Banana
Page 8
Both Molony and Christmas had experienced plenty of both (and the rewards too) by the time Zemurray sought them out, as he searched for a way to outsmart both the U.S. State Department and the sitting Honduran government. (Knox, suspicious that Zemurray would ignore warnings to stay away from Honduras, had dispatched U.S. Secret Service agents to New Orleans, where Zemurray lived at the time, to monitor the banana entrepreneur.)
In the context of over half a century of American adventures in Central America, what Zemurray planned might have seemed commonplace, but it remains one of the most audacious escapades of the era. According to his United Fruit Historical Society biography, Zemurray and the two mercenaries met at a New Orleans bawdy house. While the Secret Service agents monitored the brothel’s front door, the three men slipped out the back, making their way to a waiting boat. Laden with ammunition, the conspirators sailed south. On their arrival in Honduras, the trio—who’d also brought along former Honduran president Manuel Bonilla, who Zemurray had recruited for the plot—drummed up supporters and mounted an insurrection. Six weeks later, Bonilla was again in control of the country. One of his first acts was to sign a bill that allowed Zemurray to operate, tax free, across a broad portion of the nation. (After the fighting ended, Lee Christmas settled down, becoming a general in the Honduran army, and marrying Ida Culotta, the eighteen-year-old daughter of one of Zemurray’s colleagues.)
UNITED FRUIT DIDN’T LIKE COMPETITION, and it usually dealt with rivals in the standard way: It crushed them in price wars. It had gained partial control of the British banana market by purchasing part of Elders & Fyffes, the company’s largest rival in Jamaica (the company, now simply Fyffes, remains the United Kingdom’s largest banana importer, though Chiquita sold it to an Irish conglomerate in 1986). In 1912, United Fruit drove Atlantic Fruit, its chief rival in Costa Rica, into bankruptcy, taking possession of the stricken company’s land, workers, and railroads.
But Sam Zemurray was too small. Andrew Preston, the proper Bostonian, barely admitted to knowing who the foreign-born, Jewish Zemurray was when he testified at a congressional antitrust hearing in 1910. Even though United Fruit also had holdings in Honduras, it still didn’t appear to regard Zemurray as a proper rival (and wouldn’t, for at least fifteen more years). The company had other battles to fight. American soldiers were stationed on its behalf as police officers in Panama in 1918 and as union busters in Guatemala—where it was granted a hundred-kilometer-wide ministate—two years later. Troops were twice called on to “monitor” elections in Honduras and returned to Panama in 1925 to break up a plantation strike.
BY THE LATE 1920S, United Fruit was worth over $100 million. It had 67,000 employees and owned 1.6 million acres of land. It had business interests in thirty-two countries. It operated everything from churches to laundries. It had strung 3,500 miles of telegraph and telephone lines, including a system of ship-to-shore transmission it invented specifically for the purpose of making sure banana loaders were ready, at the docks, when cargo vessels came in. Time is of the essence with perishable fruit. As soon as the workers received the signal, they’d work, without rest, for up to seventy-two hours, harvesting and loading the fruit. The company was selling bananas as far away as Paris and was also becoming a market leader in sugar, cocoa, and coffee. In addition to running his fruit business, Andrew Preston was president of two banks, one insurance company, and a steel manufacturer. Minor C. Keith had become so powerful that he was called by many “the uncrowned king of Central America.”
Bananas continued to change life in the United States. Items that we consider mealtime standards today didn’t exist until United Fruit invented them. Company research found that mothers were feeding mashed bananas to their babies, for example. So United Fruit hired doctors to endorse the practice and launched advertisements to drive the point home. In 1924, writes Virginia Scott Jenkins, the company scored what would be its biggest culinary hit: The United Fruit test kitchens suggested that the perfect breakfast for a busy, modern family would consist of bananas sliced into corn flakes with milk. It wasn’t just the recipe that broke new ground. It was also the coupons, pioneered by the company, packed inside cereal boxes (redeemable for free bananas that the cereal companies, not the fruit importer, paid for). The company made sure that children knew about bananas, too. It set up an official “education department,” devoted to publishing textbooks and curriculum materials that subtly provided information about the fruit.
United Fruit also added a new element to its political strategy. If military action was impractical (U.S. troops might be unavailable or force precluded by situations on the ground), Central America’s geography became an ally. The region’s countries were small and easy to move between. There were plenty of natural ports on both the eastern and western coasts, and bananas could be grown just about anywhere land could be cleared and a railroad could be laid. If a government became particularly balky, the company would simply threaten to go next door.
But one thing United Fruit couldn’t control was nature. Not long after bananas added themselves as a third party in cereal and milk, the troubles growers were beginning to have with an aggressive malady became public. One headline in The New York Times read: “Banana Disease Ruins Plantations—No Remedy is Available—Whole Regions Have Been Laid Waste and Improvements Abandoned by Growers.” Fallow farms weren’t just fallen stems and the dried-out remains of banana leaves. Railroad tracks were torn up, and boxcars sat unused and rusting. The houses banana executives lived in stood empty, and the villages where banana workers worked were turned into ghost towns. The New York Times article went on to compare the scene to “a leper colony.”
CHAPTER 13
No Bananas Today
WITH LAND FOR THE TAKING in Central America, there were few signs at home of a banana shortage. The fruit had become so beloved that—as in Uganda today—people began to sing songs about it.
It began in New York City’s Tin Pan Alley. The district was more than just a place where music was created. It was, said a 1983 article in American Heritage magazine, where the idea of a pop hit came into being. (The historic song-writing zone, whose name came from the clattering din that filled the streets surrounding it, was actually a moving melodic marketplace. It started in downtown Manhattan but by the 1950s had migrated north to Times Square, where it finally vanished at the dawn of the rock-and-roll era.) Thousands of ballads, show tunes, and novelty ditties were churned out in the Alley by ambitious lyricists, up-and-coming composers, and reprobate vaudevillians.
As with the banana industry, Tin Pan Alley was powered by revolutionary technologies that brought the general public items once available only to the rich. The first commercial radio station opened in Pittsburgh in 1922. Prices for the Victrola “talking machine,” a record player, had dropped to as little as $15 for compact and stylish units (in current dollars, about the same price as today’s basic iPod). Americans were developing a nearly insatiable appetite for musical entertainment, cut in spiraling grooves on flat discs and cylinders made of shellac (and later of vinyl). “The consumption of songs in America is as constant as the consumption of shoes, and the demand is similarly met by factory output,” wrote the New York Times in 1923.
Most of the tens of thousands of songs produced by Tin Pan Alley are long forgotten. Those that remain in memory are classics: Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” along with George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
“Yes, We Have No Bananas” will never be viewed with such piety. But it was a much bigger sensation.
The song was churned out in the spring of 1923 by composers Frank Silver and Irving Cohn. It first became a hit on sheet music, designed to be performed at home (printed songs were the karaoke of their time). During the following months, at least four different recordings of the song emerged, most famously by the hugely popular comic singer and actor Eddie Cantor. “There is a calm and deliberate, even a scientific, inquiry into why 97.3 percent o
f the great American Nation, at the present advanced state of civilization, devotes itself zestfully and with unanimity to singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’” the New York Times article went on to say. The news story offers several possible causes, including vapidness, a national inferiority complex (manifested in a preference for lowbrow music), “infantile regression,” and “mob psychology.”
The origins of the song that led to this alarming state of affairs are somewhat cloudy. The melody was adapted from an 1860s sheet-music hit called “When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home,” which in turn was derived from, of all things, Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” (you can actually hear traces of the classical work in the banana song if you hum one, then the other, in the same key: hal-le-lu-jah…yes-we-have-no). But there are several variations on the origin of the final singsong hit.
The most widely accepted version puts Frank Silver on a date; while visiting his girlfriend’s home, he’s bemused, then perturbed, by an underfoot kid brother who keeps repeating the title phrase, explaining that the amusingly mangled verbiage was something he’d heard uttered by an immigrant fruit vendor. A second starting point places Cohn and Silver at a speakeasy called the Blossom Heath Inn, forty minutes by train from Manhattan in Lynbrook, Long Island. In that account, the title is coined by a Greek grocer named Jimmy Costas, who used the phrase as a sort of verbal shoulder shrug when his shelves were fresh out of the tropical fruit. A 1931 account of the song’s beginnings, published in Harper’s Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, mixes the two yarns: The keynote phrase was coined by an Italian fruit seller, repeated in a newspaper cartoon, and test-marketed by the songwriters in the Long Island suburbs before it finally made it to Broadway.
The song’s symbolic origins, however, lie not in specific people or places, but in the question it suggests: Are bananas available?
The answer was yes—they’re not.
Why would a grocer with plenty of supply—the song mentions onions and cabbages as well as “all kinds” of fresh produce—be unable to meet demand for what had, in the previous two decades, become America’s favorite and most widely available fruit?
The malady that turned banana plantations into dust was beginning to have an effect on supply. These occasional shortages were barely noticed by shoppers, because banana companies were continuing to acquire land and plant new crops. But that process was accelerating to the point where a few public blips began to appear. It didn’t mean an overall slowdown in banana consumption or an increase in prices. Instead, Americans got a happy song. Yet in the banana-growing nations, the results were increasingly harsh.
CHAPTER 14
Man Makes
a Banana
IT WASN’T THAT UNITED FRUIT was ignorant of Panama disease. A few executives warned of an impending disaster, but since the disease was relatively slow-moving, compared to today’s banana maladies, they generally went unheeded.
The banana barons might have adopted a resistant banana if they knew of one exactly like the Gros Michel, requiring no change in consumer tastes or in growing, ripening, and shipping. While the Cavendish was grown as a minor commercial variety in a few places, the idea that it would replace the best-known banana was unthinkable. The lesser-known fruit was smaller, more fragile, and didn’t taste as good as the Gros Michel. Though the banana industry had shown, repeatedly, that it knew how to innovate, it no longer seemed to want to—not when it could simply level some virgin forest and start new plantations to replace the dying ones.
The first efforts to breed stronger bananas were conducted by academics, who had a daunting task: they had to, for the first time, find out what bananas actually were, and they had to determine the genetic makeup of the fruit at a time when such structural studies were barely heard of. Almost nothing was known about bananas. With just a single variety, and it so easy to grow, an advanced understanding of the fruit, until then, seemed pointless.
The Gros Michel crisis made the work seem absolutely urgent—at least to the scientists tracking the path of the disease. In 1922 the British government founded the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, with solving the Panama disease riddle as the institution’s primary task. The key to finding a solution, the early banana scientists believed, was in creating hybrid fruit, crossing the Gros Michel with some kind of wild banana, hoping that the resistant qualities of the latter would combine with, but not significantly alter, the taste and shipping characteristics of the former. A botanical research station in Trinidad was opened so that whatever resulted from the college’s experiments could be tested in the field. Much of this work was independent, though some was commissioned by United Fruit. Scientists frequently moved between the public institutions and the private employer.
The results were maddening. E. E. Cheesman, who directed the facility, described the frustrating nature of the search for a new banana in a 1931 report: “The existence together in Gros Michel of many characters desirable in a commercial banana, such as compactness of bunch, a fruit skin not abnormally sensitive to bruising, ability to stand up well to conditions of bulk transport, and an attractive appearance on ripening, would appear at first to render the problem a simple one. All that is immediately required is to ‘build in’ to this type resistance to Panama Disease.”
Noting that there were several other banana breeds that had that resistance, he concluded that “in many crops, the solution would be a comparatively elementary exercise in plant breeding.”
Not with sexless, sterile bananas.
Unlike the Cavendish, seeds could occasionally appear in the Gros Michel—one or two for every ten thousand plants. Finding one meant manually examining each individual fruit. Even if a seed was discovered and bred, the odds of it actually growing into something were slim. If growth did occur, the problem reversed itself: the new bananas would often have seeds, making them unacceptable as an edible product. “To start with a plant almost completely sexually sterile, raise progeny in sufficient numbers to make a breeding problem possible, combine desirable characters and end with another sterile plant, is very nearly unique in plant breeding,” Cheesman noted.
A worldwide search for wild bananas—blind-date candidates for marriage with Gros Michel—began. Scientists and explorers searched Africa, Asia, and the Americas for wild species; these were then transported back to Trinidad and Jamaica, where they were stored and tested. Many of the collected bananas, along with the processes they started, form the basis for today’s banana-breeding experiments.
In 1925 a wave of excitement swept through the small world of banana research. A hybrid emerged, growing to full fruit, which seemed to have the desired characteristics. Most importantly, the plant, unlike every other hybrid the Imperial College produced, was resistant to Panama disease. The new fruit was significant enough that researchers felt they could give it a name. IC1 was the first hybrid banana to come from the Imperial College; the naming convention—an abbreviation for the breeding facility, followed by a sequenced number—is still used in banana research today.
But subsequent generations of IC1 turned out to be less perfect. Each time a new crop was harvested, the fruit moved further and further from the ideal. The hybrid’s status was downgraded from candidate to raw material for future experimentation. Those successor bananas were equally inconsistent. Fruit that bred well in the lab failed in the field. Many even contracted Panama disease.
Humans had been breeding bananas for millennia, with spectacular success across the globe. But they’d never tried to create a fruit that was meant to be grown by the billions and feed people thousands of miles away. For years the effort was a dismal failure. Yet a world search for new bananas had begun. The fruit was better understood. And scientists, from then on, would grow more and more savvy about breeding bananas.
CHAPTER 15
The Banana
Massacre
IREMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I ever understood that the retelling of ordinary events could become magic. I was a teenager,
just beginning to write, searching for inspiration. I’d always loved books about other worlds—science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series, even old pulp novels I bought at a local junk shop. But it had only recently begun to occur to me that the greatest constructed worlds could be found in works that were considered to be “true” literature.
That point was made most sharply with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I spent half a summer reading it, staying up late to follow the epic story that chronicled six generations of a single family living in a fictional village in Colombia. I was so enthralled by the characters, by the way they were swept up in events that seemed to be not of this world, that I hardly noticed the more earthbound events that actually formed the novel’s story.
The book plays out against a backdrop of bananas. The climax comes during a plantation strike, when martial law is declared. The workers gather in their town square amidst ominous signs. “Around twelve o’clock,” Márquez writes, “more than three thousand people, workers, women, and children, had spilled out into the open space in front of the station and were pressing into the neighboring streets, which the army had closed off with rows of machine guns.” The crowd remains in the square, even after they are ordered to disperse. A second warning is met with defiance. Eventually, time runs out: “Fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous vulnerability. Suddenly, on one side of the station, a cry of death tore open the enchantment: ‘Aaaagh, Mother.’ A seismic voice, a volcanic breath, the road of a cataclysm broke out in the center of the crowd.” Three thousand striking banana workers are killed; their bodies, one by one, are thrown into the ocean.