The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  As the U.S. consul in Cologne, Dunlap continued his efforts to advance U.S. interests. He offered marketing advice to U.S. firms and aid to the impecunious Americans who had traveled to Europe as stock tenders on cattle ships, only to find they had no means to return.112 He provided valuable information to his apple-exporting relatives in an official report on bruising in transit.113 His descriptions of crude instruments and backbreaking farming methods alerted U.S. farm implement makers to export opportunities.114

  Yet for all these efforts to advance U.S. interests, Dunlap could not hide his feelings of sympathy toward farmers. In multiple dispatches, H. J. expressed solidarity with their struggles against leechlike merchants, bankers, and shippers. Writing from Breslau, he complained that Germans regularly satirized farmers along with old maids and mothers-in-law. Feeling the “unjustness of such flings,” Dunlap rose to the defense of those who worked the soil.115

  From his post in Fürth, Dunlap deplored the poverty of the peasantry, characterizing it as so extreme that would-be emigrants could not afford passage.116 Although he advocated the free entry of American agricultural goods into Germany, he confessed that the prospect caused him some concern. “What will become of the farmers of this great country, once the gates are opened, is something I cannot predict. They stand in the same relation to the farmers of Illinois, that the manufacturers of the United States stand to those in Europe.” That is, they were at risk of being crushed by foreign competition. Chatting with rural people as they dug their potatoes made him appreciate their vulnerability. When they complained that wealthy manufacturers would use cheap foreign food to keep their operatives’ wages low, shafting German farmers in the process, Dunlap felt the injustice.117 However much Dunlap wanted his associates from home to outcompete their German rivals, he did not want farmers to live in misery, no matter their nationality. Years before the United States entered World War I as an associated power, H. J. Dunlap had begun to imagine a kind of alliance politics that tempered commercial competition with agrarian solidarity.

  ALLIANCE POLITICS

  Consular agents like Dunlap were not the only government agents susceptible to feelings of agrarian solidarity. Such feelings also flowered in the International Institute of Agriculture, founded in 1905. This institute built on the earlier International Commission of Agriculture, established in Paris in 1889, to foster the exchange of data on crop production collected by national statistical offices.118 The institute can also be seen as a response to Grangerist calls for agrarian cooperation.119 As they gathered information on comparative practices, such as the cooperative stores that were spreading across England, Grangers drew attention to farmers’ common interests as a class.120 Grange members were so deeply committed to cooperation across national lines that they endorsed international arbitration and, in 1916, the League of Nations.121

  The instigator behind the International Institute of Agriculture was David Lubin, a California department store magnate turned farmer on the side. Inspired by European cooperative and credit bank movements and Grangerist efforts to organize against the monopoly interests of shippers, bankers, tariff advocates, and commodity traders, Lubin advocated a Chamber of Agriculture that would unite the agricultural classes of all countries in defense of their common interests and human food security.122 The Italian king made the first bid, so the founding conference and subsequent proceedings took place in Rome. Forty-one nations sent delegates, motivated in some cases more by a desire for good relations with Italy than a particular commitment to Lubin’s vision. The United States signaled its support for the cause by signing the treaty and then appointing the determined Lubin to its seat.123

  Although the resulting organization fell short of Lubin’s vision of a unifying world congress of farmers, its charter did reflect his commitment to transnational organization on behalf of rural people. It called for the collection, analysis, and publication of statistical, technical, and economic information on farming, the commerce in agricultural products, and prevailing prices. The charter also charged the organization with tracking farm wages, studying agricultural cooperation, insurance, and credit, and investigating vegetable diseases. Besides the United States, its top-tier contributors by the 1920s included Germany, Argentina, Brazil, China, Turkey, Spain, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Romania, and Russia. Fifty-eight other states contributed, some of them colonial regimes in places such as Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, French Morocco, Italian Somaliland, and the Belgian Congo.

  The International Institute of Agriculture, founded in Rome in 1905, gathered statistics from much of the world. The adhering nations and colonies are depicted without shading; additional colonies and protectorates represented under their auspices are depicted by light shading. Only a smattering of darkly shaded nations—stretching from Haiti to Liberia and Siam—fell outside its reach.

  International Institute of Agriculture, Bulletin of Agricultural Statistics 1 (Nov. 1910), back cover.

  The institute’s reach extended to central Illinois, where the Urbana Courier took note of its proceedings and the University of Illinois subscribed to its Bulletin of Agricultural Statistics.124 If the United States participated in the International Institute of Agriculture largely to advance U.S. farmers’ particular interests, its participation drew the readers of institute reports into collective security matters, for these reports made it clear that plant diseases had implications for food security and little respect for borders.125

  This mix of self-serving financial motives and collective security commitments gave rise to another alliance of particular interest to agriculturalists: the alliance against bad weather. Recognizing the value of accurate forecasts to farmers, the U.S. government created the Weather Bureau in 1870 with about fifty stations. Telegraphic reports from Canada, Mexico, the West Indies, the Azores, and western Europe soon arrived in the Bureau’s Central Office in Washington, D.C., from whence agents distributed them across the country.126 Following the demands of a state farming convention, the Illinois Department of Agriculture called for a “pan-national conference” that would implement a “systematic plan of observation and reports.” The payoffs, it claimed, would be huge: millions of dollars for a few days’ foreknowledge of the weather, “at particular stages of the crops.”127

  In response to such calls, the United States negotiated more bilateral weather information exchanges.128 It also sent delegates to international meteorological conferences, starting with Vienna in 1873. Other international conferences followed: St. Petersburg in 1886, Munich in 1891, Uppsala in 1894. The U.S. Weather Bureau, which had moved from the Army Signal Corps to the Department of Agriculture, hosted its first international conference in 1893.129

  Whereas Dunlap imagined himself to be part of a farming fraternity that extended across national borders, the farmers who pushed for more cooperative efforts did more than profess solidarity. They pioneered tangible forms of alliance politics, justified not only in terms of self-interest, but also in terms of humanity’s need for food.

  IMPERIAL OVERSIGHT

  Taking a closer look at the kinds of alliances of particular interest to rural midwesterners reveals that the supposed isolationists of urban lore were no more neutral than they were go-it-aloners. Although they professed feelings of solidarity with farmers as a class, united in common cause against hunger, they also worked hard to ally themselves with the great imperial powers of the time. In part this was a matter of markets, for European powers, and especially Britain, were the leading purchasers of their exports. Yet midwestern farmers became entangled with European imperialism well before the point of sale.

  We can glimpse some affinities with European imperialism in Dunlap’s bid for one last post. After five years in Cologne, Dunlap wrote to his congressman, Joseph Cannon (then the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives), to say that he was “thoroughly tired of Germany” and wanted to be “transferred to some English speaking place, where the salar
y is larger.” Admitting that $3,500 might be considered a good salary in some quarters, he insisted that it was not adequate for Cologne, where the price of living was high and “we have out of respect to the office and the country we represent to put on a little style, though I assure you in my case it is very little.” He mentioned the Cape of Good Hope as a preferred choice, followed by “some place in Canada like Winnipeg or Vancouver.”130

  Dunlap’s attention to the money to be made by men such as him in places such as the Cape of Good Hope shows that he kept an eye on more than just North Atlantic trade. Looking out on the wider world, he saw European imperialism—with its footholds in South Africa and the Canadian West—as a means to advance his own prospects. He identified more with the Europeans who profited from their overseas holdings than with the non-Europeans they ruled over. These colonial subjects included the Hereros. From 1904 to 1908, the German army killed over sixty thousand indigenous Hereros in southwest Africa, as part of a campaign to open up their land to settlement by German agriculturalists. However sympathetic to German farmers, Dunlap never wrote a word about their empire’s rural victims.131 Out of sight, out of mind, and not one of his responsibilities anyway. His job at the time was to advance U.S. commerce in Cologne, and he stuck to his commercial mission so faithfully that he paid little heed to political matters of any kind, including even Prussia’s rule over Polish subjects, many of them peasants.132 But even if we pardon Dunlap by attributing his oversight more to his position than his politics, his eagerness to rope his own fortunes to European imperialism tips us off to something larger. Dunlap’s feelings of affinity with European empires outpaced his empathy for farmers subject to colonial rule.

  In this respect, Dunlap was not alone. Indeed, while Dunlap focused on what the British Empire might offer specifically to him, bioprospectors and scientific agriculturalists took a larger view as they built selective alliances on the grounds of agrarian solidarity.

  Bioprospecting may not immediately appear to be a form of alliance politics, since it largely involved efforts on the part of government plant prospectors, tourists, missionaries, and consular officers to identify and ship seeds and cuttings. The Department of Agriculture formalized these efforts by establishing a Section (later labeled an Office) of Seed and Plant Introduction, which published its first report in 1898. After screening introduced plants for disease and desirability in test gardens on the East and West Coasts, the Department of Agriculture’s plant propagators distributed them to state experiment stations, agricultural extension offices, and thousands of experimenters and breeders across the country.133 University of Illinois faculty participated in the experimentation movement, testing the suitability of plants such as Turkestan alfalfa on the university’s “curiosity strip” and others in the university’s arboretum.134

  To aid the bioprospecting frenzy, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided instructions on transporting plants, cuttings, and seeds.

  David Fairchild, “How to Send Living Plant Material to America,” United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry, Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction [1913], plates I and VI.

  Most of the plant material tested on such plots did not come from lonely wandering in the woods. It came from networking capacities. Acquisition records credit seeds and plants to foreign horticultural schools, agricultural expositions, experimental stations, private residences, and botanical gardens; to societies, scientists, officials, and military personnel.135 Even the plant prospectors employed by the Department of Agriculture spent most of their time tracking down plants of known commercial value, rather than ones from the wild. Such networking efforts played out in a thoroughly imperial landscape. In their travels through colonial terrain, professional bioprospectors relied on the assistance of European as well as U.S. expats.136 Reporting on the help offered to him in China by missionaries, plant explorer Frank Meyer wrote that “their homes are like oases to me in this yellow land.”137

  Plant prospectors acknowledged their dependence on European imperial power. Reporting from around Hankow on the Yangtze River, Meyer told of taking refuge in the foreign quarter after some toughs attacked him. Despite the uncertainty in the air, he decided he did not need to seek safety in Nagasaki because “there are twelve foreign warships in the harbor and many more along the coast. . . . The last time 100 rowdies were killed here by the foreigners and they got a pretty good lesson. Whenever I come in contact with Chinese I tell them to be very quiet with the foreigners for the next time they would smash China.”138 The defeat of the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War dispirited Meyer, for it shook up the power relations he relied on in his travels: “As you know, the Chinese consider us as rather uncivilized and especially after this ever-to-be-regretted war between the best branch of the yellow and the poorest of the white race, they have lost considerable respect for us. When I walk through the streets like here in Kaiyuan, they even call me nicknames and laugh and sneer.”139

  As the reverberations of the Japanese victory reveal, Meyer and other prospectors were able to search for plant material developed over the millennia by indigenous people because of their privileged status as white Westerners. They gathered even more specimens from colonial agents, traders, and missionaries and, in the independent republics of Latin America, from Spanish-speaking officials. Meyer obtained Siberian tree and shrub seeds from the head forester of the Imperial Russian Domains and still more seeds of “economic plants” from a Russian government agronomist.140 Many of the agricultural schools and botanical collections that he and his colleagues benefited from were colonial institutions. “Wherever the British settle, they seem to create a public garden of some kind, and Karachi was no exception,” noted Fairchild.141

  Bioprospectors did not have to travel to colonies to access imperial collections, for the metropolitan botanical collections started in the eighteenth century offered choice pickings, too. Along with stocking public collections such as the Royal Gardens at Kew, Europeans turned private gardens and fields into experimental plots, from whence U.S. prospectors could procure promising plants.142 Though native to Mesoamerica, the tomato varieties cultivated in the Midwest can be traced back mainly to England.143 To acquire Turkestani, Uzbeki, Afghan, Chinese, and Korean seeds thought to be climatically suitable for the Midwest, bioprospectors in search of a shortcut scoured western Russia.144

  Imperial infrastructures facilitated transport as well as acquisition. “Economic plants” journeyed to the United States the same way that bioprospectors had traveled to them: on imperial steamship routes. When the United States did not have parcel-post agreements with specific countries, bioprospectors routed some specimens through a dispatch agent in London and others from China through Siberia by the Russian postal service.145

  Bioprospectors might write of their “philosophy of a free exchange of plant varieties between the different nations of the world,” but they knew full well that these exchanges were uneven. The only true exchanges that Fairchild noted were the ones he established with other white men, such as the missionaries he met at Canton Christian College. Such exchanges did contain the possibility of enhancing agricultural production in South China, but only through the enhancement of missionaries’ influence.146 Tellingly, the European and U.S. botanists who mined Latin America for plants directed their publications to North Atlantic scientific audiences, not to farmers or scientists in Latin America.147 The Americans who curated plants from around the tropics in a new nursery on the outskirts of Manila published their catalog in English, the language of the U.S. occupation.148

  The connections that U.S. plant prospectors forged with European imperial agents stand out in even starker relief when contrasted with their relations to the people who had actually developed the plants they sought. Collectors in metropolitan centers looked down on European peasants and they disdained non-Western agriculturalists as lowlier still.149 Their rare acknowledgments of non-Western ex
pertise reveal unabashed surprise: “As I learned a little Malay,” wrote Fairchild, “I was astonished when chatting with the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese working in the garden to realize their knowledge of the plants.”150 Regarding farmworkers as mere menials, prospectors credited place, rather than people, for producing plants of value. In praising North China as “a veritable Klondyke of vegetable gold,” Meyer made it seem as if the land alone had produced the nuggets he sought.151 If anyone deserved to profit from this Klondyke, it was the prospector. “The whole world is mine!” exulted Meyer from the field in China.152 And from Manchuria: “I, here in my solitudes, love to call myself a builder of an empire.”153

  That empire extended to Champaign, where prior to World War I, about five hundred farmers had begun to plant soy from Japan for hay, seed, silage, hogging down, lambing down, and green forage. As early as 1902, a student essayist at the University of Illinois was urging soy as a “profitable ration” for hogs, as a protein-rich adjunct to corn. Within a generation, central Illinois had become a biculture commodity zone, its miles of corn checkered by soy.154