The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  I finally got a call from a relative of the Zemurrays. He had been in touch with the family and wanted to explain why Sam III had gone silent. This is from memory—I was in a hotel in Miami—so I won’t use quotation marks, but here’s the gist: Sam III and the people around him had decided it was not in his best interest to talk. Sam had suffered a lot of tragedy in his life—so many people around him had died—and in such a situation, the healthiest course is probably to avoid the past altogether.

  * * *

  Among other things, I had wanted to ask Sam III about the patriarch’s heritage, and his work for Israel. Did any of this survive in the family, or was it like the skim on top of the pond that cooks off by eight a.m.?

  When you ask why the Jews, of all the people of the ancient world, have persisted into modern times, you can come up with various reasons: maybe it’s the power of the tradition, maybe it’s the will of God, or maybe it’s just that Jews had no choice, were locked in ghettos, confined to towns and professions where they had to marry other Jews. Even when the walls came down in Europe, Jews were hemmed in by prejudice and fear. But in America, where we’re all mutts, Jews were offered real freedom: not only to worship and travel and work, but from history. Jews could be Jews in America, or they could stop being Jews, which, for many, turned out to be the ultimate emancipation.

  To me, Sam Zemurray’s life is the true story of the American dream—not only of the success but of the price paid for the ambition that led to that success. By the people of the isthmus, by the men who battled him in the Banana War, and by Zemurray himself. Did Sam really think he could get away without paying? He scaled the heights, but lost so much in the process—first his son; then his family, which came apart a sheet at a time. As Arthur Miller wrote in The Price, “If you don’t understand the viewpoint, you don’t understand the price.” For Zemurray, that viewpoint, to some degree, would always remain the world as seen from the window of the farmhouse in Russia, where every Jew knew that without a family, without a legacy, without a son to say Kaddish over you in the end, even the greatest man was nothing.

  * * *

  Of course, Sam Zemurray’s public legacy was not his children or grandchildren. It was his work, all gathered under the banner of United Fruit. Which must have made it painful to see the company fail in the final years. From his porch in New Orleans, he could watch a lifetime of toil swept away by the incoming tide: Guevara, Castro. This was a man who left and returned several times—because work is life and retirement is accepting the shortcomings and failures as part of the permanent record. When Zemurray took over United Fruit in 1932, the company was fading. It would have gone under if he had not breathed it full of energy. He gave it twenty-five years of prosperity. But it was his spirit that kept the beast moving. When he went away for good, the company began to die.

  Zemurray sold all his stock in United Fruit soon after he retired. He wanted a clean break, to end his life in the business, and so on, but it was more than that. Zemurray did not feel his money was in good hands at the company. He knew what was coming after him and did not like it. He had the melancholy of a person who has no choice but to leave the world in the wrong hands. The men who would follow him were smaller, weaker, products of a different culture. “When the disparities between styles became too great,” wrote Thomas McCann, “Zemurray finally sold out all his Fruit Company stock. He was too old to fight battles. [His] career was bracketed by men who failed to grasp what United Fruit was about and who failed at leadership.”

  21

  Bay of Pigs

  A corporation is a product of a particular place and a particular time. U.S. Steel was Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Microsoft was Seattle in the 1980s. It’s where and when their sense of the world was fixed. The company brain is hardwired. Which is why a corporation, though conceivably immortal, tends to have a life span, tends to age and die. Unless remade by a new generation of pioneers—in which case it’s a different company—most corporations do not outlive the era of their first success. When the ideas and assumptions prevalent at the time of their founding go out of fashion, the company fades.

  United Fruit/Cuyamel was a product of Central America circa 1911. No matter the problem, the top executives behaved as if they were still operating in the Honduras of Manuel Bonilla. A concession, a bribe, a mercenary army, a revolution—always the broad sword, the blunt instrument. It was a methodology that became impossible in the wake of Guatemala, though few seemed to realize it until they tried the same trick in Cuba.

  Fidel Castro’s father, Ángel, worked for United Fruit as a tenant farmer, growing sugarcane for the company and sending his son to U.F. schools. Fidel was a product of El Pulpo, in other words, ripening beside the stalks, the son of the caretaker who will return to depose the master and walk in muddy boots across the carpets of the big house. In 1959, Castro nationalized every U.F. plantation, building, and piece of equipment in Cuba. The company estimated its losses at $60 million. The CIA, still commanded by Allen Dulles, put together a plan. Approved by Eisenhower, green-lighted by Kennedy, it amounted to a group of Cuban exiles, Brigade 2506, landing in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, sparking a popular uprising that would hopefully overthrow Castro. Called Operation Zapata, it was led by Howard Hunt, who secured money, guns, and ships from United Fruit. According to McCann, a New Orleans–based seaman named J. Arthur Marquette, who served as U.F.’s go-between with the CIA, met with Robert Kennedy. Marquette later complained about Kennedy’s arrogance and “dirty long hair.”

  Zemurray was not involved in this. He was old and ailing, had sold his stock. If he played a role, it was by his absence. In the fiasco that followed, Zemurray was in the same position as Eisenhower: both men created a system no one else could control; both had been irreplaceable.

  Brigade 2506 reached the Bay of Pigs on the morning of April 17, 1961. Fourteen hundred men were carried on four ships, two of them supplied by United Fruit. It was a bad place to attack, isolated, with reefs close to shore. Several skiffs were damaged before the exiles even made it to the beach. They had to wade in heavy equipment. Many reached land exhausted. They dug foxholes and tried to survive as bombs fell. Dulles asked the president for emergency air support. Kennedy refused—this is where he drew the line with the agency. Brigade 2506 surrendered the following morning: 114 dead, 1,200 taken prisoner. U.F. lost both its ships. It was the company’s last attempt at regime change, a pathetic bookend to Honduras in 1911.

  United Fruit started selling its property in the Torrid Zone soon after. What Arbenz had taken by force, the company began relinquishing on its own, returning to the model that preceded Preston and Keith: instead of owning land, hospitals, and towns, instead of dealing with the challenge of life on the isthmus, the company would contract local farmers—“associate producers”—to supply bananas. U.F. sold 37,440 acres in 1962, a year after the Bay of Pigs. By 1967, the company, which once owned three million acres on the isthmus, owned less than eighty-two thousand. By 1970, the company was out of the region as a landowner altogether.

  I visited Honduras, stood in the ruins of the compounds, wandered through the banana towns, which were as forlorn as ghost towns in Colorado. It was a kingdom that ended in the way of the British Empire, slowly, then all at once. Everyone came, then everyone left. The country is just as poor as the first banana man found it, rutted roads lined with shanties, overgrown fields, empty swimming pools. The golf courses of the fruit company have been abandoned. Switch grass grows tall on the fairways.

  22

  The Earth Eats the Fish That Ate the Whale

  Thomas Lemann, who worked for Zemurray in the final years of his life, is one of the few people still living who spoke to the Banana Man as Moses spoke to the Lord. He last saw Sam at a funeral in 1961. “He couldn’t walk anymore, not even with a cane,” Mr. Lemann told me. “And he could barely talk. He was in a wheelchair. He had been powerful, but it was gone. When I bent down to shake his hand, he couldn’t even hold my grip. His mouth w
as open and his eyes were glazed.”

  Samuel Zemurray died on November 30, 1961. He was eighty-four years old. His fortune was estimated at $30 million, half of which was donated, per his instruction, to the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. The rest went to his heirs, to his causes, and to the endowment of the Zemurray Foundation, which is still giving grants. His obituary was carried on the AP wire: “Samuel Zemurray, former president of the United Fruit Company, who came to the United States as a penniless Russian immigrant and accumulated a $30,000,000 fortune selling bananas, died here last night of Parkinson’s disease,” it read. “In the banana belt of the Caribbean, Sam Zemurray was known as ‘the fish that swallowed the whale.’”

  He was buried in Metairie Cemetery—you drive past it as you head into the city from the airport—beside his wife, son, and granddaughter Anne. It’s a storied cemetery, where Zemurray lies among the most colorful figures in the history of the city. William Claiborne, the first governor of Louisiana; Richard Taylor, the son of President Zachary Taylor and a hero of the Mexican and Civil wars; Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; Mel Ott, one of the great sluggers in baseball history. Being in this ground, among these famous dead, feels like a final acceptance of a man who was never accepted in any of the clubs, nor welcomed in society, a man who was taunted by cries of “Sam the Banana Man” as he pushed his ripes through the slums of Mobile.

  23

  Fastest Way to the Street

  After Zemurray’s death, United Fruit seemed like a man without a mission, wandering from here to there, having suffered a blow to the brain. The big problem, the problem that caused so many others (Panama disease), was finally solved by Standard Fruit, which took the initiative in U.F.’s lost years of overthrow and consent decree. The disease was not cured but was made irrelevant by the introduction of a banana called the Cavendish, which grows wild in Southeast Asia. Though inferior to the Big Mike in many ways—it’s neither as tasty, nor as big, nor as hardy—the Cavendish is unaffected by Panama disease. It has a much higher yield, too. A Cavendish rhizome produces twice as many fingers as a Big Mike, meaning the banana companies could operate on half as much land, with obvious political implications.

  A. J. Chute, a scientist who worked for U.F. before going to Standard Fruit, began to experiment with the Cavendish in the 1950s. Standard shipped the first Cavendish stems in 1953, but these reached the market bruised. Whereas the Big Mike was tough and could be stored on the deck of a ship, the Cavendish was fragile. Which is why, in the 1950s, Standard Fruit introduced the banana box. I don’t want to talk too much about this—a box is a box—but it was a revolutionary development in the trade. It changed the way bananas were sorted, stacked, and shipped. Not inventing the banana box was an embarrassment for U.F. The company had lost its edge. “In place of the innovations that marked its early years, the character of the company became imitative,” explained Thomas McCann. “It merely repeated earlier moves and tactics. The company had lost every semblance of invention. In the areas of production, sales and transportation, as in politics, United Fruit was doing business at the same old stand, but in fifty years the neighborhood had changed beyond recognition.” By the early 1960s, Standard Fruit was shipping only the Cavendish. In 1962, United Fruit followed suit. The last Big Mike was sold in America in April 1965, and presumably eaten soon thereafter.

  United Fruit struggled under the weight of its own history, its own image. Once considered among the most enlightened corporations in America, it came to be seen as one of the worst. Backward. Racist. Retrograde. In November 1969, the U.F. offices at Pier 3 were bombed by radicals of the Weatherman variety. Their complaint was the Vietnam War, which had nothing to do with United Fruit, but that did not matter to the bombers. U.F. had transcended its business and become a symbol of the System. That same year, Tulane Students for a Democratic Society issued a manifesto demanding the school divest of any money given it by Zemurray. “There is every reason to believe,” reads the crazed document, “that the William Gause who appeared on campus Nov. 7, 1967, recruiting for the CIA is the same William Gause who was UFCo’s Southern Passenger Traveling Agent in the 1930s.”

  In the 1970s, Pier 3 itself was destroyed. Torn up by giant machines and dumped into the Hudson River, it became part of the landfill that made ground for the World Trade Center. Thomas McCann remembers walking though the building before it was demolished. Zemurray’s office was just as the old man left it, a shrine filled with ghosts. “He was monumental, one of the greatest people I ever met,” McCann told me, “and his furniture was huge, too. Enormous. I asked what would happen to it. They said it would be dumped into the river. I asked if I could have the desk. They were sore as hell. The thing weighed a ton. But they did it. They put it on a truck and brought it to Boston, and I’ve worked on it ever since.”

  * * *

  On September 24, 1969, someone began buying stock in United Fruit. By the end of the day, 733,000 shares had been purchased, the third-largest transaction in the history of the New York Stock Exchange to that point. At first, no one knew the identity of the buyer, though his purchase made him the owner of the company. The next morning, he called Boston to introduce himself. His name was Eli Black.

  Black was a Polish immigrant descended from ten generations of rabbis and was a rabbi himself. He led a congregation on Long Island for three years, before quitting the pulpit, changing his name from Blachowitz, and enrolling in Columbia Business School. He took a job on Wall Street after he graduated and made millions in investment banking. He was forty-eight when he purchased United Fruit. He merged the company with others he already owned and called the conglomerate United Brands, which he ran from an office in the Pan Am Building above Grand Central Station in New York. He was touchy about his previous life as a religious leader. When McCann mentioned Black’s background to a reporter, Black took him aside and said, “Forget the rabbi business.”

  Black paid around $540 million for United Fruit, which many suggested was far too much. (He overpaid, according to experts, by perhaps $200 million.) He must have had plans to overhaul the company, add value, resell it, but he was like a man who has caught an anvil. Down they went together. According to McCann, the company lost $24 million in 1971. Black slashed budgets, sold land, cut divisions. In 1973, OPEC embargoed oil to the United States, driving up United Fruit’s shipping costs, further cutting into the company’s profits. Several of the nations of the isthmus—emulating OPEC—then formed a cartel of banana-producing nations called UPEB (Union of Banana Exporting Countries). Members pledged to tax the banana companies a dollar per box. It would destroy United Fruit. Black made his case to leaders of the member states, paying special attention to the president of Honduras, Oswaldo López Arellano. It was a bleak time for the storied company.

  On Monday morning, February 3, 1975, Eli Black filled his briefcase with heavy books, told his driver to take him to the Pan Am Building, rode the elevator to the forty-fourth floor, locked his office door, removed his overcoat, hat, and scarf, smashed a window with his briefcase, cleaned up the shards of broken glass, tossed his briefcase through the broken window, then followed it out. The police said he was in the air for six seconds. The towers of Park Avenue sped past, the concrete rose to meet him. He was traveling a hundred miles per hour when he hit the street. According to a report written by Detective John Duffy, “the head had been split, it went from front to back, right down the middle.” He landed in rush-hour traffic. A beat cop bitched to a reporter on the scene—his words can stand as a critique of the banana men in general—“It’s a hell of a thing to do. Jumpers don’t care. They don’t think of anyone down below.”

  No one could make sense of the suicide. Why would he do it? Eli Black seemed wealthy, popular, loved. More than five hundred people attended his funeral. The eulogy was given by Rabbi Leonard Rosenfeld, who had flown in from Jerusalem. “How many persons pushed Eli to a desperate option?” the rabbi asked. “How many contributed to his untimely trage
dy—and who called on Eli to choose the wrong door?”

  The mystery was resolved that April when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against United Brands, which, according to the complaint, paid the president of Honduras $1.25 million to reduce the banana tax and destroy the cartel, with another $1.25 million to be paid later. “Black knew he had fallen far short of success in every area that mattered to him,” wrote Thomas McCann. “The former rabbi was embroiled in bribery and corruption. The great achievement of his business lifetime, United Brands, was struggling to stay afloat in a sea of debt. His directors were in revolt, his management had lost respect for him, his friends had deserted him, his personal finances were at least as bad as those of the company, his ability to win people’s confidence disappeared, and he had nowhere left to turn.” The scandal, which came to be known as Bananagate, drove the president of Honduras from office. Trading of United Brands was suspended for a week on the New York Stock Exchange. The share price plummeted when it resumed, hitting a low not seen since Zemurray made his trip to Boston in 1932. The company admitted wrongdoing to the SEC and agreed to pay a $14,000 fine. $14,000! Eli Black killed himself for what, in the world of bananas, seemed like a minor bit of skulduggery, business as usual on the isthmus.