the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History

Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World by
Richard P. Tucker
Review by: Kurk Dorsey
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer, 2002), pp. 144-146
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3656959 .
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144

RUSSELL A. KAZAL

provides a fascinating account of legislation proposed in 1914 to exclude

immigrants "'of the African or black race' " (153), it does not help his argument that the measure ultimately failed.
King's evidence, in fact, hints at a more complicated story than his
interpretation admits. Unearthing that story would have required an interdisciplinary approach that considered party politics; the actions of
Wilson and Lodge suggest that restrictionist and segregationist agendas
could diverge due to party pressures. Wilson had to repudiate his early,
racialist views of southeastern Europeans when he ran for president on
the ticket of the Democratic Party, the traditional home of most European immigrant voters. King portrays Lodge as compelled to back the
anti-lynching bill out of concern for his own reelection, but that the
Massachusetts Republican could be influenced at all this way suggests
that his party, then the home of most black voters, was at least somewhat
open to black concerns. Party constituencies may have led politicians to
take different stances toward African-Americans and immigrants.
Despite these caveats, and despite prose that is at times unclear and
haphazardly organized, Making Americanshas something to offer specialists, from its account of the attempted exclusion of black immigrants to
insights into the origins of multiculturalism. King raises questions that
should be considered by anyone pondering the legacy of restriction.
Russell A. Kazal
Arcadia University
InsatiableAppetite: The United States and the EcologicalDegradationof the
TropicalWorld.By Richard P. Tucker (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 551 pp. $45.00
It is commonplace now for environmentalists to complain that Americans do not know the origins of everyday consumer goods. Readers of
Tucker's remarkable book will discover not only the origins of products
such as coffee, bananas, and tires, but they will also learn some of the
costs of producing those items and the deep history of the United States'
exploitation of the natural resources of the tropics. Tucker's subject is
one that diplomatic historians have not even considered, and his work is
far more international than that of most environmental historians.
Tucker lays out an exhaustive trail of evidence that the United
States created an "ecological empire" throughout the tropics, similar to
the informal empire that diplomatic historians recognize, to feed an
enormous appetite for consumer goods (xii). He divides the book into
three sections, "Croplands," "Pasturelands," and "Forests" and further
divides the first section into chapters on sugar, fruit, coffee, and rubber.
Each chapter has smaller sections for different regions. Along the way,
the narrative moves from Cuba to Malaysia to Liberia and a host of
countries in between. Tucker shows how U.S. businessmen, as well as,
to a lesser extent, scientists and government officials, extracted resources

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REVIEWS

145

from the tropics. Such familiar figures as Harvey Firestone, Gifford

Pinchot, and Sanford Dole play key roles in his story, but so do such
lesser-known figures as George Ahern, who tried to bring U.S. forestry
practices to the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, and Claus
Spreckels, who was a Hawaiian sugar baron without rival.
Tucker focuses his account of events on the period from 1898 to
the 196os, but he demonstrates in each section that the United States was
acting within a broader Western context of a search for resources. In the
last century, the United States gradually dominated that context, especially after 1945, as Americans set the targets for increasingly higher standards of living. American consumers redefined luxuries into necessities,
driving on rubber tires to buy hamburgers with beef from the tropics,
washed down with a soda with sugar from the tropics, followed by a banana split and a cup of instant coffee. The full costs of all of these purchases were invisible to most citizens, who did not know that their
collective craving for sugar and coffee was driving corporations to plant
more land in monoculture, which forced poor citizens onto marginal
agricultural land, which led to further environmental degradation of
tropical ecosystems and worsened economic inequality in tropical nations.
The story is most clear in the first two chapters, which cover the
sugar industry. Diplomatic historians have long noted that sugar was
crucial for bringing Cuba and Hawaii into the U.S. orbit, but Tucker
tells a more complete story. He begins by explaining how entrepreneurs
planted sugarcane around the world hundreds of years ago and then experimented with refining the cane juice into pure white sugar. As the
United States grew more powerful in the i8oos, American capital, technical expertise, markets, and tariffs came to dominate the sugar industry.
Expansion of the sugar plantations meant more monoculture, which
meant more disease; it also meant displacement of other farmers, usually
onto marginal land that was good only for temporary, slash-and-burn
agriculture. In short, sugarcane had been a widespread crop long before
the United States even existed, but the expansion of the u.s. market
led to a wide range of unimagined environmental degradation of the
tropics.
This book is an ambitious and successful attempt at international
environmental history. Ambition, though, can cause minor problems.
Diplomatic historians, for instance, may well find Tucker's summations
of u.s. foreign relations-which are critical for explaining how the
United States found itself in a position to influence so much of the tropics-both too brief and occasionally flawed. This small concern does not
unravel the merits of this impressive book, but it should be an alert to all
who write interdisciplinary history that mastering many sub-fields can
be challenging.
In his thought-provoking conclusion, Tucker explicitly states that
this history has powerful implications for modern industrialized society.
Although Tucker is careful in his conclusion not to romanticize the

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146

ELISABETH

S. CLEMENS

people who have lived in the tropics-noting both that they had been
altering the landscape long before U.S. capital arrived on the scene and
that in the twentieth century, their leaders willingly worked with U.S.
business interests-he still focuses his fire on efforts at economic globalization. He sees it as largely an expanded version of what the United
States has been doing in the tropics for years. Its appetite for tropical resources, Tucker concludes, is ecologically indefensible, but until efforts
to curtail rampant consumerism gain widespread support, the tropics remain in mortal danger.
Kurk Dorsey
University of New Hampshire
The Wagesof Sickness:The Politicsof Health Insurancein ProgressiveAmerica.
By Beatrix Hoffman (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press,
2001) 261 pp. $39-95 cloth $17.95 paper
The puzzle of American exceptionalism takes many forms. For historians of social policy, the key questions are defined by comparisons with
Europe. Why was the United States precocious in providing public education, yet slow in establishing many provisions for workers and the elderly? And, unlike other industrialized nations, why did the United
States fail to lay the foundations for a system of universal health coverage?
In The Wages of Sickness,Hoffman asserts that "it could have happened here." Prior to the world war, many states had adopted workmen's compensation and mothers' pensions legislation. A system of
health and factory safety regulation was under construction. Momentum, it appeared, was with the advocates of comprehensive social provision. But in Hoffman's analysis, no economic determinism or functional
requirements guarantee the completion of a system of social provision.
Instead, she explores the coalition politics that promoted and opposed
policy initiatives. Insofar as successful policies enlarged their supporting
constituency, each battle was potentially a key turning point: "Had they
been successful, their plan might have planted the seeds of a full-fledged
system of universal health coverage in the United States" (i). But they
failed.
Hoffman focuses on the efforts to adopt health insurance in New
York State, where bills came before the legislature a number of times
and, in 1919, actually passed the state Senate. To explain why health insurance came closer to fruition in New York than in any other state but
ultimately failed, she reconstructs the key players and constituencies:
progressive reformers, health providers, fraternalinsurance orders, commercial insurance corporations, employers, organized labor, and
women's associations. In this complex political world, no one interest
controlled outcomes; the struggle for health insurance unfolded through

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