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Tutti Frutti season fall 2006
Fran Beauman • Mats Bigert • Ellen Birrell • Irene Cheng • Robert Connelly • Brian Dillon • Fallen Fruit • Joshua Glenn • Adam Leith Gollner • Mister Justice Horace Gray • Sabrina Gschwandtner • Jeffrey Kastner • Chris Kubick • Kavior Moon • Sina Najafi • Celeste Olalquiaga • Frances Richard • Barry Sanders • Andrew F. Smith • Christopher Turner • Larry Tye • Anne Walsh • McKenzie Wark • Margaret Wertheim • Anna Von Mertens cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. 55 Washington St, # 327 Our survival is dependent on support from foundations and generous individuals, Brooklyn NY 11201 USA such as you (flattery is apparently a very good tactic for this sort of thing). Please tel + 1 718 222 8434 consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Contributions to Cabinet are fax + 1 718 222 3700 fully tax-deductible for those who pay taxes to Uncle Sam. Donations of $25 or email [email protected] more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue, and those above $100 will www.cabinetmagazine.org be acknowledged for four consecutive issues. Checks should be made out to “Cabi- net” and sent to our office address. Please mark the envelope, “Life’s not a bowl of Fall 2006, issue 23 cherries but this will help.”
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Contents © 2006 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights Back cover: Sign forbidding durians on Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit. The in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works fruit’s pungent odor, which can be detected half a mile away by animals, has been contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their described as “pig-shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock” by travel thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and artists, and food writer Richard Sterling. Novelist Anthony Burgess wrote that dining on let alone the intellectually overripe editors of Cabinet. durian is like eating vanilla custard in a latrine. COLUMNS MAIN
7 Object Lesson / Abject Object 21 vIrus Camp Celeste Olalquiaga Brian Dillon Out and down in Paris The story of the Common Cold Unit
11 Colors / Scarlet 27 Letter Bombs Joshua Glenn Christopher Turner Our drug of sex and death Gerhard Zucker’s rocket post
13 Ingestion / Talking Turkey 33 Artist Project: As the Stars Go By Jeffrey Kastner Anna Von Mertens Andrew F. Smith on the reluctant star of Thanksgiving 38 A Brief History of String 18 Inventory / F is for Foley Sabrina Gschwandtner Anne Walsh & Chris Kubick From the eruv to the quipu The indexical majesty of the sound effects catalogue 43 Why Things Don’t Fall Down: An Interview WIth Robert Connelly Margaret Wertheim The forms and functions of tensegrity
49 the Beavers and the Bees Irene Cheng Intelligent design and the marvelous architecture of animals
55 tO the Vector the Spoils McKenzie Wark Gaming, outside The Cave™
60 Feet of Genius Christopher Turner Einstein’s cobbler complex fruits AND
63 Watch Out for the Top Banana POStcard Larry Tye Francis Darwin Edward Bernays and the colonial adventures of the United Fruit Company BOOkmark Jessica Green 69 Fallen Fruit To prepare you for when Cabinet goes weekly Matias Viegener Help yourself
73 thoreau’s Wild Fruits Frances Richard A philosopher among the huckleberries
77 Strange Fruit Ellen Birrell The citrus bud mite as sculptor
82 It’s a Fruit, Goddamn It! Barry Sanders The old man and the tomato
88 It’s a Vegetable, Goddamn It! Mr. Justice Gray The 1893 US Supreme Court weighs in on the Great Tomato Controversy
90 Orange CRUSH Kavior Moon Three festivals
94 the King of Fruits Fran Beauman The pineapple and the aristocrat
99 Sweet Tart: An Interview with Adam Leith Gollner Sina Najafi Conquering sourness with the miracle fruit
103 Fruit of the Whine Mats Bigert Sweden’s pacifier trees
Contributors
Fran Beauman graduated with a degree in History from Cambridge University culinary history. His latest work, The Turkey: An American Story, is scheduled and now writes and hosts for television. Her first book, The Pineapple: King for release from University of Illinois Press in October 2006. He can be reached of Fruits, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2005. She divides her time through
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet, and writes regularly for Frieze, Modern Paint- Margaret Wertheim is director of the Los Angeles–based Institute For Figuring, ers, and Art Review. His memoir In the Dark Room (Penguin) won the inaugural an organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of figures and Irish Book Awards non-fiction prize, 2006. He is working on Tormented Hope: figuring techniques. Also a science writer, she pens the “Quark Soup” column Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published in 2008. for the LA Weekly, and is currently working on a book about the role of imagina- tion in theoretical physics. See
Horace Gray (1828-1902) was an American jurist. Gray was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1881, and served on the Court for 24 years, retiring in 1902.
Sabrina Gschwandtner is a New York–based artist who works with film, video and textiles. She received her B.A. in art and semiotics from Brown University and is currently writing a book on knitting. She will exhibit a knit and text instal- lation at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, in January 2007.
Jeffrey Kastner is an independent writer and senior editor of Cabinet. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kavior Moon is an editorial assistant of Cabinet.
Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet.
Celeste Olalquiaga is the author of Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibili- ties (University of Minnesota Press, 1992) and The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (Pantheon, 1998). She is currently writing a book on petrification. For more information and to contact Olalquiaga, visit “Celeste’s World” at
Frances Richard is a poet who writes frequently about contemporary art. She teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn.
Barry Sanders is Professor of the History of Ideas at Pitzer College, of the Cla- remont Colleges. He is the author of fourteen books. The latest, written with Francis D. Adams, is titled Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African-Americans in a White Man’s Land, 1619–2000 (HarperCollins, 2004). Currently writing a book on the disappearance of the human being in the nineteenth century, he can be found eating heirloom tomatoes, when he gets the chance, with a little Cretan oil and balsamic vinegar in the company of his wife and daughter in his favorite political outpost—Portland, Oregon.
Andrew F. Smith teaches culinary history and professional food writing at the New School in Manhattan. He serves as the General Editor of the Food Series at the University of Illinois Press and is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclope- dia on Food and Drink in America. He has authored or edited eight books on COLUMNS “Object Lesson,” a column by Celeste Olalquiaga, reads culture Object lesson / Abject Object against the grain to identify striking illustrations of a historical pro- Celeste Olalquiaga cess or principle. / “Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Ingestion“ How to get rid of waste is a basic challenge for cities is a column that explores food within a framework informed by and bodies, parallel systems whose well-being depends aesthetics, history, and philosophy. / “Inventory” is a column that on the fluid transit of what comes in and what goes out, examines a list, catalogue, or register. avoiding excess/toxic retention on the one hand, and depri- vation/dysenterial depletion on the other. French royals used to deal with this problem in a perfectly sovereign way: they would allow human excretions to accumulate next to their dwellings until the stench reached intolerable proportions, and then calmly abandon the palace or castle in ques- tion, taking their potties (usually hidden under the thrones, whence the expression, “sitting on the throne”) elsewhere. Animals approach the elimination problem differently. Cats, it is said, cover their stools so as not to leave any traces for potential enemies. Dogs evidently don’t share this refined ancestral instinct. Yet not so long ago in evolutionary terms, man’s best friend would eat its prey’s droppings, thereby camouflaging its own smell so as to surreptitiously approach an unsuspecting victim. Coprophagia isn’t a canine exclu- sive, either: rabbits gobble their turds to make the most of their nutrients, while koalas and elephants feed their feces to their young to transmit digestive bacteria. Animals use their ordure for marking territory and gathering information (who, when, and how), and humans appropriate it for construction, fertilization, and combustion—as cow dung proves so well. While animal waste is a prime commodity in the eco- system, human excrement is considered repugnant and worthless, except for purposes of medical analysis. Its removal is a massive undertaking compared by Dominique Laporte in Histoire de la merde (1978) to the socializing role of language: juxtaposing a selection of French literary and official texts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth cen- turies, Delaporte argues that the transit from Latin to French as the official state language was not only symbolically intertwined with, but also as gradual and painful as, the pro- cess of dissuading citizens from throwing their excrement out the window. If Rome boasted of its cloaca maxima as the embodiment of civilization two millennia ago, Paris has finally been able, in the last few hundred years, to get its shit (or almost all of it) together. Contemporary French cleanliness, while certainly less obsessive than that of New Worlders, is nevertheless unfairly berated: Paris is not only one of few cities in the world to offer street toilets (coin-operated service soon to be available for free), but has also seen the invention of two supremely effective modern cleansing devices: bidets and toilet paper. Although not as culturally catchy as their disposable coun- terpart, bidets (those oblong basins with built-in douches for personal hygiene) go back at least 250 years, when such a meuble de toilette was recorded as part of Madame de Pompadour’s 1751 expenses. The term bidet—which derives from the ancient French verb bider, to trot—typically designated a small saddle horse (whereby the association of shape and posture with the fixture), with related usages including “donkey” (Rabelais, 1534), “revolver” (1550) and bidet de compagnie, a small horse employed to carry the exhibiting their heritage, the French must be the only people infantry’s tents in the days when war was still a body-to- to have built a museum to their own merde. Comfortably body matter. Despite their popularity in those American seated at the edge of the Pont d’Alma (where Lady Di tragi- epitomes of domestic bliss, the modern bathrooms of the cally met her own end), the Musée des Égouts de Paris is a 1950s, the American Medical Association in subsequent monument to a culture so invested in food and drink that it decades warned against bidets as hazardous, since bacteria fastidiously studies each and every step in their processing. could accumulate when they were not properly cleaned. Discussion of the production, acquisition, preparation, and Needless to say, this prohibition came much to the chagrin presentation of food often takes up its whole period of con- of a female population whose intimate parts bidets happily sumption in banquets that can last several hours, depending service in more ways than one—jealousy probably being at on the mood of the diners—rather than on contingencies the core of this radical and unfortunate ban. such as time and money, neither of which will ever prevent Quite different was the fate of that lasting invention, a good French meal from lasting as long as there is a steady toilet paper. Evolving from the fourteenth-century toilette supply of cigarettes, wine, and juicy items to criticize. or tellete—a piece of cloth used for wrapping merchandise Given this penchant for ingestion, it should not be sur- that often included objects of personal care (from toile, prising that the “outcome” be considered if not equally, then cloth, and tisser, weaving)—toilette was gradually applied at least relatively, worthy of interest. Conceived by the man to the elements and very act of washing and grooming, who overhauled the Parisian sewage system, Eugène Bel- producing such well-known items as savon de toilette, eau grand (1810–1878), the Musée des Égouts was inaugurated de toilette and in 1902, papier toilette. In 1945, probably as in 1908 as the Musée sanitaire, later known as the Musée a contraction of the term cabinet de toilette, toilette became d’hygiène générale, which eventually changed river sides a euphemistic name for that most denigrated of spaces, and adopted its current name. The institution pays tribute les toilettes, the WC, john, can, rest room, comfort station, to urban burdens. Scarcely 1,000 meters long, yet probably girl’s—or boy’s—room, etc. the soberest (not a trace of golden leaf or other baroquisms More scatological than eschatological (eschatology here) and most odoriferous of all French museums, this is a fascination with the end of the world; scatology with marvel of the plumber’s art provides a unique and absorb- the end-product of intestinal activity), and always proud of ing history of metropolitan development according to fecal disposal needs. Installed within the sewage system itself, previous page: Technical drawings of lead and iron pipes used in the construc- the museum allows due admiration of sorting, filtering, and tion of the sewers of Paris. The full set of pipes are available in all their glory in distributing mechanisms, as visitors breathe in the triumphs Paul Wéry’s Assainissement des Villes et Égouts de Paris (1898). of municipal engineering on its bottom line. above: Engraving by Jules Pelcoq of boat rides offered through the modernized Now about 150 years old, the Parisian sewers or sewers of Paris as part of the 1867 Universal Exposition. égouts (from e-gout, to distill drop by drop) are the crown- ing achievement of a system primitively instated more than The same success story cannot be told regarding the seventeen centuries before. The first grand égout, running excrement of homo erectus’s alter ego, the ubiquitous down what is now the Boulevard Saint-Michel, was built domesticated mutt, who is invariably present at the French in the Gallo-Roman city of Lutetia, before there was even table—as a voyeur, not a delicacy—although no respectable had a rive droite, and was destroyed in the third century by garçon would consider enforcing the dress code in this case. Germanic barbarians—who not only totally lacked in toilet (Only after sharing a New Year’s dinner with one such crea- training, but flung their sheitze at others. Two drainage sys- ture at table did I feel fully accepted into French society. My tems were developed in the “Dark Ages” (perhaps so-called gluttony later made me sick as a dog, but that was a small because of the “used” or “black” waters—as they are known price to pay for the welcome.) Alas, many Parisians don’t in French and Spanish, respectively—that strutted their stuff think twice about allowing their canine counterparts to soil down unpaved streets). One sewer paralleled the Montaigne streets and sidewalks. Tourists may put up with tiny, unven- St. Geneviève on the right bank, and the other was routed tilated restaurant facilities, whose operating instructions are through the Arsenal basin (formerly a tributary of the Seine) cryptic at best, but dogshit succeeds where such cabinets on the left. Both evacuated directly into the Seine, which d’eau fail: after slipping on one of the inevitable mounds— was, of course, also the main source of drinking water. 650 accidents are reported per year—the visitor finally loses Until the nineteenth century, however, the only health patience with French public hygiene. hazard fully recognized was the reeking open sewer. To be fair, Parisians have put up a struggle to eradicate Although the conduits began to be covered as early as this civic phenomenon. In-your-face ad campaigns on TV the fourteenth century, the majority of the system would and in the cinema, and, particularly, onerous fines (183 not be fully subterranean until the early 1800s. When the euros per dump) are gradually achieving what the moto- public plumbing was finally buried, it created a twenty-five- crottes (“shit-cycles” or ride-on pooper-scoopers) valiantly kilometer-long underground purgatory pungently evoked by attempted between 1985 and 2004. Painted the standard Victor Hugo in Les Misérables (1862), in the chapter aptly sanitation-department bright green, these truly French con- entitled “L’intestin de Léviathan”: traptions—consisting of a motorbike, a container box, and a hose—were supposed to rid the city of its most unpleasant Winding, fissured, unpaved, cracked, full of quagmires, décor, literally vacuuming turds off the ground. Operated by broken by strange elbows, ascending and descending with- sanitation workers, for whom regular garbage pickup must out rule, fetid, savage, ferocious, submerged in darkness, have appeared far more appealing, the 140-strong army of with scars on its pavements and gashes on its walls, grue- motocrottes was scarcely a threat to the sixteen tons of crap some, such was, viewed retrospectively, the old sewer of deposited daily by 200,000 pooches. After a good part of the Paris. Ramifications in all directions, crossings of trenches, fleet mysteriously burned in 2002, the city decided to aban- branches, goose-tracks, stars, as in mines, caecums and cul- don this strategy, to the relief of sanitation workers, street de-sacs, arches covered with saltpetre, infected pits, scabby exudations on the walls, drops falling from the roof, darkness; walkers, and pesky mongrels alike. nothing equalled the horror of this old excremental crypt; the “The enormous blind mole, the past” can thus be appre- digestive apparatus of Babylon, a den, a trench, a gulf pierced ciated in many guises, and the original abject object, shit, is with streets, a titanic mole-hill, in which the mind fancies one of them, as the study of coprolites, or fossilized dumps, that it sees, crawling in the shadows, amid the filth which has strives to show. As for those too prudish or anal to admit once been splendor, that enormous blind mole, the past. that defecation is a part of life, the Indian fable of the man who sought redemption might come in handy: counseled by It wasn’t until a cholera epidemic exploded during the 1830s a wise hermit to find something more vile than himself, the that the city’s septic situation was seriously reconsidered, man noticed his own “number two.” He was on the verge leading to its massive overhaul and expansion in the second of gathering it when the caca begged him not to, claiming half of the nineteenth century. The renovation proceeded that it was once a delicious pastry and had been reduced under Napoleon III, by order of the same Baron Haussmann to this foul state after coming in contact with the man only who transformed Paris from a medieval maze into a modern once. What worse fate could possibly await, were the man grid, and was duly executed by the aforementioned engi- to touch it again? Enlightened by this encounter, the seeker neer, Belgrand. By 1878, the sewer canals had grown to 600 became the most humble of men. kilometers, that is, 300 times their former length. Nowadays, they extend 2,100 kilometers (roughly the distance between Paris and St. Petersburg) in a complex network that also comprises running water (drinking and non-drinking), telephone lines, and part of the heating system. Eighteen thousand bouches d’égouts (sewer “mouths”) and 26,000 regards (“viewing-points,” used to access and inspect the system on the spot) attest to the anthropomorphic exten- sion of the city’s bowels to mouths and eyes, in truly Rabelaisian fashion. colors / Scarlet has a color, that is, it’s flame-red, or scarlet. This unname- Joshua Glenn able phenomenon (YHWH means “I am who I am”) seems to possess and inflame Moses: when Moses comes down from When paranoid types encounter a word as enduring and Mount Sinai after spending 40 days with YHWH, “he was pervasive as scarlet (OF, escarlate; It., scarlatto; ON, skarlat; not aware that his face was radiant”(Ex 34:29), and forever mod. Gr. skarlaton; Serbian, skrlet; etc.), we sit up and take after, one reads, he wears a veil when he’s out in public (Ex notice. 34:33–34). What does YHWH want? To shape the Hebrews A signifier used nowadays to refer to a vivid red color into a nation unlike other nations, one with no king but inclining to orange or yellow, scarlet is believed to be an YHWH; to reveal Its laws to the Hebrews; and, oddly enough, alteration of the Persian saqalat (saqirlat, in modern Arabic), to instruct the Hebrews in exacting detail on how to erect a meaning a high-quality cloth, usually dyed red. Not just any tabernacle where It will dwell. red, though! In non-industrial societies, flame-red scarlet Does this take-me-to-your-leader business put anyone symbolizes fertility and vitality. Color therapists consider in mind of JHVH-1 (JEHOVAH), the evil, godlike space crea- scarlet a vasoconstrictor, arterial stimulant, and renal ener- ture dreamed up by the parodic Church of the SubGenius? gizer: they employ it to raise blood pressure, stimulate No surprise there, because in several important respects erections, increase menstruation, and promote libido. And in YHWH does resemble an extraterrestrial. Like the radioactive our popular culture, it’s associated with fallen women (The alien in the movie Repo Man, YHWH can’t be directly viewed Scarlet Letter) and those women whom we’d like to see fall by the Hebrews. It’s kept under lock and key in a protective (Scarlett O’Hara, Scarlett Johansson, Miss Scarlet from the containment sphere of sorts: the tabernacle. Though the boardgame “Clue”). It is an intoxicating, maddening hue. Hebrews have fled into the wilderness with only a few pos- But if scarlet is reminiscent of sex, it’s also reminiscent sessions, throughout Exodus YHWH demands from them of death. Since the days of Genghis Khan, poets have mar- rare and specific materials for his dwelling place. First and veled at how poppies as scarlet as blood tend to spring up foremost, It orders them to bring offerings of “blue, purple, in war-torn meadows; that’s why veterans wear poppies on and scarlet” (Ex 25:4), meaning dyes derived (in the case Memorial Day. And recent archaeological discoveries in the of blue and purple) from shellfish that swarm in the waters Middle East suggest that scarlet has symbolized death for of the northeast Mediterranean, and (in the case of scarlet) nearly as long as humans have engaged in symbolic think- from Dactylopius coccus, the cochineal bug, as well as from ing: lumps of ocher found near the 90,000-year-old graves the various caterpillars and larvae that feed on cochineals. in the Qafzeh Cave in Israel, scholars have claimed, were Now, the scarlet pigment harvested from cochineals carefully heated in hearths to yield a scarlet hue, then used and their predators is a compound called carminic acid, in ritual activities related to burying the dead. which—according to chemical ecologists—functions as a Thus in the history of symbolic thought, scarlet has protective substance. So when YHWH tells Moses that It meant both Eros and Thanatos, Sex and Death, the conflict- wants Its tabernacle and Its door to be constructed of saqa- ing drives that—according to Freud—govern every aspect lat, and that furthermore It wants the ark in which It lives of human activity. But what if we’ve got it backwards? to be surrounded by more saqalat (Ex 26:1,36 and 27:16), What if scarlet caused us to become passionately fixated on It is obviously sterilizing Its environment. YHWH goes on to transcending ourselves, via merging with others in the act design the vestments of its priests, also of richly dyed cloth, of sex, or by killing and being killed? What if scarlet was a and It forbids anyone “unclean” to enter the tabernacle: drug—like rhoeadine, the sedative in scarlet poppies used any priest who has become unclean through contact with by the god Morpheus, and the Wicked Witch of Oz—first other Hebrews, YHWH insists, must wash himself in scarlet. distilled in the ancient Middle East? What if saqalat was not Leviticus, a book dedicated entirely to the special duties of merely a luxury item but an intoxicant that once possessed YHWH’s priests, seems to suggest that scarlet dye was also entire peoples and changed the course of history? used by the priests to infect others with what we might call At the risk of being flippant, one might go so far as to the YHWH virus. In Leviticus 14, for example, we read that suggest that this crackpot theory makes sense of the Old YHWH instructed the Levites to use a length of scarlet-dyed Testament. cord to sprinkle liquids onto the open sores of any ailing Hebrews. As we shall see, the scarlet cord, which func- • • • tioned something like a syringe, would become an important symbol for the Hebrews. Let’s face it: the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, authored by Moses himself, tells a far-out story. Skipping over Genesis, the prequel to the main narra- opposite: Pregnant female cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), Arequipa, tive (it’s The Hobbit, if you will, to Moses’ Lord of the Rings), Peru. The insect, which lives on cacti from the genus Opuntia, is a parasite that we read in Exodus that the author, an adopted Egyptian is incapable of movement and produces carminic acid to deter predation by prince who came to sympathize with the multiracial com- other insects. The acid is extracted from the insect’s body and eggs to make munity of slaves known as Hebrews, encountered an scarlet cochineal dye, primarily used as a food coloring and in cosmetics. 11 entity “in flames of fire from within a bush”: If God Photo David McLain/Aurora. There is a great deal more of this kind of thing in Kings—record Israel’s rise and fall. Judges portrays a kind of Leviticus and also in Numbers, an account of the Hebrews’ anarchist utopia unlike any other nation (i.e., an exploitative nomadic existence in the Middle East following their initial monarchy), because it could have only one king: YHWH. organization at Sinai. But in Numbers, YHWH finally reveals Early in Samuel, however, the Israelites bring YHWH’s ark his plan to the Hebrews: they are to invade Canaan. Why? into battle against the Philistines, and it is captured. For Because Canaan, later called Phoenicia, was a land where twenty years, the ark remains outside its protective taberna- the dyeing industry was of central importance to the econ- cle, and diseases follow it everywhere (1 Sam 5:6). It seems omy (both names in fact mean “land of purple”); and YHWH correct to assume that YHWH, unprotected by saqalat, was must have desired to corner the market. Having possessed destroyed at some point during this period. Perhaps this is the minds and bodies of the Hebrews via his priests’ scarlet what Philip K. Dick was getting at in Our Friends from Frolix cords, YHWH organizes them into a military camp and they 8, in which a character announces, “God is dead. They found march from Sinai as Its conquering army. The only problem his carcass in 2019. Floating out in space near Alpha.” is that the Hebrews keep defying YHWH: after thirty-nine The Hebrews, meanwhile, minds no longer clouded by years, they still haven’t invaded Canaan, and the old guard whatever ego-obliterating substance they’d received via the of tabernacle insiders is dying off. In Deuteronomy, the final priests’ scarlet cords, ceased to obey YHWH’s injunction that book of the Pentateuch, Moses makes a last-ditch series of they should have no other king. Immediately after we learn speeches urging the Hebrews to remain faithful to YHWH, of the ark’s capture, we read that Samuel, the most distin- and then dies himself. guished of Israel’s judges, was approached by a committee of Hebrews who demanded, “Now appoint a king to lead us, • • • such as all the other nations have.” Samuel anointed Saul, who proceeded to do what kings everywhere have always This might have been the end of the history of YHWH on done: he built a standing army, invaded other countries, and Earth, were it not for the efforts of Joshua, a Hebrew strong- exploited the populace. By the end of 1st and 2nd Kings, we man who got his start standing guard outside the first, cannot help but agree with the Hebrew prophets. Alas, Israel temporary tent that Moses set up for YHWH. Joshua leads became a nation like all the other nations. the Hebrews across the Jordan into Canaan, occupies the kingdoms of Og and Sihon, and sends spies into the fortified • • • kingdom of Jericho. At this transitional moment in the Book of Joshua (and the history of mankind), sex and death play a So what role does scarlet play in our lives today? We crucial role. Rahab, a prostitute, shelters Joshua’s spies and Americans have always enjoyed portraying ourselves as a delivers to them the intel that the Canaanites are terrified new Israel, but these days it’s only too apparent that we’re of the Hebrews and YHWH. The spies then inform Rahab the empire-building Israel about which Isaiah lamented. that when the Hebrews take Jericho, she can spare the Not only that, we’re a nation of sex and death addicts, rico- lives of her family by hanging something out of her window. cheting from one extreme to another—anorexia/obesity, Remember what it was? That’s right: a scarlet cord. Puritanism/pornography, sloth/war. Why? Call it an attempt Joshua and the Hebrews conquered Jericho and went to recapture the annihilating highs and lows experienced on to seize control of all the hill country and the Negev, thus thousands of years ago by the Hebrews. Like them, we’re gaining control of the area’s dye industries. The next three only happy when we’re drinking the scarlet Kool-Aid. major books of the Hebrew Bible—Judges, Samuel, and
12 INGESTION / TALKING TURKEY Jeffrey Kastner
From deli sandwich standby to familiar symbol of the American Thanksgiving holiday, the turkey’s current-day culinary ubiquity is actually the product of a remarkable geographic and economic odyssey, one that in many ways parallels the exploration and settlement of its New World home. In his new book, The Turkey: An American Story, food historian Andrew F. Smith traces this history—from the con- quistadors’ first contact with the bird in Mexico and its rapid adoption as a food throughout Europe to the turkey’s return, via the first settlers in America, to its native land, where it would eventually become the celebrated centerpiece of a new national holiday. Jeffrey Kastner spoke to Smith by telephonein June 2006.
Your book starts with a distinction between the only two tur- key species that survived from prehistoric times—the ocel- lated turkey and the common turkey. Which one became the domesticated turkey we know today?
The ocellated turkey thrives only in Honduras, Guatemala, and Southern Mexico—it’s a very narrow range—and despite repeated attempts, it has never been domesticated. The larger group is the common turkey—Meleagris gallopavo— which includes six different varieties in the United States and Mexico and Canada today, and from two of these variet- 13 ies the domesticated turkey emerged. Let’s talk about domestication. You note that there’s some America many Indian groups ate turkey. At the same time, archeological evidence of turkey domestication quite early some tribes like the Pima, the Papago, the Cheyenne, and on in Mesoamerica. the Hopi quite emphatically refused to eat turkeys, though the Hopi considered their eggs a delicacy and turkey bones The archeological record isn’t good enough to draw any and feathers were frequently used in religious ceremonies. clear conclusions. You look at the bones of wild and domesticated turkeys and they’re almost exactly the same. So how did the turkey get to Europe? Now if feathers survive, then you can get some indication of domestication: if they’re white-tipped, the birds most European explorers had no common way of describing or likely were fed a diet of corn, and corn doesn’t grow in the naming New World plants and animals, so when you’re wild—so you know there is some connection between these examining early records of voyages, you’re never exactly particular turkeys and humans. If you have eggshells nearby, sure what is being described. And there’s a linguistic prob- that can indicate domestication. It looks as if the turkey was lem with the turkey. In most European languages, it was domesticated twice—in what is now Mexico and in what is named after the peafowl. In English, the word turkey itself now the American Southwest. appears before 1492, but it most likely refers to the Guinea fowl, which originated in West Africa. The peafowl, the These pre-Columbian domestications occurred in the first Guinea fowl, and the turkey are all very closely related genet- few centuries AD. What happens between then and when ically, so it is understandable that they would be confused, the Europeans arrive? but it is very difficult examining the record to determine when the turkey really arrived in Europe. That said, the most We do have archeological evidence of wild turkeys in North likely answer to the question is that the Spanish brought America beyond the American Southwest and they go back turkeys back to Spain and Italy after Cortés’s invasion of several thousand years. We know the wild turkey Mexico in 1519. 14 was part of the diet of Mesoamerica and in North And you mention that the root “turk” was in some sense syn- made those observations were professionals who accurately onymous with “exotic.” described a lot of other things, and there’s no reason why turkeys wouldn’t be that fat—they don’t really have any natu- Yes. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Turkey controlled all ral enemies. So, obviously, settlers preferred wild turkeys, of Northern Africa and it is quite possible that the Guinea and they were so plentiful. There were millions in the wood- fowl could have come through the Eastern Mediterranean lands of Eastern North America, in the river valleys of the and been named after the Turks. But it’s only the English Midwest and Ohio, in Texas and the Southwest. And wild that called them that. So the answer is there’s no good turkeys were so easy to catch. You could do it with dogs and answer, other than to say the word turkey referred to both horses—you didn’t even need a gun, you could catch them the Guinea fowl and what we think of as the turkey today. with a noose or a net. And from descriptions alone, it’s almost impossible to tell them apart—all these birds are part of the pheasant family, That doesn’t produce much incentive to raise domesticated and these two birds were in England at the same time. The turkeys. When does that begin in the colonies? turkey is a larger bird that’s much easier to raise—it requires virtually no care at all—and it tastes better. As soon as colonists exhausted the wild supply, when they I had always understood that New World foods took killed them all off! And, of course, the slaughter was incredi- centuries to be adopted in the Old World, but this wasn’t the ble. If you look at the records in Massachusetts, for example, case with the turkey. Within a matter of twenty years of the there were wild turkeys everywhere—and within fewer than Spanish encounter with the turkey, it was a common part seventy years of the European settlement, observers are ask- of the European food system—that is an incredibly short ing, “Where did all the turkeys go?” And as time goes on, period of time. Part of the reason was the existing cultural the domesticated turkey gains in weight so that by around vision of the peacock, which was the iconic food of Europe 1750, domesticated turkeys and the dwindling number of at the time. It was a gorgeous bird: eating them was about wild turkeys that are left are pretty much the same size. And show and a demonstration of wealth. I don’t know if you’ve the domesticated turkeys are just easier at that point; you ever eaten peacock, but it tastes terrible, even by sixteenth- just pen them up and they eat anything. century standards. The turkey arrives in Europe and spreads its feathers. It’s not as gorgeous as the peacock, but it will Can you talk about the growing role of the turkey in social do in a pinch, and it tastes so much better. And turkeys are dining settings? You note that only a few decades after prolific—hens lay twelve to thirty eggs in a season, so if becoming established in England, it’s already become a ubiq- you’ve got twenty turkeys around, you can have thousands uitous part of Christmas dinner there. in a matter of years. Well, the turkey competed with the goose, which had his- Weren’t they, in fact, originally brought back as show birds torically been the traditional bird for the English Christmas rather than for eating? holiday season. But all of a sudden you have farmers, at least in the rural areas, saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve got lots of turkeys In the first recorded instance of the turkey in Italy, for exam- here!” In urban areas, like London, I suspect that turkey ple, we have someone saying, “This is for looks, don’t eat would still have been somewhat expensive, but if you look at it!” But obviously people knew what to do with the turkeys the figures, turkey cost less than chicken did, particularly at when they became plentiful. They were assimilated quickly the time of year when there was a glut in the market—in the as a foodstuff, not just in Europe, but also in Asia, India, and autumn. Then, as now, turkey was the least expensive meat China. per pound.
You’ve mentioned how rapidly the turkey spread around So it had established itself as a Christmas dish, but we now the rest of the world, but how did the domesticated turkey associate it almost exclusively with the American holiday of make its way back to the US? Were early European settlers Thanksgiving. How did that happen? in America looking to domesticate turkeys when they arrived here? Did Eastern Native American tribes have domesticated The Puritans had days of thanksgiving; that was an English turkeys when Europeans came to America in the late six- tradition. These were days specifically set aside to be teenth and early seventeenth century? spent in church, in prayer. There’s very little evidence that in Colonial America anyone ever associated a large dinner The consumption of turkeys was already well-established in with these thanksgivings. That began to change after the England before the first English settlements in the US, and American Revolution, when the dinner became the focal the settlers brought domesticated turkeys with them. But point. I don’t have a good reason for the shift, other than the settlers’ turkeys weren’t really any great shakes—for one the breakdown of religious practices and the desire of New thing, they were a lot smaller than the wild turkeys of the Englanders to have a holiday to celebrate in the fall. Sarah day. You find descriptions of wild turkeys at forty to Josepha Hale—a New Hampshire schoolteacher whose 15 sixty pounds, and I believe them. The people who first claim to fame was the poem “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” which she wrote in the 1820s—comes along and decides until the 1920s that turkey farming becomes a bigger busi- that everyone in America should celebrate Thanksgiving and ness—that’s when you have the experimental agricultural she begins campaigning for it. In her 1827 anti-slavery novel, stations that are trying to figure out how to solve the prob- Northwood, she has a full chapter on Thanksgiving and the lems associated with raising turkeys in confinement on a turkey plays a prominent role. And eventually, after seven- large scale. And of course, you had a big problem expanding teen years of vocal advocacy, she finally convinces President the turkey market: people really only ate it once or maybe Lincoln to establish this new national holiday, which he twice a year. So in fact turkey doesn’t become what you does officially in the summer of 1863, following the horrific might call an industrial product until just before World War battles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. And look at the holiday II with the shift toward the so-called broad-breasted turkey. she creates! A feminized, domestic day, where women are And as for successful attempts to solve the problem of get- the stars—it’s not religious or patriotic, though it has char- ting people to eat turkey all year long, that doesn’t occur acteristics of both. Instead it’s really a family holiday, a time until we get products like turkey bacon and ground turkey for people to come together in the household around a feast burgers in the 1980s. featuring a turkey. What is the broad-breasted turkey? How did this family holiday get bound up with the classic story about the Pilgrims and the Indians? The broad-breasted turkey was a genetic mutation that was an American bronze turkey crossed with a domesticated The Pilgrims were not actually associated with thanksgiving turkey in England. It ended up with a very large breast. It feasts until 1841, when a letter from a fellow named Edward was brought to Canada in the early twentieth century by an Winslow was discovered. Winslow was one of the Pilgrims Englishman named Jesse Throssel, who displayed his large and the letter, which he wrote to some friends in England birds at turkey exhibitions in the United States. It was a star- in 1621, says, “Oh, by the way, we had a wonderful event tling bird that was immediately acquired by several breeders, in the fall when, after the harvest was in, we started firing who really had to work on it—one big problem was that the our muskets for practice and the Indians came over and male birds had unusually short legs and couldn’t fertilize they brought some venison and we had a nice time.” There the hens, and so they began to develop modes of artificial was no mention of “thanksgiving” in Winslow’s letter, and insemination, which they finally figured out how to do eco- indeed the Puritans would not have considered it such a day. nomically in the 1930s. And they wanted a bird that could But when the letter was published in 1841, the commentary mature quickly, so they crossed it with a white turkey strain, about this section of the letter proclaimed the event to be ending up with today’s broad-breasted white turkeys. Now “America’s First Thanksgiving!” This myth was promoted producing a larger, heavier bird seems obvious, but prior mainly in New England until after the Civil War. to the arrival of the broad-breasted strains, breeders were Toward the end of the nineteenth century, immigrants mainly interested in the color of the birds’ feathers. poured into America and education became one way of assimilating the new arrivals. The nation needed a simpli- Is this a hangover from that old notion of the turkey as a kind fied history that everyone could understand. So an origin of show bird? myth was created that cast the Pilgrims as the founders of America, and Thanksgiving became part of the myth. This I think so. Farmers wanted a turkey that looked good. At that is a bit humorous given that Jamestown, Virginia, had been point, everyone sold turkeys on a per piece basis rather than founded well before the Pilgrims even thought about leav- by the pound, so you demonstrated your skill as a farmer by ing Holland. However, by the Civil War, the community of the perfection of the feathers your birds had. In any case, Jamestown had been abandoned and much of it had been taste was not a factor in breeding and for a very good rea- swallowed by the James River. But the real problem was son, which is that Americans do not like a strong taste in slavery, which began in Jamestown. By contrast, the Pil- poultry. No one cared that they were bland tasting—after all, grims were a good, religious group who initially had good part of how Americans eat turkey is with a lot of other things relationships with the American Indians. And, of course, the served on it, like gravy and stuffing and cranberry sauce. So South lost the Civil War, and the North dominated textbook the turkey is really meant to be a kind of neutral platform production, so the origin myth of the Pilgrims founding to convey whatever flavors consumers like. Some people America and of the first Thanksgiving ended up in the say turkeys don’t taste good anymore, but the fact is that schoolbooks. Americans generally don’t care.
When does turkey farming begin to evolve into the huge My favorite anecdote in the book was the story of the great business we see today? twentieth-century turkey magnate, Carl Swanson, and the birth of the ubiquitous turkey TV dinner. Though larger-scale chicken farming was already going on in the late nineteenth century, women and children Swanson was an immigrant who came to the US in 1896. 16 still mainly raised turkeys on farms and it’s not really During the Depression, he decided there was money to be made in turkeys. He went to farmers and made a deal with and had created an aluminum tray to be heated up in air- them—at the beginning of the season, he’d agree to buy x planes on trans-Atlantic flights. At that time, frozen food was number of turkeys at the end of the season at a set price, a minor product in American grocery stores because most so farmers were guaranteed a certain income. At the time, Americans didn’t have freezers in their homes. That began demand for turkey was increasing because of its low cost to change at the end of the 1940s, when every refrigerator and, during World War II, because of the scarcity of other sold had a nice-sized freezer in it. Swanson’s real brainstorm kinds of meat, so the system worked extremely well. was to connect his frozen turkey dinner to the TV, which After the war, Swanson decided to go one step fur- was very much the “in” technology. People loved the idea ther—he would try to corner the turkey market so he could that you could sit with your dinner on a tray and watch TV, sell turkeys at a higher price, so he went about the country but oddly enough, there was no thought of that at all on the signing contracts with many major raisers. The problem was part of the creators—they called it a “TV dinner” because that any farmer can raise turkeys, and as the price for tur- the container looked like a television. There had been frozen keys increased, other farmers got into the business, too. In chicken and turkey pies before that time, so it wasn’t a 1951, there was a glut of turkeys on the market and Swan- totally new technology but this was extremely success- son ended up with a lot of surplus birds that he had to buy. ful—selling millions of frozen meals annually. It wasn’t just a He decided to keep them frozen until he could figure out pie, it was a whole dinner, and included the sides, dressing, what to do. He had twenty refrigerated train cars just going gravy, and, of course, the turkey. around the country, each filled with over 50,000 pounds of frozen turkey. It turned out that one of his employees had below and previous: American postcards celebrating the turkey, ca. 1880- just visited a company that made food for Pan Am Airlines 1920. Courtesy Andrew F. Smith. inventory / F is for Foley marks (“London, Big Ben, Bell Tolls x3”) but also sounds Anne Walsh & Chris Kubick that quickly evoke their places of origin (“Poland, Ambience, shopping market w/ many Polish Voices”). When completed, Here, in its indexical majesty, is one page from a sound this so-called “World Series of Sound” will include sounds effects catalogue. We have chosen it from four pages from thirty-four nations and constitute a truly curious sort of devoted to “human” sounds in the 1996 edition of the Grand Tour-cum-documentary—not least because our Grand Sound Ideas™ Sound Effects Library catalogue, published Recordist may not be out there listening to contemporary in Toronto, where the self-described “world’s largest pub- London or Berlin or Naples so much as listening for these lisher of sound effects” is based. In addition to the many cities’ pasts, one that someone has already heard (perhaps thousands of sound effects they have produced themselves, years before) and listed on a take sheet. (Will crowd sounds Sound Ideas™ also licenses and distributes sound effects in the East African markets in Brixton be on the London take libraries from production companies such as Lucasfilm and sheet? What about prayer time in the mosques of the East 20th Century Fox. Among the many packages that Sound End? Or the polyglot crowds chatting on cell phones at the Ideas™ sells are a 45-CD set devoted to cars and trucks, 12 London Eye?) The sound effects catalogue is, it seems, less CDs devoted to wind, 5 further CDs devoted to whooshes, an archive of sounds than it is an archive of ideas and fanta- and a collection of 110 CDs that aims to serve as a general sies about sounds. collection (and is called The General). Webster’s defines sound effect as “an imitative sound, The sounds that Sound Ideas™ sells are used in films, as of thunder or an explosion, produced artificially for the- TV commercials, and other productions, particularly ones atrical purposes.” Does the fact of being named (and timed, with small budgets or tight timelines. When a producer described, classified, and numbered) render an “imitative decides that yet another car commercial will benefit from sound” less trustworthy or “authentic” than any other type the screech of a red hawk in the background (freedom, fresh of sound? Or does it simply remind us, again, of the shift- air, power, leather gloves…), a sound designer somewhere ing, tragic, comically unbreachable gaps between different reaches for “Bird, Hawk // Red-Tailed Hawk: Single: Calling.” ways of knowing? There are stories embedded within sound Purists may scoff, but there is a wonderfully cooperative effects, but we can’t really know what they are, even if the logic to this “canned” sound archive: why should more than empirical evidence—the sounds themselves—is very spe- one person ever have to record the popping click of a 1962 cific. A sound is a sound is a sound, and “Human, Horror // Ford Mustang cigarette lighter? Body Squishing and Crushing” may be what it says it is, but It is presumably in this cooperative (if ultimately capital- it’s more likely someone pulverizing a watermelon or the ist) spirit that Sound Ideas™ recently sent a young sound body of a dead chicken. F is for Fake but it’s also for Foley. recordist to Europe for the summer armed with a substantial Face Slap. Foreign, City. Fireplace. Ford Fairlane 500. Fizz. list of sounds that the Sound Ideas’™ braintrust had asked Footsteps. Forest, Tree Falling. Fondness… him to find and record. This type of list or “take sheet” is created with the idea that certain sounds will be desired opposite: Some sounds associated with the wonderfully eclectic range of by Sound Ideas™ clients for future productions—that is, activities engaged in by homo sapiens. From the catalogue of sound effects sounds that are not only unique to specific European land- available through Sound Ideas™.
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MAIN Virus Camp ing its new-born viral cargo, which quickly seizes upon the Brian Dillon surrounding cells. As yet, the patient feels nothing. Two days later, by which time the blood vessels of the nose have The process begins when one of approximately 200 dilated at the urging of chemical messengers dispatched viruses—let us say that it is a rhinovirus, the most common by besieged cells, antibodies begin to flood the affected tis- of them, which accounts for between 30 percent and 50 sues. Further chemical emissaries excite the nerve endings percent of the infections in question—lights on the mucous at the back of the nose and the top of the throat, causing the membrane of the nose and, coaxed along by the cilia (the nose to run and fits of sneezing to convulse the whole area; tiny, motile, hair-like appendages that bristle on the surface the patient is by now too well aware of what is happening, of certain cells), affixes itself to a single cell. Once absorbed though he or she, coming late to the chemical party that is by its host, the virus particle starts to replicate—within a few already in full swing only centimeters from the seat of con- hours, the cell has been fatally overrun, and bursts, releas- sciousness, blearily assumes that the disease has only just taken hold.
above: Photo taken in 1940 at the Department of Biology and Public Health at Literature has little to tell us about the progress of M.I.T. as part of a study on the significance of droplets in relation to the spread a cold; what narratives we have—the putting to bed, for of respiratory diseases. Photo Professor Marshall W. Jennison. instance, of the sodden and distraught Marianne in Jane 21 Available for a fee through Bettmann/Corbis. Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—tend toward the emotionally febrile or the melancholic; they are more concerned with the patient to “pare very thin the yellow rind of an orange, the metaphorical possibilities of fever, incapacity, and recov- roll it up inside out, and thrust a roll into each nostril.” ery than with the details of the disease itself. The affliction, of course, is not wholly symbolic: a cold, fever, or influenza • • • might easily carry off a weakened constitution, while a cough might presage the specter of consumption. Still, Following a long incubation period, knowledge regarding where are the great literary accounts of the next stage in the the common cold progressed rapidly from the late nine- course of a cold? The ode to blocked sinuses? The epic of teenth century onwards. With the discovery of bacteria, catarrh? The satirical treatment of a lingering dry cough? In it was assumed that colds had their origin in some sort her essay “On Being Ill” (1930), Virginia Woolf bemoans the of bacteriological infection. (This led to the production of general omission of illness—the absence, that is, of a sus- various vaccines, some of which were still in use, to no tained description of the experience of being unwell—from benefit at all, in the 1950s). In 1914, Dr. Walter Kruse suc- the canon of imaginative writing. She describes what it feels ceeded in infecting a team of his colleagues at the Institute like to be bed-ridden with a supposedly minor ailment: “‘I of Hygiene in Leipzig, using secretions from the nose of his am in bed with influenza’—but what does that convey of assistant, Dr. Hilger: four of the twelve subjects caught a the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; cold in Kruse’s first experiment, fifteen out of thirty-six in the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival the second. With the outbreak of war, only a few months become remote like a merry-go-round heard across far later, Kruse’s research came to an end; not, however, before fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange he had become convinced that colds were caused not by beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the bacteria but by a virus or viruses. The virus theory took whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore some time to infiltrate medical opinion—in 1932, David and seen from a ship at sea.” The patient, by turns elated and and Robert Thomson, in their 700-page study, The Common abject, finds that the illness elicits no sympathy for her exile Cold, still adhered to the bacteriological hypothesis, and from the world: “such follies have had their day; civilization referred only fleetingly to research that pointed to a viral points to a different goal.” origin. By that time, pioneering work had been carried out at Colds and flu may have seemed more ominous in pre- Columbia University by Dr. Alphonse Dochez, establishing vious centuries—even since Woolf wrote “On Being Ill,” that, although the type and quantity of bacteria in the nose their stock of suffering has fallen dramatically, to the point and throat of five laboratory staff changed during the winter where nobody will now admit to being dragged bedwards of 1925–26, the alterations could not be correlated with the by mere aching limbs and heavy head—but they were never onset of colds. really numbered among the worst of torments. The common The most dedicated and long-lived research program cold—and for most of its history, with only symptoms to go to be devoted to this humble ailment was established near on, it has been impossible to tell a cold from a bout of influ- Salisbury, England, in 1946. The Common Cold Research enza—seems to have been with us for some time: certain Unit (later simply the Common Cold Unit) had its origins Egyptian hieroglyphics appear to denote the combination both in research funded in the aftermath of the influenza of a cough and a streaming nose. The Hippocratic writings outbreak of 1918 (the so-called “Spanish flu”) and in the speak of an excess of phlegm that leaks out through the immediate exigencies and opportunities that prevailed at the small holes at the base of the skull, and thence to the nose, outset of World War II. Between 1918 and 1919, influenza in the form of rheum. Celsus, a Roman physician of the first killed more people than the Great War itself; as a conse- century AD, has this to say in his De Medicina: “[it] closes up quence, the Medical Research Council promoted research the nostrils, renders the voice hoarse, excites a dry cough; in in the new field of virology. The work was overseen by Dr. it the saliva is salt, there is ringing in the ears, the blood ves- Christopher Andrewes of the National Institute for Medi- sels of the head throb, the urine is turbid. These affections cal Research, who had witnessed Dochez’s experiments are commonly of short duration, but if neglected may last for at Columbia and planned to replicate them in London. His a long while.” The notion that these symptoms were literally funding, however, was cut during the Depression. Central to caused by cold or damp was established by the medicine of Andrewes’s research had been the question of finding suit- the Renaissance and later expressed by those, such as John able subjects for the experiments; in a move that predicted Wesley, who recorded their favored treatments. In his Primi- the methods that the CCU would use during its forty-four- tive Physick: Or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most year history, Andrewes recruited 100 medical students from Diseases, Wesley claimed that “colds are caused by chill- St. Bartholomew’s Hospital: “We cannot get hold of any ing because this diverts blood from the skin to the internal chimpanzees, and the next best thing to a chimpanzee is a organs, and instead of fluid appearing as perspiration it is Bart’s student.” shed from the nose as a cold.” As a curative, Wesley advised The immediate impetus for the establishment of the Unit came, however, from the US Army. In 1915, Harvard opposite: Herbert Mayo Bateman, from the “Coughs & Sneezes Spread Medical School has sent a surgical team to Paris, and in Diseases” series commissioned by the Ministry of Health, England, September 1939, the university president, James B. Conant, 23 1942. Courtesy The National Archives, Kew, Surrey, UK. repeated the gesture, dispatching a team from the Chemistry Department to London to study the threat of infectious of a fertile hen’s egg, in hope of growing the virus. Of the disease in a country suddenly subject to vast mobilizations seven volunteers, three were given unadulterated fluid as troops were massed, children evacuated, and Londoners from Dr. Dudgeon’s nose: two of them developed colds. took shelter in the stations and tunnels of the Underground. Neither the group of three who received the amniotic fluid, The unit moved to Salisbury to become a reference laboratory nor the one volunteer given a control solution, showed any in pathology, parasitology, and toxicology for the smaller cold symptoms. As an initial foray into the mysterious hospitals in the European theater of operations. It was world of the virus, the experiment could be counted a during this period that Andrewes conceived of a research success. facility expressly devoted to the common cold. On 11 Febru- In the coming decades, the CCU subjected a steady ary 1946, the NIMR considered Andrewes’s proposal, and stream of willing subjects to a wide and sometimes bizarre a letter was sent to him regarding the question of suitable array of procedures, designed to ascertain the means by subjects for the proposed experiments: “You already know which a cold was transmitted. Local schoolchildren—chil- that I am not very happy about prisoners and service person- dren typically suffer from between seven and ten colds a nel and that I believe that free volunteers are best. There are year, while adults may experience only two to five—were many potential sources apart from undergraduates and I do invited to parties at the Unit, where adult volunteers, as yet not think we should have difficulty in getting volunteers, uninfected, played games with them, or left them to amuse provided they were approached in the right way and with themselves at one end of the room while they sat behind a great enthusiasm.” curtain at the other, with large fans blowing childish exhala- In July 1946, the first seven volunteers—all students tions in their direction. James Lovelock, who would later from London—arrived at Harvard Hospital and were imme- become famous for his Gaia theory, devised a contraption diately quarantined for three days: anyone who showed that trickled fluorescent dye from the nose of a member of symptoms of a cold during that time would have to be sent the lab staff who was seated, playing cards, with a group home. On this first occasion, all were given a clean bill of of volunteers. When the lights were turned off, the dye was health and allowed to progress to the next stage of the found on the cards, the table, the fingers of the players, and experiment. At the NIMR in London, fluid had been obtained other, surprisingly far-flung, parts of the room. (It remained from the nose of Dr. Alastair Dudgeon, who had a unclear, however, how the real thing might infiltrate the 24 cold: some of it was injected into the amniotic fluid noses of the volunteers and thus transmit a cold.) In order to discover just how infectious the product of a sneeze public. It is difficult now, in an era when public trust in medi- might be, the volunteers’ heads were enclosed in large cal and scientific institutions is at a low ebb, to quite grasp plastic bags, and their noses tickled until they sneezed: the the mixture of curiosity, civic-mindedness, and boredom air was sucked out and its particles collected using a device that motivated those who elected to spend ten days (often, called a Porton Impinger. In a reversal of the same proce- in other words, their whole allotted annual holiday) in the dure, the volunteer sat on a chair inside a wardrobe (left austere military huts that comprised the facility at Salisbury. behind by the American forces) while virus suspension was At first, the standards of accommodation, heating, and food sprayed through a hole above his head. would actually have been something of an improvement on Unsurprisingly, the Unit attracted a number of cranks, the everyday conditions of many in war-weary Britain. But quacks, and hypochondriacs, though not, it seems, among as the country recovered, and the memory of wartime duty the volunteers. It was common for members of the public receded, or became the object of fond satire, something of to write seeking advice about catarrh, sinus trouble, nasal that sense of doing one’s bit for one’s country survived into polyps, and allergies, but also to offer their own recipes for the era of television and foreign holidays. treatments and cures. A predictable number of the latter In his book Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common involved some sort of hot, sweet drink, generously laced Cold (2002), David Tyrrell, the Unit’s director from 1957 until with alcohol. Garlic, too, was recommended: it was either its closure in 1990, records the favorable accounts written to be eaten in large quantities or, less conventionally, placed by volunteers in the first years of the CCU’s operation. An in one’s socks. One correspondent wrote to inform the experts that he had been successfully treating his own colds above: Staff member at the CCU counting out the volunteers’ tissues used in for thirty years by inserting a blob of antiseptic cream into twenty-four hours at the height of a cold. The bags, each containing five tis- each nostril as soon as he felt the first symptoms. As yet, sues, were later weighed to calculate the weight of nasal secretions produced. he lamented, his family had declined to follow his perfectly An experiment at the Common Cold Unit on how viruses are spread. sensible regimen. opposite: The person at the back had a tube running to his nose that slowly The singular oddity of the Unit itself, however, and leaked a fluorescent dye while he played cards with his three companions. the reason it became, during its four and a half decades, a After the game, the room was examined with the light of an ultraviolet lamp, regular subject of media interest in Britain, was its which showed that the dye had spread over each of the players, the table and 25 reliance on volunteers recruited from the general cards, and even further away. From the collection of Keith R. Thompson. early visitor, a male teacher, recalled: “It was a fine place. minor infections. A series of posters was commissioned I was able to retreat in the monastic sense, once to read, from the cartoonist H. M. Bateman: each bore the legend, the second time to revise for an impending examination. “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases. Trap the germs by Everything was gently controlled and, although the Scottish using your handkerchief. Help to keep the Nation Fighting matron was somewhat unnerving and terrifying, the lack Fit.” A succession of feckless sneezers was depicted, in the of authority, apart from the very few things we were forbid- queue at a canteen, in the middle of a crowded cinema, at den, was a good relaxation after a heavy term of teaching. the production line of a munitions factory—each red-faced And I was given a cold on neither visit.” One woman, also a offender surrounded by outraged individuals. teacher, volunteered six times in eleven years: “Time flew, In 1945, a short film was produced to drive the mes- sewing, reading, going on the occasional walk. It was a sage even further home. It showed a middle-aged man, complete break from the world, a time to return to the free- liberally sneezing in public without a handkerchief, and dom of childhood without its restraints. The yellow trolley responding, confusedly at first, to the authoritative tones of (bringing meals) was a highlight of the trials. Pavlov’s dogs the voiceover: “Hi! Stop it, you. Stop it. STOP IT. Come here. had nothing on us.” What do you think you’re up to? You’ve probably infected Despite these memories of childish liberation, the quo- thousands of people already. What do you think this is for?” tidian lives of the volunteers were necessarily constrained. At which point a disembodied hand is thrust under his nose, They were housed in pairs or in threes, in huts that con- proffering a pristine, folded, white handkerchief. tained a sitting room, bedrooms, medical room, and a small The CCU, in other words, was the peacetime con- kitchen. Each pair or trio had to stay thirty feet from those tinuation of a condition of mind fostered during a state of in the neighboring huts—it was possible to shout between emergency. It is perhaps best understood as a vision of huts, but even the chattiest soon tired of this. Later, a tele- medical progress that was conjured into being by scien- phone exchange was installed, and volunteers could pass tists and the military, but sustained by a British public that the evenings playing chess by phone with their neighbors. was keen to retain, for a time, a sense of order, duty, and Unless married, men and women were housed separately: civic self-sacrifice that was otherwise slipping away. One one young couple managed to convince the authorities to might say that its quarantines and thirty-foot exclusion let them go for a walk together in the countryside, with a zones functioned as a set of consoling metaphors for the taut thirty-foot rope between them; but they soon walked more alarming prophylaxis of nuclear deterrence. The fight either side of a tree and were forced together. Tyrrell’s against the rhinovirus was a synecdoche for the wider but account of such capers reads much like the memoir of no more intricate effort to keep a new enemy at bay: its an indulgent boarding-school headmaster, and a little like existence assured the populace of the essential benignity the plot of one of the medical comedies (the Doctor… and of the scientific and military machinery of the other Cold Carry On… series) that were popular with British cinema- War. The volunteers who answered the advertisements that goers in the postwar period. He writes of one man, initially were regularly placed in national newspapers and magazines attracted by an advertisement at Dover town hall, and who constituted a sort of sniffling civil defense force: as much returned another nine times: “On one occasion he developed against public skepticism of such official facilities as against a romantic feeling for a woman volunteer, an oboist who the virus itself. It was, no doubt (in whatever minor a way), played with a London orchestra. ‘I had brought my guitar of some benefit to successive British governments to down with me,’ he said, ‘and we played duets at 30 feet have such a ready symbol of the conjunction of militarism while the trial lasted, and closer at the end.’” and state-run medicine, especially one that seemed, in the popular imagination, both useful and somewhat • • • absurd. This did not stop persistent rumors that the Common The main thrust of the Unit’s research was always to Cold Unit was in fact a covert adjunct to the nearby Defence discover how colds and flu were transmitted, and only sec- Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, on the ondarily to treat them. Although several strands of inquiry other side of the town of Salisbury. The two facilities shared were devoted, especially in later years, to treatment—anti- equipment and data, especially in the 1950s and 60s. The histamines, Vitamin C, antibiotics, and interferon were all link continues to trouble the Department of Defence, after canvassed as potential cures: none of them worked—the an inquest in 2004 found that a 1953 sarin toxicity test at CCU remained a product of a particular wartime mental- Porton Down, in which an airman, Ronald Maddison, aged ity, and the fear of contagion that came with it. A cure for 20, died, had been illegal. Maddison’s family had asserted the common cold was low on the list of priorities precisely that he had believed he was taking part in an experiment to because the Unit was born not out of concern for the suffer- find a cure for colds: a claim still refuted by the Department ing of those briefly afflicted with a cold, but from a concern of Defence, which denies that any volunteers, civilian or for their productivity. The somewhat infantilizing culture of enlisted, were ever subjected to biochemical agents while the CCU is entirely of a piece with a campaign launched by under the impression that they were part of the struggle the Ministry of Health in 1942, designed to appraise against an ancient and recalcitrant, if mostly just annoying, 26 the public of the effect on the war effort of even enemy. LETTER BOMBS a rocket 1,000 feet into the air. Early rockets were notori- Christopher Turner ously inefficient and erratic—a dangerous hobby for the young men who gathered just outside Berlin on a patch of There is a picture of Gerhard Zucker, taken in Berlin in 1933, scrubland known as Rocket Airfield (rocket pioneer Rein- which shows him demonstrating a model of his thirteen-foot hold Trilling died the year of Zucker’s demonstration in a rocket to a large crowd of Nazi officials; he boasted then that laboratory explosion which also killed his two assistants). it was “the largest rocket ever built on earth.” The twenty- The Nazis established the Peenemünde Rocket Center on five-year-old inventor is gesturing towards his “dirigible air the Baltic Sea to perfect the science, where over the next torpedo,” which lies on a carriage with flimsy wheels and decade von Braun and a growing team of specialists would points forty-five degrees into the air. The Luftwaffe had been develop the famous V-2 rocket, 3,500 of which would be disbanded under the Versailles agreement, and Zucker was launched in World War II. explaining to the assembled representatives that his missile In 1933, Zucker worked in the mountain town of might reach many parts of the world as an alternative bomb Silberhutte for Eisfeld, a company that had developed a carrier. He wanted 10,000 DM to develop his idea. rocket-propelled train that Zucker—prone to self-mythologiz- In the background of this photograph you can see a ing—claimed to have driven as it was sent hurtling along group of jodhpur-clad Brown-shirts laughing. Of the fourteen its rails at 250 kilometers an hour. “I was virtually the first specialists in attendance, twelve declared Zucker’s idea rocket pilot, but earned no appraisal at that time,” Zucker utopian—only two, Zucker later remembered, believed it boasted. “I realized then that rockets had no place on the might work. In a three-page curriculum vitae, written shortly earth’s surface, but would be more suitable to fly” (Max before his death in 1985, Zucker wrote that after this lecture Valier, author of “Berlin to New York in One Hour” and also he was taken to a lunatic asylum for a psychiatric evaluation. a member of the VfR, was in fact the first rocket pilot. Valier He described how he was locked up for two hours—“the died when his rocket car exploded in 1930). doors had no handles on the inside!”—before a friendly psy- Having been rejected by the army, and determined to chiatrist declared him sane. The doctor, Zucker later claimed, get his rocket airborne, Zucker persuaded his father, who “suggested I should send those who had sent me for tests.” owned a dairy in the Harz mountains, to sell a few acres of What Zucker didn’t know was that the Nazis had land to fund his craze for rocketry. His subsequent experi- already begun secret experiments with early liquid fuel ments with rockets were media events, and Zucker’s natural rockets. The previous summer, twenty-two-year-old Wernher von Braun, a member of the Jules Verne–inspired Society opposite: One of the singed letters from the failed Scarp-Harris experiment. for Spaceflight (VfR), had impressed officers of Zucker’s specially made rocket stamp appears bottom left. The letter was 27 the German Army Ordinance by successfully firing subsequently sent by regular mail. Courtesy Museum nan Eilean. talent for showmanship became an embarrassment to the wouldn’t go along with that, so he got out of the country … Nazis, who feared he would draw attention to their own I liked the guy, and he liked me, and I agreed to serve as his secret tests. They tried, and failed, to stop him flying rock- publicity man. ets. It is later thought that he must have redeemed himself: some historians believe that he joined von Braun’s team in Zucker was shrewd enough to hide his attempted collabo- the late 1930s. ration with the Nazis from Hartman, who was Jewish and Zucker fired his first missile on 9 April 1933, near vehemently anti-fascist. Hartman had waged a brave print Duhnen on the North Sea coast. According to one contem- campaign against Hitler, and when the Nazis came to power porary journalist, the large crowd who turned out to watch he narrowly escaped arrest by hiding in an insane asylum burst out in mocking laughter when his rocket belly-flopped until his friends could smuggle him out of Germany. In con- into the Cuxhaven mudflats. Zucker blamed the ballistics trast, Zucker’s alleged pacifism was more accidental than experts who supervised his experiment and demanded that principled. he reduce the amount of igniter fuel by half—Zucker had The newly formed British Rocket Syndicate immediately packed enough, they said, to propel his rocket to Helgoland, encountered a major obstacle. When Zucker telegraphed the seventy kilometers off the German coastline. Zucker planned German firm who made and packed his special rocket fuel, another flight four days later—which would carry a mailbag he discovered that the Nazis had banned its export. Mrs. of postcards that had been stamped with the message Dombrowski was dispatched on a special trip to Germany “Sent by the dirigible mail-rocket Herta (System Zucker)”— to buy a supply—it was planned that she would sneak some but the authorities forbade him from making any further back hidden in her hatbox. However, she soon realized that demonstrations. the Gestapo had her under close surveillance and came back Zucker’s obsession wasn’t so easily extinguished by empty-handed. Zucker was forced to rebuild his aluminum Nazi officialdom. In the summer of 1934, he accepted rocket to accommodate substitute cartridges packed with an invitation to the APEX International Airmail Exhibition British Brocks Firework powder instead. in London. The organizers had initially invited Friedrich At dawn on 6 June 1934, Zucker assembled his launch- Schmiedl, the Austrian rocketeer who had made the first ing rack on the Sussex Downs and lubricated its rails with rocket mail flight in 1931, and who had planned a regular butter. At three feet six inches, the rocket that was loaded service over the Alps between Germany and Switzerland. onto it was a miniature version of the one used at Dunhen. But Schmiedl had destroyed all his scientific instruments There were only six witnesses to the test flight—Zucker, and special apparatus in 1933, so as “to prevent their Dombrowski, Hartman, a philatelic magazine editor, and misuse for military purposes.” Zucker, who would have a reporter and a photographer from the Daily Express, to been delighted to have won the military backing awarded whom Hartman had sold the exclusive rights to the story. von Braun, had no such reservations. Dombrowski had designed special rocket stamps, which fea- At the exhibition, Zucker’s fortunes changed when tured Zucker’s rocket hurtling over the goalposts of London’s he met the London stamp dealer C. H. Dombrowski, with Tower Bridge. whom he became joint founder and co-director of the Brit- Zucker pressed the trigger—“And, by golly, it worked!” ish Rocket Syndicate. “All that I was refused in Germany,” wrote Hartman. The shiny aluminum rocket was then filled Zucker wrote, “I was to become in London.” According to with letters and it flew perfectly twice more, tracing a Zucker, Dombrowski raised £50,000 for future flights, a neat curve, reaching heights of 800 meters, and covering sum which he hoped to recoup selling specially minted distances of up to a mile. A thouand letters, post-marked rocket mail stamps. “If successful, the stamps will be very “Zucker Rocket Post, Rocket fee two shillings sixpence valuable,” Zucker told potential sponsors, “Some stamps paid,” were flown; Zucker addressed one to King George V. sold in Germany three months previously are now worth The recipients must have thought they had traveled via the £100” (the stamps from his aborted Duhnen flight were sell- moon, but in fact they were taken to Brighton Post Office, ing for 800 times their original value). having only been airborne for several seconds, and made the The logician and philosopher, Robert Hartman (who was rest of their journey by conventional mail. (The London Eve- nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973), then working ning News had been cynical about the chances of the as a photographer in London, volunteered to become the syndicate’s press agent. In his autobiography, Freedom to opposite: Images from Gerhard Zucker’s scrapbook. Courtesy Lore Cremer. Live, Hartman recalled meeting the persuasive Zucker: Clockwise from top left: 1. Zucker in 1932. On a routine photographic trip to the opening of the 2. A disappointed Zucker—second from right, wearing a jumpsuit—grimaces at London Air Post Exhibition, I met Gerhard Zucker, a young the camera over the remains of the rocket used in his unsuccessful Scarp- German … who had invented a rocket, the forerunner of the Harris launch in 1934. lethal German V-2 rockets of World War II and of the rockets 3. Zucker, far left, watches as his experimental rocket is packed with letters of today which are taking man into space. Zucker wanted his ready for the Scarp-Harris launch. rocket to be used to carry mail. Hitler, he said, had 4. Zucker on the right—he has marked himself with an X—leaning against the 29 wanted to use the rocket to deliver bombs, and he rocket used in the launch (below) at Duhnen, Germany, in 1933. letters making it to their destination: “If the rocket misses “With German stubbornness,” as Hartman put it, fire,” a journalist for the paper wrote, “the letters will no Zucker “plodded on.” In the winter of 1934, the London doubt be given to the village idiot to take to the post-office.”) Evening News dubbed him the “try-try-again inventor” after The next day, the Daily Express featured the front- he announced his plan to send a rocket from Lymington golf page headline, “FIRST BRITISH ROCKET MAIL,” and the sub- course in Hampshire across the sea to the Isle of Wight. heading, “Syndicate Plans 1-Minute Postal Service Between Zucker had made adjustments to his rocket and it launched Dover and Calais.” Zucker apparently hoped for a regular ser- successfully, speeding away on its ten-second journey with vice across the twenty-one-mile English channel; he thought a fierce hiss. However, a southerly gust of wind blew it off his rival Friedrich Schmiedl might be persuaded to operate a course, keeping it to the mainland, and the rocket was found seventeen-foot version of his rocket from the French side of badly buckled, buried three feet deep in the mud of Penning- the channel, whilst he would return fire from England. ton Marshes a few miles away. One can only imagine Goebbels, who was aware that Freeman Dyson, the distinguished English-born Ameri- the capital was a potential target for the V-2, getting excited can physicist—who worked on the clandestine development when he read another news story about the “German rocket of a US nuclear-propelled “atomic spaceship” between 1957 flight over London” (the author had evidently taken the and 1965 (known as Project Orion)—grew up in Hampshire image used on Dombrowski’s stamp literally). The British and was a ten-year-old eyewitness to the launch. “They had government also became interested in Zucker’s scheme, and this very impressive-looking rocket,” Dyson remembers: that July they arranged for an official test flight in Scotland. It was the first over-water rocket flight ever attempted, from They set it up with great ceremony on this rather derelict Scarp Island to the Isle of Harris just under a mile away. piece of land where we lived, which was sort of a mudflat on This remote part of the Hebrides had been in the news the coast opposite the Isle of Wight. They had some dignitar- recently because the people of Scarp, which had no tele- ies from London who came down, and ceremoniously put phones, were unable to contact anyone in an emergency this bag of mail with special stamps into the rocket. Then they when bad weather made it impossible to relay a message launched and the thing zoomed up into the sky very beauti- by boat. Christina Maclennan, who was due to have twins, fully. But then it turned around and came back almost exactly had a difficult labor and no doctor could be summoned to where it took off and landed with a big splash in the mud. So help her; she eventually had one daughter on Scarp and the they went out and retrieved it and the mail went over later on second, after the weather had died down and she could be the boat. evacuated, two days later in a hospital on the Isle of Lewis. The mother and twins survived, but questions were asked in The Home Office tried to stop this boomeranging flight, the House of Parliament about how the great British Empire and had advised Zucker to try out his rocket in the safety could allow its own subjects to live with such primitive com- of an artillery range or at sea. The Postmaster General was munications. Zucker’s rocket, a high-tech emergency flare, admonished by the Secretary of State for sending two of his promised to provide almost instant messages. representatives to witness the Lymington launch—“You will His thirty-pound air torpedo was intended to zoom at appreciate that these apparent indications of official encour- 1,000 miles per hour across the Sound of Scarp. However, agement have been a little embarrassing to us, and to the when the much-anticipated launch took place, the rocket Police, in our attempts to prevent what we regard as a dis- lifted only a few feet before exploding with a dull thud. tinctly risky experiment.” As the Rt. Hon Sir Philip Sassoon, When the smoke cleared, 1,200 letters marked with green MP, put it when answering an enquiry about Zucker’s rock- and red rocket mail stamps could be seen falling like confetti ets from the Indian Air Mail Society (which went on to carry over the beach. Seven hundred and ninety-three envelopes out 270 rocket mail flights between 1934 and 1944), “the were salvaged, and their singed remains were posted ones tested have shown a remarkable tendency to convey anyway, stamped with the three-line disclaimer “Damaged letters to anywhere but their proper destination.” by first / explosions at / Scarp-Harris”; the scorched mark- Zucker was later arrested and spent two days in prison ings only increased their value for collectors. According to after leaving a dangerous load of gunpowder in a railway sta- one witness, “the rocket was split open and twisted out of tion cloakroom. Rumor spread that he was a Nazi spy who all recognition.” Zucker blamed his makeshift propellant, was scoping out potential U-boat ports and secretly trying claiming that he needed his special German fuel. “It was to gauge the sophistication of British explosives. Zucker was the cartridge,” Zucker explained. “The powder had not been deported from Britain soon afterwards, accused of defraud- properly packed and air pockets caused the explosion.” ing the Post Office with his bogus stamps (the Post Office Another attempt was made three days later in the had the exclusive privilege of conveying letters) and of being opposite direction, from Harris to Scarp, but it too met with a danger to the national security of the country (due more failure. “There was a flash of fire,” the Scotsman reported, to the threat of injury his loose rockets posed than to the “a cloud of smoke, and when the air cleared the letters were espionage he was wrongly thought to have been doing). In seen strewn about the wreckage of the firing apparatus.” 1936, after a brief tour of Europe, he returned to Germany It was small consolation that a piece of the rocket to see his parents and was immediately imprisoned by the 30 managed to hit its intended target. Gestapo—charged, he later claimed, with high treason. In his biography, Hartman wrote that he had read a team were secretly extricated to the United States— notice in the Hamburg Fremdenblatt reporting that Zucker the Nazi scientists were too useful to the American military had been executed for “an attempt to sell an invention to be executed as war criminals—but Zucker was left important to Germany to a foreign power.” But Zucker hadn’t behind to begin a new career as a furniture dealer in West been made “a head shorter,” as he later joked, because he Germany. could prove that a German subject, Hartman, had been at In the 1960s, Zucker once again began flying rocket every launch. Hartman was in political exile, so it is unlikely mail. “This was just playing around,” he wrote in his CV. the Nazis would have been impressed with Zucker’s citing He failed to mention that on Ascension Day 1964, this “play- him in his defense. And Hartman thought Zucker dead, and ing around” brought him into the headlines once again, so was evidently never interviewed to clear his friend. when another of his rockets exploded, scattering shrapnel The Nazis obviously wouldn’t have been pleased that over the crowd of spectators and killing two schoolboys. Zucker had alerted the British to the potential military uses Zucker served a six-month prison sentence for involuntary of rockets. But was he really charged with treason? Newspa- manslaughter—it was the third time rockets had landed per cuttings tell a different story of Zucker’s fate. He served him behind bars—and the West German government conse- just under sixteen months in prison, they say, for fraud and quently banned all civil rocket experiments. embezzlement, accused of selling stamps from two rocket By then, his fantasy alter-ego, von Braun, now director launches in Ostende, Belgium, that never took place. Zucker of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, was freed, with one condition: that he never touch a rocket Alabama, was developing the Saturn rockets that would again. launch man to the moon. Zucker wanted recognition for his He joined the Luftwaffe in World War II, but was so tangential role in that amazing story. “I can see today that I badly wounded in August 1944 that he was left, as he was the first pioneer,” he wrote, concluding his sketch of his described it in his CV, “70% invalid.” The month after he life. “Posterity may give thought to how difficult and dan- was hospitalized, the first V-2 rocket was launched against gerous it was. But only those who fought and those who Britain. It rose to a height of over fifty miles, and sketched a have died in thought know. That was my life, the memories graceful parabola, before devastating Staveley Road in Chis- remain.” wick, South London, over 200 miles from the launch site.
Sixteen seconds later, another one-ton warhead left an enor- A sound recording of one of Zucker’s (successful) rocket-mail launches is available at mous crater in the middle of Epping, just north of the capital.
As the Stars Go By Anna Von Mertens
This body of work takes violent moments in American histo- ry that act as pivot points—where what came before seems separate from what follows—and depicts the star rotation pattern above these moments in time. My hand-stitched works have the proportions of a movie screen, intended to suggest a representation of historical events through the distanced lens of observation, but through this format also offering a literal vista, a window onto a world. Events portrayed in the series include the Civil War Battle of Antietam, which remains the greatest one-day loss of life in America’s history; the stars seen from the bal- cony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel on 4 April 1968, as dusk settles during the hour between the time that Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and the time he was pronounced dead; and the first sighting of land by Christopher Columbus off the coast of the Bahamas, a moment at which the stars are both a navigational tool and an indicator of the changes to come. The work is intended to act on many levels: as a memo- rial, as an actual vantage from a specific moment in history, but ultimately I am simply documenting an impassive natu- ral cycle that is oblivious to the violence below.
Pages 34–35: Anna Von Mertens, Midnight until the first sighting of land, October 12, 1492, six miles off the coast of current-day San Salvador Island, Bahamas, 2006.
This work shows the stars as Christopher Columbus and his crew would have seen them when they first sighted land off the coast of the present-day Bahamas. From Columbus’s journal: “The crew of the Nina saw other signs of land, and a stalk loaded with rose berries. These signs encouraged them, and they all grew cheerful. … After sunset, steered their original course west and sailed twelve miles an hour till two hours after midnight … and as the Pinta was the swiftest sailer, and kept ahead of the Admiral [Columbus’s phrase for himself], she discovered land and made the signals which had been ordered.” I chose this pivotal event in American history not for any violence contained in those few hours, but for the violence that would ensue from that moment.
Pages 36–37: Anna Von Mertens, 5:34 am until sunrise, March 20, 2003, Baghdad, Iraq (from the Palestine Hotel looking toward the Presidential Palace on the Tigris River), 2006.
This work documents the star rotation pattern above Baghdad—with the constellation Scorpio tracking across the southwestern sky—as the bomb- ing began on 20 March 2003 during the second war between Iraq and the United States. The vantage point from the Palestine Hotel is familiar to many Americans, as that is where most members of the foreign press were staying. I remember hearing witnesses describing the bombs that lit up the Baghdad sky that night as looking like fireworks. In this instance, the sense of medi- ated, distanced observation that characterized the American experience of the war is mirrored in the impassive wheeling of the stars.
33
A Brief History of String to ascertain, each week, whether the eruv is functional. A Sabrina Gschwandtner weekly inspector traverses the line of the eruv to ensure it is intact. And a hotline or website reports on its status. I called A tactile line with innumerable uses, string is a modest several eruv hotlines: material that has also been tied, hung, and otherwise handled in order to express abstract thought. String has Today is April seventh. For this Shabbos, the eruv is up and delineated religious space, described narratives, denoted operational. mathematical data, and possibly even delivered language. —Chicago, Illinois A timeline of three principal ways in which string has been used to embody ideas also reveals a history of con- Friday afternoon, July the fourteenth, the eruv is kosher. tested or suppressed information. A brief history of string —Baltimore, Maryland is thus a record of attempts to break or recover links between meaning and its material. May fifth: Shabbat is at 7:35. The Skokie eruv is kosher. —Skokie, Illinois
I. Eruv An eruv is a symbolic enclosure that dates back to the I met with two rabbis in Brooklyn Heights, New York, near Biblical era. where I live. The eruv in my neighborhood is a series of The Torah prohibits certain kinds of work in public strings tied from telephone poles running parallel to the domains during the Sabbath, but allows that work to be Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, through Cadman Plaza, up done in an enclosed private area. Jay Street, across Livingston Street, then along Hoyt Street The Hebrew word eruv means “to mix” or “join until it hangs down from a tree branch on Second Street. together”; an eruv serves to integrate a number of private An eruv is supposed to form a closed loop, but the rabbis and public properties into one larger private domain. Within told me that their eruv is being combined with its neighbor- the space delineated by an eruv, certain work, like carrying ing Park Slope eruv, which is probably why the Hoyt Street an umbrella or pushing a stroller, becomes permissible. line is broken. The Brooklyn Heights rabbis referred me to There are currently over 150 eruvim in communities an eruv inspector in Park Slope. We spoke several times by throughout the world. The Washington DC eruv includes phone, but he ultimately declined to take me on his weekly the White House. The Strasbourg eruv encompasses the eruv walks, saying that he preferred not to publicize the eruv European Court of Human Rights. because of a history of controversy. There are numerous regulations concerning the place- Eruvim have provoked numerous acrimonious conflicts ment of an eruv. Those who use one have an obligation over definitions of public property and religious space. In 2002, for example, a New Jersey town claimed that the eruv above: String marking out boundary of an eruv in Manhattan. All of Central constituted an improper government endorsement of reli- Park is enclosed within this eruv. Photos Sabrina Gschwandtner. gion. A local court sided with the borough, which ordered opposite: According to Gary Urton & Carrie Brezine, there are seven the eruv be removed. That decision was later overturned on distinct quipus in this arrangement. The primary cords of these quipus an appeal; the new decision was upheld in subsequent court have been attached to form a ring. Courtesy Harvard University, rulings. In 2003, the Supreme Court refused to hear the New 38 Peabody Museum. Jersey municipality’s appeal, keeping the eruv legal. II. Quipu Quipus also provided a visual form for the concept of Quipu, also spelled khipu and kipu, is the word for “knot” place. As Cecilia Vicuña, a Chilean poet and artist based in the native Inca language, Quechua. Quipus are bundles in New York who has been making artwork based on the of twisted and knotted colored threads, each feature of concept of quipu for over forty years, told me, “In Andean which—length, color of string, number of knots, and type thought … they conceptualized themselves—the totality of of knots, for example—is thought to convey information. their humanness—as one huge quipu. And the core of that Quipus were presumably read by touch and sight. quipu would be [the Incan capital] Cusco. From this city, Knots were continuously tied and retied, an unfixed means virtual straight lines would set out in all directions, just like of inscribing. a quipu. And the knots would be sacred sites … place[s] Only about 600 pre-Columbian quipus survived the where transformation and passing from one dimension to Spanish conquest and are preserved in private and museum the next occurs.” collections. The Spanish destroyed quipus in order to estab- lish the new law of writing. The ancient knowledge that the III. String Figures Andean people kept within their quipus is long lost. String figures are made by twisting or weaving a loop of While quipus are generally believed to contain string about six feet long to form patterns evocative of famil- genealogical, bureaucratic, economic, and astronomical iar objects. Although there are some string figures, like cat’s information, some researchers are working to translate cradle, that are made by two or more people, most string them into language. Professor Gary Urton, a leading anthro- figures are derived from solitary activity, produced by two pologist in this field who has compiled an extensive quipu hands. Other string figures call upon the facility of toes, database, claims that quipus can be read as a kind of three- knees, elbows, or mouth. dimensional binary code. This would be similar to the way Though string figures have probably been made for computers translate eight-bit ASCII into letters and words. thousands of years, the history of collecting them is only Last August, Dr. Urton and his associate Carrie Brezine about a hundred years old. Alfred C. Haddon, a zoologist, is (a mathematician, spinner, and weaver) reported that they credited as the first person to devise a scientific language may have decoded the first word: Puruchuco, a place name. for recording how a string figure is made. Anthropologists
39 avidly collected string figures in the late nineteenth and early him certain series of string figures. In some locations, string twentieth centuries. The first two decades of the 1900s were figures also acted as good luck charms to help ensure a suc- known as “The Golden Age of String Figures” because so cessful harvest or hunt. many were notated during that period. Harry Smith (1923–1991), the painter, filmmaker, Perhaps because missionaries who viewed string figures and musicologist who made significant contributions to as a pagan holdover exerted pressure on practitioners to stop anthropology and to the preservation of America’s cultural making them, the meaning of the various forms is still largely heritage, considered himself the world’s leading authority elusive. Evidence exists that some early collectors suspected on string figures. When he died, Smith left behind a thou- that string figures might possess a significance that escaped sand-page manuscript, a collection of string figure patterns them. As anthropologist Franz Boas wrote in 1888: mounted on black board, and a box of index cards related to his research. On each card, Smith notated the method for It would seem that as yet there is no substantial evidence making the string figure, along with a list of features (such that the construction of string figures is other than a recre- as, “this string figure has three diamonds”). Smith would ation. I say “as yet” for new discoveries may at any time alter sort the cards into different piles based on cross-cultural our views on this question. commonality, seeking universal threads.
Anthropologists still classify string figures as a pastime: The author wishes to thank Jeff Place, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings; Vuka Roussa- something that prevents boredom. Mark Sherman, director kis, American Museum of Natural History; Mark Sherman, ISFA; Rani Singh, Harry Smith of the International String Figure Association, spoke about Archives; Sally Slate, American Museum of Natural History; and Cecilia Vicuña. the kinesthetic feeling of producing a string design as he showed me several ornate figures. “String figures, once Further reading: completed, are dissolved within seconds. The wonderful Steve Connor, “Inca May Have Used Knot Computer Code to Bind Empire.” The Indepen- thing about string figures is the process of making them … dent, 23 June 2003. the feel of the string on your fingers. The kinesthetic sense Manuel Herz & Eyal Weizman, “Between City and Desert.” AA Files no. 34, Autumn 1997. of making string figures is the same gratification you get Caroline Furness Jayne, String Figures and How To Make Them (New York: Dover Pub- from flying a kite; you can feel the tugging of the string— lications, Inc., 1962). This is an unabridged reproduction of the work first published by the motion is what’s pleasurable. There is a sense of tension, Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1906 under the former title, String Figures. and then when you drop loops off your fingers and display Tina Kelley, “Town Votes for Marker Used by Jews,” The New York Times, 25 January the design, you have a sense of release. It’s a very dynamic 2006. process.” Charles G. Moore, “The Implication of String Figures for American Indian Mathematics Yet it is known that in some areas of the world, string Education,” The Journal of American Indian Education, vol. 28, no. 8, October 1988. figure practice was more than just play and was connected Mark Sherman, videotaped interview, 25 September 2005. Bill Sillar, “Communicative Technologies in the Ancient Andes: Decoding the Inka Khipu,” to religion, mythology, and divination. The Navajo honored Current Anthropology, vol. 46, no. 4, August–October 2005, pp. 690–691. string figures as a gift from Grandmother Spider, and only Cecilia Vicuña, videotaped interview, 22 September 2005. made them during the winter when spiders were inactive. Nicholas Wade, “Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest,” The Among the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, certain string New York Times, 16 August 2005. figures were passwords that gave entry into secret societ- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv ies. The natives of the Gilbert Islands believed in a guide to http://www.darsie.net/string/ the underworld who required the deceased to perform with
opposite: Page from Harry Smith’s album of string games. Courtesy of John 41 Cohen and Harry Smith Archives
WHY THINGS DON’T FALL DOWN: An Interview with Robert Connelly Margaret Wertheim
In the autumn of 1948, while experimenting with ways to build flexible modular towers, a young artist named Kenneth Snelson constructed a sort of sculpture that had never been seen before. Ethereal in appearance and with no obvious weight-bearing elements, it nonetheless retained its shape and stability. The following summer, Snelson showed the form to his mentor, R. Buckminster Fuller, who had also been thinking about the possibilities of structures held together by tension. Fuller adopted Snelson’s inven- tion as the centerpiece of his system of synergetics and, acknowledging its integrity under tension, gave it the name tensegrity. Tensegrities are manifest in such diverse structures as geodesic domes, cabled roofs, robotic arms, and spider webs, while analytical methods derived from understanding these forms are now shedding light on such scientific questions as how proteins fold and how glassy materials behave. In the 1970s, mathematicians began a systematic study of tensegrity structures, creating a theory with particular regard to their geometry. Robert Connelly, a mathematician at Cornell University and an expert on the mathematics of rigid and flexible frameworks, is a pioneer of this field. Using the mathematics of group theory, Connelly and his colleague Allen Back have compiled a catalogue of “super-stable symmetric tensegrities,” and in 1998 Connelly was part of the team that proved the famous “carpenter’s rule conjecture” using the idea of anti-tensegrity. In May 2005, he gave a talk at the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles, in which audience members built and explored their own tensegrities. (A version of this talk will be deliv- ered by Connelly on 20 November 2006 in New York at an event co-organized by Cabinet and the IFF and hosted by the Kitchen.) The interview below was conducted by IFF director Margaret Wertheim over the phone.
Can we start off with a little history? How did Snelson and Fuller come to the idea of tensegrities?
As I understand it, there was a workshop at Black Mountain College where Fuller was a teacher and Snelson was a student. At that time, Snelson discovered or created some structures he thought were interesting and showed them to Fuller. The first thing Snelson built was a kind of X shape, with wires around the outside; the X’s cross in the middle and you connect wires or strings or rubber bands around the outside. It’s a very simple structure but really quite intrigu- ing. Over the years, he’s made a career out of building very large and complex tensegrities all over the world, including a sixty-foot-high structure at the Hirshhorn Museum. They’re wondrous things, made of thick aluminum tubes connected by high-gauge steel cable under an enormous tension. If you
opposite: Kenneth Snelson, 4-Way Tower, 1963. Courtesy the artist. 43 overleaf: Spiderwebs, Kiateur Falls, Guyana. Photos Margaret Wertheim. touch them, they kind of vibrate and you wonder how the They’re of interest to me because it’s a basic part of geom- thing can hold up. Fuller gave them a clever name, lectured etry. You have points floating around and you have distance about them, and thought about them as the basis for a lot constraints between the points, and the question is, “How of different structures and how they related to things in the do these constraints determine the configuration?” One world around us. example is a spider web. An interesting question is, “Why are spider webs rigid?” Are they rigid? Spider webs were What does the term tensegrity mean? the beginning point for me. It turns out that you can think of a spider web mathematically as a bunch of cables attached One way of understanding tensegrity is that it’s a pattern that to some fixed points in space and the question is whether a results when the pushes and pulls within a structure have a particular configuration is going to flop around or is it going win-win relationship with each other. The pull is balanced by to hold its shape? It turns out that the secret is tension. If the push, producing integrity of tension and compression. there’s tension everywhere in the web, it will hold its shape. Snelson’s idea was for a structure made of bars or struts That’s all you need. If there isn’t tension, it won’t. That’s a suspended by cables—the cables are under tension and the complete description of the tensegrity of a spider web. struts are under compression. The tension in the system is There is a very nice theorem, that got me interested in the “tense” part, and the whole thing was stable—it didn’t this subject, known as the “rigidity conjecture,” which goes fall down—so that’s the “integrity” part, hence the term ten- back at least to the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler sional integrity. in the eighteenth century. The rigidity conjecture looks at closed surfaces, but not smooth continuous surfaces; rather, How do mathematicians understand tensegrities? ones made up of triangular pieces joined at the edges— what we call triangulated surfaces. A complete geodesic It depends on the mathematician you ask. The way I think sphere would be a closed triangulated surface. The conjec- of it is quite simple: you have a bunch of points connected ture was that if you have such a surface, it would be rigid; it by lines, some of the points are allowed to get closer could not wiggle about or change its shape at all. For over a together but not further apart—these are what we call the century, mathematicians believed this was true for all cases, “cables”—but other pairs of points are allowed to get further but in 1977 I actually found a counter-example. So that got apart but not closer together—those are the “struts.” These me thinking about why anything keeps its shape and what rules put constraints on the system that determine what are some general principles that you can use to show why shape the structure can be overall. In the physical world, we things do or don’t keep their shape. don’t think of struts as things that are only allowed to get further apart; they’re objects that have fixed length. But for This is a critical subject for engineers; haven’t they been the mathematical study of tensegrities, you have one set developing a formal study of how things keep their shape, of objects that can stretch (the struts) and another that can and what conditions are necessary for that? shrink (the cables)—the cables are under tension, and the struts are under compression. Of course engineers build buildings and spaceships and cars and boxes—billions of things. But when I started looking at What is specifically interesting for a mathematician what the principles were that they were using to show these 44 about these structures? things are rigid, frankly I was perplexed. Engineers seemed mostly concerned with giving examples, but, at first, didn’t but then if you build them they get a little too wiggly. My seem to have a set of general principles. On looking into the analysis is slightly different from what most engineers are matter more closely, I realized that an underlying principle in used to, which is why I’m writing a book with my colleague all structures was energy. Think of a spring: it takes energy Simon Guest. We’re trying to bridge this divide between the to push it from its rest position. Many structures, including mathematics and the engineering communities so that both springs, tend to go into a configuration of minimal energy. A groups can talk to one another. very basic principle that goes back to the great mathemati- cians Euler and Lagrange in the eighteenth century is that Aside from designing buildings, are there applications of if a system, such as a set of springs, is in a state of minimal your work to other practical problems? energy, it will be rigid. The first thing I did was to apply this principle to spider webs, and I found that it worked beauti- One possibility is protein folding. That’s a big subject a lot fully. The trouble was that the mathematics I used, which I of people are working on right now. Mother Nature creates thought was cool from the point of view of geometry, didn’t these long molecules, and somehow, as the molecule is seem to make much sense from the point of view of real- being built, it wiggles its way out of the cell and forms a world physics. So I went back and talked to the engineers particular shape; that shape causes it to have some function, because clearly the math worked, and it got answers. chemical or biological. In principle, the forces and energies are pretty well understood, but when people try to model What was so good about this mathematics you discovered? proteins, it turns into a big mess. I think this is tailor-made for tensegrities, and the geometry and theory that go into them. Here’s a way to think of it. Imagine you have a tripod sitting Another example is having better mathematical models on the ground with its three feet. It’s very stable—if you for understanding how glassy substances behave. As mate- push, it pushes back and maintains its shape. The tensegri- rials, glasses are very random; the atoms or molecules get ties Snelson built are more complex – if you push them they connected in a random way, so they are hard to model, change their shape. Think of a clothes-line strung between unlike crystals where the arrangements are highly ordered. two buildings, a weightless clothesline. Now suppose you There are groups of chemists and physicists interested in attach a shirt in the middle. The shirt pushes down, and the trying to model glasses, and one thing they have done is clothes-line will yield to that force and go down a bit until to use a rigidity model. On a computer, you start with a the forces restabilize. A tensegrity is more like a clothes-line network of points—think of a lattice made up of triangles than a tripod, and you have to consider non-linear factors. stuck together. Now if you regard this lattice as made up My mathematical energy function was good because it used of solid bars, it’s rigid. But what happens if you cut away very simple equations to describe this situation, equations some of those bars randomly? If you take away too many, that are not trivial, but simple. the thing becomes floppy. The question is, “How many can you take away before it becomes floppy, and when does it How will this mathematical understanding of tensegrities change from being rigid to floppy?” Rigidity theory allows help engineers? people to quickly compute whether a structure is rigid or not, and that has been very valuable. That work looked at Engineers often don’t feel comfortable building structures two-dimensional lattices, and one interesting question is that look like Snelson’s tensegrities because they’re kind of whether we can do a similar analysis with three-dimensional wiggly; they can vibrate in funny ways. If one of the cables lattices, which is a much harder problem. The math I work breaks or something gets struck, the whole structure can on may help solve this question. deform. But tensegrity is a useful idea for certain kinds of structures—roofs, for example, are often built on tensegrity You were involved in solving the famous carpenter’s rule principles. This mathematics would help engineers with problem using ideas that came from the analysis of tensegri- structures that are Snelson-like, in the sense that they are ties. What is this problem? under tension, like the clothes-line or a spider web. It would help with the analysis because it’s a computational question You can think of it like protein folding in flatland. You have a where you can hopefully simplify the calculations so that it’s chain of sticks strung together, just like a classic carpenter’s easier to tell whether the structure is stable or not. ruler. Now imagine you folded a really long carpenter’s ruler on a tabletop, in a very complicated pattern, but with no Will the math you are developing help engineers build new crossings. The question is, can it always be straightened out, kinds of structures? or are there configurations where it gets locked up and can’t be unfolded? For a long time, people found all sorts of clever Possibly. I have a catalogue of symmetric tensegrity struc- configurations that seemed to be locked. But it turned out tures, and I’ve arranged it so that with my analysis I can tell some other guy would always come along and say, “Here, I you that these things are nicely stable. That’s not always can open it.” Günter Rote in Berlin, Erik Demaine, who’s now true with tensegrities. Sometimes you can make at MIT, and I worked on the problem and we proved that 45 structures that look like they’re going to be okay, you could open up any configuration. Our theory involved a little-known result from the nineteenth-century physicist your way to the top—you keep doing the same thing over James Clerk Maxwell that was used by structural engineers and over. But if you build a dome, it can be tricky. The idea to compute the forces in buildings. It showed that once of having something that’s a kind of arch, where you have you get started opening a folded ruler, there’s no stopping. a true tensegrity in the sense of Snelson, where things are One way of understanding this was that we were looking at suspended—that’s awkward to build. On the other hand, the problem as if it were an anti-tensegrity, something that there are buildings today built on the principle of having a didn’t have a stable state. shell on the outside and the shell provides the stability for the structure on the inside. That’s actually close to what the Fuller had a conception that we’d all soon be living in tenseg- mathematician Cauchy did in 1813 that really pre-empted rity houses, particularly in geodesic domes, that we’d have some of Fuller’s ideas. Personally, I think geodesic domes whole cities sequestered in climate-controlled environments should be called Cauchy domes because he did the basic under enormous geodesic domes, and that we’d have space theory which showed why they hold up. Fuller’s domes are stations built inside giant tensegrity spheres. We don’t live really just a specific instance of Cauchy’s basic principle. in that world. Why haven’t tensegrity structures taken off in Another practical reason we don’t see more tensegrity-type an everyday sense? buildings is that engineers, by necessity, are conservative. Just think if they said, “We’ll build a big building, it’s some- Basically, they have some serious practical drawbacks. When thing nobody’s done before, but I’m pretty sure it’ll hold up. you build a big building, you start at the bottom and build If it falls down, too bad.” That doesn’t really sell too well. As someone who studies tensegrities formally, what do you He’s having a renaissance at the moment in the art and archi- think of Fuller’s visionary touting of these structures? tecture worlds. It’s interesting that the concept of tensegrity has an enormous resonance for so many people philosophi- I think the reason for his popularity has a lot to do with his cally and aesthetically. lack of concreteness or specificity. He’s been called a Yankee salesman, and it’s a bit like going to see fortunetellers. You I agree and I think that’s not unreasonable. You can wax elo- think, “Wow, what they said was right on,” but mostly it’s quent about the principles of tensegrities because they are because they said things in such a way that you can’t really the principles of structures, the principles underlying why say it was wrong. You just connect with what you think is things hold together. relevant. I think Fuller was a master of that. He wasn’t really somebody like Newton or Maxwell who had a great new theory; he was somebody who said things that connected with people. As far as saying, “Well, I’m going to use his idea to build this building,” I don’t think you need that much of what he said. On the other hand, there are a lot of things below: Examples of symmetric tensegrity structures. These images were he did build that were interesting, and in that respect, you produced by Robert Connelly and Allen Back using Maple and the open source can’t put him aside. visualization software, Geomview. Connelly and Allen would like to thank Intel Corporation for the donation of workstations to support this work.
The Beavers and the Bees systems; his books on the Iroquois and other “ancient soci- Irene Cheng eties” earned him a claim to being one of the founders of
American anthropology.2 But it was through his role as a Architects have long suffered from animal envy. Vitruvius shareholder and director of a railroad company that Morgan speculated that humans learned the art of building by watch- developed his interest in the genus Castor. In the 1850s, the ing birds construct their nests—a claim echoed nearly two railroad built a spur into the virgin iron regions south of Lake thousand years later by Bernard Rudofsky, best known today Superior—an area that turned out to be a rich construction as the curator of the 1964 MoMA exhibition “Architecture site for beavers. Convinced that earlier naturalists in the without Architects.” Yet the two men differed on one key mold of Georges Cuvier had focused excessively on anatomy point: whereas Vitruvius asserted that men soon surpassed and classification, Morgan sought to cast light on the mental their animal teachers in skill, Rudofsky believed contempo- lives of the beavers, or “mutes” as he called them. In 1861, rary designers could learn something yet from the beavers he began studying the creatures, eventually publishing his and the bees. In The Prodigious Builders (1977), the Viennese findings in the book later cribbed by Rudofsky. Morgan was emigré collected images of bower bird nests, termite hills, well aware of the potential tension between the beavers’ and beehives alongside photographs of Dogon cliff dwell- way of life and the railroad. A map of his study area indi- ings and wind-scoop structures in Pakistan, warning that if cated the locations of iron mines alongside beaver dams, modern hominids wanted to preserve their “humaneness,” lodges, and meadows—a fragile coexistence on paper that they “had better be informed about the finer points of ani- seemed to augur an impending confrontation between mal architecture and engineering.” Specifically, it was the animal and machine, nature and industrial modernization.3 creatures’ instincts that Rudofsky envied. Modern men, he The beaver’s works were all the more remarkable lamented, had lost touch with their intuitions as a result of considering its low position on the scale of mammals. A over-civilization. Hence, “whereas man is unable to shape a member of the humble rodent order, it was not an attrac- tool or build a house without previous experience, most ani- tive animal, in Morgan’s estimation: “The smallness of the mals have an innate sense of construction.”1 eyes and ears renders its physiognomy dull and uninterest- To bolster his argument about the constructive virtuos- ing.” Yet the beaver was endowed with several anatomical ity of animals, Rudofsky culled illustrations and references features that facilitated its remarkable building activities, from numerous nineteenth-century books on natural history. including a pair of sharp front incisor teeth, which Morgan Following the trail of footnotes in The Prodigious Builders compared to chisels, and a tail that he likened to a trowel for leads to the discovery of a fascinating alternate discourse on patting down mud. “It is in the beaver’s structural organiza- animal architecture, one that absorbed philosophers and sci- tion that we discover the possibility of his architectural skill,” entists from the natural theologian William Paley to Charles he wrote. Or as an architecture theorist might put it, form Darwin and William James. At issue for these thinkers was followed anatomy. the question: Why do animals build? Was it instinct or intel- The relationship between anatomy and building was not ligence that propelled spiders, birds, bees, and beavers to determinate, however. European beavers, Morgan observed, construct their wonderful creations? The answer, of course, did not engage in dam-building, living instead in burrows had everything to do with that other burning question of dug into river banks. So why would their North American the nineteenth century: What distinguishes animals from cousins go to such architecturally ambitious lengths? The humans? The debates about animal architecture and con- dams were not absolutely necessary to the beaver’s exis- sciousness were thus also disputes over the nature of the tence, Morgan speculated, but rather served to “promote his human mind. happiness, and to secure his safety.” The objective was to create artificial ponds, the levels of which the animals main-
Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver tained by regulating the flow of water through the dams. One of the most mysterious images in The Prodigious Builders This allowed the beavers to flee from landbound predators is one that at first glance looks like an abstract diagram of into the underwater entrances of their lodges and burrows. hourglasses (or half-eaten apple cores) stacked on top of Within the fifty-acre area of his study, Morgan counted sixty- each other. The caption offers only minimal illumination: “A three beaver dams ranging from 50 to 500 feet in length. sequence of seven beaver dams at the entrance of a gorge, He compared the organization of dams and resulting ponds the largest of which forms a pond covering 10 acres. From to a “net-work,” one subject to constant maintenance and
The American Beaver and His Works by L. H. Morgan.” How supervision.4 and why would beavers have created something that, like Dismissing earlier romanticized accounts of beavers crop circles, seems so clearly designed for an aerial view? laboring in colonies, Morgan observed that the animals
And more important, who would write an entire monograph worked in pairs or single families.5 Generations of Castor on beaver architecture? Intrigued, I dug up the source.
Lewis Henry Morgan, it turns out, was a consummate opposite: Plate XII in Morgan’s The American Beaver, also used in Rudofsky’s nineteenth-century polymath. A lawyer by trade, he served Prodigious Builders. This series of seven dams in a gorge was one of several as a member of the New York State legislature, and examples that Morgan recorded of beavers adapting their design to specific 49 in his spare time studied Native American kinship circumstances. acting independently over hundreds and even thousands experience, by natural suggestion.”6 The structures typically of years led to the erection of extensive works such as the had two underwater entrances: one designed to admit bea- Great Beaver Dam at Grass Lake, Michigan, which measured vers and the other a loading portal for wood. In the winter, a whopping 260 feet in length and created a seventy-acre the beavers transported cuttings from an underwater store lake. Beyond its scale, several features of the dam drew into the lodge, ate the bark, and then placed the cuttings on Morgan’s attention. First, it was curved at the center, the roof. In the late fall, the animals plastered the sides of against the direction of the water and at the point of great- the lodge with mud and removed decayed parts from within, est pressure. Second, the dam was flanked by two smaller causing it to grow gradually in size. Most important, like the barriers—one 100 feet downstream, and the other just up dams, the forms of the shelters were adapted to a range of the river. These, Morgan speculated, served to neutralize environmental circumstances, resulting in island, bank, and the water pressure acting on the large levee and to protect lake variants. it from being overwhelmed by sudden rises in water level. Yet the beavers’ highest demonstration of intelligence, As to whether these measures were part of a conscious in Morgan’s view, was their excavation of canals. By digging engineering system, he refrained from venturing an opinion, channels that collected runoff water in swampy areas, the adding only that he had found the same pattern repeated beavers formed small streams on which to float deciduous near other large dams. Morgan also recorded other exam- hardwood from higher ground down to their lodges. In other ples of dams adapted to specific circumstances: solid-bank instances, the animals dug shortcuts at the bends of streams structures, a levee built in part out of a fallen tree, and a or across islands. Viewed collectively, the beavers’ dams, series of dams in a gorge (the last was the subject of the lodges, canals, meadows, and slides represented an impres- image Rudofsky borrowed). All of these structures Morgan sively large-scale artificial reshaping of the land. took as evidence of the beaver’s ability to adjust its designs Nevertheless, the question remained: Was the beaver to varying circumstances rather than blindly following an really a designer or merely a builder? How consciously did unchanging model. the mutes plan and undertake their architectural projects? The dams, impressive as they may be, were just the tip Was it instinct or intelligence that compelled them to build? of the iceberg as far as the beaver’s oeuvre was concerned. Morgan took up these problems in the final part of his trea- That the natural residence of the animal was a humble tise on beavers, in a chapter titled “Animal Psychology.” burrow made their erection of dome-shaped wooden lodges Morgan, it will be obvious by now, was a proponent of all the more remarkable. Morgan thought that the idea of the the theory of animal intelligence. He thought that the very lodge must have evolved over time, “in the progress of their concept of “instinct”—what the Scottish common-sense philosopher William Hamilton had defined as an “agent by recourse to a higher power. After all, he argued, an intel- which performs ignorantly and blindly a work of intelligence ligent design was the sign of an intelligent designer: “There and knowledge”—was illogical.7 If the act appeared to be a cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without “work of intelligence and knowledge,” then why not simply a contriver; order without choice; … Arrangement, disposi- attribute it accordingly? Metaphysicians had invented the tion of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of idea of “instinct,” Morgan claimed, in order to assert the instruments to a use, imply the presence of intelligence and existence of an absolute distinction between humans and mind.” lower animals. In contrast, Morgan asserted that animals possessed a mental principle—one that was essentially the same as that of humans, any differences being a matter of degree rather than kind. If, as Cuvier had asserted, all vertebrates possessed a common nervous system, then it followed that they shared a set of mental faculties. Morgan cited countless anecdotes and examples of animal ingenuity to demonstrate that the lower species possessed all the same mental capacities as man: memory, reason, imagination, will, passions and appetites, and even the ability to go mad. Above all, however, it was the beavers’ ability to adapt their constructions to a variety of environmental conditions rather than follow a fixed type that demonstrated to Morgan the lower species’ possession of a “free intelligence.”
Instinct versus Intelligence Morgan’s ideas about animal instinct and intelligence con- tributed to a debate with long roots. Before the nineteenth century, the dominant view of animal behavior, inherited in various forms from Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, was that the “brutes” operated according to innate instincts given by a divine source for their own wel- fare. Descartes in particular argued that only humans were endowed with reason; animals were essentially automatons that functioned according to the laws of physics. The princi- pal opposition to the prevailing view of animal instinct came from the Sensationalists, most notably Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of Charles. In accordance with the Sensationalist belief that all ideas originate from sensory impressions and their related associations, Darwin argued in Zoonomia (1796) that seemingly instinctual behaviors such as nest building among birds resulted from observa- tion, experience, and learning. Following a logic not unlike Lewis Morgan’s, Darwin attributed the variations in nest construction among birds of the same species to their accommodation of local circumstances.8 The Perfection of Bee Architecture: In the nineteenth century, the debate over animal Sydney Smirke and Charles Darwin instinct and intelligence intensified as scientific evidence As evidence of such purpose-driven design, Paley cited mounted—and as the philosophical and theological stakes the beehive: “No person, who has inspected a bee-hive,” increased. The natural theologian William Paley (1743–1805) he wrote, “can forbear remarking how commodiously the specifically refuted many of Erasmus Darwin’s claims, honey is bestowed in the comb.”9 Indeed, beehives—and asserting that the wonders of nature could only be explained bee “societies”—had been a subject of marvel since ancient times and were frequently cited as evidence of divine design opposite: Plate VII in Morgan’s The American Beaver. The Great Beaver Dam at and as a model of social order.10 Beehives even attracted Grass Lake measured 260 feet in length and over 6 feet in height, and resulted the attention of human architects, as evidenced by a paper in a lake covering seventy acres. Morgan took special note of the curve in the delivered to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1853 dam and two smaller dams above and below the large barrier. by Sidney Smirke (1798–1877).11 Although he prefaced his above right: The architecture of beehives, as portrayed in François remarks with the qualification that the bees’ architectural 51 Huber’s seminal Nouvelles observations sur les abeilles, 1814. instinct was “planted in them by that Hand which has shaped all things,” Smirke nevertheless went on to imagine humble bee, made cruder, less mathematically rigorous what a bee would say if it could speak: cells, while others subject to greater selection pressures, like the hive bee, created combs that were superlative in econo- It is laid down for us by our great Master that the three mizing wax. The result was a flawless structure: “Beyond main, co-ordinate, and dominant principles which should this state of perfection in architecture, natural selection guide us in our construction are—convenience, strength, could not lead.”16 It was, we might note, a curiously defini- economy. We trouble ourselves but little about ornament, tive statement from someone who is generally assumed to which those giants, men, have so much at heart: we are a have divested nature of teleology. mere drudging, practical, little people, well satisfied with what beauty may happen to result from order, symmetry, and The Beaver and the Bee: Two Theories of Architecture? simplicity. Next to Darwin’s precise bees and their mathematically perfect hives, Lewis Henry Morgan’s beavers appeared Through a curious act of ventriloquism, Smirke thus became downright brute-like and their dams primitive. As Morgan a kind of apiarian Vitruvius, reworking the traditional triad himself observed, the beavers’ piles of sticks and mud of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas by replacing beauty with were built in haphazard fashion, only attaining an “artistic” economy. appearance over time. Yet what Morgan admired about the The bulk of Smirke’s discourse centered on the math- beavers’ works was not the final form so much as the pro- ematical perfection of the honeycomb. Noting that the cess of reasoning that allowed the animal architect to adapt hexagon was one of nature’s favorite geometric figures— its constructions intelligently. Unlike the bees, Morgan’s one found in the shell of the echinus, on the scaly surface mutes built not out of base need, or driven by a “struggle of many reptiles, the eyes of insects, in basalt, and soap for existence,” but to further their own well-being and hap- bubbles—Smirke showed how the hexagonal structure of piness. He believed that the beaver had a fundamental the honeycomb, with its rhomboidal base, was an eminently awareness of its own creation: “When a beaver stands for a efficient form, enclosing the maximum of space with the moment and looks upon his work, evidently to see whether minimum amount of wax. He concluded his essay by mar- it is right, and whether anything else is needed, he shows veling—with a hint of wistfulness—at the “precision and himself capable of holding his thoughts before his beaver truth with which the honey-comb is drawn and executed: mind; in other words, he is conscious of his own mental the nice accuracy of the mitres; the exact coincidence of the processes.”17 In contrast, Darwin did not give much credit to angles; and the perfect regularity of all the forms.”12 Smirke the bees for their artistry: quoted William Kirby’s Monographia Apium to underscore the lesson to be drawn; animal instinct—or, more precisely, The bees, of course, [are] no more knowing that they divine wisdom as embodied in brute intuition—always sur- swept their spheres at one particular distance from each oth- passed human efforts: “Where is the architect … who can er, than they know what are the several angles of the hexago- carry impressed upon the tablet of his memory the entire nal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates. The motive power idea of the edifice he means to erect, and without rule, of the process of natural selection having been economy of square, plumb-line, or compass, can cut out all his material wax; that individual swarm which wasted least honey in the to their exact dimensions, without making a single mistake secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and having trans- or a single false stroke?”13 mitted by inheritance its newly acquired economical instinct Charles Darwin shared Paley’s and Smirke’s sense of to new swarms, … will have had the best chance of succeed- wonderment regarding beehives. In fact, historian of science ing in the struggle for existence.18 Robert Richards argues that Darwin saw the marvelousness of animal architecture and the problem of instinct as one of It was this drone-like aspect of Darwin’s organisms that the strongest claims against his developing theory of evolu- proved most threatening to nineteenth-century sensibilities. tion.14 In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin wrote that For although he refrained from stating them explicitly in the “so wonderful an instinct as that of the hive-bee making its Origin, the implications of his theory were clear: men were cells will probably have occurred to many readers, as a dif- essentially like bees, moved by natural forces beyond their ficulty sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.”15 Hence, he control. In the years following the publication of Darwin’s took special pains to develop a counter-theory to explain the revolutionary book, as the specters of a mechanistic world architectural activities of the hive bee. Rather than dismiss view and biological determinism crystallized, even support- the notion of instinct, Darwin instead co-opted the insights ers of the theory of natural selection sought ways to soften of the natural theologians, merely replacing the divine the blow by reintroducing mind as an agent in evolution. origin of innate impulses with a natural one. He argued that In the second half of the century, scientists like George the refinement of the bee’s works resulted from natural Romanes, Conway Lloyd Morgan, and William James selection—that is, through the accumulation of numerous developed new methods in comparative psychology to successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts. One demonstrate how consciousness—both human and animal—
could witness this progress by comparing the nests might play a role in directing adaptation.19 The mind was 52 of several types of bees: some, like the aptly named more than just brain—more than its material container, the latter Darwinists argued. Intelligence contributed to shaping perspective that allowed him to embrace beaver dams as the world and furthering human and natural development. easily as he did locomotives. While Rudofsky, citing Darwin, The question of mind is central to the distinction I am would find much to admire about animals’ primal instincts, drawing between Lewis Morgan’s beaver and Darwin’s bee. Morgan’s work on beavers suggests that the fascination In one case, the animal’s intelligence was seen as directing of animal architecture lay in the brutes’ eminent powers of the activity of building; architecture therefore was an expres- reason—a progressive intelligence that was nothing if not sion of consciousness. In the other account, beautiful forms modern. developed accidentally, through agents working according to natural laws but with no awareness of the means and Thanks to Barry Bergdoll and Mary McLeod for reading drafts of this essay and to ends. The differences between the two thinkers should not Andrea Renner and Bernie Zernheld for pointing me to invaluable sources. be overstated—after all, Darwin cited Morgan’s study on beavers in The Descent of Man to argue for the fundamental below: Plate II in Morgan’s The American Beaver. Morgan writes that the similarity of human and animal mental faculties (although he beaver “uses his tail to pack and compress mud and earth while constructing thought Morgan might not give enough weight to instinct).20 a lodge or dam, which he effects by heavy and repeated down strokes. It per- Their approaches, although related, were also at odds; forms in this respect a most important office, and one not unlike some of the they were like two jousters aiming for the same spot and uses of a trowel.” bypassing each other. Whereas Morgan sought to show that animals were intelligent, like humans, Darwin tried to dem- onstrate in The Descent of Man that humans operated on instinct, like animals. In a sense, Morgan’s fierce attachment to the agency of the animal architect ironically was reminiscent of Paley’s credo that where there was an intelligent design, there must be an intelligent designer. Unlike the theologian, however, Morgan thought it was the animal’s rather than divine intel- ligence that gave shape to material reality. And Morgan believed in the capacity of the mind—both human and animal—to progress through experimentation and experi- ence.21 Thus, although the beaver was a “low animal in its structural organization, … by his sagacity, his industry, and his artificial erections, he has raised himself to a very respectable position, in human estimation, for intelligence and architectural capacity.” The principle of progress applied not only to the mutes but also to humans, as he hinted in the conclusion to The American Beaver: “If then an animal, with such inferior organization, manifests so large an amount of mental capacity, of how much more must those be capable whose organization is found to be so much superior!”22 Morgan’s words could be read as a challenge to human architects. If the humble beaver was capable of creating such extraordinary works—and more importantly, of devel- oping his craft progressively over time—how much more might the mind of a human designer accomplish? Had he lived longer, then, Morgan might have been surprised to find himself included in Rudofsky’s Prodigious Builders, marshaled into an argument for the resurrection of animal instinct against the evils of human over-education. In showcasing examples of animal and primitive architecture, Rudofsky was inclined “to blame progress for about every evil that has befallen this planet” and found it “a comfort- ing thought that, everything considered, we have not much progressed in those disciplines that proclaim most emphati- cally humanity’s humaneness: poetry, music, and the arts.”23 Against modern forms of architectural education, Rudofsky advocated a return to spontaneity, play, and instinct. Morgan, in contrast, was a wholehearted 53 believer in progress through experience. It was a 1 Bernard Rudofsky, The Prodigious Builders (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 57–58. 2 While The American Beaver and His Works (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868) is the volume discussed here, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Fam- ily (1871) and Ancient Society (1877) are generally considered to be Morgan’s major anthropological works. Interest in his research on kinship spread far enough to reach Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) was subtitled In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. 3 Morgan tells of a “conflict of interests [that] arose between the beavers, on the one hand, and one of the chief commercial enterprises of the country, on the other.” A family of beavers built a dam against a railroad embankment that passed parallel to a brook. In order to prevent the accumulation of water against the tracks, the track master cut the dam repeatedly, but each time, the beavers immediately repaired the breach. Finally, after ten or fifteen rounds, the animals desisted. See The American Beaver, p. 102. 4 Ibid., pp. 48, 139, 18, 81. 5 In his 1843 essay “Mind or Instinct,” Morgan repeated the myth, probably inherited from Buffon, that beavers worked in organized colonies. By 1868, after undertaking his own firsthand research into beavers, Morgan recanted this view. 6 Morgan, The American Beaver, p. 140. 7 Sir William Hamilton, quoted in Morgan, The American Beaver, p. 262. 8 Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 35. 9 William Paley, Natural Theology, or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 12th ed., (London: J. Faulder, 1809), pp. 11, 332. 10 In the fourth century, the Alexandrine geometer Pappus wrote on the geometrical properties of bees, in a passage often excerpted as “The Sagacity of Bees.” Pappus cited the work of an even earlier mathematician named Zenodorus in observing that the honeycomb’s hexagonal structure enclosed the greatest amount of space with the least amount of material. See also Juan Antonio Ramirez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudí to Le Corbusier (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 11 Smirke was the architect of the soon-to-be constructed round reading room of the British Museum (1857) and the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark (1838), now the Imperial War Museum. 12 Sydney Smirke, “Observations on the Architecture of the Honey Bee” (1853), Papers Read at the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1853–1854 (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1854), pp. 1, 1, 5. 13 William Kirby, quoted in Smirke, p. 5. 14 Richards, p. 144. 15 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species [1859], (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1964), p. 207. 16 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 235. 17 Morgan, The American Beaver, p. 256. 18 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 235. 19 See Richards, Darwin. Richards argues, however, that Darwin, too, resisted a blindly mechanistic, materialist view of nature, and sought to reestablish man’s identity as a moral agent on a new biological basis. 20 Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex [1871], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 105. Morgan met Darwin on a trip to England in 1871. Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan, American Scholar (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1960), p. 125. 21 See Marc Swetlitz, “The Minds of Beavers and the Minds of Humans: Natural Sugges- tion, Natural Selection, and Experiment in the Work of Lewis Henry Morgan,” in George W. Stocking, ed., Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 80. Swetlitz argues that Morgan was influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy in giving priority to the activity of mind in human progress: “Morgan agreed with his British sociocultural evolutionary contemporaries that, for the most part, human beings had thought their way from savagery to civilization.”(p. 58) 22 Morgan, The American Beaver, pp. 267, 267. 54 23 Rudofsky, Prodigious Builders, pp. 9–10. To the Vector the Spoils prizes or envy this power or honor?”1 You bet! The Cave™ McKenzie Wark is a world of pure agon, of competitive striving after distinc- tion. But suppose you are that rare, stray, thoughtful gamer
01. who decides to try this new game of getting beyond the Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called game again? Suppose you emerge from The Cave™ and The Cave™. It offers, for a small hourly fee, access to game decide to take stock of the world beyond? You find that this consoles in a darkened room. Suppose it is part of a chain. other world is in some curious ways rather like The Cave™. The consoles form a local area network, and also link to The pics of family, the map of the ‘hood—seem made of the other such networks elsewhere in the chain. Suppose you same digital stuff as your favorites games inside The Cave™. are a gamer in The Cave™. You test your skills against other If there is a difference, it may not be quite what it seems. gamers. You have played in The Cave™ since childhood.
Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear 05. only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands Here is what you observe about the world outside The clutch only the controllers with which you blast away at the Cave™: the whole of life appears as a vast accumulation of digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here commodities and spectacles, of things wrapped in images gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each and images sold as things. Images appear as prizes, and other: “Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds call us to play the game in which they are all that is at stake. are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere.” The You observe that world after world, cave after cave, what existence of another, more real world of which The Cave™ prevails is the same digital, agonistic logic of one versus the provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much other, ending in victory or defeat. Everything has value only of it. when ranked against another; everyone has value only when ranked against another. Every situation is win-lose, unless it
02. is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate Perhaps you are not just any gamer. You are the one who only because they seek prizes in different games. decides to investigate the assumption of another world. You turn away from the screen and unplug the headphones. You 06. get up and stagger out of the darkened room, toward the The real world appears as a fun park divided into many and light outside. You are so dazzled by the light that the people varied games. Work is a rat race. Politics is a horse race. The and things out there in the bright world seem less real than economy is a casino. Even the utopian justice to come in the the images and sounds of The Cave™. You turn away from afterlife is foreclosed: He who dies with the most toys wins. this blinding new world, which seems, strangely, unreal. You Games are no longer a pastime, outside or alongside of life. return to the screen and the headphones and the darkness They are now the very form of life, and death, and time, of being a gamer in The Cave™. itself. These games are no joke. When the screen flashes the legend “Game Over,” you are either dead, or defeated, or at
03. best out of quarters. Suppose someone, a parent maybe, a teacher or some other guardian, drags you back out into the light and makes 07. you stay there. It would still be blinding. You could not look The game has colonized its rivals within the cultural realm, directly at things. Maybe the guardian prints out some pics from the spectacle of cinema to the simulations of television. of your family or maybe a map of the neighborhood, to Narrative is no longer a question of an imaginary reconcili- acclimate you, before you can look at things. Gradually you ation of real problems. The story just recounts the steps by see the people around you, and what it is that they do. Then which someone beat someone else—a real victory for imagi- perhaps you remember the immense, immersive games of nary stakes. The game has not just colonized reality; it is also The Cave™, and what passes for wisdom amongst those still the sole remaining ideal. Gamespace proclaims its legiti- stuck there. And so you returns to The Cave™, to talk or text macy through victory over all rivals. The reigning ideology to the other gamers about this world outside. imagines the world as a level playing field, upon which all men are equal before God, the great game designer. History,
04. politics, culture—gamespace dynamites everything that is You communicate to fellow gamers in The Cave™ about not in the game, like an out-dated Vegas casino. the outside world of which The Cave™ is just a shadow.
Or try to. Plato: “And if the cave-dwellers had established, 08. down there in the cave, certain prizes and distinctions for Ever get the feeling you are playing some vast and useless those who were most keen-sighted in seeing the passing game to which you don’t know the goal, and can’t remem- shadows, and who were best able to remember what came ber the rules? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to before, and after, and simultaneously with what, thus best forfeit, only to discover there’s no umpire, no referee, no reg- able to predict future appearances in the shadow- ulatory body to whom to announce your capitulation? Ever 55 world, will our released prisoner hanker after these get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t even know the score, ning the game. Work becomes play. Work demands not just or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who one’s mind and body but also one’s soul. You have to be a your real opponent might be? Ever get mad over the obvi- team player. Your work has to be creative, inventive, play- ous fact that the dice are loaded, the deck stacked, the table ful—ludic, but not ludicrous. rigged, and the fix in? Welcome to gamespace, where we cross our fingers when we roll the dice.2 13. No games are freely chosen any more. Not least for children,
09. who if they are to be the successful offspring of successful All that counts here is the score. As for who owns the teams parents, find themselves drafted into endless evening shifts and who runs the league, best not to ask. As for who is of team sport. The purpose of which is to build character, of excluded from the big leagues and high scores, best not to course. Which character? The character of the good sport. ask. As for who keeps the score and who makes the rules, Character for what? For the workplace, with its team cama- best not to ask. As for what ruling body does the handicap- raderie and peer-enforced discipline. For others, work is still ping and on what basis, best not to ask. All is for the best just dull, repetitive work, but the dream is to escape into in the best—and only—possible world. There is—to give it a the commerce of play—to make it into the major leagues, name—a military entertainment complex, and it rules. Its tri- or compete for record deals as a diva or a playa in the rap umphs affirm the rule of the game and the rules of the game. game. And for still others, there is only the game of survival. Biggie: “If I wasn’t in the rap game / I’d probably have a key
10. knee-deep in the crack game.”4 Play becomes everything Everything the military entertainment complex touches turns to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious, it is to digits. Everything is digital and yet the digital is as noth- morality, it is necessity. ing. It just beeps and blinks and reports itself in glowing alphanumerics, spouting stock quotes on your cell phone. 14. Sure, there may be vivid 3-D graphics. There may be pie The old identities peter out. Nobody has the time. The gamer charts and bar graphs. There may be swirls and whorls of is not interested in playing the citizen. The gamer elects to brightly colored polygons blazing from screen to screen. But choose sides only for the purpose of the game. This week these are just decoration. The jitter of your thumb on the but- it might be as the Germans vs. the Americans. Next week it ton or the flicker of your wrist on the mouse connect directly might be as a gangster against the law. If the gamer chooses to an invisible, intangible gamespace of pure contest, pure to be a soldier and play with real weapons, it is as an Army agon. It doesn’t matter if your cave comes equipped with a of One, testing and refining personal skill points. The shrill Playstation or Bloomberg terminal. It is all just an algorithm and constant patriotic noise you hear through the speakers with enough unknowns to make a game of it. masks the slow erosion of any coherent fellow feeling within the remnants of a national space. This gamespace escapes
11. all borders. All that is left of the nation is an everywhere that Once games required an actual place to play them, whether is nowhere, an atopia of noisy, righteous victories and quiet, on the chessboard or the football field. Even wars had sinister failures. Manifest destiny—the right to rule through battlefields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole virtue—gives way to its latent destiny—the virtue of right earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, through rule. now looks like video games. Well, don’t kid yourself. War is a video game—for the military entertainment complex. 15. To them, it doesn’t matter what happens “on the ground.” The gamer is not really interested in faith, although a height- The ground—the old-fashioned battlefield itself—is just a ened rhetoric of faith may fill the void carved out in the soul necessary externality to the game. Zizek: “It is thus not the by the insinuations of gamespace. The gamer’s God is a fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind game designer. He implants in everything a hidden algo- computer screens that protects us from the reality of the rithm. Faith is a matter of the ability to intuit the parameters face-to-face killing of another person; on the contrary it is of this intelligent design and score accordingly. All that is this fantasy of face-to-face encounter with an enemy killed righteous wins; all that wins is righteous. To be a loser or bloodily that we construct in order to escape the Real of the a lamer is the mark of damnation. Gamers confront each depersonalized war turned into an anonymous technological other in games of skill that reveal who has been chosen operation.”3 by the game as the one who has most fully internalized its algorithm. For those who despair of their abilities, there are
12. games of chance, where grace reveals itself in the roll of the The old class antagonisms have not gone away, but are dice. Caillois: “Chance is courted because hard work and hidden beneath levels of rank, where each measures their personal qualifications are powerless to bring such success worth against others in the size and price of their house, the
size and price of their vehicle, and where, perversely, opposite: Donald Hayes’s record-breaking scores for the arcade game Tron. 57 working longer and longer hours is a sign of win- Courtesy of Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard. about.”5 The gambler may know what the gamer’s faith chance and competition. And beyond that? Not much. The refuses to countenance. real has become a mere epiphenomenon without which gamespace cannot exist, but which is losing, bit by bit, any
16. form or substance or spirit or history that is not sucked into To be a gamer is to live by nothing but level, which has and transformed by gamespace. Beyond gamespace are meaning only in relation to the levels ranked above or below. only the nameless fragments of the real. Identity loses its qualitative dimension. Gamespace leaves its mark on the gamer in the reduction of self to score. 20. Questions of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, or race, nation, The gamer arrives at the beginnings of a reflective life, a tribe, or even species become purely arbitrary. Play as who- gamer theory, by stepping out of The Cave™—and return- ever or whatever you like. Choose your skin. Gamers don’t ing back to it. If the gamer is to hold gamespace to account care. It’s all an agon of competing abilities, and abilities all in terms of something other than itself, it might not be that have their measure. It all ends in a summary decision: That’s mere shadow of a shadow of the real—murky, formless, a Hot! One hopes, or if not, You’re Fired! Got questions about residue in the corners. It might instead be the game proper, qualities of Being? Whatever. as it is played in The Cave.™ There at least the game shad- ows the pure form of the algorithm. There at least the digital
17. logic to which gamespace merely aspires is actually realized. So this is the world as it appears to the gamer: a matrix of The challenge is—ah, but even to phrase it thus is to fall endlessly varying games, all reducible to the same principles, back into the game—to play at play itself, but from within all producing the same kind of subject who belongs to this the game. The gamer as theorist has to choose between two gamespace in the same way—as a gamer to a game. What strategies for playing against gamespace. One is to play for would it mean to lift one’s eye from the target, to pause on the real. But the real is nothing but a heap of broken images. the trigger, to unclench one’s ever-clicking finger? Is it even The other is to play for the game. Play within the game, but possible to think outside The Cave™? Perhaps with the against gamespace. The digital game plays up everything triumph of gamespace, what the gamer as theorist needs that gamespace merely pretends to be: a fair fight, a level is to reconstruct the deleted files on those who opposed playing field, free competition. gamespace with their revolutionary playdates. Debord, for example, who declared: “I have scarcely begun to make you 21. understand that I don’t intend to play the game.”6 Now there No wonder digital games are the cultural form of the times. was a player unconcerned with an exit strategy. The times have themselves become just a series of less perfect games. Games like those played in The Cave™ pres-
18. ent them in a pure state, as a realm where justice—of a “Play” was once a great slogan of liberation. Neville: “The sort—reigns. The beginnings of a gamer theory might lie new beautiful freaks will teach us all how to play again (and not in holding games accountable as failed representations they’ll suffer society’s penalty).”7 Play was once the batter- of the world, but quite the reverse. The world outside is a ing ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, gamespace that appears as an imperfect form of the game. of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play The gamer is an archeologist of The Cave™. The digital is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work games that the gamer finds there are the ruins, not of a lost becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by past, but of a lost future. Gamespace is built on the ruins of the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom a future it proclaims in theory yet disavows in practice. of the player with endless games of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same. Play no longer func- 22. tions as a fulcrum for a critical theory. The utopian dream Of all the kinds of belonging that contend for allegiance—as of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond workers against the boss, as citizens against the enemy, the game, merely opened the way for the extension of as believers against the infidel—all now have to compete gamespace into every aspect of everyday life. with one which makes agon its first and only principle. Gamespace wants us all to believe we are nothing but gam-
19. ers now, competing not against enemies of class or faith or What then has the gamer seen in that bright world, that nation, but only against other gamers. A new historical per- gamespace, beyond The Cave™? You see people hunched sona stalks the earth. All of the previous such persona had over screens, their hands compulsively jerking controllers. many breviaries and manuals, and so what’s needed is some Each sits alone, and talks or texts to unseen others, dazzled primers for gamers. Not strategy guides for how to improve by images that seem to come from nowhere, awash in puls- one’s score or hone one’s trigger finger. Primers, rather, in ing and beeping sounds. The enlightened gamer sees how thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, made the world beyond the games of The Cave™ seems like an over as an imperfect copy of the game. The game might not array of more or less similar caves, all digital, each be utopia, but it might be the only thing left with which to 58 an agon with its own rules, some arbitrary blend of play against gamespace. “To the Vector the Spoils” is adapted from GAM3R 7H30RY, a “networked book” project designed by McKenzie Wark in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book. It can be found at
1 Quoted in Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 31. 2 Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows,” from I’m Your Man, Sony, 1998. 3 Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), p. 77. 4 Notorious B.I.G., “Things Done Changed,” from Ready To Die (Remastered), Bad Boy Records, 2004. 5 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 114. 6 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle and Other Films (London: Rebel Press, 1992). 7 Richard Neville, Play Power: Exploring the International Underground (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 278.
below: Screenshot of Atari’s 1977 game, Canyon Bomber. Courtesy of Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard.
59 Feet of genius During the early 1920s, Einstein and the Hungarian Christopher Turner physicist Leo Szilárd designed refrigerators, filing over forty- five patents for a design that never made it off the assembly On a Monday morning in the fall of 1952, Peter Hulit left his line. Did Einstein’s sketch represent his foray into shoe Princeton shoe store and walked the short distance to Albert design? Einstein’s home at 112 Mercer Street. Einstein’s secretary, Einstein led Hulit into his den, where he sat in an Helen Dukas, had asked Hulit to make an emergency house ornate, high-backed winged chair and offered up his feet. call because Einstein was having a problem with sore feet. He was legendary for going sockless, and this occasion was “This magnificent guy came down the stairs,” Hulit recalls, no exception (you can still buy an odor-eating spray called “smoking his pipe, and he whipped this folded piece of paper “Albert Einstein—No More Smelly Shoes!”). Hulit found out of his pocket and said, ‘Zis is ze problem, Mr. Hulit.’” himself on his knees before Einstein, as if washing the feet When I visited Hulit, now 83, in his apartment on the of the great genius. “When you touched his feet,” Hulit outskirts of Princeton, he showed me the crumpled page, recalls, “they were tender like a child’s, that skin texture; which he had asked the physicist to sign and date as a sou- they were soft and easy.” It didn’t take a genius to diagnose venir of their encounter. On it was Einstein’s quick sketch the problem, however: “What really happened is that he illustrating his foot problem and his design for a more com- had gained some weight in his older age and his feet fortable shoe. Einstein wrote “representation of weight?” in changed size.” an almost illegible hand above two doodles of his right foot. Einstein was an outspoken pacifist, and he’d managed One footprint is labeled “bad” and shows how his weight is to avoid Swiss military service because of the very same concentrated on his big toe and the outer edge of his foot, flat and sweaty feet that were still troubling him. In July causing him pain. Another drawing, labeled “good,” shows 1939, Szilárd had visited Einstein at his summer retreat on Einstein’s solution: a shoe that allows a generous space Long Island—not to design new household appliances, but around the foot so that the pressure could be more evenly to present Einstein with a moral dilemma that would force distributed. Underneath this blueprint for his perfect shoe, him to reconsider his commitment to non-violence. He told Einstein has given a back elevation view—a leg, clad in a pair Einstein that scientists in Berlin were stockpiling uranium of shakily drawn trousers, shown resting snugly in an inel- and experimenting with nuclear chain reactions that would egant bowl of footwear. enable them to create “extremely powerful bombs,” and he urged the scientist to write to President Roosevelt to encour- age him to enter this deadly arms race. Einstein described his subsequent letter to Roosevelt, which initiated the Man- hattan Project, as the “one great mistake in my life.” That summer, Einstein went to the Rothman’s Depart- ment Store in Southold, Long Island, to buy some footwear: “Einstein came in and asked, did we sell sundials?” remem- bers the current owner, Robert Rothman, who was twelve at the time. “My father took him out to the backyard and showed him sundials. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no. Sundials,’ and pointed to his feet.” Six years later, when Einstein heard that President Truman had ordered bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—causing the deaths of over 210,000 people—he is purported to have said, “If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.” When Hulit received news of the atomic explosion he was serving as a corporal in the army, on his way to Burma after a long tour of duty in Europe. His boat was immediately diverted back to America. “We thought it was a great thing,” Hulit says of the bomb. “There was no remorse … remorse comes later.” After the war, he went to work in his father’s shoe store in Princeton. For Einstein, cobbling was a fantasy alternative job, something earthy and grounded, at the furthest extreme from his cerebral world of abstract equations. He referred to his years working for the Swiss patent office (1902– 1909) as his “cobbler’s trade”—it was undemanding work that gave him the thinking space to hatch the world-shatter- ing ideas that he produced in his “Annus Mirabilis Papers” of 1905, which contained among other things the theory of relativity. He regretted leaving this position to take a job at the University of Berlin, where he felt that the constant pressure to produce new work led to “the temptation of superficial analysis.” In 1924, Einstein wrote of his objection to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s idea of quantum mechanics, the paradoxes of which he never fully accepted: “I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.” Perhaps he had Bohr in mind when he repeated this sentiment after the atomic bomb was dropped. By the 1940s, Bohr was working with Szilárd on the Manhat- tan Project in Los Alamos under Robert Oppenheimer. In 1947, Oppenheimer became the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; he too visited Hulit’s store to be fitted for shoes. “‘Don’t do what I’ve done,” Einstein advised nuclear physicist Ernest J. Sternglass when he was contemplating above: Another case of fascination with Einstein’s feet. This letter is found in going back to graduate school. “They will try to crush a section of Einstein’s archive labeled “Die Komische Mappe,” which contains every bit of originality out of you. … Always have a eccentric missives from flat-earthers and a letter from a man whose thirteen cobbler’s job. Always have a job where you can get up in talking cats revealed to him the secret of the fourth dimension. Courtesy the morning, face yourself, that you’re doing something Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. useful for humanity. Because nobody can be a opposite: Einstein’s diagram of forces acting on his feet, 1952. 61 genius every day.” Courtesy Peter Hulit. fruits WATCH OUT FOR THE TOP BANANA and the limited materials available from the American and Larry Tye Guatemalan governments. Upon Bernays’s death in 1995, however, the Library of Congress made public fifty-three It was a war in which few shots would be fired, but upon boxes of his papers on United Fruit that paint in vivid detail which the very safety of the Free World was said to hang. his behind-the-scenes maneuvering and show how, in 1954, It was a war where words and symbols were the primary he helped topple Guatemala’s left-leaning regime. Those weapons and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward L. Bernays, papers offer insights into how the United States viewed its supplied the ammunition. And in 1954 Bernays’s arsenal Latin neighbors as ripe for economic exploitation and politi- was as well-stocked as it would ever be. cal manipulation—and how the propaganda war Bernays He had a plan for spying, one that involved putting in waged in Guatemala set the pattern for future US-led cam- place a network of moles. He had a plan for waging psycho- paigns in Cuba and, much later, Vietnam. logical warfare, and another plan for wooing the press. He “This whole matter of effective counter-Communist pro- even had a plan for contrasting his Godless enemy’s outlook paganda is not one of improvising,” Bernays noted in a 1952 on twenty-two vital issues with those of Christianity. All this memo to United Fruit’s publicity chief. “What is needed,” for an undeclared war waged on behalf of United Fruit, one he added, is “the same type of scientific approach that is of America’s richest companies. A war fought in quiet alli- applied, let us say, to a problem of fighting a certain plant ance with the US government, on foreign soil, against the disease.” elected government of Guatemala. A war that, in the mid- 1950s when the Cold War seemed ready to boil over, was • • • seen by those waging it as a crusade to keep Moscow from gaining a beachhead 1,000 miles south of New Orleans. The United Fruit Company was born over a bottle of rum. In Bernays helped mastermind that war for his fruit 1870, Lorenzo Dow Baker, skipper of the Boston schooner company client, drawing on every public relations tactic and strategy he had refined since giving birth to the profes- below: From United Fruit’s undated booklet “Chiquita Mashed Banana Simple sion forty years before. Historians have written extensively Recipes,” probably 1950s. With the fruit preserved in tins, Edward Bernays about that propaganda campaign, but always relied on the could now market bananas for the company all year round. Courtesy Washing- sketchy account Bernays provided in his autobiography ton Banana Museum.
63 Telegraph, pulled into Jamaica for a taste of the island’s which churned out brochures and press releases with titles famous distilled alcohol and a load of bamboo. While he was like “How about Tomato Lamburgers?” The Bureau was drinking, a local tradesman came by offering green bananas; in part an honest attempt to educate, providing scholars, Baker bought 160 bunches at twenty-five cents each. He journalists, and others with the latest information about resold them in New York for up to $3.25 a bunch, a deal a nearby place most Americans knew nothing about, but so sweet he couldn’t resist doing it again. By 1885, eleven where did the Bureau get its material? From United Fruit, ships were flying under the banner of the new Boston Fruit of course. “I wrote articles, one after another, I ground Company, bringing to the United States 10 million bunches them out and they were sent to newspapers throughout of bananas a year. United Fruit was formed in 1899, with the country,” recalled Samuel Rovner, who went to work assets that included more than 210,000 acres of land across for Bernays right after graduating from the Columbia the Caribbean and Central America and enough political School of Journalism in 1943. “I didn’t know much about clout that Honduras, Costa Rica, and other countries in the Latin America. I did some research now and then but for region became known as “banana republics.” the most part it was based on material that came from the The company also soon had a kingpin worthy of its United Fruit Company.” swashbuckling history: Samuel Zemurray, better known as Sam the Banana Man. Big and blunt, the Jewish immigrant • • • from Russia used a blend of cleverness and cunning to buy up a bankrupt steamship company and plot the overthrow By the mid-1950s, questions of public education, and even of the Honduran government, to acquire millions of dollars of selling bananas, were being subsumed by questions of of United Fruit stock, and, convinced it was being misman- politics for Bernays and his employers at United Fruit. aged, to insert himself as head of the Boston-based firm. By Guatemala was the hot spot, and had been since 1949, Zemurray had built United into one of America’s big- 1944, when a mass uprising ended the fourteen-year rule gest and best-run companies, with $54 million in earnings of strongman General Jorge Ubico. Juan Jose Arevalo, a and control of more than half the US market in imported professor living in exile in Argentina, returned home and bananas. was swept into office with more than 85 percent of the vote. But he always was looking to sell more, especially Arevalo introduced a democratic political system and, for during the winter, when frosts made shipment and storage the first time, gave workers the right to organize and strike. more difficult. Which is why, in the early 1940s, he brought In March 1951, Arevalo was succeeded by his defense min- on as his public relations counsel Edward Bernays, a diminu- ister, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz picked up the pace tive man who had proven his ability to act big by convincing of change, enacting a modest income tax, upgrading roads a generation of American women to smoke the cigarettes and ports, and, most significantly, pushing a program to made by his client American Tobacco Co., luring a genera- redistribute uncultivated lands owned by large plantations. tion of children into carving sculptures from Ivory Soap Between 1952 and 1954, the Arbenz government confis- bars made by client Proctor and Gamble, and generally tap- cated and turned over to 100,000 poor families 1.5 million ping the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, on why people acres—including, in March 1953, 210,000 acres belonging behave the way they do, only to reshape those behaviors for to the United Fruit Company. the benefit of his paying customers. United Fruit had chosen Guatemala half a century One way to boost sales for United Fruit, Bernays rea- before in large part because of its pliable government. soned, was to link bananas to good health. Bernays also Guatemalan rulers exempted the company from internal connected the fruit to national defense, a link less obtuse taxation, helped it maintain control of the country’s only than it seems since United’s “Great White Fleet” was used Atlantic seaport and virtually every mile of railroad, and in both world wars to ferry supplies and troops. On top of guaranteed workers would get no more than fifty cents a that were campaigns to get bananas into hotels, railroad day. It was a capitalist’s dream. By the time Arevalo took dining cars, airplanes, and steamers; to feed them to profes- over, United Fruit was Guatemala’s number one landowner, sional and college football teams, summer campers, YMCA employer, and exporter. The Arevalo reign raised a red flag and YWCA members, Boy and Girl scouts, and students of for the company. Workers went on strike at its banana all ages; to push them with companies making cake, cook- plantation and seaport, forcing it to make concessions in a ies, ice cream, and candy; and to secure a place for them labor contract, and United Fruit was targeted as Guatemala’s in movie studio cafeterias and at top-of-the-line resorts in most glaring symbol of hated Yankee imperialism. Arbenz places like Palm Beach and Sun Valley. went several steps further, vowing to build a highway to the But Bernays was farsighted enough to realize that if Atlantic to break United Fruit’s stranglehold on inland trans- United Fruit wanted to cement its position in the North port, a second port to compete with United Fruit’s facilities American economy, it had to teach North Americans about at Puerto Barrios, and a hydroelectric plant to end the near- their neighbors to the south. The mission wasn’t just to sell monopoly of US-backed power suppliers. He also wanted to bananas, he told Zemurray, but to sell an entire region of the take another 177,000 acres of United Fruit Company land. hemisphere. So he set up one of his trademark front The company would be reimbursed about three dollars an 64 groups, the Middle America Information Bureau, acre. That was what United Fruit said in its tax statements the 1950s was a young public relations official with United Fruit, wrote in his memoir that “what the press would hear and see was carefully staged and regulated by the host. The plan represented a serious attempt to compromise objectivity. Moreover, it was a compromise implicit in the invitation—only underscored by Bernays’s and the Compa- ny’s repeated claims to the contrary.”
• • •
Bernays was gaining ground with the press but, like a relentless general, each step forward only made him more determined to gain more ground. In March 1952, Guatemala offered United Fruit the labor contract it had long sought. While company officials saw that as a major triumph, Bernays insisted it was a “tacti- cal retreat” by the communists and “does not mean in any the fallow land was worth, but it was far less than the sev- sense that their power has been eliminated.” The appropri- enty-five dollars an acre the company claimed once the land ate response, he added in a letter to United Fruit President was expropriated. Kenneth H. Redmond, would be “to carry forward the strong All of this reinforced alarms Bernays had been sound- aggressive tactics of the United Fruit Company in pointing ing since he visited the region early in the Arevalo regime. the finger at Communism in Guatemala.” He warned that Guatemala was ripe for revolution, and that In letters over the next two years to Edmund Whitman, the communists were gaining increasing influence. And he the fruit company’s publicity chief, Bernays spelled out the counseled the company to scream so loud the United States “aggressive tactics” he had in mind. One way to strike out would step in to check this threat so near its border. The at the regime would be to issue the “first book on Com- way to do that, he argued, was via the media. He had picked munist propaganda” and outline the “scientific method of out ten widely circulated magazines, including Reader’s approach” needed to fight back. Soon after he proposed Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, and said each could hiring Leigh White, “an outstanding investigating expert” be convinced to run a slightly different story on the brewing working in Egypt, to undertake a “private intelligence Guatemalan crisis. “In certain cases, stories would be writ- survey” of the political situation in Guatemala. That was ten by staff men,” Bernays wrote. “In certain other cases, the first in a series of references by Bernays to a network the magazine might ask us to supply the story, and we, in of intelligence agents, spies of sorts, he helped set up in turn, would engage a most suitable writer to handle the Central America to be coordinated by “the company’s ‘state matter.” While United Fruit didn’t move as quickly as he department.’” Bernays’s memos to Whitman and to news- wanted, articles began appearing in the New York Times, paper executives suggest the network did supply valuable New York Herald Tribune, and other publications, all discuss- information. In a May 1954 letter to David Sentner of the ing the growing influence of Guatemala’s communists. That International News Service, he said weapons were being liberal journals like the Nation also were coming around was funneled from the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to “Gua- especially satisfying to Bernays, who believed winning over temalan reds,” adding that some of that information came liberals was essential to winning over America. from “a very responsible correspondent of ours in Guate- Reporters weren’t the only ones willing to see the mala City” while the rest was from “an equally responsible tropics through Bernays’s lens. In January 1952, he took on gentleman in Honduras.” Only select journalists—on what a two-week tour of the region the publishers of Newsweek, Bernays called his “confidential list of approximately 100 the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Nashville Banner, and the New special writers interested in Latin America”—received such Orleans Item, a contributing editor from Time, the foreign sensitive leaks. editor of Scripps-Howard, and high-ranking officials from In June 1952, Bernays broached the topic of psycholog- the United Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami ical warfare. History suggested how valuable such activities Herald, and the Christian Science Monitor. Bernays insisted could be, Bernays argued in another memo, writing that in in his autobiography that the journalists were free “to go “studies of the Nazi criminals by psychologists, the stud- where they wanted, talk to whomever they wanted, and ies psychiatrists make of court cases after the criminal has report their findings freely.” But Thomas McCann, who in been sentenced would indicate that had previous knowledge been had of the situation, one might have coped much more above: Four of the five members of the original Armas junta (seated on couch) effectively.” In the case of Arbenz and his colleagues, Ber- pose with Papal Nuncio Monsignor Gennaro Verrolino, a bitter Arbenz oppo- nays wanted “information about the cultural background nent (seated on chair, far right). Armas is third from left on the of the individual, his family background, his early upbring- 65 couch. Courtesy World Wide Photos. ing, his education, development of career and a look at the 66 various incidents and activities in his life that might shed reportage as a result of what Eddie did. … There is abso- light on his personality.” lutely no question that Bernays played a significant role in Events on the ground in Guatemala, meanwhile, were changing public opinion on Guatemala. He did it through firing up. The Eisenhower administration, which assumed manipulation of the press. He was very, very good at that office in 1953, stepped up the pressure on Arbenz. The Gua- until the day he died.” temalan president responded by hardening his stance, and month by month, the situation edged towards confrontation. • • • The final showdown began on 18 June 1954 when Lieuten- ant Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, an army officer living It is not often that historical figures get a chance to revisit in exile, crossed the border from Honduras with 200 men controversies that have plagued them the way Guatemala recruited and trained by the CIA—a band Bernays called the did Bernays. But he did, in 1961. The setting this time was “army of liberation.” Armas’s “invasion,” supported by a CIA South Vietnam and, at first, his history seemed to be repeat- air attack, quickly achieved its end, and on 27 June a military ing itself. junta took control of Guatemala. Armas was named presi- He was advising a New York advertising agency that dent a week later. was working for the government of South Vietnam just as How much of a role did Bernays play in undermining America was ratcheting up its involvement there. His advice the Arbenz government? His Library of Congress files show included precisely the sort of propaganda he’d engineered he remained a key source of information for the press right on behalf of Guatemala, complete with a South Vietnam through the takeover. Bernays wasn’t the only one pressing Information Center and endless fact sheets to “give the United Fruit’s case, of course. The company had powerful readers a picture of the country—geographic, economic, friends in the Eisenhower administration, including Assistant educational, ideological.” Bernays’s special expertise here, Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs John M. Cabot, as in all his foreign assignments, was handling the press. whose brother Tom briefly was United’s president. It also He had plans for extracting favorable coverage from the hired Washington lobbyist Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Saturday Evening Post, Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Monthly, Corcoran, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s brain trust- and Life. He also knew what to do with TV. On 19 July ers, and two other public relations experts, John 1961, he wrote to David Brinkley, then with NBC, saying, Clements, a powerful conservative, and Spruille Braden, “The thought has occurred to us that in connection with Truman’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American your forthcoming program you might care to visit South Affairs. And United Fruit wasn’t the only one pressing for Vietnam, the Republic in Southeast Asia now fighting back intervention. McCarthyism was at its peak, the Cold War Communist infiltration. If you are interested I feel sure the was heating up, and conservatives in Congress and the government of South Vietnam would open its facilities and Eisenhower administration were anxious to take on an do everything it could to expedite your visit.” apparent Red push in their own hemisphere. Many liberals, It is unclear just how long he continued providing afraid of being labeled appeasers, remained silent or joined such advice, but by 1970—the height of the antiwar move- in sounding the alarm. ment—he had switched sides, actually proposing to write But most analysts agree that United Fruit was the most a paperback book “aimed at men and women interested in important force in toppling Arbenz, and Bernays was the having a manual on the how-to of organizing public support company’s most effective propagandist. “By early 1954, for political action at every level to stop the war in Indo- Bernays’s carefully planned campaign had created an atmo- china.” Why the switch? The country was turning around on sphere of deep suspicion and fear in the United States about Vietnam, and Bernays, a master at reading public attitudes, the nature and intentions of the Guatemalan government,” appreciated sooner than most establishment figures how Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer write in their 1982 deep-seated that antiwar sentiment was. So, even as he book Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in continued to defend what he had done in Guatemala, he was Guatemala. “In the publicity battle between the Fruit Com- offering to put all his insider’s know-how to work to stop this pany and the Arbenz government, Bernays outmaneuvered, latest crusade against communism. No matter that he was outplanned and outspent the Guatemalans.” McCann, the 78, and that few in the antiwar movement knew or cared young United PR man, had an even better view of what about all he had seen, done, and learned in Guatemala. What Bernays was doing: “My estimate is we were spending in he was offering them, he told publishers who never took him excess of $100,000 a year for Edward L. Bernays, just for up on his offer, was a “practical guide to political and public his consulting services, which was an enormous amount of action by a man who for half a century has practiced in this money in 1952.” area of public opinion and public relations.” “Everybody in the company hated [Bernays], didn’t trust him, didn’t like his politics, didn’t like his fees,” McCann recalled, “But my sense is we were getting our money’s worth, very definitely. I joined the company in ‘52, just about opposite: The cover of Warren Sloat’s The United Fruit Co. in Guatemala, Or, the time Arbenz made his big move to expropriate Watch Out for the Top Banana (Voluntown, CT: AVILA [Avoid Vietnam in Latin 67 our land, and I saw a complete turnaround in the America], n.d). Probably 1960s. Courtesy Washington Banana Museum.
Fallen Fruit cally harvested or from fields where it is not economically Matias Viegener profitable to harvest. Gleaning was a legal risk until the 1996 passage of the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation On the corner of Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens, Act, which promotes food recovery by limiting the liability of Georgia, grows a white oak tree that belongs to no one but donors to instances of gross negligence or intentional mis- itself. William H. Jackson’s love for this tree was so great conduct. National food salvage programs work within the that in 1820 he deeded it to itself, and it grows on a pro- legal definitions of this act to regularly deliver surplus food tected corner island to this day. To be precise, this is not the from restaurants and shops to emergency food centers. same tree. The original died at the approximate age of 400 Gleaners also refers to those who live outside the in 1942, at which time the horticulture students at the local conventional world, nomadic and without property, living university planted an acorn from the original tree on the without working and surviving on only the cast-off food they same plot of land. This “son,” the legal heir of the original find. The Brahmin of India are likewise ascetics, but also rig- tree, was featured in the original Ripley’s Believe It or Not orous vegetarians whose beliefs come through Hinduism’s series and has become one of the oddities on the tourist equation of meat-eating with violence and with the karmic map. Its popularity may lie in the set of questions it provokes belief that such violence would be returned; certain sects of about humans’ relationship to the natural world: Can some- Brahmins are renowned for not harvesting and only eating thing we consider property own itself? What is the purpose fallen fruit. Today’s “fregans,” coined from free and vegan, of public space and who controls its use? Does nature serve are similar to gleaners, though they embrace more anarchis- us or do we serve it? tic notions of rejecting capitalism, labor, property, and the A corollary of these questions is another vexing area obligation to work and be productive. Their lifestyles are an of property law: What happens when your neighbor’s tree active critique of the economics and values of modern life. grows over your land? Common law holds that you cannot Our project, Fallen Fruit, began in response to a call destroy the tree, but you can prune or control any part that for submissions in the summer of 2004 from the Journal of encroaches upon your airspace. Legal precedents are even Aesthetics & Protest for work addressing urgent social and more complicated when it comes to the ownership of the political questions, not in the form of critique or negation, tree’s fruit. One interpretation holds that the tree’s owner but by proposing generative solutions. The problems of also owns all the fruit, though he may have no legal access urban life seem obvious enough: disengagement, alienation to harvest portions hanging outside his land, while another from neighbors, and ignorance of the often grave needs of holds that the fruit, like the branches and leaves, may be others, such as the homeless. Our approach was to address disposed of as the lucky or unlucky neighbor sees fit. Many these problems through the coupling of waste and need by a homeowner has known this dilemma as he gazes upon a coining the term “public fruit,” and surveying our neighbor- neighbor’s bounteous crop of apples or pears overhanging hood to inventory this underlooked resource. Los Angeles is his fence. a particularly fertile city with an “artificial” ecology of great What if the tree hangs over public space, a sidewalk, variety, as well as a fading past of agrarian values that mirror street, or alley? The status of this “public fruit” is even more all American cities and especially their suburbs, with a fruit unclear. Los Angeles is a good case in point. In a city of tree in every yard. Fresh fruit holds a poignant place in the moderate density spread over a large area peppered with mythology of California; early postcards often depict houses lawns, shrubs, trees, and even survivors of long-gone fruit with swimming pools and orange trees against a backdrop orchards, public fruit is to be found on almost every block. of snow-covered mountains. Bananas, peaches, avocados, lemons, oranges, limes, Fallen Fruit’s first project was to produce a map of all kumquats, loquats, apples, plums, passion fruits, walnuts, the public fruit within a five-or-so block radius of the homes pomegranates, guavas, and more grow year round in every of its three members (David Burns, Austin Young, and neighborhood in the city. Urban public fruit, whether deliber- myself). The desire to map one’s neighborhood fruit has its ate or accidental, is more efficient to grow than farmed fruit seed in the wish to be in a fantastical California resembling because it eliminates the cost of transport. Since it is not the Garden of Eden. But in a city as auto-centric as Los a mono-crop, as in an orchard of a single variety of apple, Angeles, the simple mandate to either map or follow a map there are fewer pests and less chemicals required to treat also obliges you to take to your feet and see the neighbor- them. A further irony is that most public fruit in Los Angeles hood from a very different angle, akin perhaps to learning is organic, blessed by neglect. about the strata of pipelines, tunnels, and subterranean The question of food, property, and social responsibil- wiring under all cities. Additionally, a fruit map suggests that ity is not a modern one. The Old Testament contains several the separation of city and farm is not real or absolute, and injunctions to farmers and growers not to “reap all the way that all neighborhoods possess far more secrets than we to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your know. The map of the Silver Lake neighborhood has spurred harvest ... or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” (Leviticus opposite: Admiring street fruit on Larissa Drive, Los Angeles, a few yards from 19:9–10) Today’s gleaners collect leftover crops the pre-celebrity apartments of Rock Hudson and James Dean. All images 69 from farmers’ fields after they have been mechani- Fallen Fruit. others to map their own neighborhoods, and the goal is to proposed for Griffith Park, the largest urban park in America. keep mapping, building a kind of unending, Borgesian fruit Most fruit-producing trees are not native to California, which map that covers the world. means our park contravenes Griffith Park’s current policy As with many activist-oriented projects whose purpose only to plant natives; the park authorities have agreed, how- is to spur change, it soon became apparent that mapping or ever, to consider siting the project in marginal land, probably describing the world one would like to see is no substitute by the LA River, that can be reclaimed. This park would for actually making it happen. Fallen Fruit began to gener- be planted with the drought-tolerant varieties catalogued ate “propaganda” material urging property owners to plant around the city’s neighborhoods: figs, loquats, walnuts, trees on their perimeters and to generate a culture of public carob, avocados, and pomegranates. sharing. We organized a series of nocturnal fruit tours, both The second park that Fallen Fruit has proposed is called following the maps and looking for more public fruit. All of the Endless Orchard, to be located in the park between the the residents we met while surveying and leading the fruit Music Center and City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, cur- walks were not only curious about the crowd admiring their rently a hodgepodge of outdated and underused “green fruit, but invariably invited them to pick some, indicating that space” slated for renovation. The Endless Orchard is a ten- for a variety of reasons they never ate any or that they had by-ten grid of fruit trees spaced twenty feet apart, the size of far more than they needed. In a city with such great con- two city lots, enclosed on three sides by perfectly mirrored trasts of wealth and poverty, the quantity of already existing walls and open on the fourth side facing City Hall. The visi- public fruit is remarkable. This would be even greater but for tor to the orchard will experience the boundless vista of fruit the fact that many residents are reluctant to plant fruit trees trees that once characterized much of California, whose because of the litter, or fallen fruit, that has to be disposed agrarian bounty was the state’s first engine of economic of; and it also needs to be pointed out that pedestrians are growth. The mirrors on three sides reference the state’s often reluctant to pick food within their grasp because they current economic investment in the business of creating perceive it to be private property. illusions. The trees in the Endless Orchard will be 5-in-1 Fallen Fruit has proposed two public fruit parks, which grafted fruit trees, with plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines would include only fruit or nut-yielding plants whose bounty and pluots, for example, all ripening at different times. Visi- is to be shared communally. They include demonstration tors are asked to take no more than they can hold in their areas, fruit-sharing depositories (so people can trade their hands—to sample, not hoard. excess fruit for other people’s), and informative plaques Fallen Fruit also engages in guerilla fruit plantings with thoughts about public fruit. One park was originally in which unwanted private fruit trees are “liberated” and replanted on public land. The volunteers are found through opposite: Fruit map of the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, 2004. craigslist.org, where homeowners list their unwanted goods above left: Drive-by fruit on Vendome Street, Los Angeles. Most drive-by fruit under “Free Stuff.” The fruit plantings generally take place can only be picked from the passenger side; because this one lies on a traffic in the evening with members of Fallen Fruit wearing their island, the driver can access it. work clothes—brown worker’s outfits that resemble UPS above right: Fallen fruit on the sidewalk of 3rd Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico. uniforms. The apricot is to Santa Fe what the fig is to Los Angeles; both grow There is a growing community garden movement in 71 without any care and seem to re-seed themselves. America, which has a kinship to the great popularity of farmers’ markets, and to the artisanal, organic, and slow food movements. All are responses not only to urbanization and to a perceived ecological crisis, but also to a global- ized model of food production in which every step has been industrialized and monetized. Chez Panisse chef, Alice Waters, in Berkeley has founded a community school pro- gram called the Edible Schoolyard, which provides urban middle school students with a one-acre organic garden and classes in nutrition and cooking; the goal is to foster envi- ronmental stewardship and to revolutionize the school lunch program. Earthworks, a community organization in Boston, has had an Urban Orchards project since 1990. Funded by a grant from the US Forest Service, it is a greening and food production program that operates with local groups to plant, maintain, and harvest fruit- and nut-bearing trees, shrubs, and vines on public land. South Central Farmers, a collec- tive of 350 or so low-income and largely Latino immigrant families in South Central Los Angeles, has received national publicity in its struggles to hold on to the fourteen-acre farm that the city has sold from underneath them. One of the largest urban and communal farms in the US, its occupants were forcibly removed by the sheriff in June 2006; forty people were arrested. The ejection of the community gardeners conjures a much older event in the history of property and its use—the enclosure of the commons that began after the Renaissance and took full steam during the Industrial Revolution. Com- mons were found in many pre-industrial societies and were used for grazing, communal farming, woodcutting, and fishing. The principle was that though common land might be owned by towns or individuals, the right to its resources or its use was shared by the community. Examples of rights of common are common piscary (the right to fish), estovers (the right to take sufficient firewood) and common pasture (to graze one’s animals); communal plantings were neces- sary because plowing and farming were so labor-intensive. The legal position concerning the commons is ambiguous, as most commons were based on ancient rights that predate formal law and any form of government. Most Scandinavian countries still permit public lingonberry and cowberry har- vesting on uncultivated private land, and hunting game on private land is permitted (with a license) in countries all over the world. Food has always provided the most ancient forms of communion among people. Hunters and gatherers banded together for survival, and gatherers became farmers; farming laid the ground for humans’ connections to the earth, and farms became the first communities. Among all the foods, fruit holds a special place as a symbol of bounty, fertility, beauty, and hospitality, which is perhaps why of all foods we most like to give fruit as a gift. The gift model—giving with- out expectation of return—forms the basis of the public fruit project, re-territorializing urban space with a sort of residual slippage of control and restrictions.
left: Figs on the border of private property, Talmadge Street, Los Angeles. An example of half-public, half-private fruit. Thoreau’s Wild Fruits (or not) at market, and represented in history. Frances Richard The manuscript of Wild Fruits was left bound together with string, full of interleaved passages stuck in place with In 1862, Henry David Thoreau was forty-four years old. He sealing wax, larded with not-yet-synthesized redundan- had already written Walden; or, Life in the Woods and spent cies, and marked in the author’s notoriously hard-to-read the night in jail that generated “Civil Disobedience.” He had hand with corrections, queries, and notes for possible cuts. graduated from Harvard, taught school, failed as a pencil- The difficulty of arriving at a clean final text was such that maker, and was scraping by as a surveyor. Living at his the material was not published until 2000, when Bradley mother’s house on Main Street in Concord, Massachusetts, P. Dean, longtime editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin, he had neglected to marry, though he sometimes squired his produced a scholarly edition tracking each crossed-out sister Sophia on his daily walks and boating trips. He main- word and syntactical variant, with an appendix presenting a tained a nourishing, if volatile, friendship with the “Sage related, also unfinished piece considering reforestation pro- of Concord,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, and when Margaret cesses, called The Dispersion of Seeds. Abiding by Thoreau’s Fuller Ossoli—translator of Goethe, editor with Emerson of lyrical-encyclopedic format, Dean’s text is organized under the transcendentalist magazine The Dial, and author of the plant-name headings. In places, the prose amounts to little feminist classic Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1854)— more than jauntily annotated dates: drowned with her Italian husband and their baby off Cape Cod, Thoreau was dispatched to claim the bodies. He was, TOUCH-ME-NOT in other words, claimed as a peer by a generation of writ- ers freshly conscious of their role in creating a specifically July 14, 1856. The touch-me-not (noli-me-tangere) American literature, and he was generally expected—by seeds already spring. himself and by his friends—to do great things for which his September 17, 1852. Its seeds [sic] vessels go off like extant books were preparation. Instead, on the morning of pistols—shooting their seeds like shot. They explode in May 6, Thoreau died of tuberculosis. my hat. The expectations, though, were not unfounded. He July 30, 1850. Some quite seedy and spring on a slight was deep in a writing project he called Wild Fruits, which touch, and startling you: striped, stomate, light- and he envisioned as nothing less than a handbook of practi- dark-green.1 cal woodcraft seamlessly woven into an ars poetica of New England nature—at once a scientifically accurate study Elsewhere, favorite subjects—cranberries, huckleberries, of fruiting and forestry in the North Atlantic states, and a chestnuts, acorns, wild apples—evolve into stand-alone soaring though acerbic celebration of the ecological inter- essays (a version of “Wild Apples” was the only portion of dependences that link plants to humans, animals, weather the manuscript published in Thoreau’s lifetime). In these pas- patterns, and topography. Thoreau the serious amateur sages, the direct experience of virgin terrain is considered naturalist builds a scaffold inside his hat for carrying home as a vehicle for individual and national self-knowledge. This freshly picked specimens, makes bold to taste choke cher- self-discovery entails a brave American rejection of haughty, ries and spotted water-hemlock, and notes the days in overcivilized—read, “European”—precedents. Speaking, for consecutive years when muskmelon, fever bush, or bayberry example, of his beloved black huckleberry, Thoreau descants bloom, ripen, wither, and freeze. In his pastoral-hermit upon nomenclature: guise, he squats down to watch white-pine cones dry and open, measures the tubers of wild artichokes, and draws By botanists it is called of late, but I think without good blown cattails and the seedpods of Asclepias cornuti in his reason, Gaylussacia resinosa, after the celebrated French diary. As a polemicist, however, he remains acutely aware chemist [Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, 1778-1850]. If he had that his compatriots are busy building railroads, harvesting been the first to distill its juices and put them in this globu- old-growth timber, and arguing the legality of slavery in the lar bag, he would deserve this honor; or if he had been a territories of Kansas and Nebraska. He intends his precise celebrated picker of huckleberries, perchance paid for his botanical observations to refract the moral and aesthetic schooling so, or only notoriously a lover of them, we should life of a swiftly modernizing capitalist nation embroiled in not much object. But it does not appear that he ever saw one. civil war, and he seems to know that he is speaking for the What if a committee of Parisian naturalists had been appoint- conservation of undespoiled lands near a point of no return. ed to break this important news to an Indian maiden who had Wild Fruits thus emerges as a kind of hands-on record of the just filled her basket on the shore of Lake Huron! It is as if we motions of the spirit that Emerson called the “Over-Soul.” A should hear that the daguerreotype had been finally named journal of ecstatic union with the lilies of the field, the book after the distinguished Chippeway conjurer, The-Wind-that- never ceases to inquire into the biological and cultural pro- Blows.2 cesses whereby those lilies—or sassafras roots, nightshade berries, whortleberries, and wild grapes—are germinated, But independence-minded wit is not, in Wild Fruits, an mulched, garnered by squirrels, pecked by birds, unmixed flavor. The book also consistently takes Americans 73 marked by rot, appreciated (or not) by farmers, sold to task for exploiting their physical surroundings and CHOKECHERRY SUNFLOWER BLUEBERRY HUCKLEBERRY (Prunus virginiana) (Helianthus annuus) (Vaccinium spp.) (Vaccinium membranaceum)
forgetting their status as sojourners or “Saunterers” whose “who always selects the right word,” when he says that wild tenure on the continent is new, and problematic. “Our wild apples “have a kind of bow-arrow tang.”9 apple,” Thoreau admits, “is wild only like myself, perchance, This fellow-feeling for the keepers of homely know- who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed how avoids (as it does not always in Walden) rugged- into the woods from the cultivated stock.”3 This “straying” individualist rhetoric. Rather, it is kept soberly in check is clearly salutary, for it is the woods that will redeem and by Thoreau’s consciousness of war and industrialization. educate an American understanding already conditioned by He muses romantically, “Is not the bloom on fruits equivalent violence—not only against the landscape and non-European to that blue veil of air which distance gives to many objects, peoples, but against what President Lincoln, in his first inau- as to mountains in the horizon?”10 and allows as how the gural address in 1861, had called “the better angels of our “tame and forgettable” apples cultivated by “pomological nature.” Thoreau reminds his readers that, in wild places, gentlemen” are eaten “with comparatively little zest and
have no real tang or smack to them.”11 But he admits that [i]f you look closely you will find blueberry and huckle- even the solitary walker must come home, and that the berry bushes under your feet, though they may be feeble and indoor life transforms perceptions: barren, throughout all our woods, the most persevering Native Americans, ready to shoot up into place and power at the next It is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so election among the plants, ready to reclothe the hills when spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being man has laid them bare and feed all kinds of pensioners.4 brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunterer’s Apple not even the saunterer can eat Again meditating on black huckleberry, he bursts out: in the house … for there you miss the November air, which is
the sauce it is to be eaten with.12 This crop grows wild all over the country—wholesome, bountiful, and free, a real ambrosia. And yet men, the foolish Such recognition of rhetorical shades of gray extends to demons that they are, devote themselves to the culture of one of Thoreau’s favorite subjects, the schoolboy’s sen- tobacco, inventing slavery and a thousand other curses for timental education in the woods. He grouses about the that purpose…5 Parisian patrician who has never seen a huckleberry field nor needed the money he got from picking quarts there. But Thoreau’s voice in Wild Fruits, as elsewhere, can turn the pure-hearted country youth or proto-Huckleberry Finn is sarcastic—cranberries, he remarks grumpily, “cut the acknowledged, simultaneously, to be an apprentice in a far winter’s phlegm, and now you can swallow another year more complex and compromising system: of this world without other sauce”6—or slides toward the different-drummer cadences of Walden—“If you would really Sometimes, just before reaching the spot, every boy take a position outside the street and daily life of men, you rushed to the hillside, and hastily selecting a spot, shouted, must have deliberately planned your course, you must have “I speak for this place,” indicating its bounds, and another “I business which is not your neighbors’ business, which they speak for that,” and so on; and this was sometimes consid- cannot understand.”7 Like Emerson, he revels in cross- ered good law for the huckleberry field. At any rate, it is a law referenced reading of historical sources, ranging knowledge- similar to this by which we have taken possession of the terri- ably from Pliny to Manasseh Cutler’s “An Account of Some tory of Indians and Mexicans.13 of the Vegetable Productions, Naturally Growing in This Part of America, Botanically Arranged,” published in 1785. He As Dean points out in his introduction, Wild Fruits responds also writes, approvingly, of Darwin. But the lonely ferocity to the exhortation in Emerson’s Nature (1836), which argues of his earlier years has distilled to something less hotly per- audaciously that “foregoing generations beheld God and sonal, and he privileges, as kindred spirits, distinctly unlofty nature face to face; we through their eyes. … Why should sources—elderly Penobscot Indians, housewives, school- not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”14 boys. Conspicuously avoiding Christian piety, he refers to Thoreau’s universe was comparatively narrow. He climbed
Mother Nature as the “midwife”8 of uncultivated 74 growth, and quotes delightedly the battered farmer above and opposite: Edible wild plants that Thoreau would have recognized. WATER HEMLOCK BAYBERRY WILD GRAPE CRANBERRY (Cicuta douglasii) (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) (Vitis spp.) (Vaccinium vitis-idaea)
Mount Katahdin (“Ktaadn”) in Maine, foraged in the dunes War, before Marx published Das Kapital (1867), and before of the Cape, and ventured as far north as Quebec and west the United States was urbanized, Thoreau saw connections to Minnesota. He never crossed the Atlantic, nor saw the between political choices, market forces, labor and social Pacific. Rather, his decades spent walking, rowing, and relations, and the collective understanding of national char- working in the ponds and hills neighboring Concord came acter. He argued that such human arrangements are bound to stand in for the erotic, expansive “kosmos” that Whitman up, inextricably, with the life of sumac, dogwood, mouse- identifies with the poetic self.15 ear, tupelo, barberry, and sand cherry.
I see that all is not garden and cultivated field and 1 Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, ed. Bradley P. Dean (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., copse, that there are square rods [Webster’s defines a square 2000), p. 64. Emphasis original. The entries are not alphabetical, nor are the notes under rod as 30.25 square yards] in Middlesex County as purely each heading always chronological. This follows (I assume) Dean’s findings in the manu- primitive and wild as they were a thousand years ago, which script. Dean defines stomate as “covered with a surface of fine pores, such as breathing have escaped the plow and the axe and the scythe and the pores,” p. 277. cranberry rake—little oases of wildness in the desert of our 2 Ibid., p. 37. civilization, wild as a square rod on the moon, supposing it 3 Ibid., p. 79. Italics original. to be uninhabited. I believe almost in the personality of such 4 Ibid., p. 44. planetary matter, feel something akin to reverence for it, can 5 Ibid., p. 51. even worship it as terrene, titanic matter extant in my day. … 6 Ibid., p. 106. I love it as a maiden. … How happens it that we reverence 7 Ibid., p. 165. the stones which fall from another planet, and not the stones 8 Ibid., p. 100. 9 Ibid., p. 84. which belong to this—another globe, not this—heaven, and 10 Ibid., p. 157. not earth? Are not the stones in Hodge’s wall as good as the 11 Ibid., p. 84–85. Italics original. aerolite at Mecca? Is not our broad backdoor stone as good 12 Ibid., p. 85. as any corner-stone in heaven? 13 Ibid., p. 56. It would imply the regeneration of mankind if they 14 Ibid., p. xiii. were to become elevated enough to truly worship sticks and 15 As Whitman put it in section 24 of “Song of Myself”: stones. … If I could, I would worship the parings of my nails. … I would fain improve every opportunity to wonder and wor- Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, ship, as a sunflower welcomes the light.16 No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Like the “spirited and racy” wild apple, Wild Fruits is an acquired taste. The reader not already enamored of field Unscrew the locks from the doors! guides and almanacs may be dismayed by the plethora of Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! weedy detail minutely recounted. But for the mind charmed Whoever degrades another degrades me, by sensory immersion—in “the odor of skunk cabbage” (Red And whatever is done or said returns at last to me … and Fetid Currants),17 “a rare steel-blue purple” (Solanum This was the 1892 version of the passage, though Whitman had been experimenting dulcamara),18 rattling seedpods sounding “like the trinkets with the idea of himself as a “kosmos” since Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855. about an Indian’s leggins [sic] or a rattlesnake” (Crotalaria),19 16 Ibid., p. 168–169. or the picture of the philosophical author, hands sticky with 17 Ibid., p. 59. white-pine pitch, kicking his coat into the air and catching 18 Ibid., p. 95. it on his arm, or picking it up with his teeth—the book is a 19 Ibid., p. 192. treasure-trove of vicarious experience. The “tang and smack” of Thoreau’s language is such that it is better to quote than paraphrase him, and reading him at length, unadulterated, is the tangiest of all. Almost 150 years down the line, however, the sharpest part of Wild Fruits is its prescience. 75 Before Reconstruction or the Spanish-American
Strange fruit or larger. Each man is assigned a bin in the field; if they pick Ellen Birrell fast enough, they may make more than minimum wage. This is terrifically physical labor, and it is done at speed. Consider the common lemon: languishing in unassuming As it turns out, the packinghouses rotate their picking piles or perhaps bagged by the dozen in the flora part of crews from orchard to orchard, and there is a terrible labor your local market, leafless. You know the shape; the size is shortage, made even more acute of late by immigration not larger than your fist. The thick skin, “lemon yellow” in issues. So we are lucky if we get the pickers four times a color, is sometimes fragrant but often not. Cut one open and year. The fruit gets graded according to three standards: a good lemon imparts a flavor and acidity of infinite uses in Fancy, Choice, and Juice. Fancy is the essence of lemon- your kitchen so ubiquitous as to be hardly worth mention- ness, the one you pay top dollar for in the store. Choice is ing. As a child, I loved to eat them like an orange—the saliva the food service grade—the garnish on your plate, the slice pools beneath my tongue as I remember this. in your water—the largest part of the market for conven- A transplant from east to west, I go to K-Mart for a tionally grown lemons. Since a yellow lemon will continue Eureka lemon tree, the first occupant of the first garden growing as long as it is on the tree, a good percentage of I make in Southern California. Seventeen years later, the any pick is graded Juice. Growers hope to not exceed 50%, second garden I steward has to have a Meyer lemon, a but the timing of the pick is everything. Juice is where the sweeter variety I notice now becoming popular in upscale appearance of the fruit does not matter, as the consumer specialty markets. Eight years on, now half my life a Cali- never sees the Juice lemon. This lemon ends up in anything fornian, my love and I move from the city to a lemon and with natural lemon flavor—soaps, pies, barbeque sauces, avocado farm in the heart of the last agricultural county in sodas, and even those plastic juice bottles shaped like, you Southern California. Jumping off the Deep End we call it. guessed it, a perfect nine ring lemon. Conversation between my love and our future orchard Our first pick is in April, the lead edge of the peak manager: demand season for lemons. The fact that we should have been picked in January means that we have a lot of Juice “That lemon tree looks really droopy. Maybe it should lemons, and as I wander around the groves, I find some have some water?” of them are exceedingly odd—softball-sized, and football- “That’s an avocado…but of course, you knew that…” shaped, with weird ridgy protuberances. Cut open, the fruit part is about the size of a nine ring surrounded by a very Here’s how commercial lemon farming works: you join a thick pith and heavy peel. Great for zest with all that surface packinghouse. This requires signing a contract that essen- area, but I have to use the one-handed orange squeezer, tially says to the grower, “All the fruit on your trees is ours to not the smaller lemon squeezer, to extract the juice. Some pick and market as we see fit.” We decide on a small coop- lemons are so big I simply dig in with my fingers—clearly erative packinghouse, rather than the very large commercial this is not a convenience food. packinghouse that has the vast majority of contracts. We get picked again in late June, and not so many Joining an operation of that scale is to cede all control of the Juice this time, but by the end of the summer while we wait orchard. We want to farm. for our third pick, we begin to find we have grown even Our farm, Deep End, has about thirty acres planted in stranger lemons than our April juicers. Sometimes large, my first lemon variety, Eureka. This is the lemon you know but not always, these lemons are forked, doubled, fingered, from the market. In this microclimate, the trees are ever twisted, and bizarre. Sometimes they look like an ordinary bearing. That means on any given day, on any one of our lemon that has decided to become something else entirely, 3,500 trees, you might find blossoms opening, green lemons smack in the middle of being a lemon. Sometimes, they growing, and yellow lemons, also growing. One of the tasks bear no resemblance to a lemon at all, except in their color. of the lemon farmer is to prune the trees every year to main- My knowledgeable urban gardener friends say, “Buddha tain a height not taller than fifteen feet. Left to themselves, Hands,” but these are not citrons; they are lemons. I cut Eureka lemons would grow twice that high, as have the several of them open, and they are perfectly ordinary lemons few, now ornamental, Valencia oranges left over from the inside. Even the larger swollen fingers have their good tart first orchards planted on this land. The height is important: lemon segments. I ask our packinghouse guy what’s up. He lemons cannot be picked by any mechanical means. Men, says, “Bud mites—talk to your entomologist. Perfectly good wrapped head to toe against thorns, regardless of weather, fruit, though they’ll all be Juice. It’s our own fault for how climb peculiar three-legged stepladders to clip, not pull, well we have marketed the nine ring all these years.” each lemon from its limb. This operation takes both hands. Ah, the pastoral life. We share a well with some rather The men place the lemons in picker’s bags worn crosswise belligerent neighbors (those are the two-legged kind), and on their chests and shoulders. These bags, when full, weigh we share our lemons with gophers, rabbits, ground squirrels, upwards of seventy pounds. They are looking for the perfect and snails—make that a plague of snails—not to mention lemon. They call it a “nine ring” for the sizing ring that each everything from snakes, deer, coyotes, vultures, owls, and picker is to slip over the end of the fruit before clip- hawks, all the way up the food chain to mountain lions and 77 ping it. Their job is to pick all the fruit “nine ring” size possibly black bears. Now our entomologist introduces us to a whole other host of neighbors: peel miners, red 1
IT’S A FRUIT, GODDAMN IT! He came to this country from Russia—the Ukraine, Barry Sanders Odessa actually—just after the pogroms got under way in ‘06 or ‘07. Fresh off the boat, he sold fruits and vegetables
THESIS: YOU GOTTA LOVE TOMATOES with a pushcart on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, on My old man sold fruits and vegetables. Mostly, though, he Hester Street, to help support his mother and father. He sold tomatoes. The Irving Sanders Tomato Company, that’s was a gangster movie, a tough guy, and even fought a few what he called his business. Every once in a while, a letter semi-pro prizefights. A lot of Jews boxed in those days, like would arrive addressed to Mister Tomato. That’s him, the Barney Ross and Benny Leonard. And a lot of them, along tomato king, and he talked as if he knew everything about with the Italians, sold fruits and vegetables. The Italians got tomatoes. How much there was to know about them, I the grapes and the lettuce, sometimes the asparagus; the wasn’t quite sure. “It’s a fruit, the tomato,” he would say. Jews got the tomatoes, the potatoes, the cucumbers, and “Your average person doesn’t know that. Most people a few of the melons—Cranshaw and Honeydew. But mainly think it’s a vegetable, but it’s a fruit. I guarantee you. It’s a the tomatoes. I now know why, but it took me a long time to fruit, goddamn it!” And to make sure I knew what a fruit find the answer. was, he would add, “You know, like an orange or an apple— For a very long time, he spoke no English—only Rus- a fruit.” sian and Yiddish. In this country, even if you don’t know the He liked telling me over and over that tomatoes are language, you can sell anything to anyone. Did he love fruits never picked ripe; that they’re picked green—hard, so they and vegetables? I always thought so: he had control over can withstand shipping—and then, when he got hold of them; they didn’t talk back. He made up stories that they them, he would say, he gassed them with ethylene. That’s were filled with vitamins—A, C, D, F, M. Later, with a wink, what all the wholesale produce guys used, ethylene. A he added R. Tomatoes cured heart disease, cancer, arthritis, worker would stack the tomatoes lug upon wooden lug in a the common cold, and on and on. I think he may have truly small room fitted with nozzles on the ceiling, close the door, loved tomatoes. Beyond that, I do not really know what he and then turn a handle two or three times until he heard loved. a steady hiss. I don’t think my father ever saw the awful In the 1920s, my father gave up the pushcart and connection. At least he never mentioned it. “In no time at moved to Newark, New Jersey, to sell produce, as he said, all,” he would say, “you got yourself a roomful of bright red like the pros. During Prohibition, when his business fell off, tomatoes. Your average housewife,” he would shake his he got hired to drive his trucks for some mobsters—Jews head, “they don’t know about tomatoes; they just want them mainly—like Irving Waxy Wexler, Longy Zwillman, and round and shiny, bright red. That’s all they know, they got to Mickey Cohen. Hooch, he liked to say, he moved hooch look good. Uniform. You get a tomato with a funny shape, around for the mob. His whole life, he counted wise guys as you can’t give it away. Even if it tasted like gold, I couldn’t his best friends. “Don’t let anyone tell you they ain’t nice,” give it away. But let me tell you, if they don’t ripen on the he liked to brag, “because that’s just plain crap. Zwillman’d vine, they’re not worth a damn. That’s why in this family we give me the shirt off his back—if I asked nicely. Without do not eat gassed tomatoes. What I bring home got ripe the them guys, this family would not have made it.” They paid natural way, on the vine. I get them special. Right out of the my old man well, too well, and always in cash. All his life, he ground. For us.” loved to carry a huge wad of bills in his pants pocket, a roll He smelled like tomatoes. I mean, he hung around held together with a thick rubber band, twisted double and them for so many hours, in such close quarters, he actu- tight. He was the kind of guy who spit on his fingers when ally smelled like tomatoes. His clothes, his skin, his hair: I he peeled off tens or twenties. Lots of working stiffs in those could tell when he was coming through the front door—a days spit on their hands before they pitched into some seri- 220-pound tomato. My father was the first person to pack- ous work, like digging a ditch, loading a truck, or peeling off age tomatoes—three or four—in a small container, sealed bills to pay a gambling debt. in plastic, instead of displaying them in the supermarket in Oh yeah, that’s the other thing he loved, gambling—on bulk. “Your average housewife,” he told me over and over, anything. He liked to say if he got good enough odds, he “she doesn’t want to search through every goddamned would bet on the sun coming up. But he loved shooting tomato looking for the perfect ones. So you give her three craps, playing the numbers, card games like poker, pinochle, good ones, and you stick her with one that’s bad. She has to or his favorite, an arcane Eastern European concoction cut out a little bit of rot, is that such a big deal? Otherwise, I called klabiash. And the races, my god, how he loved the got to dump an entire carload of fruit and, boom, there goes horses. You see, you get a lot of free time if you sell fruits the price, sky high. So she wins in the end. Look, the bum and vegetables—produce—wholesale. The market starts side you always put down, that way they look nice—round around midnight or one in the morning, and by six, certainly and red. Pretty. Use your common sense. That’s what people by seven in the morning, it is all over. The buying stops. want today. I swear to God, it’s not food anymore. I don’t When our family moved out to Los Angeles, my father know what they want, but it’s not food. Window dress- proudly recreated his business in one of the largest and ing maybe. Everything’s a goddamned show these oldest wholesale produce centers in the world, City Market. 82 days.” It had been opened in 1909 alongside the railroad tracks, at Ninth and San Julian Streets, by Japanese, Chinese, and Russian immigrants. My father felt right at home. The Market grew fast. By 1945, when he arrived, it already covered twenty or more square blocks in the middle of the dark downtown streets of LA, just a couple of blocks from Skid Row. It looked like the best of film noir. MGM and Paramount shot there often. John Garfield walked its streets almost as often as my father. I saw a guy get his neck sliced wide open in a craps game on a street corner when I went to work one night with my father. The sidewalk turned blood red, tomato red. It was definitely not a movie. “Do me a favor,” he pleaded, “find yourself another line of work. Do not spend your life doing this. This is not a line of work. You got me? When someone asks, ‘What do you do, kid?’ you cannot say ‘fruits and vegetables,’ because that is not a line of work. A lawyer, a doctor, that’s a line of work. You got me? You stay in school. Nothing good hap- pens here.” So what do you do from, say, seven in the morning, when the market closes, until three or four in the afternoon, when it’s time to go to bed, so that you can get up for work that starts again at midnight? You’ve got the whole day in front of you and a lot of easy cash. You don’t go to the library, especially not when you’ve only had a third-grade education. (Besides, there’s no library or movie theater for miles.) Anyway, what you do if you are in the wholesale produce business and you have all that free time and cash, is that you gamble a good deal of the time away with your cro- nies, the other produce dogs at the City Market. Now, if you are from the Ukraine, then you welcome the day by going to the Russian steam baths on Pico Boulevard and drinking schnapps and playing pinochle. And when Hollywood Park, or Santa Anita, or Del Mar finally opens, around eleven or twelve, then you head out with your buddies to lay off one or two hundred bucks on that morning’s inside tip. At the track, my old man would read the Form, eat, and drink, all the while bitching and whining about the price of FOB toma- toes. They would not, of course, miss the chance to play a few more hands of pinochle in between each race. By the time he got home around four or five, he was too full and too drunk to eat dinner with the family. So he would typically turn on the TV, watch wrestling for a half hour, and fall into a coma on the couch. If he lost big, he would go to sleep cursing his luck. Periodically, he would wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, or worse yet, not get up and vomit all over himself. He consumed Alka-Seltzer tablets like chickpeas. He swore that every person he ever met—including my mother and brother—was stealing him blind. My mother tried to stay out of his way. I stayed completely out of his way. Little by little, tomatoes started to scare the hell out of me. They reminded me too much of his life, his furious, unpredictable, eruptive, and shadowy life. When I saw The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, I immediately thought of my old man. I even had a hard time with ketchup, a substance we were forbidden to have in the house because the Heinz 83 above: Umm, a tomato. Photo Adam Nollmeyer. Company—obviously German—made their sauce out of the leftovers, the bottom of the barrel, the rotten of the rotten.
Barry Sanders’s father in the market, late 1940s. Sanders writes: “The person Absolute crap. holding the receipts in the center of the photograph is my old man. The pic- Dig slightly below the level of the mob, and you’ll come ture, taken for a local LA newspaper such as the Herald Examiner or the Star face to face with the wholesale fruit and vegetable business. News, ran alongside a story on the LA produce markets. The photographer It was its own kind of underworld, designed to be sordid: the took the shot from the accounting office located above the warehouse floor, life is a fast-paced, all-male, cash-based affair, transacted in a perfect look-out for spotting cops or other unwanted visitors. My old man the darkest hours of the night. Customers knew better than is surrounded by lugs of tomatoes, some of which have been stamped 5x5 to ask for a receipt. Truckloads of fruits and vegetables— or 6x6, numbers which translate into sizes. A 5x5, for example, means five worth thousands of dollars—got sold with just a handshake rows of five tomatoes each; a 6x6 contains six rows of six tomatoes each—the or a nod of the head. Skimming cash is a way to beat the tomatoes in the first category are obviously larger than in the second. The odds. Produce men pay off the cops to leave them alone. photograph was staged. If it were a candid shot, my father would no doubt be Hookers—the “hot tomatoes”—strolled by every few min- clutching a handful of cash rather than fingering a few receipts. The bottle of utes. Bookies were on first-name basis with every sales guy. Johnny Walker Black Label is also conspicuously absent.” Runners made their way from produce stall to produce stall carrying punch cards. Punch out the right number and win an easy fifty or even a hundred-dollar bill. Produce is the ultimate hustle; you have to stay on your toes. Fruits and vegetables are perishable. The entire inven- tory has to be sold and sold fast. Buyers want fresh. They 84 all demand the goods that came in that very morning. You always have to have fresh. Not exactly a bold-faced lie, but a “When’s the last time you had a tomato that tasted like a really interesting, puffed-up story can make the oldest toma- tomato?” Most people answer, “When I was a kid, I think.” toes in the warehouse sound as fresh as a newborn infant. Inert, inedible tomatoes are a sure sign, for millions of Amer- And my father knew how to tell a story: he kibitzed, he icans, of the death of civilization. A handful of rare heirloom talked, he persuaded. He loved to tell the same joke over and tomato seeds sells on Ebay at Beluga caviar prices. over. Out of the house, he was everybody’s pal. And he sold.
He was good. Damned good. Most of the top accounts he ANTITHESIS: YOU GOTTA HATE TOMATOES had in his pocket. In the language of the produce mavens, Tomatoes belong to the solanaceae, or Deadly Nightshade he was a hondler. The guys who sold cukes and melons and family, so named because they contain the poisonous potatoes envied the hell out of him. alkaloid, solanine. Solanum in Latin means “nightshade.” That was fruits and vegetables in the ‘30s and ‘40s and Frightened? Just check www.tomatoesareevil.com, the ‘50s in this country. And that’s what America was for my old website devoted to the proposition that the humble tomato man, a hit-it-big, bust-it-wide-open democracy. If you loved is the root of all evil. You’ll never eat another one. For start- action, lots of fast action, you could find it in the produce ers, you’ll discover that tomatoes are cousin not only to markets in New York, Chicago, and LA. Since everything’s the eggplant, red pepper, and potato, but to the highly toxic corrupt, you might as well get in on the ground floor and sell belladonna, as well. Botanists count an astonishing 10,000 fruits and vegetables. Everybody’s got to eat. varieties of tomatoes, all of them containing trace elements While the San Joaquin Valley, in northern California, of nicotine, which some doctors insist can promote an still reigns as the largest producer of food in the country, addiction every bit as tenacious and debilitating as ciga- the means of production and distribution began to change rettes. So frightening is this category of plants that one radically in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. By then, the wise can find warnings of its side effects from one of England’s guys and the tough guys were all doing time or had died off. earliest poets, Aelfric, in the year 1000, in his Chronicles of The suits took over. Agribusiness, big box stores, geneti- Britain. cally modified seeds, and the IRS helped put an end to the More than any other food, the tomato had to undergo old way of life. The City Market has shrunk to one-third its an astonishing journey to become today’s standard original size, and now shares space with hip art galleries, accompaniment to, say, almost every one of the billions of even hipper clothes designers, and up-scale faux delis. The hamburgers that people consume around the world every only thing that remains from the old days—even after Cesar year. The tomato went from a poisonous plant to be avoided Chavez and a revolution in technology—are poorly paid, at all costs to one of the rare treats on the most elegant poorly housed migrant workers from Mexico, who pick the dinner tables. No other fruit or vegetable, not even the avo- fields in 110 degree heat. They still keep the prices at the cado or the artichoke, can claim such a through-going and supermarkets ridiculously low. They do the work, as George radical reversal. W. Bush says, that no one else wants to do. Which is to say The Aztecs cultivated the plant as early as 700 AD. Thus, that no white American wants to work ten hours a day at a job tomato is one of the few words in English that derives from of grueling stoop labor that pays less than minimum wage. the Uto-Aztecan language, specifically from the Nahautl My old man turns out to be sort of right: the shop- word, xitotomatl, “plump fruit,” which got shortened to the per still pays fairly low prices; good-looking tomatoes win simpler tomatl. Some historians believe that Cortés brought out over the morphs. Most tomatoes are still gassed. Our the tomato back to Europe, to Seville, an early version of the first line of defense against cancer, cholesterol, obesity, City Market, which distributed produce to Italy and the Low and hypertension—fruits and vegetables—is for the most Countries. Whether Cortés carried the plant back or not, part in the hands of Monsanto and their number one seller, when the tomato finally made its way to England, people Roundup Ready seeds. Four crops—soybeans, cotton, corn, could not even bear to speak its name. For instance, while and canola—make up 95% of the transgenic commercial the British began cultivating tomatoes as early as the 1580s, production in the US. Soybeans comprise 75% of the total the word does not appear in English until some twenty years area planted with genetically modified seeds. Farmers grow later, as if naming it made the tomato too real and perma- strawberries on gargantuan sheets of polyvinyl chloride. nent. When botanists finally named the plant, in 1604, they The first genetically modified food approved by the FDA kept its Hispanic root in its new name, tomate, making cer- was the Flavr-Savr tomato in 1993, produced by the biotech tain that no one mistake this plant as native to British soil. company Calgene. The controversy over so-called Franken- Farmers in England found the tomato unfit for con- foods caused Calgene to pull the Flavr-Savr from the market sumption even by wild animals, and grew them exclusively in 1997. The Department of Agriculture at the University of as ornamental plants. For one thing, botanists mistook the California, Davis, however, continues to design newer and fruit’s Italian name Pomo d’oro, the “golden apple,” for Pomo ever-better tomatoes, giving them less evocative names, like d’amoro, “love apple,” prompting authorities to issue strong the M-44 and the C-80. warnings against its consumption, as a most potent aphro- Over all these years, from the ‘20s to now, tomatoes disiac. As if that were not damning enough, the British also have persisted as the litmus test, the mine canaries believed that the tomato was a hallucinogen, which could 85 of cuisine. One hears the question over and over: induce grand visions of flying. This helped to forge a close symbolic connection between tomatoes and those creatures he would consume an entire bushel of the supposed toxic who spent a good deal of time airborne—witches. And tomatoes in one sitting without missing a single heartbeat. since witches had a special talent for conjuring werewolves, On the afternoon of 26 September 1830, an astonish- it prompted the eighteenth-century botanist John Hill to ing two thousand people showed up on the steps of the classify the tomato as lycopersicon lycopersicum, or “wolf courthouse in Salem. Johnson’s own physician, James Van peach.” Meter, playing the Dauphin to Johnson’s Duke, raised crowd All of this with one glaring exception. Which helps expectations to a fever pitch: “The foolish colonel will foam to explain my father’s own fascination with tomatoes. and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis. Historians have found recipes using tomatoes in English All that oxalic acid in one dose, and he is dead. If the Wolf cookbooks used by Sephardic Jews who had emigrated Peach is too ripe and warmed by the sun, he might even from Spain and Portugal. Other Jews, from Europe and be exposing himself to brain fever. Should he, by some Russia, quietly embraced the lowly tomato as well. One unlikely chance, survive, I must warn him that his skin will of the principal outsiders, the Jew, made friends with the stick to his stomach and cause cancer.” Like some death- weirdest outsider fruit of all time, the tomato. Jews and defying circus performer, Johnson ate his way through the tomatoes: who would have thought it? It turns out that my bushel-full of tomatoes to thunderous applause. The modern old man worked in an ancient, established tradition. tomato was born. In fact, the tomato’s outsider status helps explain why At that moment, acceptance came so fast that, by the my mother owned a pincushion in the shape of a small, red late 1830s, several pharmaceutical companies were in fierce tomato. I thought it was her clever way to placate my father, competition selling tomato pills, which they guaranteed—in making him believe that tomatoes were so important in her language my father would later use with me—to cure diar- life that she even kept one in front of her when she darned rhea, dyspepsia, cholera, and even cancer. During the Civil his socks (and damned his life). But it turns out that virtually War, both sides consumed a daily ration of tomatoes—solid everyone’s mother had a version of the tomato pincushion— enough proof for the whole of the United States, North and all because of homeopathic magic. In many Renaissance South, that tomatoes were as safe as, well, tomatoes. households, people placed a tomato on their mantle as a And certainly safe enough for an unknown fruit way of containing evil in one evil object, thus helping to merchant named Joseph Campbell and an icebox manu- ensure prosperity for the family. But tomatoes eventually rot. facturer named Abraham Anderson to open their Joseph So people resorted to stuffed models. And since the little A. Campbell Preserve Company, in that same state of New cushions possessed a bit of voodoo magic, it held all the Jersey, in the city of Camden, just down the road from my pins and needles in the house. father’s stomping ground, Newark. By 1897, shortly after Though it’s hard to imagine, Americans feared the the company opened, it took an investment gamble and deadly tomato more than did the British, reluctant to treat started producing condensed tomato soup. The cans sold them even as ornamental. The earliest references to the so extraordinarily well that the partners quickly changed the plant in America come from a herbalist, in 1710, at a South name of their operation to the Campbell Soup Company. Carolina plantation, who approached the tomato with the “Just add water” entered common kitchen lingo. Today, same trepidation that sushi eaters approach the blowfish: Americans down approximately 2.5 billion bowls of Camp- they might taste wonderful, but I am not dying to find out. bell’s soups yearly, the vast majority of those bowls brimful He exhibited them on his property as a curiosity. Accord- with tomato soup. ing to the standard work, Andrew Smith’s The Tomato in It’s only in the summer, and only in Campbell’s state of America, attitudes did not really begin to change until 100 New Jersey, by the way, that one hears a decisive answer to years later when the president himself, Thomas Jefferson, the Great Tomato Question. “I had a terrific tomato only yes- announced in 1809 that he had begun growing tomatoes on terday,” people eagerly report, “from upstate Jersey. Right his own grounds and serving them at state dinners. By then, from the field. Picked ripe. Not gassed.” the British had had several centuries to get used to toma- So famous are those tomatoes that, in 2004, a local toes, and were eating them in at least small amounts. But growers association proposed that the state of New Jersey Americans remained wary. Jefferson was in the last year of adopt the tomato as the state fruit. But the tomato simply his presidency, and who knows, perhaps he thought he had could not shed enough of its night-shady past to satisfy little to lose in recommending them. the bigwigs in the state capital, leaving some lowly fourth- Whatever the case, Jefferson’s endorsement did not graders from a local elementary school to best the growers. help. Americans needed more pizzazz, more flash, in their The children lobbied the state assembly through petitions testimonials. This is a country, after all, with a long history of and letters in favor of the much more benign cultivated mountebanks. We invented the Shopping Channel. Ameri- blueberry. Much to the chagrin of the New Jersey State cans need outrageous claims, unbelievable guarantees, and Growers Association, the blueberry now reigns as the wild promises. A local entrepreneur, Colonel Robert Gibbon state fruit. Johnson, a huckster straight out of Huckleberry Finn, gave
the public exactly what it needed. He took an ad in SYNTHESIS: YOU GOTTA SERVE TOMATOES 86 a local Salem, New Jersey, newspaper boasting that Why wouldn’t Andy Warhol seize on Campbell’s Tomato Soup as the American icon? Joe Campbell had tamed the AFTERWORD: “YOU SAY TOE-MAY-TOE AND I SAY TOE-MAH-TOE” renegade tomato, vacuum packed it, and delivered it to Look up the word fruit in the Oxford English Dictionary and America in safe metal containers. He added a label white as here’s what you’ll find: “Vegetable products in general, that cleanliness itself—not a witch or a werewolf in sight—with are fit to be used as food by men and animals.” According to just enough red to suggest that somewhere in the process the principle authority on the English language, the OED, a a tomato had once been present. The color was uniform, fruit’s nothing but a vegetable. Try to find the botanical defi- the taste absolutely uniform. No one in the family, not even nition of a fruit. That, too, will prove difficult. You won’t find mother, need touch a tomato to serve soup to every person. it in the Oxford Companion to Food. The OED won’t reveal it. In a stroke of genius, Campbell had turned those little red Only the venerable Larousse Gastronomique comes titillating bombs into the purity of puree. close: “Botanically speaking the ovary of any growing plant. Warhol took Joe Campbell a couple of steps farther. He In current usage, however, ‘fruit’ refers only to those ovaries drained whatever bogey was still left in the tomato, what- which may be eaten as dessert.” ever fear the public still felt, and re-presented the package No plant eludes the grasp of taxonomy quite like the as the height of slick. Still frightened by that little red fruit? tomato. It must be a vegetable. Instinct tells us so. Other- You don’t even have to eat it. Look, tomato soup has leaped wise, we would not so willingly lay a slice on a hamburger categories. Pop: It’s art! You can buy a can, just like the one patty. My old man, of course, knew better. He had inside Andy used, and put it on your shelf. And admire it. Even in info. Though my father would cringe, if he knew it, the the kitchen, you can be famous. tomato is the plant’s ovary, along with its seeds. “Eating a Warhol showed his first red and white silkscreen in tomato”—the idea’s damned near pornographic. 1962. I had my fifteen minutes of silkscreen fame much In 1883, tariff laws in the United States imposed a duty earlier—in 1946. Those few moments arrived when my on vegetables but not on fruits. Here was a chance to find father got the bright idea that he would brand his small out the tomato’s precise status. Newspapers raised the tomato packages, BARRY BOY TOMATOES. Was my old issue: Should the government tax tomatoes? The Depart- man an incipient Warhol? I think not, but on each small box ment of Agriculture argued the point; botanists, too. The he printed a picture of my eight-year-old face, hovering over debate continued for a solid decade. And since the politi- the caption, “Oh Boy, Barry Boy, Just The Best.” My father cians and the scientists could not agree, the legal system was playing off of existing varieties like Better Boy and Big would have to decide the tomato’s fate. Government lawyers Boy. He never asked my permission. But I enjoyed hours and hauled the tomato into the Supreme Court. In 1893, the nine hours of fame. Supremes, in a case known as Nix v. Hedden, classified the I would walk into the Safeway or A & P Market and tomato as a vegetable, using as definitive proof the fact that there I would be, lined up in the produce department, people eat tomatoes with their main course and not with, or between the corn and the peas, my smile of freshness and as, their dessert. quality beaming back at me from dozens of small packages One hundred years later, in an attempt to justify of tomatoes. What I didn’t realize at first, of course, is that all President Reagan’s drastic cuts in the school lunch my friends were seeing the same tomato packages, and the program, the Chairman of the United States Department same dumb smiling face. Of course, they quickly branded of Agriculture, citing Nix v. Hedden, reassured a wary me Barry Boy, or Tomato Boy, or Best Boy. Friends noticed public that the tomato was indeed a vegetable. Reagan’s that I, too, was round and rosy, just like a tomato. I was “a budget cuts had wiped out all the fresh vegetables on fruit,” “a veg,” a general freak. school cafeteria menus, and parents protested. But since But there it was—tomatoes were part of me. My the kids still had their ketchup, that was good enough for father’s advice did not work. How could it? Tomatoes the Gipper. Ketchup: my father would have yanked me out were not just in my blood; he had turned me into a tomato. of school. Was I animal, mineral, or vegetable? No, I was indeed a In the winter of 1967, at the end of a career spent sell- fruit. I prayed for him to go out of business. My face was ing tomatoes, my father lay on his deathbed and told me a curse. But I was only seven. No worry, in only ten or what a terrifically hard life he had endured. Some part of twenty or thirty short years, I could hopefully grow out of me just would not buy it, and I asked him: didn’t he actu- my shame. ally have a good time those sixty-odd years in the produce And I did. In 1970, after being fired from my teaching market, with all his hard-boiled pals? We were alone; it was job at a local college, after an anti-Vietnam War demonstra- the end. He could speak the truth. True to his character to tion, I opened a vegetarian restaurant in Santa Monica, the very end, my father managed a slight Cagney smile and California, which I ran collectively with students who had nodded, yes. Then he asked me to promise him something. dropped out with me. I gave the endeavor a bit of Warhol I said, “Of course.” He looked me in the eye and uttered the irony by naming it The Health Department. Rolling Stone last sentence of his life, seven words that allowed me to touted it as the best buy for food in LA. We served only veg- choose, if I really, truly wanted, fruits and vegetables as my etarian meals, only organic fresh fruits and vegetables. We line of work. Here are his last words: “Don’t do the things featured the tomato. We served them as a dessert. you don’t enjoy.” 87 My father had won. I thought. He would have liked my restaurant. I think. IT’S A vegetable, GODDAMN IT! Mr. Justice Gray
In 1893, nine men, collectively known as the Justices of the US Supreme Court, had to decide whether the tomato is legally a fruit or a vegetable. The Tariff Act of 1883 had imposed a tax on imported vegetables, but not fruit, and the matter had to be settled once and for all. Here is the Court’s opinion, written by Mr. Justice Gray.
At law. Action by John Nix, John W. Nix, George W. Nix, and Frank W. Nix against Edward L. Hedden, collector of the port of New York, to recover back duties paid under protest. Judgment on verdict directed for defendant. 39 Fed. Rep. 109. Plaintiffs bring error. Affirmed. Statement by Mr. Justice GRAY: [149 US 304, 305] This was an action brought February 4, 1887, against the collec- tor of the port of New York to recover back duties paid under protest on tomatoes imported by the plaintiff from the West Indies in the spring of 1886, which the collector assessed under “Schedule G—Provisions,” of the tariff act of March 3, 1883, (chapter 121) imposing a duty on “vegetables in their natural state, or in salt or brine, not specially enumer- ated or provided for in this act, ten per centum ad valorem;” and which the plaintiffs contended came within the clause in the free list of the same act, “Fruits, green, ripe, or dried, not specially enumerated or provided for in this act.” 22 Stat. 504, 519. At the trial the plaintiff’s counsel, after reading in evi- dence definitions of the words “fruit” and “vegetables” from Webster’s Dictionary, Worcester’s Dictionary, and the Imperial Dictionary, called two witnesses, who had been for 30 years in the business of selling fruit and vegetables, and asked them, after hearing these definitions, to say whether these words had “any special meaning in trade or com- merce, different from those read.” One of the witnesses answered as follows: “Well, it does not classify all things there, but they are correct as far as they go. It does not take all kinds of fruit or vegetables; it takes a portion of them. I think the words ‘fruit’ and ‘veg- etable’ have the same meaning in trade to-day that they had on March 1, 1883. I understand that the term ‘fruit’ is applied in trade only to such plants or parts of plants as contain the seeds. There are more vegetables than those in the enumeration given in Webster’s Dictionary under the term ‘vegetable,’ as ‘cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, potatoes, peas, beans, and the like,’ probably covered by the words ‘and the like.’” The other witness testified: “I don’t think the term ‘fruit’ or the term ‘vegetables’ had, in March 1883, and prior thereto, any special meaning in trade and commerce in this country different from that which I have read here from the dictionaries.” The plaintiff’s counsel then read in evidence from the same dictionaries the definitions of the word “tomato.” [149 US 304, 306] The defendant’s counsel then read in evidence 88 from Webster’s Dictionary the definitions of the words “pea,” “eggplant,” “cucumber,” “squash,” and “pepper.” that [149 US 304, 307] meaning the court is bound to take The plaintiff then read in evidence from Webster’s and judicial notice, as it does in regard to all words in our own Worcester’s dictionaries the definitions of “potato,” “turnip,” tongue; and upon such a question dictionaries are admitted, “parsnip,” “cauliflower,” “cabbage,” “carrot,” and “bean.” not as evidence, but only as aids to the memory and under- No other evidence was offered by either party. The standing of the court. Brown v. Piper, 91 US 37 , 42; Jones court, upon the defendant’s motion, directed a verdict for v. US, 137 US 202, 216 , 11 S. Sup. Ct. Rep. 80; Nelson v. him, which was returned, and judgment rendered thereon. Cushing, 2 Cush. 519, 532, 533; Page v. Fawcet, 1 Leon. 39 Fed. Rep. 109. The plaintiffs duly excepted to the instruc- 242; Tayl. Ev. (8th Ed.) 16, 21. tion, and sued out this writ of error. Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, Edwin B. Smith, for plaintiffs in error. just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in Asst. Atty. Gen. Maury, for defendant in error. the common language of the people, whether sellers or Mr. Justice GRAY, after stating the facts in the foregoing consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are language, delivered the opinion of the court. grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked The single question in this case is whether tomatoes, or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, considered as provisions, are to be classed as “vegetables” cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served or as “fruit,” within the meaning of the tariff act of 1883. at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which The only witnesses called at the trial testified that nei- constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits ther “vegetables” nor “fruit” had any special meaning in generally, as dessert. trade or commerce different from that given in the dictionar- The attempt to class tomatoes as fruit is not unlike ies, and that they had the same meaning in trade today that a recent attempt to class beans as seeds, of which Mr. they had in March 1883. Justice Bradley, speaking for this court, said: “We do The passages cited from the dictionaries define the not see why they should be classified as seeds, any more word “fruit” as the seed of plants, or that part of plants than walnuts should be so classified. Both are seeds, in which contains the seed, and especially the juicy, pulpy the language of botany or natural history, but not in products of certain plants, covering and containing the seed. commerce nor in common parlance. On the other hand These definitions have no tendency to show that tomatoes in speaking generally of provisions, beans may well be are “fruit,” as distinguished from “vegetables,” in common included under the term ‘vegetables.’ As an article of speech, or within the meaning of the tariff act. food on our tables, whether baked or boiled, or forming There being no evidence that the words “fruit” and the basis of soup, they are used as a vegetable, as well “vegetables” have acquired any special meaning in trade when ripe as when green. This is the principal use to which or commerce, they must receive their ordinary meaning. Of they are put. Beyond the common knowledge which we have on this subject, very little evidence is necessary, or
above: Tomato juice boasting an image of the Supreme Court Chambers, can be produced.” Robertson v. Salomon, 130 US 412, Chenango County Court House, Norwich, NY, ca. 1940. 414, 9 S. Sup. Ct. Rep. 559. 89 Courtesy Andrew F. Smith. Judgment affirmed. ORANGE CRUSH: Three festivals Kavior Moon
Ivrea Orange-throwing battle in progress during the Carnival in Ivrea, Italy. According to a popular legend, in 1194, a just-married local miller’s daughter named Violetta cut off the head of the ruling Count Ranieri of Biandrate, who had demanded the right to spend the first night with newly-wedded brides. The beheading started a popular revolt during which the commoners fought with stones against the troops and set the tyrant’s castle on fire. Oranges were introduced into the carnival in the nineteenth century as people on balconies would toss them at passersby, who would respond in kind. This developed into the present celebration, known as La Battaglia delle Arance: the teams on foot represent the com- moners, while those in horse-drawn carts represent the tyrant’s troops and the ruling class.
Binche Men dressed as Gille, the principal character of the Carnival in Binche, Belgium. They carry baskets of blood oranges to throw to onlookers, as seen in the picture below. Legend has it that while residing in Binche in 1549, Queen Maria of Hungary decided to organize a special ceremony during the town’s Carnival festivities in honor of her brother Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain, who had come for a visit. She had the courtiers dress as Incas, a reference to the Spanish expeditions to South America at the time, though another version of the story claims real Incas were brought over from Peru. The Incan- inspired character—later named Gille—traditionally wears a wax mask, a hay-stuffed burlap suit decorated with bells, an eight-pound, white-plumed hat (made with ostrich feathers), and wooden shoes. The “Gilles” appear only once a year, on Shrove Tuesday, when they dance down the streets to the beat of drums during a parade leading to the Town Hall. The oranges are thought to be a substitute for the gold coins that Queen Maria threw to the crowd.
Menton Floats made of lemons and oranges on display at La Fête du Citron in Menton, France (2006). This festival, which takes place in mid-February each year, was started in 1934 by an ambitious local hotelier to attract tourists. Some three to four tons of citrus fruits— mainly lemons and oranges—are used for each of the floats, which are designed according to a new theme each year. All the fruit, nearly 120 tons worth, is imported from Spain. After the event, the surviving fruits are sold at a discounted price for consumption.
page 91: Ivrea, 2005. Photo Aram Armstrong. page 92: Binche, 2004. Courtesy Alain Schroeder, Reporters Agency. 90 page 93: Menton, 2006. Courtesy Office de Tourisme de Menton.
THE KING OF FRUITS And yet, for a few delicious moments in its history, this not Fran Beauman only came to pass, but did so to a spectacular degree. By the 1770s, estates like Chatsworth, Sledmere, and Castle A Single Seed thrown into the hot Bed of Fashion will produce Howard cultivated their own specimens, sometimes hun- an immeasurable crop—All must have their Fooleries as well dreds at a time: “No garden is now thought to be complete,” as their Pineries; and the only struggle seems to be, whose wrote one contemporary botanist, “without a stove for rais-
Fruit shall be the largest and most talk’d of. ing of pine-apples.”3
—James Ralph (1758)1 The financial outlay required to grow pineapples outside of their natural habitat was astronomical. First, the pinery The Dunmore Pineapple is one of Britain’s most eccentric itself. It was estimated in 1764 that the construction costs architectural splendors. It is also one of the few buildings alone of a pineapple stove 40 feet long and 12 feet wide in the world that is shaped like a fruit. Looming fifty-three were about £80. It would cost another £30 to stock it with feet high over the walled apple orchard of the Dunmore Park pineapple plants, which in the early days had to be specially estate near Stirling, Scotland, the architect of this “garden ordered and shipped from the Caribbean, while maintenance folly” is not recorded in official records, although tradition costs were also a consideration—about £21 a year. This was ascribes it to Sir William Chambers. The elegant classi- in addition to the extensive labor involved: the three to four cal base dates from 1761, but the stone sculpture on top years that each plant took to fruit were years of incredibly appears to have been a later addition commissioned by the hard work for some unfortunate garden boy whose sole job it fourth Lord Dunmore, John Murray.2 was to ensure that temperatures inside the pinery remained The fourth Lord Dunmore was the eldest son of William, sufficiently high—stoking the stoves, raking the manure, the third Lord Dunmore, by his wife the Honorable Catherine even sleeping among the plants to ensure they did not burst Nairn. In 1770, at the age of thirty-eight, he was appointed into flames by mistake, as occasionally happened. With governor of the colony of New York, and subsequently of all this in mind, the average total cost of the cultivation of Virginia as well. From the beginning of his tenure, he proved just one pineapple was about £80 (about $3000 in today’s deeply unpopular. Hindered by his Scottish ancestry that money)—about the same as the cost of a new coach.4 made him appear boorish to the Virginian gentry, he won Yet in the eighteenth century, the glory that ensured few friends with his impatient and abrupt manner. He was from offering one’s dinner guests this tiny taste of Paradise also rather cowardly: faced with the onset of the mass made it all seem worth it—for the master of the house, at unrest that was to culminate in the War of Independence, least. “Look how rich I am,” it screeched in a decidedly his response was to retreat from the Governor’s Palace to undignified manner. The Prada handbag of its day, the pine- the safety of a naval vessel moored offshore. Deemed even apple essentially functioned as a response to a condition less forgivable at the time was the fact that he was the only that today might be deemed “status anxiety”—the most British commander ever to free slaves. Having utterly failed impressive specimens made the rounds of urban dinner par- to establish his dominance, he went on to suffer a series ties for weeks at a time, to be consumed only once they had of humiliating losses in battle that culminated in defeat on begun to rot so much that they stank out the entire house- Gwynn’s Island, Virginia, on 8 July 1776. It is likely that con- hold. struction started on the Dunmore Pineapple on his return Ever since 1493, when the pineapple was first “discov- from the New World the same year. ered” by Columbus, it had been perceived in the West as the To the contemporary onlooker, frittering away the archetypically “exotic” fruit, inextricably intertwined with all equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars on a garden that was wondrous about the New World; this explains the folly shaped like a pineapple might seem like a somewhat many rhapsodic accounts of the fruit written by sixteenth- unusual decision. To begin with, it is a distinctly odd- and seventeenth-century explorers. The pineapple was a looking fruit, with its royal crown, its armor-like rind, and physical manifestation of Britain’s spectacularly successful its sword-like leaves. Why not build a folly in the shape of appropriation of the New World as a whole. A 1766 poem an apple, say, or a strawberry? Or, indeed, of something by James Grainger describes how on the island of St Chris- other than a fruit entirely? The answer lies in the complex topher’s, “the Sun’s child, the mail’d anana, yields / His regal cultural resonances that had accumulated like weeds around apple to the ravish’d taste…”5 It is a powerful metaphor the pineapple in the years since Christopher Columbus first for the way that the “mail’d” native Americans had been stumbled across it in Guadeloupe—in particular, in the fact forced to “yield” themselves to those who “ravish’d,” that that by the eighteenth century, it had emerged as one of the is the British. Thus every time a pineapple, which was so most potent status symbols of the age. intimately associated with the New World, appeared at the Dunmore Park was one of many great British country dinner table, those present were reminded in an intensely estates to possess its own productive pinery—that is, a hot- visual way of the fruits of British victory overseas. house designed solely for pineapples. In a country famed for With consumerism becoming an increasingly central its cold, wet weather, to attempt to propagate a tropical fruit tenet of British society in this period, some of the cannier like the pineapple, which needs an air and soil tem- 94 perature of 60–70°F is clearly a preposterous project. opposite: The Pineapple at Dunmore Park. Courtesy The Landmark Trust. shopkeepers soon sought to market the pineapple to the Lord Dunmore arrived in New York to take up the post upper classes in all shapes, forms, and materials. Here was of Governor just as the British aristocracy’s mania for pine- a vessel through which the aristocracy was able to express apples was being adopted with zest by Colonial American a complicated but commonly understood cohort of contem- gentlemen anxious to copy fashions back home—despite porary values and mores within an arena that extended far the decidedly non-tropical climate which they too had to beyond the garden or the dinner table. A pineapple in china cope with. In October of that year, Mary Ambler was taken or stone may not have been as impressive as the edible on a tour of Mount Clare, Charles Carroll’s Maryland estate. kind, but it did the job. The early 1760s saw the appearance The sun was strangely hot for the time of year and her new of Josiah Wedgwood’s earliest pineapple designs, among shoes had pinched her the whole day through, but there was them teapots, bowls, sauceboats, sugar dishes, and tea cad- one sight that she did not fail to note in her diary: “There is dies. Also popular was a stone pineapple atop a gatepost. a Green House with a good many Orange & Lemon Trees Situated in such a way that it served to mark out the limits just ready to bear besides which he is now buildg a Pinery of property, it was a way of very publicly differentiating where the Gardr expects to raise about an 100 Pine Apples a between those who could afford the pineapple, whether in Year. He expects to Ripen some next Summer.”6 In Colonial reality or in replica, and those who could not. Dunmore’s America’s unpredictable environment, where finances were design for his garden folly may certainly be viewed in this precarious, time and labor at a premium, and horticultural light—there really was no danger that the neighbors knowledge scarce, cultivating pineapples really was a bizarre 96 would miss it. hobby; yet Abraham Redwood in Rhode Island, Henry Laurens in South Carolina, and others all joined Carroll in apple was a symbol of hospitality. When sea captains taking to it enthusiastically.7 returned from trade missions with the West Indies, they For those American gentlemen who chose not to nur- were thought to have brought with them the native custom ture pineapples at home, there was another option: imports of placing a fresh pineapple at the entrance to their home to from the Caribbean, where they naturally grew in abun- signify to the neighbors that visitors would be welcome. The dance. Some confectioners even hired pineapples out by the theory is that colonial gentlemen then sought to echo this day; and no wonder, when a real-life pineapple had become custom in a more permanent form. Contemporary sources, the one essential guest to feature at all the society parties of however, make no reference to this story. In fact, this more the age. Hence in mansion houses up and down the country, benign explanation only gained currency in the 1930s as men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson historic house museums sought to recreate an idealized would periodically display a pineapple at dinner as one way colonial past. of asserting their place within this newly formed and deeply All the associations that surrounded an artistic repre- fragile social structure.8 Washington in particular had a sentation of a pineapple in this period were, in fact, inherited predilection for the fruit: “None pleases my taste as do’s the wholesale from England, particularly status. On a gatepost, pine,” he confided in his diary during a trip to Barbados.9 for example, it served to differentiate between the haves and Pineapples made of stone, silver, wood, or porcelain the have-nots. In the frenzy to establish this kind of social also found a role within American cultural life. Particularly differentiation that gripped Colonial America from around popular was Staffordshire pineappleware, evidence of the 1730s, the pineapple—rare, strange, and expensive— which has been recovered at Monticello and throughout proved a useful and distinctive marker. A less democratic Colonial America, while a rifle through the Pennsylvania response to the fruit than previously thought, it was none- Gazette during the 1760s throws up regular advertisements theless the one recognized at the time—not least by Lord such as one placed by Joseph Stansbury in December 1769 Dunmore as he struggled to establish himself there during announcing that he had a new range of pineapple teapots to a time of frightening unrest. offer his customers, should they care to call at his shop on The Dunmore Pineapple may also have been built for
Second Street near Arch Street in Philadelphia.10 Stone pine- the associations it inspired in the viewer’s imagination: the apples, like those that still adorn the house built by William fruit’s most immediate and appealing associations are the Byrd in Westover, Virginia, were common too. otherworldly antithesis of the dull grays and greens of rainy The most often cited explanation for the pineapple’s Britain. This is a manifestation of a yearning for the escapist ubiquity on America’s eastern seaboard is that the pine- “other” that was identified by James (now Jan) Morris as a kind of alter ego—“as though the British had another people inside themselves … who yearned to break out of their sad
or prosaic realities, and live more brilliant lives in Xanadu.”11 Perhaps for this reason, pineapples frequently featured in contemporary design manuals such as William Wrighte’s 1767 bestseller Grotesque Architecture. In addition, the Dunmore Pineapple reflects a sub- versive streak in the British aristocracy, bursting out of the rigid repression of the classical form of the folly’s base, as extravagant in its way as Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill or William Beckford’s Fonthill. The triumph of the whim of the individual over the rule of authority was another trend typical of Enlightenment thinking, and the juxtaposition of European classicism in the form of the Dunmore Pineapple’s base and the New World influence in the form of the stone pineapple itself was relatively common in eighteenth- century architecture—though rarely in such an extreme form. However, it is surely Dunmore’s experiences in the New World that hold the key to his garden folly. While there, he had been spectacularly unsuccessful in meeting his brief from the King of England to suppress the festering uprising in Virginia—he had proved incapable of asserting his author- ity over the foreign. While it may therefore seem odd that
opposite: Hendrick Danckerts (attributed), John Rose Presents Charles II with a on his return he chose to erect such a potent reminder, per- Pineapple, ca. 1670. Courtesy Bridgeman Art Library. haps—by representing the pineapple in classical, Western above: The Wimbledon Challenge Cup, awarded to the men’s singles terms—he sought to translate a foreign, somewhat threat- 97 champion, bears a pineapple at its apex. ening entity into the familiar cultural setting of his apple orchard, a setting in which he felt able to control it, even 1 James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade Stated With Regard to Book- dominate it, in a way he had so publicly failed to do in reality. sellers, the Stage, and the Public (London: Ralph Griffith, 1758), pp. 41–42. In essence, the Pineapple at Dunmore Park is a spectacular 2 For more on the Pineapple, see the Landmark Trust documents at the building itself , attempt by the master of the house to contextualize the as well as Glynn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp, Follies: A Guide to Rogue Architecture exotic on his own terms. in England, Scotland and Wales (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 469; Stirlingshire: In 1787, Lord Dunmore was installed as the Governor An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the of the Bahamas—not only had he apparently recovered from Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1963), p. 341; and George Mott and Sally Sample Aall, Follies and Pleasure Pavilions (London: Pavilion Books, 1989), p. 55. his traumatic experiences in Virginia, he also felt able to drag 3 Richard Weston, Tracts on Practical Agriculture and Gardening (London: S. Hooper, himself away from his beloved Pineapple for a few years. 1769), p. 78. The recompense, perhaps, was that he was now surrounded 4 Museum Rusticum et Commerciale, vol. 1 (1764), p. 143. by fields and fields of the real thing. While he stood up for 5 James Grainger, The Sugar-Cane: A Poem (Dublin: William Sleater, 1766), p. 30. the rights of Bahamian slaves (as he had in the American 6 Mary Ambler, “Diary of Mary Ambler,” Mrs. Gordon B. Ambler, ed., Virginia Magazine of colonies), he again proved deeply unpopular, due to nepo- History & Biography, no. 45 (1937), p. 166. tism, crooked land speculation, and a strange obsession 7 For Abraham Redwood’s pineapples, see Alice G. B. Lockwood, ed., Gardens of Colony with building expensive new forts for no reason. Few were and State: Gardens and Gardeners of the American Colonies and of the Republic before surprised when, in 1796, Dunmore was abruptly recalled 1840, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), p. 217; for Henry Laurens’s pine- by the British government. As a result, his most enduring apples, see Philip M. Hamer, ed., The Papers of Henry Laurens, vols. 5 and 7(Columbia, legacy has in fact turned out to be the defiant architectural SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968) , p. 360 and p. 357, respectively. statement that is the Dunmore Pineapple. In the words of 8 For George Washington’s pineapples, see George Washington to Lawrence Sanford William Makepeace Thackeray in 1850: “And as the race of (26 September 1769) and George Washington to Robert McMickan (10 May 1774) in pine-apples, so is the race of Man.”12 Account Book 2 in The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741– 1799. For Thomas Jefferson’s pineapples, see James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany 1767–1826, vol. 1(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) , p. 78. 9 John Fitzpatrick, The Diaries of George Washington 1748-1799, vol. 1 (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925), p. 27. 10 The Pennsylvania Gazette, 28 December 1769. 11 James Morris, Heaven’s Command (London: Faber, 1973), p. 6. 12 William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, vol. 2, Peter L. Shillings- above: A Wedgwood teapot and tea caddy, ca. 1765. Courtesy Colonial burg, ed. (London: Garland, 1991), p. 63. Williamsburg Foundation. Sweet Tart: An Interview with Adam can eat a lemon, and it tastes delicious. If something has no Leith Gollner acidity in it, though, it won’t become sweeter. For example, Sina Najafi it doesn’t really do much to coffee. The effect lasts about an hour and a half and it doesn’t matter if you have one berry or As the name suggests, the red berry of the West African a thousand—the effect is the same. miracle fruit (Sideroxylon dulcificum) has one astonishing property: all sour things eaten afterwards taste sweet. In the Given the berry’s astonishing effect, it’s surprising that early 1970s, two American entrepreneurs set out to isolate Fairchild or his successors didn’t pursue it further. its active ingredient and use it as the basis for a range of food products. If they had succeeded, the US would today be A whole bunch of people, including the US Army, private inundated with miracle fruit candy, popsicles, and chewing researchers, and major chemical corporations, were doing gum, and perhaps obesity would not be the medical issue experiments with it. The problem is that miracle fruit doesn’t that it is. But in 1974, under rather strange circumstances, have a long shelf-life; the berry, once plucked, only lasts for the FDA banned miracle fruit and all its derivative products. a couple of days. And it has a complicated molecular struc- Adam Leith Gollner’s forthcoming book on what he calls ture which doesn’t lend itself easily to synthesis. In 1968, the “fruit underworld” examines the short, unhappy life of two young entrepreneurs—Robert Harvey and Don Emery— miracle fruit in the US. Sina Najafi spoke to him by phone. pulled money together from a variety of investors, set up a company called Miralin, and started doing a very disciplined How did Westerners first become aware of miracle fruit? series of tests. They figured out a way to isolate the active ingredient, which is a glycoprotein, and turn it into a pow- It was first come across by a French explorer called Des der, which they called miraculin. The main visionary was Marchais in 1725 on the Gold Coast of Africa. He noted Harvey, a young biomedical engineer who had made a lot of how various tribes were popping miracle fruit berries before money by inventing a number of unusual contrivances, such they would eat their traditional foods—kankies (cornbread), as a nuclear-powered artificial heart. He came across this pitto (palm wine), and guddoe (oatmeal gruel). He tried fruit and sunk some of his own money into it, and, because some and noticed that the berries made these sour foods of his earlier successes, was able to rally other investors sweet. The encounter is written about in his journals and behind the idea. Soon enough, he had raised close to 10 mil- in Jean-Baptiste Labat’s Voyage du Chevalier Des Marchais lion dollars to focus on figuring out how the fruit works and en Guineé, isles voisines, et à Cayenne (1731). And then Dr. creating all sorts of products incorporating miraculin. Their W. F. Daniel, a British surgeon stationed in West Africa, FDA approval was pending but by 1973, they had huge plan- described it as the “miraculous” berry in 1852 in a periodical tations up and running in Jamaica, Brazil, Florida, and parts called The Pharmaceutical Journal. After him, several other of Africa, and they started creating this marvelous suite of people investigated miracle fruit, notably a plant explorer miracle fruit products. They had, for example, popsicles named David Fairchild who was one of the first people hired coated with miraculin. The first couple of licks covered the by the US Department of Agriculture to travel overseas and tongue, and then the rest of the popsicle tasted really sweet find out what the rest of the world had in terms of fruits and although there was no sugar in it. other plants that were useful and could be grown in the US. He brought miracle fruit from West Africa to a USDA agri- Is the sweetness any different from that of sugar? cultural station in Puerto Rico, where it was grown, though not on a large scale. Nothing much happened until the late It is absolutely different. It isn’t like sugar, because it isn’t 1960s, when some entrepreneurs came across it and real- exactly a sweetener. It’s an elusive, illusory effect that ized there was enormous potential in this fruit and started depends on what you eat afterwards. With lemons, it has a doing studies to figure out how to bring it to market. kind of deep sweetness.
Do other regions in the world, for example Europe, import or But it seems not to be an acquired taste if a young kid could grow the fruit? enjoy it immediately.
There are miracle fruit cafes in Japan where you can have It is a complex taste but instantly accessible; in Miralin’s the fruit followed by sodas, ice creams, and desserts that market research, children preferred miracle fruit popsicles actually aren’t sweet. Miracle fruit grows in tropical and sub- to traditional ones. Miralin also created a chewing gum; the tropical regions all over the world, but it isn’t really available sugar in regular gum dissipates after ten or fifteen minutes, on a wide scale anywhere besides tropical Africa, where but miracle fruit gum stayed sweet for over an hour and a it grows wild. It’s a fair-sized bush, and you pluck the little half. They had miracle fruit mints, salad dressing, desserts, berry off and pop it in your mouth. There is not a lot of flesh chewable tablets. They even had a soft drink with miracle to it, but there is a pleasant squirt of juice that coats your fruit in the straw, so that the first sip would contain miracu- tongue and deactivates all your acid taste buds, so lin and make the rest of the soda taste sweet. They had an 99 you can only taste the sweet things in foods. You entire marketing campaign, a miracle fruit juggernaut. 100 Presumably diabetics were also part of the target audience. major plantation was. One night in Hudson, Harvey and Emery got into a high-speed car chase. On another occa- It was greeted with open arms by diabetics in the 70s. sion, men in sunglasses jumped out of cars and snapped Miralin placed ads in diabetes periodicals and offered free cameras in their faces to intimidate them. And coming back samples to diabetics. They scored an enormous success to work after dinner one night, Harvey and Emery noticed rate; 85% of people who received the free samples wanted two men sitting in a car in the parking lot across from their to order more. This was all while Miralin was waiting for FDA warehouse. As they went up into their offices, they saw approval. Incidentally, the fruit is still used in Florida by che- someone dash out their back door, get into the car in the motherapy patients. It removes the metallic taste caused by parking lot, and speed off into the night. Whoever it was cancer medications, and helps patients eat food that would had rifled through their files and stolen some documents. otherwise be unpalatable. This is in the weeks leading up to the product’s commercial So Miralin had millions of dollars of products ready release. to go, and they’d launched their advertising campaigns. And then came the letter from Sam Fine at the FDA At about this point, major corporations like Lifesavers and dated 19 September 1974 telling them miracle fruit was not Gillette started approaching the company and offering eight- approved and was not allowed to be sold in any form what- figure deals for a controlling interest, but Harvey and Emery soever, from the berries to the powder to the popsicles to decided to turn down all these offers. They had already been the chewing gum. The letter didn’t provide any reasons, stat- assured several times by the FDA that they would be granted ing simply that further testing was required, which it hinted approval and they were pretty confident that they were would last a minimum of three more years and cost millions going to be making billions of dollars. more. All the investors at this point panicked and backed Alongside interest from huge multinationals, the sweet- away. Miralin had no choice but to declare bankruptcy. ening industry was playing close attention, and they weren’t Part of the problem had been that these young guys very happy about this new threat. The late 60s and early weren’t familiar with the process of dealing with the regu- 70s were the glory days of artificial sweeteners: Aspartame, latory commission. They weren’t following the correct cyclomates, and saccharin were all introduced at around this protocol that is required to introduce any new substance, time. Some artificial sweeteners had been banned because whether it is a food or drug. They had already stared doing tests had shown that they caused cancer in lab rats. Sac- things without approval—that’s a no-no. Compounding mat- charin was sold until recently with fine print saying it causes ters, their timing was all wrong. Artificial sweeteners were cancer. Because of health uncertainties, there was a long being cast in a very dubious light, and Miralin was rushing to vetting process for any new sweeteners. In 1958, the FDA bring its products to market. They made some of it available had introduced measures for protecting new foods and publicly when it wasn’t supposed to be, and they did tests drugs called the GRAS system: Generally Regarded As Safe. on little children, which they weren’t supposed to do. Things eaten before 1958 that hadn’t caused any notable problems, for example sugar and salt, were automatically The Generally Regarded As Safe principles presumably don’t GRAS. New substances, however, needed to be accepted by apply to non-Westerners. The fact that for centuries West the FDA. Even so, it can take decades for hazardous effects Africans had been eating the berry didn’t count, right? to become noticeable, as we saw recently with Vioxx. The FDA had approved some sweeteners without due That’s right. The only guy eating it in America previous to process, and after the cancer studies, there was a lot of heat 1958 was this one fruit enthusiast who had brought a plant on the FDA regarding new sugar substitutes. That is very back from Puerto Rico. He would eat it every morning before important in light of the decision that was subsequently his fruit salad, and he was fine. He is still alive. made banning miracle fruit. You also have to bear in mind So miracle fruit remains in a kind of legal limbo. It can that the sugar industry itself was immensely powerful, and be grown, you can give it to people, you can even sell a little has been since the early days of capitalism. So you have at a time, but you cannot do so on a large scale. You can’t these very powerful special interests—sugar going toe-to- market it either. There are dozens of small growers who have toe with artificial sweeteners—but then out of the rubble miracle fruits in their back yards in Florida and Hawaii and comes this little African berry with none of the side effects in greenhouses, and nobody is saying boo. The problem is of sugar or artificial sweeteners. The mere thought of it when it starts threatening other major industries—that is incurred the wrath of these billionaire corporations. Just to when you are not allowed to move forward. give you an indication of the level of power of these artificial sweeteners; Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of Searle, the To what extent was the FDA’s decision the result of pres- company that manufactured Aspartame. And these people sures from the large corporations and special interests? do not want anything dipping into their profits. So just as Miralin’s products are about to become available to the It is open to interpretation. But it’s a marvelous fruit and we public, a number of mysterious events start to take place are being deprived of an all-natural wonder. in the middle of the night, in their headquarters in 101 Hudson, Massachusetts, and in Jamaica, where their opposite: Miralin ad from March 1974 issue of Family Circle.
Fruit of the Whine Mats Bigert
When entering the domesticated animal area of Stockholm’s zoo, Skansen, you immediately notice that there is some- thing strange going on with the trees. Even though you might expect zoological gardens to spice up the flora with a few exotic additions, the outgrowths on the branches providing shade for the kitten enclosure look like nothing you’ve seen before. On closer inspection, the fungal growths competing with the foliage turn out to be clusters of baby pacifiers. The string theory here claims that the evolution of this strange fruit started thirty years ago with a piece of linen attached to a piece of string. This contraption, which usu- ally works well for playing with kittens, was not suited to the daily wear and tear at the zoo. The cloth was constantly being ripped apart and the zookeepers realized they needed to attach something more resilient at the end of the line. And then one day a baby drooling after a kitten dropped her paci- fier in the kitten pen; the perfect bait had been discovered. The zookeepers tied the pacifier to the string, and as more and more babies threw their pacifiers to the kittens, the zookeepers hung more and more strings to accommodate all of them. Soon the strings started to look like crystalline necklaces dipped into a solution of plastic and silicon. With time, the kitten enclosure even shrank as a result of this inorganic invasion, and the pacifier necklaces grew up the tree trunks. By 2000, when the last count was taken, this hanging garden comprised 11,873 pacifiers. These days, toddlers from all over Sweden make the pilgrimage to Skansen to throw away their pacifiers. By offering their pacifiers to the kittens, toddlers leave behind babyhood to take on the burdens of kiddyhood. From that point on, the kid is obliged to lead a life without substitutes. And perhaps this modern fruit de passage is a way of creat- ing a more self-controlled individual who knows how to kick a habit voluntarily. And who also knows how to subdue the adolescent oral cravings that would otherwise one day lead to dope smoking and excessive use of cafellatio.
Photos Mats Bigert.
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