The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  Long identified this power as Sam Zemurray, a friend and ally of Senator Ransdell. Long then spent several weeks crossing Louisiana, denouncing the Banana Man—parasite of parasites, the worst offender in a den of thieves. He did this from the stage and he did it from sound trucks, driven in and out of towns in northern Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast beaches, through the parking lot of LSU stadium. Long’s organization printed two million copies of a circular—it appeared as a bulletin from The Louisiana Progress, a newspaper owned by Long—which was plastered to every telephone pole and tree in the state, stuffed into every mailbox and beneath the wiper on every windshield.

  WHY THE ZEMURRAY MILLIONS

  SUPPORT THE RING—

  THE BLOOD OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS THAT IS SPILLED

  FOR ZEMURRAY—

  HIS REASON FOR BACKING RANSDELL—

  WHY RANSDELL FOUGHT HIS PEOPLE ON FLOOD CONTROL—

  THE BARTER OF THE JUDICIARY AND SEATS IN CONGRESS—

  It is not a matter of very common knowledge, but it is nevertheless a fact, that the United States has kept a standing army down in Central America to fight for certain interests “making investments” in such countries as Nicaragua and Honduras. The story runs that, when one of these large American interests is not pleased with what he can get at the hands of the Central American governments, they “change the government.”

  Among the men who have made millions in Central America out of the work of the soldiers of this country is one Sam Zemurray of New Orleans. He has many concessions in the Central American countries. Time after time, except for the blood of the soldiers of this country, his “concessions” would have gone up in smoke. Wherever he drove down his stob and laid claim to a few hundred miles of property, no matter what side of a revolution he bought it from, he was able to make good his claim by the fact that the United States would send soldiers there to back him up.

  It took influence to have the army of the United States in a constant war to make money for Zemurray. There was no war declared, and yet the U.S. soldiers spent their blood for the cause of the financial gain of Mr. Zemurray, just the same as if war had been declared. Why? Mr. Zemurray took in as an associate, we find, a nephew of Senator Joe Ransdell, Joe Montgomery, and this Zemurray and Ransdell’s kinfolks’ combination made millions on top of millions that anybody else could have made if they had only been furnished with the United States army to back them up in their concessions and grants, in the revolutions of Central America.

  Many a mother’s son lies in an unmarked grave in the tropics for the cause of Zemurray’s millions.

  It must have been a nightmare for Zemurray, a private man who disdained publicity, to be dragged out into the spotlight where the multitudes gawk, the sort of thing that got him cursing and threatening that miserable, rotten, no-good son of a bitch.

  Long turned paranoid. He began to speak of himself as a target of assassins. He was especially fearful of the former New Orleans police official Guy Molony, who turned up in the city in 1934 after a lengthy stay in Honduras. Long believed that Molony had returned at the request of an anonymous third party to lead a mercenary army to overthrow Long and replace him with T. Semmes Walmsley, the mayor of New Orleans. When questioned about this at a public hearing, Molony laughed as he denied the charges. There is no such plot, said Molony, but he would be happy to participate if one was organized.

  Long began to travel amid a phalanx of bodyguards, Louisiana state troopers in squeaky black boots and mirror shades. He investigated his enemies, had their tax returns scutinized, desks rifled, comings and goings monitored.

  At first glance, Zemurray and Long seemed to have had a lot in common: both were self-made men who grew up on farms; both were seen as interlopers, shut out of the best clubs; both were Democrats with a similar critique of the New Deal—neither far enough nor fast enough. But unlike Zemurray, who wanted to reform the system to save it, Long wanted to tear it down. In him, Zemurray would have recognized an old foe: the charlatan, the snake-oil salesman, the Cossack. When Huey said, “Let’s soak the rich,” Sam heard, “Let’s soak Zemurray.” When Huey said, “Let’s crush the Ring,” Sam heard, “Let’s crush Zemurray.” To Long, Zemurray represented everything that was wrong in America: the fat cat who had taken more than his share, the tycoon whose fortune was built on the backs of the poor. His brain is money; his teeth are rifle shells; his eyes are the stolen jade of the Mayan highlands; his fingers are ripes; his diet is human misery and human blood. On foreign policy, Long seemed to have just one concern: he did not want U.S. troops sent to the isthmus, where, Long claimed, they would protect the interests of Zemurray, whom Long denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

  It seemed the conflict would turn into something truly ugly. Then it didn’t. Or maybe it did. On September 8, 1935, at 9:20 p.m., Senator Long, who had returned to Baton Rogue to attend to legislative business, was approached by a man in the hall of the Capitol building, Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a Louisiana judge. Weiss shot Long in the chest, then struggled with his bodyguards, who knocked the assassin to the ground and shot him thirty times. As for Long, after he was hit, wrote A. J. Liebling, he “spun around, made one whoop, and ran down the hall like a hit deer.” He was taken to a hospital, where he died two days later. He was forty-two years old.

  I’m not saying Zemurray was behind the Huey Long assassination, though skeptics still contest the official version of the killing: Dr. Weiss, acting on a mad impulse of his own, sneaks into the statehouse and fixes Huey good. There was enough doubt to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Justice Department in the fall of 1935. I once knew one of the investigators, Morris Leibman, who had worked for the Justice Department when he was a young attorney. When I asked him about the killing, he said, “Louisiana—you never know.” Later evidence suggested the bullet that killed Long came from a .38-caliber or .45-caliber pistol. Dr. Weiss owned a gun, but it was a .32-caliber. In fact, the bullet that killed Huey Long matched the guns carried by his own bodyguards. And we know for certain they fired their weapons that night, a number of times. Some people suggest Long’s death was a tragic accident: a jumpy bodyguard set off another jumpy bodyguard, until the air was full of lead; others suggest Dr. Weiss fired and missed, but Long was accidentally shot in the ensuing melee. In either scenario, Dr. Weiss is framed by the bodyguards, wishing to avoid a scandal. Others suggest a darker conspiracy, a collusion of interests determined to prevent Long from challenging Roosevelt in the upcoming presidential election, in which case Dr. Weiss was the patsy. Or perhaps the assassination was the Ring settling a score. In this scenario, the bodyguards were paid off, corrupted. (“In the evenings they literally sat around their drawing rooms discussing ways to murder him.”) So, no, I’m not saying Zemurray was behind the assassination of Huey Long, knew about it in advance, or did anything other than mourn when he got the news. But the fact is, the few men stupid enough to outrage Sam Zemurray, to challenge him, or disrespect him, or get in his way, from Miguel Dávila to Huey Long, had a habit of coming to a bad end.

  14

  The Fish That Ate the Whale

  One morning in 1931, Zemurray woke early, had a breakfast of figs and water, stood on his head for fifteen minutes, went through his front door, crossed St. Charles Avenue, and headed downtown. This was Sam in early retirement, unable to keep away from the wharves, the ships, the machinery. He followed Calhoun Street to Magazine, which is curio shops and storefronts, then turned onto Nashville. The streets run down as you approach the river. The potholes fill with oily water and truck drivers grip their wheels tight as if bouncing across the face of the moon. Zemurray took a right on Annunciation Street, which is as sleepy and small as a street in the hills above Cannery Row—it being understood, I hope, that I’m re-creating a typical walk, not saying this is the route he followed every day. He cut down Octavia and turned left on Tchoupitoulas, then crossed the overpass that carried him above the railroad tracks to the Mississippi.

  H
e walked along the river most mornings, now and then following it for miles. Did Sam miss the jungle? Did he long for the isthmus, where he could get out of these itchy clothes and away from this polite society? He lingered on the Erato Wharf, the Desire Wharf, the Pauline Wharf, where twenty-five hundred bunches of bananas were unloaded every hour. He liked the smell of the river and the ships covered in produce, the fishermen in the rigging. He liked the shop talk of sea captains. He liked the fruit piled on the railroad sidings, greens and ripes and browns. But the morning I speak of he would have seen something terrible and new, a feature that appeared on the river as if overnight: a shantytown built by the homeless. In New York City, the Hoovervilles were built in Central and Riverside parks, great agglomerations of lean-tos ands tents. In New Orleans, the Hooverville was like Venice, built on the water with rafts and barges. It was a mirror of the city laid out by the French, a prophecy of what that city would become in the time of the Flood. Most of the structures were made of driftwood that came down the river. Hoboes fished out the scrap and lashed it into shelters. It grew by accretion, a monument of ingenuity, a chaos of rafts and skiffs that lined the river from Thalia Street all the way to Carrollton. This picturesque slum must have impressed Zemurray in a way he would never be impressed by statistics or employment rolls. It was the future if nothing was done.

  Zemurray had become increasingly aware of the direness of the situation. America teetered on the edge of an abyss. He would see it in the collapse of the national economy, in the army of men who had taken to the roads, in the shuttered factories. He would hear it in the hush that settled on the docks, where only half the shipping lines were running and the stevedores had little to do. He would recognize it most clearly in his own dividend checks and the reports that came from the Boston headquarters of United Fruit. The company, which had weathered the stock market collapse of 1929, was being crushed by the economic depression that followed. As one of the world’s first truly global corporations, United Fruit—its entire product line grown overseas, most of its market domestic—was uniquely vulnerable. In 1930 and 1931, the company diminished in ways that would have stunned Preston and Keith. Collapse of demand, labor unrest, deflation—there was serious trouble. In 1928, U.F. had made $45 million in profit. In 1932, it made just $6 million, an 85 percent decline. This meant fewer workers employed, fewer fields planted, fewer bananas grown, which meant even lower profits, which meant still fewer fields planted and fewer bananas grown. The less we produce, the less we profit; the less we profit, the less we produce. The company was caught in a death spiral.

  For Zemurray, the collapse of United Fruit would have been devastating. Most of his net worth was tied up in U.F. stock. The more the company struggled, the bleaker his prospects became. When Sam merged with United Fruit, its stock was trading at just over $100 a share. Two years later, the same shares were going for $10.25. The Zemurray fortune, once figured at $30 million, was valued at less than $3 million by 1932. Whether he was sitting on his porch or walking on the docks, Sam was watching it all go away.

  The greatness of Zemurray lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation. Bad things happened to him as bad things happen to everyone, but unlike so many he was never tempted by failure. He never felt powerless or trapped. He was, as I said, an optimist. He stood in constant defiance. When the secretary of state teamed up with J. P. Morgan and the Honduran government in a way contrary to Zemurray’s interests, he simply changed the Honduran government. When United Fruit drew a line at the Utila River and said, “You shall not cross,” he crossed anyway. When he was forbidden to build a bridge, he built a bridge but called it something else. For every move, there is a countermove. For every disaster, there is a recovery. He never lost faith in his own agency. With his fortune fast diminishing, it was time to act.

  He started by asking two questions. First: Are the challenges facing United Fruit part of the systemic failure of the global economy, meaning there’s nothing to do but hope and pray? Second: If the answer to the first question is no, what can be done to move the product, increase profits, resuscitate the company? How can U.F. be saved?

  Where did Zemurray go for answers? Did he meet with economic experts and college professors? Did he call Daniel Wing, the chairman of U.F.’s board, and Victor Cutter, its president, and ask, “Do you have a plan?” And even if they did have a plan, so what? These were the same men who had run the company into a ditch. He went to the docks instead, where he spent the winter of 1932 walking through warehouses and standing on the decks of banana boats, talking to fruit peddlers and captains, loaders and stevedores—the people who really knew. (It was the end of his retirement, though few realized it at the time.) He peppered them with questions. He wanted to know specifics, the mood on the isthmus, the color and size of the latest harvest, the speed of the crossing. How fast is the captain running her? Is he letting out all the stops? In this way, he learned, among other things, that the banana captains were on orders from Boston to lay off the throttle and cross the Gulf at paddle speed, thus saving gasoline. But a man focused on the near horizon of cost can lose sight of the far horizon of potential windfall. By quick calculation, Sam realized that whatever money was being saved on fuel was being lost on the high percentage of fruit that ripened during the extra days on the water. The schmucks! They’re losing more than they’re saving.

  Zemurray wrote his findings in a letter—unusual for him, as he liked to leave no record—which he sent to Boston. He pointed out obvious problems, then went on to paint a troubled big picture pieced together from details picked up on the docks: banana boats running half speed, half full, ripes dumped into the sea, fields of undernourished stems, labor unrest in banana towns where the company had stopped spending. He included suggestions, ideas. Repurpose the boats, fallow the fields, control supply.

  The members of the United Fruit board, the financial elite of Boston, were not interested in the ravings of the Russian. They had, in fact, taken over Cuyamel with the purpose of keeping him out of the conversation. Having been well paid for his silence, he was supposed to stay away and shut up. The letter went unanswered. There must have been a moment when Zemurray felt that the sale of his company to these fools had been the mistake of his life. He was like the gambler who had won all night, only to lose everything on the last hand. His concerns, which had been those of an investor—three hundred thousand shares!—grew into something deeper. More than anger, it was the rage of the self-made man who’s been treated like something he used to be: the fruit peddler, the immigrant, the schnorrer.

  In June 1932, Zemurray traveled to Boston to attend a meeting of the board of directors. The details were reported in The American Magazine and The Wall Street Journal: Zemurray sat quietly as a secretary read through minutes and notes, reports from various tropical divisions. The corporate officers then discussed a request from a plantation manager, who wanted $10,000 to build an irrigation ditch in Guatemala. The executives called on experts, who detailed the costs and benefits of the project. Zemurray grew restless. To him, such a debate was symptomatic of a greater problem. The executives running United Fruit did not understand their role, what they could and could not do. He raised his hand, stood to speak. “This man in Guatemala, he’s your manager, isn’t he?” Zemurray asked.

  Yes.

  “Then listen to what the man is telling you. You’re here, he’s there,” said Zemurray. “If you trust him, trust him. If you don’t trust him, fire him and get a man you do trust in the job.”

  Zemurray went on to explain his frustration with how the company was being run, then offered a few ideas. He had some experience. He wanted to help. His offer was rejected at the meeting, rejected again later by Victor Cutter, who dismissed Zemurray’s complaints as the griping of a man who did not comprehend the business cycle.

  “I became worried,” Zemurray told a reporter. “I attended a directors’ meeting and told the management I was not satisfied. I could see that most
of the others also weren’t satisfied. I had previously worked hard and had built up a big company into excellent shape. I knew that I could render great service to United Fruit, if given the opportunity. But the directors turned me down.”

  * * *

  My mother says, “Don’t go away mad, just go away.”

  Zemurray went away mad. He was not used to being slighted, condescended to, rebuffed, ignored. He spent the following weeks on the road, traveling from city to city, sitting in the offices and living rooms of shareholders. He made the same case over and over. The current management is not up to the task. Don’t believe me? Just look at the most recent quarterly report. The board must change course, follow the plan I have outlined or something similar. If allowed to continue on its current path, the value of the stock—then selling at $10 a share—will dwindle away to nothing. The company will become a relic: overgrown fields, ships sold for junk. Within five years, United Fruit will be a story of the once-upon-a-time variety.

  When Zemurray spoke to the board again several months later, he had with him a bagful of proxies, the voting rights turned over to him by other stockholders. Along with his own shares, these proxies could give Zemurray control of the company, though he kept their existence a secret—for the moment, anyway. The best tycoons are like magicians; they know when to share information and when to withhold.

  The meeting took place on the tenth floor of the United Fruit Building at 1 Federal Street in Boston on a January morning in 1933. It was an iconic corporate showdown of the era, remembered and discussed to this day. The outsider finds himself in a room of sneering insiders, the board of United Fruit being made up of the elite as it existed before the levees broke and the Catholics and Jews flooded in: Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, a descendant of two presidents; Channing H. Cox, the former governor of Massachusetts; Bradley Palmer, the company officer who negotiated the buyout of Cuyamel—one of the few people in the room sympathetic to Zemurray; Francis Hart, the oldest son of an original investor in Boston Fruit. A former division head, Hart had published three books on Caribbean life. He was famed for his planter’s punch. To such men, Zemurray, with his diets and love of the vernacular, was comical, offensive, crude. This meeting epitomizes the moment the establishment began to give way to the strivers.