The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  Time went by. Zemurray continued to clear fields, plant bananas. United Fruit approached Honduran president Tiburcio Carías, a strongman who came to power in 1924. Carías was a kickback artist with the sort of power mustache favored by junta leaders. Zemurray still received special consideration in the country, but his influence had waned since the death of Manuel Bonilla. Carías had, in fact, become increasingly close to United Fruit. When Cuyamel requested permission to build a bridge across the Utila—a bridge Zemurray needed to get his bananas to Puerto Cortés—President Carías turned him down. No bridge, no train. No train, no bananas.

  More time went by. Carías continued to favor United Fruit. How did Zemurray respond? By making room in his southbound banana ships, not for produce or seed but for hardware, guns, and bullets that found their way to the liberal insurgents who had taken to the hills in Honduras. It was always an option: if the leader is in the pocket of the other guy, change the leader. The State Department, then run by Frank B. Kellogg, received reports of smuggled weapons. A Cuyamel boat, anchored at a Hudson River pier in New York, was searched by the Port Authority. Fifty thousand dollars’ worth of weapons were found. Another cache was discovered in New Orleans—news of which was reported on the front page of The Times-Picayune on May 4, 1928:

  Rifles, automatic pistols and ammunition regarded as harbingers of a new revolution in Central America were seized by detectives and government secret service operatives in a double house at 1458–60 Marais Street Thursday night.

  Cuyamel Fruit was charged with violating the Neutrality Act. At the trial in New Orleans, the company was defended by Joseph Montgomery, who, as the New Orleans district attorney, had previously prosecuted Cuyamel. This was a preferred Zemurray tactic: if you meet a truly formidable foe, flip him.

  When Zemurray realized he would never get permission to bridge the Utila, he did what he’d always done: innovated, building surreally long docks on both sides of the river, then having his engineers design a temporary bridge, though no one was allowed to call it that. The inflatable device could be thrown from extended dock to extended dock in no time, completing the railroad that ended on one pier and began again on the other. According to Life, “The whole contraption could be taken up or down in three hours.” When United Fruit complained to Honduran officials, saying Cuyamel had built a bridge without a permit, Zemurray smiled and said, “Why, that’s no bridge. It’s just a couple of little old wharfs.”

  U.F. purchased thousands of acres in the Honduran highlands near La Lima, a mysterious acquisition as the terrain was not suited for bananas. What was Cutter up to? Zemurray soon figured it out, realizing, in one terrible moment, that the land contained the headwaters of the rivers that watered the Sula Valley, where Cuyamel grew most of its fruit. By damming or rerouting those rivers, Cutter could cripple Zemurray. (“Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez wrote in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “[the banana men] changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests, and moved the river from where it had always been and put it with its white stones and icy currents on the other side of the town.”)

  By the autumn of 1928, what began as a corporate rivalry had turned into an open conflict, with soldiers in the field and ships on the sea. If this were a mob movie—and the story of Sam Zemurray was the story of Don Corleone on the isthmus—here would be the part where the capos took to the mattresses and prowled the weeds, searching for the decisive blow.

  I’ve been trying to give the impression of a pot rising to a boil, the tension that began when Zemurray made his first move on the Utila building to a crescendo when he threw his temporary bridge across the river and sent his vaqueros into the field. The region seemed set to explode. Armies were mobilized in Honduras and Guatemala. Soldiers in trucks rushed to the border, the treads of their tires caked in mud. At the last possible moment, the diplomats got involved and a sort of peace conference was convened. In normal cases, this would be the head of the League of Nations calling the presidents of the feuding countries to Vienna or Yalta. In this case, it was officials from the U.S. State Department summoning the bosses of the fruit companies to Washington, D.C. The Banana War threatened American interests, breeding hatred for the United States on the isthmus and posing a danger to a region that included the Panama Canal.

  * * *

  Zemurray made the trip by ship and rail, checked into his hotel, waited. It was the spring of 1929. Several meetings followed, Zemurray across a table from Cutter and his lackeys. The best solution, the only way to end the feud, would be a merger or a buyout. The companies must be forced into a union for the greater good. If there was one company instead of two, if Zemurray and Cutter had the same interests, things might return to normal. Which, of course, raised flags: What about the antitrust laws? Together the companies would control 68 percent of the market (U.F. had a 54 percent share; Cuyamel, 14 percent). Wouldn’t such a combination result in prosecution under the Anti-Trust Act? It was the threat of such a prosecution that caused Preston to sell his Cuyamel stake in the first place. Assurances were given. After all, the authorities wanted the companies to merge. It’s how our government operates, lurching from crisis to crisis, trustbuster to peacemaker: now there is not enough competition, now the competition is too chaotic and free.

  Once the concept was agreed upon—where there had been two companies, there would be one—it was merely a matter of settling the particulars. Months of negotiations followed, offers pushed back and forth across a table, Zemurray studying the numbers through half-closed eyes. Since God is in the details, that’s where he went, adding and multiplying but never subtracting. He fought over each clause and contingency, threatened, complained, and swore in every language he knew. According to friends, Sam was a sharp trader who knew the prize goes to he who does not lose his head or open his mouth too soon. What cannot be accomplished by threats can often be achieved by composure. Sit and stare and let your opponent fill the silence with his own demons.

  The word “sellout” is thrown around with gleeful ease in our society. Did she sell out? You hypocritical sellout! In most cases, such charges are false, as you actually need something to sell to qualify as a sellout. Sam Zemurray really was a sellout, in the classical sense. He had gathered his winnings in a pile and carried them to the counting room, where he sat across from Cutter, as shadowy figures tallied the skim. He was putting a price on his company, which was more than a company—it was his body and soul, twenty years in the jungle, epic journeys on muleback, Mobile, New Orleans, and Puerto Cortés. Cuyamel Fruit was Zemurray in the shape of a corporation, his personality made manifest, his home and his love, where he tested his theories and formed his philosophy: get up first, work harder, get your hands in the dirt and the blood in your eyes. And here he was preparing to sell it to United Fruit.

  Why?

  There was the matter of the State Department, of course. The summons to D.C., the demand for a solution. The pressure was intense. But Sam had never been afraid to defy the government, to curse in Spanish and walk away. This was the man who, told by Philander Knox to mind his business, raised an army instead. But that was a different time in the life of the Banana Man. Then he had been a kid, an outsider with nothing to lose. He had since become a man of means. Whereas the young Sam was reckless and immune—from nowhere, with nothing—there were all sorts of ways the middle-aged Sam could be hurt. Success limited his options and made him vulnerable.

  There was also the matter of the stock market. One Friday in October, as the men were negotiating, news came of the collapse in New York. In the course of a day, the wealth accumulated over a decade by the blue-chip companies of America vanished. U.F. stock was not greatly affected, not at first, nor was Cuyamel stock, but a tremendous sense of insecurity followed the crash. For a man like Zemurray, who was as sensitive as a weather vane, it must have seemed like a propitious moment to attach his fate to the fortunes of the behemoth. Just as
k Christopher Columbus, tossed by wind and rain for one hundred days, what a man needs to survive a tempest: lots of food, lots of money, lots of luck—size, size, size. It must have seemed like the perfect moment to sell. If you deal now, you deal from a position of strength. Who knows what will happen next year?

  In the end, after weeks of bargaining, with the threat of a walkout always in the air, the final agreement was worked out in a haphazard, casual way. Bradley Palmer, United Fruit’s largest shareholder and a ranking director, tracked Zemurray down to a pub in London, where he was eating alone. Palmer ordered a pint of Bass. Zemurray ordered a pint himself. Twelve pints later, the deal was done. Not a buyout but a merger, with the smaller company becoming a division of the larger. This was the key for Zemurray, not only for reasons of pride but also because it meant none of his workers would be fired, nor any of his plantations shut down. The deal would be structured as a stock swap. When Zemurray brought it to his investors, holders of Cuyamel’s stock signed agreements allowing their shares to be exchanged for shares in United Fruit. (Cuyamel was trading at $107; U.F. was trading at $108.50.) Sam would receive three hundred thousand shares of United Fruit for his shares of Cuyamel. His stake, after the merger, would be valued at more than $30 million. A figure worth considering, as it would make Sam Zemurray, who had arrived in Selma with nothing three decades before, one of the richest men in America.

  U.F. would take possession of Cuyamel, the best banana company in the world, with thirty-five thousand cultivated acres in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico, fifteen top-of-the-line banana boats, and the capacity to produce and ship six million bunches a year. “It was a marriage of opposites,” wrote Thomas McCann, a longtime U.F. employee, in An American Company. “Zemurray’s personal style, as well as his operating practices, was completely contrary to the traditions of United Fruit. Zemurray had lived in the tropics and had personally pioneered many of the practices in agriculture and engineering which became the standards for the industry. By contrast, the management of the United Fruit Company had been content, for the most part, to sit in Boston and count the money and watch bananas grow with the same detachment with which an actuary watches the growth and death of populations.”

  As part of the agreement, Zemurray, who would now become the majority owner of United Fruit stock, agreed to retire from the banana trade. United Fruit would be run as it had been: by Victor Cutter and his board of directors in Boston. U.F. management insisted on this. To them, the deal was aimed less at acquiring extra capacity than at driving their greatest competitor from the field. They wanted to get rid of Zemurray, bury him under a pile of stock. Sam agreed to retire, promising to neither work for a rival nor start a new fruit company of his own. A standard noncompete clause. Zemurray was given an honorary title but would really have no more say than any other shareholder: he could attend public meetings and raise his hand.

  The deal was approved by U.F. stockholders in December 1929, two months after the stock market crash. It was among the biggest corporate mergers of the era, first reported on the front page of The New York Times on November 26, 1929, with the headline “Cuyamel Accepts United Fruit Offer: Holders Vote for Merger of Companies at Share-for-Share Exchange of Stock.” The same news, carried in the United Fruit Annual Report in 1930, ran to two sentences. There was no mention of Zemurray, the Banana War, the banana cowboys, the State Department, or the twelve bottles of ale. It’s the sort of description—“In December of last year the directors authorized the purchase of the properties of the Cuyamel Fruit Company. These assets will be added to the inventory of the United Fruit Company”—that attempts to shape history Soviet-style, by exclusion. As far as the executives of United Fruit were concerned, Zemurray would now fade away like the other storied figures of the banana past. If remembered at all, it would be as a folk hero from an antique age, “the gran hombre of the Chamelecon-Utila Basin,” as Charles Morrow Wilson described him, who “spent sodden weeks and months walking scores of jungle trails from Ceiba Point to Tegucigalpa.”

  This was the state of affairs circa January 1930, when Sam boarded a steamship in Puerto Cortés to return to New Orleans. In the way of a retiring politician or athlete, he promised to embrace his retirement, spend more time with his loved ones, pursue causes and fancies. For once in his life, which had been nothing but sixteen-hour workdays, he would enjoy his success and be happy. It’s possible he believed these things as he said them, but, in truth, Zemurray was not old and was still angry, easy to insult, easy to incense, driven, and restless. Show me a happy man and I will show you a man who is getting nothing accomplished in this world.

  Ripe

  13

  King Fish

  Samuel Zemurray returned to New Orleans in the winter of 1930. He was fifty-three years old. Though never handsome, he was one of those powerful men who get more impressive with age. He dressed in the simple way of a mariner home from sea, button-down shirt, linen coat, slacks. He had dark eyes and a high forehead that folded like an accordion when he was concerned. He was rich and famous, a legend of the industry, but people let him believe in his anonymity, that he was coming across as just another fruit jobber, drinking coffee on the wharf, soaking up the gossip of the river trade.

  He was experiencing a caesura, a pause between the episodes of his life. For the first time, he seemed inclined to ruminate and consider. I do not know if he was a religious man, if he believed in God or if there was nothing he could hold on to. I do not know if he was scared of death, or if he believed that the soul of a person never perishes. Whenever I reach the borders of Zemurray’s story, where the record leaves off and the shadows encroach, I come across the same word, assembled in pickets, marking where I can and cannot go: UNKNOWN, UNKNOWN, UNKNOWN. After all, some of the most profound moments of any life are lived between three and four in the morning, when you stare at the ceiling as the silence roars.

  New Orleans was a great city in 1930, blocks and blocks of streets lit by yellow lights, storefronts aglow in the evening, tobacco shops, coffeehouses, newsstands, hotels and taverns, the storied restaurants, Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, Arnaud’s, the antiquated hitching posts of the French Quarter, wrought-iron balconies, the clang of the streetcar. Zemurray was living in the house at 2 Audubon Place that for many remains the most famous thing about him. It’s tied to him as Monticello is to Thomas Jefferson, as Graceland is to Elvis Presley.

  Built in the early 1900s for a lumber tycoon, the house was a redbrick Beaux Arts mansion shaped like a cross, with columns, porches, porticoes, overhangs, and grand front steps. The sitting rooms and libraries, the staircase that ascends like a helix, were made from Louisiana pine and Virginia cypress. Zemurray purchased the house for $60,000 in 1917. Tulane University had recently moved into its new uptown campus, which began a few hundred feet from Sam’s lawn. Though the address is Audubon Place—a gated street favored by the elite of the city—the front door opens on St. Charles Avenue across from Audubon Park.

  Rebuilding the house was a project of Zemurray’s retirement. He installed dumbwaiters and elevators, added rooms. By 1931, it looked like it does today: a white mansion in the Antebellum style. On the third floor, he built a ballroom with a parquet floor lit by a crystal chandelier. A handmade organ piped music throughout the house. An intercom connected the rooms. Now and then, you might hear the voice of the Banana Man booming through the halls: Sarah! Where are you? Sarah Zemurray! Please come upstairs! Sarah!… Sarah? There was an office on the second floor with a mahogany desk where Zemurray rested his feet as he read the paper. The master bedroom looked out on St. Charles. There was a screened sleeping porch where the family slept on hot nights. There was a kind of crow’s nest on the top floor of the house, windows with views, where Zemurray paced as he talked on the phone. It was his favorite room. He often had breakfast on the porch, where there was always a stem of bananas hanging from a hook. Now and then, he pulled down a finger or bunch. He might consume five bananas at a sitting. No. 2 Audubon rema
ins perhaps the most fashionable address in New Orleans. In this city, people tell you it’s the most beautiful house in America. When Zemurray died, he left it to Tulane. It’s been the official residence of the university president since the 1970s, a place of fund-raisers and galas. But an inspection of its rooms is still a tour through the mind of the Banana Man. The house is rooted in an antique age. Its façade is Sam’s face, how he wanted to be seen by the world.

  Zemurray bought a twenty-five-thousand-acre plantation near Hammond, Louisiana, fifty-eight miles north of New Orleans, where he could repair in the worst of the summer heat. It had been the property of a lumber company. Zemurray knocked down the old woodworks, built a house, planted flowers and trees. It was his retreat, the place he could reconnect to the essential things: dirt instead of concrete, paths instead of roads, fields instead of markets. He built a golf course, a hunting lodge, a game park stocked with exotic fauna. He planted orchards, harvested crops, crossbred, experimented. “All my life I’ve wanted to be a real season-to-season farmer,” he explained. “I’ve been wanting a farm of my own since I was a little boy looking at the tall wheat fields back in the old country.”

  The plantation became very special for Zemurray. It’s where he took associates when a deal had to get done, where he went with family when he needed to impart and explain. His thoughts turned increasingly to the next generation, to his daughter, Doris, whom he loved, and to his son, Sam Jr., whom he loved in a different way. It was Sam Jr. who would carry on the name. Everything that was being accumulated was, in a sense, being accumulated with him in mind. Passing on the Jewish traditions was clearly not that important to Sam. If it had been, he would not have given his son his own name—it’s a very un-Ashkenazi thing to do. But legacy did matter. He wanted to teach his son everything he knew so his son could improve the life and status of the family in the next generation. In this way, Zemurray replaced tradition with progress and Zion with America.