In 1884, the water hyacinth delighted audiences when it made its North American debut at the Cotton States Exposition in New Orleans. With its delicate purple flowers and glossy leaves, the Amazonian plant was poised to become the new frontier of ornamental gardening, the fair’s organizers proclaimed, handing out hyacinths to anyone who wanted them.
But beneath its pretty exterior, the hyacinth hid its true nature as a malevolent marauder. The plant spread like a virus first in Louisiana and then in Florida. Within 20 years, it had overtaken waterways across the South, threatening long-established trade routes. Workers hoping to halt the hyacinth’s growth broke the plants apart and dredged them from the river banks; they soaked the blooms in gasoline and set them on fire. Each time, the hyacinth not only survived but also thrived.
As Southerners waged a never-ending botanical battle, a second crisis brewed in the United States. Around the turn of the 20th century, inexpensive meat, a product of American prosperity that had long been available to even the poorest immigrants, was suddenly in short supply. “Meatpackers blamed the grain prices and cattle shortages, butchers blamed the meatpackers, [and most everyone else] blamed the Beef Trust”—a nickname for the nation’s largest meatpacking companies—“for conspiring to profit at their expense,” says Catherine McNeur, a historian at Portland State University.
The only one way to solve both problems at once, argued Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard, was to embrace hippopotamus ranching. On March 24, 1910, Broussard stood before the House Committee on Agriculture to lay out the details of his “American Hippo Bill” (House Resolution 23261). He believed importing the hungry herbivores from Africa would rid Louisiana and Florida of the hyacinths smothering their waterways. When the animals were good and fat (on average, hippos weigh between 3,000 and 9,920 pounds), farmers could take their inventory to slaughter, revitalizing America’s low-cost meat supply.
But hippo meat, or “lake cow bacon,” as the New York Times called it, would be just the start. “I think it is easily possible to add 1,000,000 tons of meat a year to our supply,” William Newton Irwin, a researcher at the Department of Agriculture, told the congressional panel. “There is not any reason why we cannot find a place in the United States for every one of the more than 100 species of animals that are in existence today and not domesticated.”