by Rich Cohen
Was Eisenhower punishing United Fruit for duping him, or was he sacrificing the company with his own reelection in mind? To know this, you must determine the following: Who was in control in Guatemala? Had United Fruit manipulated the CIA, or had the company been used—a tool in a cold war? Most historians long believed the coup was staged at the behest of the company, as it was no longer politically feasible for the banana men to field a mercenary army of their own. But some suggest the trickery went the other way. Marcelo Bucheli, a professor at the University of Illinois and the author of Bananas and Business, told me that it was most likely the CIA that used United Fruit: for its money, its ships, its railroads, its know-how. Used it to fight a battle in the cold war, then dumped it when things got too hot. In this scenario, the antitrust suit was the last act of a covert operation: the spies severing connection to their co-conspirator as the local cops move in. No, officer, I’ve never met this man before.
The Justice Department claimed United Fruit operated by monopoly in Guatemala. The company did not refute the charge but instead cited the Oliver Wendell Holmes Supreme Court opinion from early in the century to argue that American courts had no jurisdiction, as all the practices in question occurred overseas. Edward Bernays was given the assignment of swaying public opinion. He planted stories in newspapers around the country and pressed for editorials that asked why the very company that helped drive the Communists from Central America was being targeted by prosecutors with no understanding of how the world actually works. We should be thanking God for the fruit company, not breaking it up.
But times had changed. The old magic was gone. Whereas the company had once been considered the tip of the spear, the cutting edge of American capitalism, staffed with clean-cut men bringing civilization to the waste places, it had since come to be seen as a relic, a leftover from the colonial world destroyed in the Second World War. It was an image problem that became acute. U.F. was increasingly considered an embarrassment, a throwback to the ugliest days of old lamplit America. Thomas McCann recalled a plantation manager, responding to a suggestion that banana workers be given more freedom, saying, “Shit, man, suppose Leroy don’t want to carry the ball? He don’t want to—what’re you going to do?”
The antitrust suit was settled in 1958, when U.F. agreed to sign a consent decree. While admitting no wrongdoing, the company promised to establish, within ten years, a competitor at least one-third its own size in Guatemala. To accomplish this, U.F. promised to sell 33 percent of its fields and facilities to an “independent fruit company.” This would mean the end of United Fruit as it had been envisioned first by Preston, then by Keith, then by Zemurray. It took a generation to work out the details. Not wanting to advantage its main competitor, Standard Fruit—later purchased by Dole—United Fruit eventually sold the remainder of its properties in Guatemala to Del Monte, then a distant third in the trade. Within a few years of the sale, United Fruit had fallen out of first place in market share, a position it had held since the start of the century. The lead went back and forth after that, but United Fruit never regained its dominance. In 1950, the company cleared $66 million in profit. By 1955, that number had fallen to $33.5 million. In 1960, United Fruit earned just over $2 million. The story that began in the right-of-way along the Costa Rican railroad had come to an end.
Brown
20
What Remains
While no one was looking, Samuel Zemurray had grown painfully, shockingly, bitterly old. It’s like this: you leave the house in the morning and are young and fit and strong, and you whistle as you walk down Magazine Street, then turn a corner, and bang, run right into your own decrepit seventy-eight-year-old self going the other way.
He retired from the banana trade. For the last time. He left Boston forever. He left New York forever. He left Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia forever. He was like a man wandering though a mansion, closing doors. At a certain age, no matter which direction you walk, you are walking away.
Sam had one of those seemingly endless careers that span eras: in the beginning, it was the Wild West of banana cowboys and mercenaries raising hell on the isthmus, the America of Owen Wister and Bret Harte; in the end, it was the CIA and the triumph of the corporation and the air-conditioned nightmare, the America of Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy. He did not just live through this change, which is the rise of America told another way—he helped make it happen. Perhaps he’s best understood as a last player in the drama of Manifest Destiny, a man who lived as if the wild places of the hemisphere were his for the taking. It was in this spirit that he built his company into a colossus, so big its size became the most important fact of life on the isthmus. The United Fruit Company’s dominance in Central America made a mockery of regional governments, and was humiliating and infantilizing in ways that were hardly understood at the time. It was worse than the old European colonialism, which at least came with a sense of obligation. Those who lived in the banana lands were ruled not by foreign nationals bringing “civilization” and the word of God but by businessmen who looked on their fields with a cold moneymaking precision.
Sam did not see himself this way, of course. He considered himself a bearer of modern industry, creating jobs and wealth in a place deprived of both. But there is the world as you see it and the world as it is. It was not all Zemurray’s fault: he had inherited a machine built by his predecessors. If he had questioned the workings of this machine, he would have been a great man, but he was not a great man; he was a complicated man blessed with great energy and ideas. He did not question the machine because he did not understand what it was doing to the people who lived in its gears. When things got so hot the truth could not be missed, he saw himself, for one terrible moment, as he was seen: a pirate, a puppet master, a banana king. In an instant, the work of your life reveals itself to be the opposite of what you had always considered it. He reacted with a burst of activity. He tried to change his legacy at the end of the game—built roads and hospitals, train depots, water systems—but it was too late. The story of United Fruit had been written. “I feel guilty about some of the things we did,” he said. “All we cared about was dividends. Well, we can’t do business that way today. We have learned that what’s best for the countries we operate in is best for the company. Maybe we can’t make the people love us, but we will make ourselves so useful to them that they will want us to stay.” These are the words of a card shark who has realized, at dawn, that the power has shifted, that the pictures on the face cards have lost their meaning. The boss who dominated for decades became a person at the mercy of historical forces, the will of the people, who had hardly figured in his calculations.
Sam Zemurray has two legacies: as a leader in the business world of America, he was a stunning success, a pioneer, everything he considered himself; as a leader in Latin America, a man so powerful he became a political factor, his legacy is darker. Far darker. Regardless of his intentions, he aligned himself with the forces of reaction. As a man, he was admired, even respected—this had to do with his love for Honduras and its people. As the boss of United Fruit, he was abhorred. Even now, years after the company as he knew it has ceased to exist, Hugo Chávez is denouncing El Pulpo. Many books about United Fruit give short shrift to Zemurray, though he was its body and its brain for twenty-five years, a lifetime in the corporate world. He is mentioned in passing, as a colorful character who once ruled banana land as Jeroboam once ruled the Kingdom of Israel. (We still find his seal on ancient coins in the ruins.) That’s because, in the popular imagination, Zemurray was able to separate his legacy from that of United Fruit. An amazing feat. It’s as if the company founded by Preston, Baker, and Keith were a monster that, once set loose, gobbled up everything in its way, even Sam the Banana Man.
In his final years, Zemurray liked to walk in Audubon Park, or linger in coffeehouses in the French Quarter, an old man with his buttermilk and Times-Picayune. He stood on the wharf watching the Mississippi River. The evening cam
e slowly, a shade of blue at a time. The lights went on in Algiers, where African slaves were once kept in chains. The world is young but the history of man is long. His Parkinson’s got worse. He was nothing but tremor. The planet was trying to shake him off. His thoughts were cloudy. He had lived so long and done so much and now he was tired. He had huge hands that became huge fists which he brought down on the table when he was frustrated, because the thought was there, but he couldn’t dig it out. Goddamn it, Sarah, is this how it’s going to be? He went to bed early. He stayed in bed late. He was a burned-out engine. Now and then, when you close your eyes in New Orleans as the rain drums on the roof, you feel as if you are back in the jungle, on the first day of your career, and this time you will do everything right.
Did Sam Zemurray have regrets?
He lived one of the great lives of his time. He devoured his years, consumed as much as he could reach. He was not as famous as many, but I would put his story beside the most heralded. He never recovered from the death of his son, but that was not a regret. It was a blow, suffered in the service of his country in a war.
If he had a regret, it might have been that he did not raise his children as Jews. Here was a man who lived every aspect of the Jewish experience in America. He came with the great influx from Eastern Europe, prospered with his times, was devastated by the war. He married a Jewish woman, belonged to a synagogue, said Kaddish for his dead. He was a Zionist. Israel was important to him, and he was important to Israel. And yet he did not teach his children or grandchildren to be Jewish—to marry Jews, raise Jews, worship as Jews, fret as Jews. And none of them did. I do not think Sam did this intentionally, or wanted it to happen. It was just one of the things that unfolded when he was away on the isthmus. He was too busy to pay attention, did not care enough to notice, until he was old and it was too late. His particular line diverged from the story of his people, has been swallowed by the freedom of America. I believe that was Zemurray’s regret, the sadness of his final years. He accomplished everything, and let everything go.
Of course, this is just me imagining myself into the mind of a man I never met and can never really know. Perhaps I have it wrong. Perhaps it’s merely a lack of imagination and courage that causes me to see the sheep gone astray as a tragedy. Perhaps neither confusion, regret, nor sadness waits beyond the Judean hills—perhaps it’s Disneyland for the soul, utter fulfillment, total escape. In the end, Zemurray traded his ancient heritage for a place in the upper reaches of the establishment. As my grandfather would say, “The son of a bitch got away!” Perhaps this had been his goal from the beginning, a crucial aspect of his American dream. Perhaps Judaism, with its ancient past and dusty books and moral codes and stooped men in dim rooms, was a prison he longed to escape. Perhaps his work for Israel was merely a tax, the price of getting away. But I doubt it.
Let me explain in a Jewish way—with a story. I heard it from Marjorie Cowen at Tulane. When Zemurray was old, Sam Jr.’s children moved into the house at 2 Audubon Place, where they were raised by a nanny. One day, Zemurray, who did not know his grandchildren well, banged on the door of Sam III’s room with his cane. The boy, twelve or thirteen, stood in the threshold. Zemurray studied him, then asked, “What religion are you, anyway?”
“Christian,” said the boy.
Zemurray turned and went down the stairs, muttering.
* * *
By this time, Doris Zemurray Stone, Sam’s daughter, with degrees from Radcliffe, had become a scholar of Mesoamerican art and culture. She moved to Costa Rica, where she lived on a plantation with her husband, Roger Thayer Stone. Doris was an ethnographer and anthropologist, an expert in the lost cultures of the isthmus, some centered in the very valleys Zemurray bought for a song, cleared, and planted. Is it ironic? Her tremendous work of memory and recovery was made possible by his tremendous work of amnesia and destruction. For Sam, the past was at best irrelevant, at worst a fantasy. He was a materialist. All we have and know is what you see today. For Doris Stone, the past mattered. It’s like this: first conquer, then kill, then gather the artifacts and open a museum.
Doris and her husband had a child, Samuel Zemurray Stone, and he, too, became a scholar of Central American history. A member of the Princeton Class of 1954, Sam Stone published several books, including The Heritage of the Conquistadors: Ruling Classes in Central America from Conquest to the Sandinistas and Telltale Stories from Central America: Cultural Heritage, Political Systems, and Resistance in Developing Countries. It’s strange to read Sam Stone’s books about the isthmus. He wrote as if he had no connection to the story, as if every person gets a clean start. Some passages feel like condemnations of his own grandfather, the source of the wealth that made such musing possible. “Many outsiders continue to repeat that these countries need and want foreign investment,” wrote Stone, who died in Costa Rica in 1996, “and the constant discord between the United Fruit Company … and most of the Central American governments passes almost unnoticed in the United States.… In spite of a variety of expressions of such sentiments, United States (and Japanese) corporations in Central America, due to the small size of the Isthmian countries, still aspire to become the biggest employers. Although they provide foreign exchange and create jobs, it hurts the Central American to make him feel he has not been capable of utilizing his own resources, and foreign interference in national politics adds insult to injury.”
Sam Stone’s most interesting theory regards the political dynamics of the region. Having traced the genealogies of powerful local leaders, he showed that the countries of Central America have always been ruled by a handful of families, each of which can trace its roots back to a conquistador who traveled with Cortés. Starting around 1910, these families, who long ruled in partnership with the military, began to be replaced by banana men, who used their wealth and influence to strike their own deals with the generals, overthrowing the aristocrats, becoming aristocrats themselves. Unlike the old families, the banana royalty had no roots in the region. In this way, the ancient regime was superseded by a band of capitalists, who got rich and got out, and whose only obligation was to the shareholders back in Boston or New Orleans. (“All we cared about was dividends.”)
Sam Stone had two children, the great-granddaughters of Sam the Banana Man, whom they never knew: Alison Stone of El Salvador, who is on the board of Tulane, and Stephanie Stone Feoli, a historian of Latin American art, who lives in New Orleans, where I met her while working on this book. We talked in a coffee shop on the campus of Tulane. In her forties, slender and pretty, she did not have much to say about her great-grandfather—a few legends, a few myths, a general sense of him as a hero to some, a more complicated figure to others. Talking to her, you realize that Samuel Zemurray occupies a strange middle ground. He died a long time ago. There are very few people alive who knew him face-to-face. But he’s not yet the true historical figure he will become when the last living witness is gone. There are four rungs: newly dead; dead but remembered; dead and all those who knew you dead; dead and all those who knew those who knew you dead. When I asked Stephanie Feoli about her great-grandfather’s legacy, she told me it was too soon to tell. Everything that happens makes the past a different story. For Stephanie’s daughter, her great-great-grandfather will be a relic, less known to her than the dead presidents of the United States. That’s the way a living, breathing, jungle-clearing, government-toppling banana man turns into just another picture on the wall.
At the time of his death, Sam Jr. was married with two young children, Anne and Sam III. In the years that followed, the family evaporated. Anne went first, in a car crash. She was a young woman, newly married. It was another disaster piled on the shoulders of Sam Jr.’s widow, Margaret Thurston Pickering, who was fragile to begin with. She traveled in elite circles, flirting with madness. She served on the staff of Norbert Wiener, a storied scientist at MIT, and worked at The Atlantic as a manuscript reader. Her last address was the Robert B. Brigham Hospital in Boston, where she died in Ju
ne 1968, at age fifty-four. Her obituary, which ran in the Times (“Mrs. Zemurray Jr., Widow of Major”), made no mention of her daughter, which struck me as sad. It was as if Anne Zemurray had never been born.
This left only Sam III, a little boy alone, the sole survivor. I have seen him in a picture that ran in Life in 1951, where he is posed with his sister and grandparents—Sarah and Sam—on a field in the Zemurray plantation. You look at this picture as if looking back at the past, the past not only of this family but also of the country and of the South: the boy at the feet of the tycoon, his grandmother and sister, the dogs, the stiff smiles, the mackinaw coats, the tall grass and oak trees. It’s a vision from another world. I saw him again in a documentary about the house at 2 Audubon Place. Dignified and old, he looked distant and thoughtful. But the years in between are something of a mystery. Sam III’s family was among the most notable in the South, but he drifted away.
When I tracked him down in Savannah, Georgia, where he has lived with his wife for many years, he was stewing over an NPR interview he had recently heard in which a historian described Samuel Zemurray in the worst terms. “Robber baron,” that was the word that particularly galled Sam III. He repeated it as if stunned by the collision between his family narrative—Sam, the fish that ate the whale—and the public narrative that has taken shape over the years. At first, this made Sam III eager to talk to me. He would clarify, explain, set the record straight. We made plans, considered dates. I would fly down, sit on the porch, stay in a country motel, drive a rented Taurus to his house each morning, drink lemonade with mint leaf. Perhaps I would buy a seersucker suit. But as time went by, Sam III took longer and longer to return my calls, and I never could pin him down to a date. Then he stopped returning calls altogether. I left message after message, sent e-mail after e-mail.