With cherry blossoms about to bloom, more than half a million tourists descend on the nation's capital as they do every spring, capturing the beauty and serenity of the 3,500 cherry trees along the Tidal Basin and Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Peak bloom is expected April 4-9, with the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival March 31-April 4.

But when the cherry trees first arrived in 1910 -- a gift from Japan -- there was little sense of beauty. Instead, the U.S. government burned them in a bizarre display that pitted federal bureaucrats against each other. The goal, according to a new article in a Cornell University journal, was to prevent "ecological imperialism," with President William Howard Taft approving the final order in an effort to prevent Japanese insect pests from infesting America's plants.

Although new trees, certified by the Japanese government to be bug-free, arrived in 1912, the protectionists within the U.S. Department of Agriculture already had won their war, argues Philip J. Pauly, professor of history at Rutgers University, in an article published in the Cornell journal Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society (March 1996, pp. 51-73). Pauly's article, the cover story, is titled "The Beauty and Menace of the Japanese Cherry Trees." The journal is edited by Margaret W. Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science at Cornell.

The cherry tree incident is central, Pauly said, "to the American debate over the shape of what I call 'American ecological independence,' that is, what sort of control Americans would exert over the kinds of exotic plants and animals that could enter the United States." Entomologists in the USDA wanted the trees destroyed, while botanists clamored to save them. "Here is a controversy within the USDA between those who wanted introduction and those who favored pest exclusion. This was an important moment in the biotic history of North America, in which humans started to control and manage what the flora and fauna ought to look like in this country in the future," Pauly said.

Pauly further extends the controversy to political, human and demographic policies toward Japan and toward immigration in general. The same debates about protectionism, immigration, imperialism and national independence seen in this year's Republican presidential campaign were evident in bureaucratic debates almost a century ago.

"One sees parallels in the early 20th century between attitudes toward 'plant immigrants' and human immigrants. There was this feeling of nativism -- only native plants should be here, just as some of this year's presidential candidates call for nativism protectionist immigration policies," Pauly said.

"For a century after the founding of the Republic, Americans had the same mixture of interest and distrust, and the same laissez-faire policy toward foreign humans as they did toward foreign plants and birds," he writes.

Cherry trees have been a part of the American national symbolism ever since the story of George Washington's attack on his father's prized specimen -- a European variety, incidentally. Pauly writes: "The Japanese, by sponsoring the planting of their own varieties within sight of the Washington Monument, were linking themselves to American stories in ways that no one could fully predict. . . . The annual displays are more spectacular than ever, because the trees donated by Tokyo have been replaced and supplemented by specimens grown in American nurseries. . . . The trees have, in a word, been naturalized."