in a strange land, nineteenth-century arrivals sought both familiarity and possibility. Given their diverse backgrounds and investments, this led to plenty of cross-pollination in agricultural practice.
The desire to duplicate departed lands and the openness to opportunity that characterized the first century of settlement extended to other means of production besides plants. Fields of fodder fed imported strains of cattle and pigs, Shorthorns and Berkshires prominent among them. Oats fed draft horses, some with a Percheron influence, following importations from the La Perche region of Normandy. Breeders also imported a number of sturdy English Shire horses and Clydesdales from Canada and Scotland.69
Ongoing imports also affected sheep and poultry lines. In the 1870s, the Illinois State Fair offered prizes for Cotswold rams and Spanish, Hamburg, Polish, and French Houdan chickens. It also ran an “Asiatic” poultry competition, with prizes going to “light Brahma,” a Chinese breed with some South Asian admixture.70 Breeders advertised Rouen ducks, Pekin drakes, and blue Andalusians in the Prairie Farmer.71 Ads in the American Swine and Poultry Journal hawked Toulouse geese, Java sparrows, “French fowls,” and Spanish Merino sheep “from the most celebrated and tested strains.”72
Then there were the Italians that swarmed across the Illinois countryside—countless millions of them, descended from imported queens. Queen bees, that is. Whereas Italian people struck nativists as undesirable in the late nineteenth century, Italian bees had a warmer reception. Beekeepers found the offspring of these pollinators to be superior honey gatherers, quieter and more peaceable than native bees, more prolific, and less susceptible to moths.73 Enthusiasts also preferred the Italians’ golden bands to the dull black color of nativ
e bees.74
For first-class chickens, poultry producers turned to varieties with Asian ancestors (among them Brahmas and Cochins), the Houdan breed that originated in France, Leghorns traceable back to Italy, and the Plymouth Rock breed, developed in the United States from a range of immigrant ancestors.
American Swine and Poultry Journal 3 (Nov. 1875).
Not even subsequent introductions of Syrians, Cyprians, Punics, Holy Lands, and Hungarians dislodged the Italians from their hives. “Italians Are the Best,” claimed a report on the various “races” of bees.75
Italian queens, shipped by rail, established gold-banded colonies of pollinators across the Midwest in the late nineteenth century.
American Bee Journal 10 (March 1874), 74.
As imported bees brought new pollination preferences to Illinois flight paths, new underground organisms changed the composition of the soil.76 The worms that wiggled out of the root balls of introduced plants found a virgin land, at least in terms of rival worms, because Ice Age glaciation had frozen competitors out. These largely unremarked newcomers began to change soil structure and chemistry through their digging, defecating, diet, decay, and impact on microarthropods.77 If worms arrived mostly as stowaways, new bacteria strains debuted under the watchful care of chaperones. The Illinois Agricultural Extension service shipped what it referred to as “infected alfalfa soil”—containing nitrogen-fixing bacteria derived from German cultures—to farmers across the state.78 In conjunction with the spread of European pollinators, the new soil makers and nitrogen fixers helped Europeanize the land. And since Europeans had long histories of introducing African and Asian plants, to become more like Europe meant to become more global.
The process of making the midwestern countryside ecologically un-American was hardly isolationist. Nor was it even unilateralist. Although farmers certainly wanted to advance their own competitive advantage through their importations of exogenous plant and animal lines, these importations also fostered cross-border business relationships. By crediting other farmers with domesticating and improving various plants and animals, Illinois farmers acknowledged their indebtedness to agriculturalists elsewhere. Even as they tried to locate their own place in space by figuring out what would prosper on their fields, their efforts to acquire the world’s best germ plasm also taught them about global threads of connection.79
DUNLAP GOES TO GERMANY
By the late nineteenth century, falling prices competed with seed catalogs for farmers’ attention, turning them into a vociferous foreign policy constituency. In hopes of reaching wider markets, they called for low tariffs, an isthmian canal, and other transportation improvements. Less known are their demands for foreign relations representation through commercial agents focused on agricultural markets, agricultural attachés attached to embassies, and, most importantly, consular appointments.80
In the early 1890s, the United States employed about 775 consular officers in foreign posts. These officers did most of the daily work of U.S. foreign relations, issuing passports, administering the estates of U.S. citizens who died overseas, tracking down heirs and fugitives, verifying invoices for tariff purposes, and serving as the U.S. government’s overseas eyes and ears (among other responsibilities). In hopes of advancing production and trade, the Department of State charged consular officers with filing dispatches on about fifty subjects, including agricultural matters.81 Appreciating the value of this large pool of area experts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked consular officers to relay promising seeds and plants, and it disseminated their written reports in its own publications.82
From the early nineteenth century, party hacks regarded consular posts as political plums. Despite the establishment of an examination system in 1895, patronage remained pervasive until President Theodore Roosevelt broadened the merit principle a decade later.83 The desire to reward political allies and build party loyalty explains why places like east-central Illinois became nurseries for consular officers. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed George Scroggs, of the Champaign Gazette, consul at Hamburg in 1879.84 Dr. L. S. Wilcox, a former mayor of Champaign, served as consul general in Hankow, China.85 William R. Grant left a managerial post to serve as a deputy consul in Calgary.86 John M. Gregory, the onetime president of the Illinois Industrial University, was not as fortunate, for his many pleas for an appointment came to naught. Rejected for the post of U.S. minister to Italy, as well as for that of minister to Switzerland and a position in the mission to Belgium, he became a tour guide instead, joining with his wife, Louisa, to offer an exclusive ten-month study trip to Europe for a “select party of ladies.”87
Hiram J. Dunlap, known as H. J. Dunlap, had better connections and luck. Born near Chicago in 1841, he moved at age fifteen with his parents to Savoy, a village southwest of the Champaign County seat. Dunlap’s father, the Dunlap who tested the Chinese yam, had established a nursery and orchard in Savoy, continuing to write on the side.88 H. J. followed in his father’s footsteps. For fourteen years, he ran his own farm, with the help of his wife, Nellie Baker Dunlap (born in Michigan, she had taught in Mississippi during Reconstruction before moving to Savoy).89 In 1874, H. J. Dunlap became the associate editor of the Champaign Gazette. Five years later, he assumed the editorship.90 He proved himself to be a stalwart Republican, including on the protective tariffs so dear to Republican hearts. In 1889, through his connections with Congressman Joseph Cannon, Dunlap won a presidential appointment as the U.S. consul in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland, but then part of Germany).91
In the early twentieth century, as merit reforms passed during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency took hold, the University of Illinois began to offer consular service courses in its business administration program.92 Dunlap, however, had no such formal training. (This may help explain why his superiors admonished him for his sketchy report on “injurious beer mug covers.”) Nevertheless, Dunlap did have several qualifications.93 Besides his Republican Party bona fides and expertise with a pen, Dunlap spoke German, having learned it as a child from his family’s hired help and his attendance at a German-language school.94 According to the press reports, when his friends gathered to bid him goodbye, “Herr Dunlap responded in a German speech.”95
After accepting the post, H. J. traveled to Washington, D.C., for a predeparture briefing. He and Nellie stayed ten days, with friends.96 H. J. called at the State Department, which referred him to the consular bureau. Dunlap reported that “the experience was rather disappointing, for they give you the last few months’ correspondence with your predecessor to read; and as my predecessor, who was spoken of in the Champaign Times a few weeks ago as being so lonesome, died last April, there wasn’t much from him.” Before leaving Washington, he stopped at the White House, to shake hands with the president.97 From there, he and Nellie set forth to New York, and onward to Hamburg. En route to Breslau, the Dunlaps visited Berlin, where H. J. called on W. W. Phelps, the U.S. minister, who has “frequently been in Champaign and made many inquiries about the place.”98
Having assumed his post (and hired Nellie as the consulate’s clerk), Dunlap wrote home to say that the nation’s newest consular officer had never dreamed that he should “represent in an humble manner the greatest nation on earth in one of the chief cities of Poland; but nevertheless, by the grace of Providence and the republican party, here he is.”99 Marveling at his own accomplishment, Dunlap knew he owed his job to his political connections. But in the larger sense, he won his post because his fellow midwestern farmers demanded international representation. With their interests in mind, Consul Dunlap did his best to provide that.
FARMERS FIRST
Then the second city in size in the German Empire, Breslau did not seem an obvious posting for a farmer turned editor of a small-town Illinois newspaper. It was the seat of large manufacturers of woollen, linen, silk, and cotton goods, not a center of agricultural production.100 But this did not keep Dunlap from purs
uing his abiding interest in farming or serving his fellow citizens with interests in this topic. In addition to submitting the required crop reports to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dunlap investigated the undervaluation (for tax purposes) of German sugar shipments.101 He wrote favorably of the cooperative efforts he saw in Breslau, seeing them as a model for U.S. Granges, Farmers’ Alliances, and “kindred associations.”102 On trips into the countryside, Dunlap paid sharp attention to plowing and ditching, the composition of the soil and the size of the plats.103 He noted the economy practiced by Prussian farmers, which he urged farmers at home to emulate. He took a more critical view of labor conditions, and especially of the frequency with which he saw women in the fields with hoes.104
Dunlap lasted less than a year in Breslau. He resigned his position upon being appointed U.S. commercial agent at Fürth, a Bavarian manufacturing center considered a more pleasant and lucrative post.105 As in his prior post, Dunlap escaped the city for the countryside, keeping a keen eye on farming practice. A sample dispatch: Bavarian farmers kept their manure heaps wet, which destroyed the seeds they contained, thereby preventing the propagation of weeds. From a trip to Strasburg: the soil was rich, the country a “good deal like our Illinois prairies,” only without a foot of wasteland and no weeds anywhere.106 On market conditions: Germans were afraid to buy American hams, even though cheaper, because they were afraid they would not taste right. Horse meat was abundant in German cities.107
In 1891, H. J. had terrible news to report in the column he regularly dispatched to Champaign: Nellie had died. He brought her body home for burial. After the funeral, he returned to his post, but not for long.108 In 1893, H. J. moved to Kankakee (about sixty miles north of the Champaign County line), where he published the Kankakee Republican News and courted Elizabeth Frith, known as Bessie. The two married in 1894.109 Dunlap’s experiences as consul appear to have enhanced his political prospects, given that he became a state senator and served as president of the Illinois World’s Fair Commission.110 Yet whatever the attractions of Kankakee, either H. J. missed the life of a consular officer or Bessie keenly wanted to see the world. Maybe both. In 1905, the Dunlaps packed up for a posting in Cologne. They stayed in that city for eight years.111
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