The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  * * *

  After Zemurray returned from his tour of the isthmus, he began to settle into the routine he would follow as the head of United Fruit. For part of the year, he would have to live in Boston, where the company was headquartered. He spent an afternoon crossing the city with a real estate agent, walking through houses in Brookline and Back Bay, where many United Fruit executives lived. Though he would stay in the city only a few months a year, the address was important. Choosing a home was making a statement, showing a commitment to the traditions of the fruit company. He walked through brick houses built in the Federal style, through houses that mimicked grand Tudor estates, through Victorian waterfront mansions that were nothing but dormer and gable. From the eastern windows, you could see the ocean, so different here from the ocean in Puerto Cortés, different tints and colors, Jehovah working with a limited palette of muted greens and dirty grays.

  Zemurray was no longer young. What’s more, he was no longer nearly young or recently young. He was deep in middle age, on the far side of a room that he had been through and explored, having tried out every style, every way of being powerful in the world. He had been loud and voluble, quiet and reserved. His mere presence, size, the ice of his glare, were usually enough to get his way. He wore double-breasted suits and conservative ties. His hair, combed to the side, checked now and then with a broad open hand, had thinned and gone gray.

  All this time, he’d been aging. He started as a kid, a set of eyes peering from the steerage deck of an Atlantic steamer. He grew into a young man, a go-getter hauling ripes. He became a hustler, hurrying through the streets of the French Quarter with a pocketful of bills. When he went to the isthmus, he became the Gringo humping over the mountains on a mule, buying and clearing swaths of jungle. Then he was El Amigo, the father of the revolution, a man with nothing to lose. Then he was the little guy at war with the Octopus. Then he was a millionaire, a sellout, a retiree, a battler in a political war, a symbol of everything good and bad about America, the opportunity to rise and the inevitable corruption, the best and worst. He had finally become the boss, the king, one of the most powerful men in America.

  And yet …

  Zemurray made offers on several houses in Boston, but in the end each deal fell through—because there had been a better price, because a seller had suddenly decided to take the property off the market. It was the old problem: no Italians, no Irish, no Jews—regardless of how much money you had. I was told this story by people who knew Zemurray. When I asked if it bothered him, they said no, no, the Banana Man was beyond such petty concerns. They told me he faced it with a smile, as if to say, You have won the hand, but I will win the game. “Over the years I have heard many stories about how this treatment [in Boston] galled Zemurray,” Thomas McCann wrote, “but in most cases the tellers were Bostonians who had never even met him, and I came to believe that the stories were based on wishful thinking. Zemurray was too big a man to care. That must have galled the Brahmins.”

  After a few days of hunting in vain, Zemurray decided, Screw it, they don’t want to sell, I don’t want to buy. He would keep a suite at the Ritz-Carlton instead, charging the cost to the company. He would never be more than a visitor to Boston as a result, a hotel man who came and went as dictated by his schedule. You can judge a place by how it treated the Banana Man. Rejected by Russia and Boston, accepted by Puerto Cortés and New Orleans.

  * * *

  Zemurray spent the last quarter of his life in transit, traveling from town to town. He was one of those men who seems still in mind only when his body is in motion. His wife grew old, his daughter moved away, his son became a father, pushing Sam one row closer to the abyss in the family photo. He spent every winter on the isthmus, where he lived in a house that a colleague described as “slightly larger than the others, orchids growing in profusion in hanging baskets.” Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador—no matter the country, the scene was always the same. The grid of streets, houses and stores, the electrified fences, golf courses, banana fields, bowling alleys, and swimming pools. “There was something at once very exciting, very masculine and very romantic about the company [in those] days,” wrote McCann. “It was a mixture of John Wayne movie clichés and the legacy of an incredible period in history: gin and tonics and Dewar’s White Label Scotch on tropical verandas; endless miles of private jungle fiefdoms, natives who were variously brooding, surly or submissive; boots, khaki uniforms, horses and pistols; the Great White Fleet that was really the largest private navy in the world (and operated on the open-secret motto ‘Every banana a guest, every passenger a pest’); the early morning produce markets and the colorful, crude men who ran them: longshoremen, traders, plantation managers, ambitious men, hard men, lazy men, rich men; and behind it all a tradition of enormous wealth and power and privilege that already was beginning to decay.”

  By 1940, the network of banana colonies had developed its own society, its own codes, poets, heroes. There was cruelty and racism, the dark-skinned made to scrape and bow, the white man king (the constant mention of skin color, defined to the minutest degree, is perhaps the most miserable relic of that era). There was the sporting life, baseball stars who played for U.F. teams in Ecuador and Cuba, who barnstormed, packing the wooden bleachers. There was Unifruco, the company’s magazine published with the intent of forging a banana culture. The pages were filled with poems, quizzes, and letters from far-flung divisions. A typical lead: “Puerto Barrios had faded away in a crimson and mauve sunset.” More than a hundred thousand people worked for the company at the peak, with alumni scattered across the world: H. L. Mencken, who toiled on a U.F. dock in Baltimore; Lee Harvey Oswald, who unloaded its cargo in New Orleans; Fidel Castro, whose father grew sugarcane for the company in Cuba. Writers employed by the company chronicled its development, the most famous being William McFee, a U.F. sea engineer who wrote stories between trips across the Gulf of Mexico. McFee published many books, the titles of which tell the story of the era: Letters from an Ocean Tramp, Harbours of Memory, Sunlight in New Granada, Sailors of Fortune, The Beachcomber, Sailor’s Wisdom, Ship to Shore, The Law of the Sea. There was the leisurely tempo of the life, golf tournaments and regattas. “John Wayne … often visited the company’s Central American plantations,” wrote McCann, “anchoring his yacht in a bay protected by United Fruit property, playing cards long into the night with company ‘banana cowboys’ and living as the company’s guest for days at a time.”

  Zemurray spent more and more time in New York. He stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel on Forty-fifth Street off Madison Avenue. By then, he had traded his cotton pants and work clothes for wool suits. He wore tortoiseshell glasses, which gave him a scholarly air, and combed his hair left to right, covering the smooth bald plain that was his skull. Broad faced with heavy circles under his eyes, he filled out as he aged, got some meat on his bones. His irises were black gems and remained tranquil as his face puffed out, filled with lines, then sagged, losing their mischievous sparkle only at the very end, when they were clouded with cataracts. He was one of those placid men who seem to get wiser as the years pass, and understand more than a person probably has a right to.

  Each morning, he took a car to the United Fruit office on Pier 3, which was built on pilings in the Hudson River. The Humphrey Bogart movie Sabrina was filmed there. You see it in the climactic scene when Bogie runs after the ship that is carrying away his beloved. Elia Kazan wanted to use the dock in On the Waterfront, but the U.F. public relations department refused. The building was a warren of concrete and tin. Zemurray’s office was on the south side, with big windows looking out on the Palisades of New Jersey, the ferry sheds of Weehawken, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the crowded shipping lanes of New York Harbor. It’s gone now, ripped out in the early 1970s to make way for the World Trade Center.

  16

  Bananas Go to War

  Hitler ruined everything. He ruined the life of the Jews, he ruined the dream of Europe, he ruined
the history of Germany. He ruined the banana business, too, the indolence of the compounds, the excitement of the trading houses. Some of the causes were proximate, having to do with the way the Second World War would discredit all varieties of colonialism; some were direct, a result of the hammer blows that began to fall as soon as the German army crossed the frontier into Poland in September 1939.

  A war that fills the oceans with U-boats is bad business for bananas. A pure import, with no real local market, no home country, every stem has to be shipped at great expenditures of manpower and fuel, great risk to vessel and sailor. As soon as the bullets fly, gasoline prices rise and insurance rates spike, and the financial model fails. In 1939, the British government, looking to save money and resources, declared the banana a luxury. All shipments to Britain and its colonies were banned. One day, the British market accounted for 20 percent of United Fruit’s profits; the next day, it was gone. For Sam Zemurray, the game was survival.

  British-flagged ships of the Great White Fleet were seized soon after, twenty-three banana boats impressed into service in the Royal Navy, most converted into troop carriers. Big and slow, these became a favorite target of German submarines. As the U-boat captains were not especially careful about distinguishing repurposed boats from active members of the U.F. fleet, the life of the banana captain turned hazardous. On June 12, 1942, the Sixaola, an iron horse that had been in service with the company almost from its start, was torpedoed off Guatemala. Rescue boats, cutters, and yachts responded to the SOS. Men swung lanterns in pilothouses, called for survivors, sent up flares. Nothing was found but a patch of oil and a few thousand bananas floating in the debris. Twenty-nine people died, the worst tragedy in the history of the Great White Fleet.

  Profits tumbled as the ships went down. Zemurray was never heard to bitch or justify. He was a member of a generation that lived by the maxim “Never complain, never explain.” Like a lot of business leaders of that era, he probably felt there was something ennobling in the losses, which were not losses in the ordinary sense. It was blood shed in the service of a great cause, and nothing compared to the sacrifices made by the men who were actually fighting. Zemurray was never more engaged than he was in those years. The battles, the headlines—they seemed to wake him from the moneymaking dream of the previous decade. You sense it in his great burst of activity: how he raised money, championed causes, advised politicians. The war brought together the key obsessions of his biography: Sam the Russian, Sam the Jew, Sam the American, Sam the Capitalist. Soon after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the American War Department followed the British example, limiting the importation of bananas (a quota) and seizing most of the Great White Fleet. (The company was left with only the clunkers.) Though the impressed ships, remade with armor and cannon, had become the property of the U.S. Navy, Sam continued to follow them as you might follow the exploits of a war-fighting son—a terrible premonition. Edward Bernays, the public relations guru who began working with Sam in these years, recalled a meeting at which a secretary handed Zemurray a note every few minutes. Zemurray would glance at the paper, then carry on. Only later did Bernays learn that each note brought news of another banana boat destroyed at sea. U.F. would lose nineteen ships in the course of the war.

  Zemurray’s business challenge was straightforward. Though his product was as excellent as ever, he did not have the ships to get it to market. Between 1942 and 1944, an average of seventy thousand tons of United Fruit bananas rotted in the fields.

  What do you do when your product rots?

  Find something else to sell.

  United Fruit still had acres of sugarcane scattered across the Caribbean, which continued to be profitable, but it was not nearly enough. Zemurray began to look for other crops he could grow on his plantations, crops that could be classified as necessities (no quota). He sent agents in search of plants and trees that grew in the tropics on other parts of the globe, in the band of sunshine that wraps the earth. The men returned with cuttings, bulbs, seeds. During the war, Zemurray introduced many crops that remain staples in the region, some that had always grown wild on the isthmus but were never farmed, some that were novel: palm oil, quinine, hemp. He was especially interested in plants critical to the war effort but whose import from Asia had been blocked by the Japanese. Hemp for rope, quinine for antimalaria pills, rubber trees for tank treads, boot bottoms, and everything else. He promised to meet the military demand with supplies grown in our own hemisphere, making America more self-sufficient. He explained in an essay:

  WAR CROPS

  When the Jap blitz cut off rubber, hemp, quinine, and other vital supplies, it opened our eyes to the potential riches of Latin America. Here the head of the world’s largest tropical farming organization tells how, with the aid of our Southern neighbors, we are developing the essential products we formerly got from the Far East.

  By 1944, Zemurray had thousands of acres bearing strange fruit. As he later told reporters and friends, it was among the proudest achievements of his life. He was a farmer at heart. And here he was behaving like a farmer in the midst of a locust blight, innovating his way out of ruin.

  He involved himself in the war effort as much as possible, volunteered, hosted, contributed—did everything but fight, and would have done that, if not for his advancing years. As part of FDR’s National War Board, he brought more than twenty thousand men from Jamaica to work in factories in the Midwest—a surreal historical interlude. Sam gave everything he had in the battle against Germany and Japan.

  * * *

  Sam Zemurray Jr. enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He went into the service in the summer of 1942, was assigned the rank of major and sent to train with the U.S. Army Air Forces—he was already a skilled pilot. He was shipped to North Africa, where he would take part in America’s first battles of the Second World War.

  In those days, when the fighting started, you went. If you did not go, there was something wrong with you—a defect, a malfunction. What’s more, Sam Jr., who was smart and surely understood history, the general history of Europe and the particular history of his father, would have known that this was no ordinary war. It was the war, the sons of darkness against the sons of light.

  Sam Jr. was attached to the Western Desert Air Force, which consisted of British, South African, Canadian, and American fliers. There were fighter wings, bomber wings, reconnaissance wings. P-51 Mustangs and Hawker Hurricanes stood tail to nose on the runways. It was extremely dangerous work. The German antiaircraft guns were only part of the problem; the real challenge was the landscape, the fog that settled on the desert floor, the hills that rose up from nowhere. Show me a picture of Allied pilots from the North African campaign—tanned, dark eyed, happy—and I will show you young men who did not survive.

  Here’s a photo of Sam Jr. taken in the fall of 1943. He’s broad shouldered and handsome in his flight suit, aviator’s cap, goggles pushed back on his head, hands in his pockets, smiling as the landing strip behind him swarms with vehicles. He was assigned a P-51 modified for photo reconnaissance. He flew dozens of missions, the desert falling away, the sky filling with stars. He flew over the German lines into enemy territory. He photographed military camps, ridges, beaches, artillery positions, and guns, the hazards Allied infantry would have to face. He was transferred to a base in Algeria, where the mess hall buzzed with men from a half dozen nations. He was probably happiest in the sky, when the world was a pattern of lights. He set out again and again, his plane creeping to the end of the runway, the go signal, the rush of speed, the hills suddenly far below. Recon pilots in the Desert Air Force had to fly dangerously low to get their pictures, brush the rooftops of towns, swing out over the sea to escape.

  Sam Jr. took off at sundown on January 7, 1943. The ground crew would see him closed in his helmet, closed in his head. Then he was a star on the horizon, fading as it goes away. He vanished over the hills or into the sea. No one is sure exactly what happened—it’s a puzzle without a solution.
The best guess: Major Samuel Zemurray Jr., thirty-one, having lost his way in heavy fog, flew his P-51 into a mountain. There was a flash when the fuel tanks ignited, then darkness. I don’t know when Zemurray Sr. got the news. There was often a delay of days or even weeks before word made it back to the family. It’s impossible to express the horror he must have felt: one moment there was a world full of people and markets, the next moment there was nothing.

  The story was reported in The New York Times on February 4, 1943.

  NEW YORK MAJOR KILLED

  Samuel Zemurray Jr. Loses Life in Plane Crash in Africa

  Major Samuel Zemurray Jr., son of Samuel Zemurray, president of the United Fruit Company, was killed Jan. 7 when his plane struck a mountainside on a scouting expedition somewhere in Africa, according to word received here yesterday. He was 31 years old. The major left the United States last October for foreign duty. He had seen action in Casablanca and later was assigned to service in Algeria.…

  A memorial was held at Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. It was the saddest thing of all—a funeral without a body. For a time, Zemurray had clung to the hope that Sam Jr. had escaped the wreck and was still alive, lost and wandering in the desert. The memorial ended such fantasies. The service was led by Rabbi Julian B. Feibelman. Zemurray wept as he chanted the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, the rhythms falling on the hushed heads of the congregants: Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash sh’may ra’bbo.… Standing beside Sarah, he suddenly looked very old.