Flowers, Guns, and Money

The vast majority of Americans would not know that the lush red-and-green potted plant so ubiquitous at Christmastime, the poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima, also known as Poinsettia pulcherrima, cuetlaxochitl in Nahuatl, and flor de Nochebuena in Spanish) was introduced into the United States from its native Mexico by the US statesman Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779–1851), an important political figure of the early US republic. It is ironic, furthermore, that in 2002 the US House of Representatives created National Poinsettia Day, observed every year on December 12 (the date of Poinsett's death), blithely unaware (or uncaring) of his history in Mexico or that the same day is dedicated there to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the country's patroness. As the first accredited envoy to the Mexican republic, Minister Poinsett made himself persona non grata in the country. He introduced the more liberal York rite strain of Masonic lodges, thus aggravating the often violent polarization in political life; mixed unabashedly in domestic politics in other ways; pressed for the sale of Mexican territory to the United States; treated many Mexican political men with undisguised disdain; engaged in virtually open diplomatic warfare with the British envoy Henry George Ward; and developed a near-poisonous antagonism with conservative foreign and interior secretary Lucas Alamán, the principal minister in the national government, whom he accused of being a puppet of British interests. The Mexican government under President Vicente Guerrero finally pressed for his recall in 1829.Lindsay Schakenbach Regele's book might well have borne the less catchy title Money, Guns, and Flowers, since while trading on his association with the famous plant, she devotes very little space to the flower itself or to Poinsett's intense amateur botanizing in Mexico and elsewhere. For historians of Mexico and Latin America more generally, one of the book's virtues is that it places Poinsett firmly in the US political and social context rather than reducing him to the role of a pathogen set loose in early Mexican political life. There is no question that Poinsett was an interesting figure, but in Schakenbach Regele's telling he emerges credibly as rather an unsympathetic one. As a biography this relatively diminutive book offers little beyond J. Fred Rippy's 1935 work, Joel R. Poinsett, Versatile American, although exhaustively and impressively documented from original sources, less hagiographic than Rippy's, and emphasizing Poinsett's role in American domestic politics. A South Carolinian, Poinsett inherited substantial wealth, studied medicine in Edinburgh, then law, and traveled widely. He fathered an illegitimate son with whom he had little to do and whose care he fobbed off on a compliant friend, married a wealthy plantation owner late in life, and was quite indifferent to the institution of slavery or his own human chattels. At the beginning of the nineteenth century he worked as a secret agent in South America (playing a prominent military and political role in Chile's independence struggle) and then as ambassador to Mexico, later serving as a member of the South Carolina legislature, a congressman, and secretary of war in the Martin Van Buren administration (1837–41). An ardent nationalist, he steadfastly opposed his home state's threatened withdrawal from the Union during the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 (to which Schakenbach Regele devotes a long and interesting chapter), played a central role in the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, and was one of the key government figures in the westward removal of Native Americans in the late 1830s, the Trail of Tears. A more cosmopolitan political pragmatist than many southern gentlemen, he opposed the doctrine of states’ rights and eventually the annexation of Texas.Although schematic as a biography, the book does work well as an extended essay in the political culture and economic life of the early US republic. Poinsett's career works as a case study in self-interested patriotism (in the style of “What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA”) and what Schakenbach Regele aptly calls “martial capitalism” (p. 3). She portrays him as a proponent of “individual autonomy” rather than a fervent republican, although how the two positions were incompatible she never makes clear (p. 15). She does pay some attention to his investments in Mexican mining ventures in the 1820s, to his efforts as an improving landlord on his plantations, and to his tendency to see his own economic interests and his (un)diplomatic activities as identical with his country's. While the latter part of the book reasonably concentrates on Poinsett's political doings while in the national government (briefly touted by his friends as a possible presidential candidate), and his militarism is consistently addressed, the theme of his economic pursuits and their identification in his eyes with national interests tends to fade like a weak radio signal. On the whole, however, the book revealingly places Poinsett's life against a larger background than the one in which historians of Latin America are wont to see him

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