In Gatsby's Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau

5. Viva Mexico!

5 VIVA MEXICO! From the day he left St. Paul to attend school in the East, Blair Flandrau was a worry and embarrassment to his parents. He was kicked out of Andover. He failed to receive his degree from Harvard. He had a string of affairs, including the rumor of a scandalous one, some said, with the wife of a Minnesota governor. He was wild, immature , irresponsible, but had a contagious zest for life. He had a waggish , offbeat sense of humor, and with his stiff, rheumatic neck and “wickedly gleaming eye he looked,” said James Gray, “like an elegant crow.” Many of the stories he told in casual conversation were off-color but masterfully, delicately understated. You had to pay attention. “He could tell a yarn the point of which was riotous,” said Gray, “and yet there was always in the performance a special sort of reticence and respect for the victim that made the effort arresting.” His personality charmed, but he was a failure in business. After Harvard, he played at a variety of jobs, mostly arranged through his parents’ connections: assistant to the Flandrau neighbor and friend, architect Cass Gilbert, and on James J. Hill’s railroad as a management trainee (for sons of Hill’s cronies) in North Dakota and Montana. One summer day in 1904 he had lunch in Chicago with a former Harvard classmate headed for Mexico. The conversation turned to Blair’s future, then to “What very agreeable people one runs across in queer out of the way places!” said Blair. “Who on earth are you thinking of now?” asked Charlie. “Why, I was thinking of us!” replied Blair. Charles Macomb Flandrau, Viva Mexico!, 1908 Mexico, and in weeks Blair was convinced his fortune lay south of the border. He persuaded Rebecca, who financed the venture, that he could make money growing coffee. And so in early October 1904 Blair bought 321 acres from a Belgian expatriate. There was a minor detail — Mexico was seething with social and political unrest. The corrupt, autocratic regime of Porfirio Díaz, ruthless dean of Latin American dictators, had the country firmly by the throat, encouraging rapacious foreign investment. Blair bet his inheritance on a small coffee ranch in the humid, subtropical jungle near the Gulf Coast — some thirty thousand coffee plants. The natives called it Santa Margarita. It was in Mexico’s largest coffee-producing area, Veracruz state, north of Jalapa near Misantla in the Sierra Madre foothills. It was there the powerful Díaz regime worked its will, in concert with wealthy American landowners and American investors, growing and harvesting coffee beans on cheap land, using cheap Mexican peasant labor. On December 11, 1904, Charlie and Rebecca, sixty-five and frail, left New York in a blizzard on the SS Vonistoria for Veracruz, the first of four ocean voyages together to Santa Margarita. Charlie and Blair not only hoped an escape from Minnesota’s winter would do Rebecca good, they became the migratory vanguard of northerners for generations to come: snowbirds. It was a lunatic business proposition. Judge Flandrau, dead only three years, would have been appalled at the absurdity and waste of it all, the squandering of a good slice of Blair’s inheritance on a godforsaken coffee plantation in the midst of the most politically turbulent country on earth. The journey inland to the plantation was enough to kill Rebecca. They brought six trunks on the twoday train ride along the route of the conquistadors from Veracruz to the steep, cobblestone streets of Jalapa. The medieval-style town was set, as Grace Flandrau later described it, high up in a green valley “surrounded by purple mountains that appeared transparent in the mist and sunlight.” Each trunk had to be repacked into sixteen smaller boxes for the grueling, perilous, two-day mule ride over “high gorges and spider trestles” through jungle and along mountain precipices as high as four thousand feet above sea level to the remote plantation forty-five miles from Jalapa. Charlie was ill-prepared. All his travels in other lands had been a “more gradual disassociation from the familiar.” In rural, tropical Mexico he found himself on another planet. “There is no interval for adjustment, no benign period of adaptation,” he wrote. “Unprepared 98 V I VA M E X I C O ! and abruptly one plunges — or slides, slips and flounders — into a primal Aztec-Spanish environment...