The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  Christmas returned to New Orleans to volunteer for the U.S. Army during the First World War. He thought he would be sworn in as an officer, his experience on the isthmus being a boon, but was rejected as too old. He went to Washington, D.C., where, because he was famous, he was able to make his case to President Woodrow Wilson. He then returned to New Orleans and again tried to enlist. After being rejected a second time, Christmas issued a public challenge, calling out any man forty years of age, the army’s cutoff, who wanted to fight. Let them show themselves, and let them be thrashed! He moved to Guatemala, then back to New Orleans, where he became an inventor, securing patents on a rattrap that worked without bait and a railroad safety device that shut down the engine the moment the engineer took his hand off the throttle, which must’ve been inspired by his own terrible accident. In 1921, he sued Encyclopædia Britannica for libel, citing an article on Central America that said Christmas had been killed in the battle of Maraita in 1907. He asked for $100,000 in damages. The publisher corrected the text but paid no money. He moved to Nicaragua, where he invested in oil wells (they went dry) and home remedies, the last of his money going for shark oil, which he considered an elixir. This venture ended when dozens of sharks, which he was holding in a pen off Puerto Cortés, escaped in a storm and terrorized the coast.

  He fell ill in 1922. It started as a vague listlessness, ennui, but turned into fever. He was misdiagnosed, wrongly prescribed. In New Orleans, a doctor told him he had tropical sprue, a blood disease that would steadily weaken him. He collapsed in New York, where he had gone to meet a potential business investor. He was treated at St. Vincent’s hospital but could not pay the bill. Guy Molony, who had become superintendent of the New Orleans city police, wired him money and a train ticket home.

  He received a full transfusion of blood, donated by Molony, when he returned. This made headlines around the country and struck people as wonderful. It restored him for a time, but soon he weakened again. There were two more transfusions, each less effective than the last. He got in a fight with his wife near the end and left on a train like the dying Tolstoy. He turned up at the door of a long-lost son in Memphis, who put him back on a train for New Orleans. He was too weak to get off the train by himself and cried when he had to be carried. He cried again when he learned that his wife, who had been among the first ladies of Honduras, had taken a job selling radios on Canal Street. He was admitted to Touro Infirmary in January 1924. “When a man becomes my age in the United States,” he told Molony, “he’s only good for fertilizer.” He died a few weeks later. There was a huge funeral. The pallbearers were aging mercenaries. Minor Keith sent a letter to be read, in which he called Lee Christmas “my ideal of manliness and courage.” For the second time in thirty years, The New York Times ran his obituary.

  11

  To the Isthmus and Back

  Let me show you a picture of Samuel Zemurray’s primary residence circa 1912: a white bungalow with a zinc roof in the shade of a coconut tree on the north coast of Honduras. When a storm blows through, which is most afternoons, the rain drums on the roof and the water hangs like a curtain from a steel awning, beneath which Sam sits reading reports. He’s up early each morning and eats a breakfast of raw vegetables and bananas. In other cases, I might not linger on what a man had for breakfast, but such details fascinated and confused Zemurray’s competitors. In Empire in Green and Gold, Charles Morrow Wilson claimed executives at United Fruit were bewildered by reports of the jungle-dwelling Russian who “had been living for weeks on nothing but figs; or [who] was taking a ‘fast cure’ for twenty days; or [who] had been seen standing on his head beside a shade tree in the process of proving (or disproving) that inversion benefits the digestion.”

  As for the reports—sales figures and yields, the length of the average banana, the market rate per stem—Zemurray went through these fast, a scan, a few mental notes, done. He disdained bureaucracy, hated paperwork. “So seldom does he dictate a letter that he requires no full-time secretary,” Life reported. “He will telephone division managers in half a dozen countries, correlate their reports in his head and reach his decision without touching a pencil.” A corporate legend told the Cuyamel executives everything they needed to know about their boss. One morning, as Zemurray was eating breakfast, an apparatchik handed him a thick report, fifty or sixty pages detailing every aspect of the operation. There was a summary on page one, chapter headings, bullet points. Zemurray flipped through the document, frowning, then ripped off the first page and threw away the rest, saying, “Most sensible damn statement I ever saw.”

  In the years that followed the coup, Sam spent most of his time in Honduras. He had a wife in New Orleans, a daughter and a son, but must have felt he had no choice. Having established his position on the isthmus, it was time to work like a dog: build his business, pay his creditors, accumulate his money. By 1913, he had saved enough to buy back the stake U.F. owned in Cuyamel Fruit, a move that would secure Zemurray’s independence.

  Selling back these shares was unusual for United Fruit, but the company was forced by outside events. In 1913, Congress proposed a tax on bananas, which had already become the most widely consumed fruit in America, an astonishing fact considering that not a single banana is grown here. Called the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Bill, it was usually referred to as “the banana tax.” This was during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who believed the revenue generated by such a tax would close the gaping hole in the national budget.

  Did the leaders of the banana industry raise a stink?

  Of course they did.

  An army of lobbyists, most of them on the payroll of United Fruit, descended on Washington waving documents, quoting figures, and making their case. The banana tax will ruin the business as it has long been practiced: dirt-cheap bananas sold at tremendous volume, unbelievable prices achieved by concession, cheap land, peasant labor, and NO TAX. An additional five cents per stem would return the banana to its original state, a delicacy for the rich. An industry spokesman accused Congress of attacking “the fruit of the poor.”

  Probably in response to the ruckus raised by lobbyists, the Justice Department opened its own investigation of United Fruit. The Feds believed that by colluding to fix prices and crush competition, the company was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. As the Justice Department pursued the case, U.F. searched for ways to make the company look like anything but what it was: a monopoly. Simply put, United Fruit had to demonstrate there were other firms that could compete, that the field had not been cleared by price war and buyout. It was with this need in mind that Andrew Preston sold Sam Zemurray the shares United Fruit still held in Cuyamel. If Zemurray could be shown to be truly independent, perhaps the charges of antitrust would be disproved and the investigation stymied.

  Congress lingered on U.F.’s sale of its Cuyamel shares during hearings before the House Committee of the Merchant Marine and Fisheries. It struck many as an effort to fool the government: a drug dealer tossing a parcel into the bushes as the cops close in.

  Preston denied such suggestions. A congressman pressed, demanding the reason for the sale of the Cuyamel shares.

  “I think Mr. Zemurray desired it,” said Preston. “He is a man of speculative ideas, and he thought he could do better if he had the entire property, and on the recommendations of our people, I think it was sold to him.”

  Though the Justice Department never filed any charges, the investigation had the desired effect: by forcing Preston to sell his shares in Cuyamel, the government created a competitive market. It did this by assuring Zemurray the freedom to develop into a genuine competitor. In later years, when Zemurray had grown powerful, analysts spoke of the mistake U.F. made: they had underestimated a dangerous rival in Zemurray. In fact, the executives at United Fruit, Preston and Keith first among them, understood the genius of Zemurray from the beginning. They had long been dazzled by his rise from the docks, but it was a matter of triage: cut off the leg to save the body; cut free the
Banana Man to save the company.

  Zemurray must have been elated to free himself from United Fruit. It meant independence and control. What’s more, he believed the association with El Pulpo had damaged his reputation. A few years before, when the Nicaraguan banana growers boycotted U.F. and prevented its ships from sailing down the big rivers, U.F. broke the blockade, not with its own fleet but with Cuyamel ships. Everywhere workers gathered, bloodied by the police, beaten but not defeated, they attached their misery to the name on the side of the boats carrying away the product of their labor: Cuyamel. It damaged Sam’s name in a country where he’d long been admired as the son-in-law of the beloved Parrot King. Zemurray never forgot the lesson. It does not matter how many bananas you ship: when you lose your reputation, you lose everything.

  * * *

  Sam Zemurray lived in two worlds: the world of family and society in New Orleans, and the jungle world of pure escape, hard work, machete fights, and booze on the isthmus. Some years, he sailed back and forth half a dozen times. He stood on the prow of the ship, thrilled by the first sight of New Orleans, its smokestacks and warehouses appearing around the bend in the river, but was probably more thrilled to leave it behind, to plunge into the primitive South of harbors and coasts, change into his work clothes, and find himself surrounded by roughnecks who had come to the isthmus because it was the last place a man could be free. They called it the Banana Frontier because it recalled America before California had been divided into lots, before the grasslands had been wrested from the cowboys and handed to the merchants.

  Central America was a fantasyland where nostalgic North Americans could live their dream of Western wilderness. There were old hands who had been on the isthmus long before the incorporation of the United Fruit Company, men who had come looking for a personal El Dorado and realized too late they were ruined for any other kind of life. There were managers who came to get their cards punched and planned to stay no more than a season or two but got stuck. There were rowdies who had come on a spree, to dress in khaki and carry a gun. There were college men who came for the job but stayed for the stuff, how far the dollar could go, a life of leisure, servants, and clubs. Unifruco, the United Fruit magazine, which was as slick as The New Yorker, speaks of company men returning to an earlier stage of American history on the isthmus, of living as men used to live before the women took over and softened us with their rules and finery, of confronting nature in the spirit of Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, of again seeing the forest as primeval, wild, and mysterious.

  I know how often Zemurray traveled back and forth because I’ve seen the manifests filled out at each port, the stack of paper that charts his endless crossing. He was a perfect example of the Wandering Jew, always going but never arriving, living out of a steamer trunk, changing twice before dinner, never settled on any one part of the planet, never living at any one time of the day.

  Whenever he arrived in Honduras, word spread through the plantation: the old man is back! He was respected because he understood the trade. By the time he was forty, he had served in every position, from fruit jobber to boss. He worked on the docks, on the ships and railroads, in the fields and warehouses. He had ridden the mules. He had managed the fruit and money, the mercenaries and government men. He understood the meaning of every change in the weather, the significance of every date on the calendar. There was not a job he could not do, nor a task he could not accomplish. (He considered it a secret of his success.) He was up every morning at dawn, having breakfast, standing on his head, walking in the fields. As far as possible, he refrained from giving interviews, addressing shareholders, or attending functions, all of which took him away from his work. He was one of those men who toiled all day every day until they had to be rolled away in a chair. When he failed to appear at a reception in Havana, Cuba, which had been thrown in his honor, a lieutenant tracked him down to the wharf, where he was going over manifest documents with a ship’s purser.

  He was wildly ambitious and innovated like mad. As soon as he had full control of his company, he began to visit boatyards. He wanted to build a fleet so he would never again be dependent on other companies to haul his product. I have a list of the ships he purchased: the Jamaica, the Lempira, the Omoa, the Maya, the Augusta. He had acquired twenty by 1915. Most of these were steamships, ice sheathed in the harbors of New York and Boston, sweating in the humidity of New Orleans and Puerto Cortés. The decks were fitted with loaders, the holds refrigerated. Soon after being stowed, the bananas were “put to sleep,” the temperature never allowed to climb above 56 degrees. Many ships were purchased from rival companies that had discontinued a route. Some were in service with Cuyamel for only a year before an upgrade made them obsolete. In 1921, Zemurray acquired the entire fleet of the Bluefields Fruit Company, the property of his father-in-law. By then, the Cuyamel fleet had become a familiar sight on the New Orleans waterfront, where people referred to it affectionately as the Little Navy.

  Around this time, Zemurray moved his headquarters in Honduras from Omoa to Puerto Cortés, where he built a modern pier that went out past the shallows a quarter mile into the sea. The company grew and grew, acquiring more and more land in Honduras but also in Nicaragua and Mexico. Following the example of United Fruit, he began to invest in other crops: coconuts and pineapples, palm oil, cattle, timber, and sugarcane. It was a hedge against hurricane and drought, as well as the ups and downs of the market. It was sugarcane, a staple that sells in quantity regardless of the economy, that got Cuyamel through the First World War, when many of the company’s ships were impressed for service in the U.S. Navy.

  Of course, the most important tests of leadership are intangible: How do you handle a crisis, sweet-talk a landowner, manage the rough stuff? Can you stand up to the goons, face down the mercenary who overstays his welcome? Can you figure out whom to bribe and make it stick? Can you plunge the machete all the way to the Collins? Zemurray was like a character out of Damon Runyon or Saul Bellow. He could play as dirty as anyone else in the game. (Had he been born in Chicago, they would have called him Nails.) If you saw him talking to a crew boss, sleeves rolled back, black eyes narrowed, neck thick and freckled from the sun, every atom in your body would tell you to stay away. That’s why Minor Keith never underestimated Zemurray. He recognized him as one of his own, a throwback to the sort of men who built the industry, who went into the jungle with nothing but trinkets and came out with a million dollars. The banana business might be respectable in the North, but it was rough and lawless in the South.

  Like every other enterprise on the isthmus, Cuyamel was built on the kickback, the bribe, the threat delivered in symbols: the photo with a face blacked out, the scythe busted in two. Zemurray often implied that his deals were backed by the U.S. Navy. In other words, he threatened. He did not raise his voice when he made these threats, though he did swear with great exuberance. He whispered so people would have to lean close and concentrate on each word. When he said something was going to happen, it usually did. Even if you were a friend, you would be roughly handled if you got in his way. A State Department document chronicles a conversation a U.S. diplomat had with Zemurray concerning a loan Sam made to the government of Honduras. When Zemurray asked if the U.S. government could help collect, the diplomat spoke vaguely of the Hague Convention, which might technically allow it. “Mr. Zemurray was pleased upon learning of this Hague Convention,” the official reported, “and seemed to think it afforded a satisfactory guarantee.” It was not American action that Zemurray wanted. It was the credible threat of such action, which might be achieved by the simple spectacle of Sam huddled with a diplomat in the dark corner of the bar.

  Zemurray was direct in a way that could come across as ruthless. Speaking of Nicaragua, he notoriously said, “A mule costs more than a deputy.” These words have been quoted again and again, in pamphlets, articles, and books—nailed forever to his forehead, thrown around him like a cape. They are said to tell everything you need to know about the Banana Man:
the callous indifference, the contempt for life, the sort of corruption that borders on evil. Though Zemurray denied speaking these words—it’s the sort of thing that enters the record because it’s what people imagine him saying—let’s for a moment accept the sentiment as his: A mule costs more than a deputy.

  Are these words evil, or are they a simple statement of fact?

  If a man wanted to do business in Nicaragua, there were certain things he had to buy—these included banana mules and police deputies. When balancing the books, you could not miss the fact: a mule did indeed cost more than a deputy.

  Frank Brogan told me the following story: “Jake Weinberger came out of retirement and got a nice little banana business going with his son Leopold. Not that they grew the fruit: they bought and sold it. But Mr. Zemurray didn’t want them competing, particularly in New Orleans and Mobile where Jake was selling at a low price. So he went to his father-in-law and said, ‘Look, Jake, I want you out of business. I’m going to give you money so you’ll be just fine, but I don’t want you fooling with price. I want to set the price.’ Jake said, ‘I’m not going to give it up. I’m making money.’ Sam said, ‘Well, Jake, you either get out or I’m going to cut my price and drive you out and you’ll be ruined.’”