The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  That’s the end of United Fruit. I mean, yes, more happened, and happens still. The company bounced from owner to owner. After posting a $200 million loss in 1983, it was taken over by Carl Lindner, a billionaire investor who began his career in his father’s ice-cream shop. Lindner moved the company to Cincinnati and changed its name to Chiquita Brands International, Inc. In 2001, the company declared bankruptcy. It came out of it a year later. Lindner had retired by then. Ice-cream men get old, too. More recently, Chiquita was accused of paying protection money to FARC, the Colombian terrorist organization, buying immunity for its executives, endangering the nonprotected executives of other companies. But for me, the story of U.F. ended when the rabbi hit Park Avenue.

  Epilogue

  The story of Sam Zemurray is the story of New Orleans. It was booming when he found it and it’s foundered since he died. It’s a body without a soul. It’s a skinny man in fat-man pants. The buildings are grand, the streets are endless, but the people are gone. According to the last census, the city has fewer than three hundred thousand inhabitants—a 40 percent drop since its peak in the 1950s. No longer the world strider and shipbuilder, no longer the capital of commerce and Queen of the Gulf Ports, no longer the preferred destination of pirates, no longer the oasis of Kentucky woodsmen, it’s been mummified, pickled, turned into a diorama that tells the story of its own existence. It lives on its memories, tearing off and selling pieces of its skin. Run-down, dilapidated, depleted, and yet still wonderful. Because no other city in America looks like it. Because its houses are haunted and its people are strange and its sunsets are bloody and its waters are black and its music is madness and its food is incredible. Because it was once inhabited by mercenaries and parrot kings and machine gunners and the greatest banana man the world has ever known. If New Orleans was New York, Samuel Zemurray would be John D. Rockefeller. What happens when you attach your legacy to a city and that city dies?

  Saddest of all is the United Fruit Building on St. Charles Avenue north of Canal Street. You can see the entrance from a passing car. The doorway is arched, the stone etched with filigree, a frieze of tropical plenty. It’s the sort of entrance that was built when this city was sure of its future and U.F. was king, the first of the truly global concerns, with a hundred ships and a million acres and a hundred thousand employees. But when you step through the arch, you find nothing but a shabby foyer, a building dumb to its own glory, its rooms rented to foreign consulates, nondescript law firms, a bank. When I went into the bank and looked at the ceiling—there was once a Diego Rivera–like mural there that showed a banana steamer coasting a palm-fringed bay—the teller seemed irritated.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “I wanted to see if the United Fruit mural was still up there.”

  “What’s United Fruit?”

  Sam Z, Sam the Banana Man, El Amigo, the Big Russian, the Gringo—he was not an easy person, nor is his biography without controversy. To some, it’s the story of a great man, a pioneer in business, a hero. To others, it’s the story of a pirate, a conquistador who took without asking.

  What does it say about America?

  It’s a question I have asked myself repeatedly as I researched, interviewed, traveled, and wrote. In the end, I decided that his career is the history of the nation, the promise and the betrayal of that promise, experienced in the span of a single life. It starts a hundred years ago, when America was a rising power, and ends the day before yesterday, with the confidence of the people sapped. It might look bad but, as Zemurray understood, as long as you’re breathing, the end remains to be written. Sam’s defining characteristic was his belief in his own agency, his refusal to despair. No story is without the possibility of redemption; with cleverness and hustle, the worst can be overcome. I can’t help but feel, after all the talk of America’s decline, that we would do well by emulating Sam Zemurray—not the brutality or the conquest, but the righteous anger that sent the striver into the boardroom of laughing elites, waving his proxies, shouting, “You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”

  A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments

  In writing these pages, I have drawn on hundreds of books, newspaper articles, magazine stories, interviews, government documents, and corporate reports, as well as less conventional sources. Especially helpful was the work of the beat writers and war reporters who covered these events as they unfolded, including writers from The New York Times, The New Orleans Statesman and The Daily Picayune, The Times-Picayune, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Forbes, Fortune, and Life. Also helpful were unpublished dissertations archived at various libraries, as well as diaries, collections of letters, and personal correspondence at Tulane University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The letters of Lee Christmas were especially illuminating on the early years in Honduras. Also thanks to people at great research institutions, public and private, where material relating to these years is collected: the Library of Congress; Harvard Library, which has a collection of United Fruit photos; the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, which keeps the entire run of Unifruco, United Fruit’s magazine, regularly published for more than forty years; the Securities and Exchange Commission’s digital archive, where I found documents concerning antitrust investigations of United Fruit and the banana trade, as well as legal filings concerning Bananagate; the archive of the U.S. Congress, where I found transcripts from subcommittee hearings on the proposed “banana tax”; the U.S. Army websites; and the Ellis Island archive. Through the U.S. Customs Department and Ancestry.com, I was able to trace the comings and goings of Sam and Sarah and look at nearly every passport and manifest filled out by the Banana Man.

  Equally valuable were people who sat for interviews and served as guides, directing me through a storied epoch of American history: Thomas Lemann, who did legal work for Zemurray in his later days; Nick Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, who directed me to his father, Thomas (when talking about his son, Mr. Lemann, who is in his eighties, would say, “So what does the dean think about it?”); Frank Brogan, among the last of the banana cowboys—he probably knew Zemurray and his son better than anyone else still living; Hortensia Calvo at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane; Kathe Lawton, at Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute; the staff at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where Zemurray’s collection of Mayan artifacts was on display while I was researching; Marcelo Bucheli, historian, author, and expert on all things United Fruit—Bucheli maintains the United Fruit Historical Society, an outstanding website dedicated to the company’s history; Mike Valladares, who served as a translator and guide in Honduras; Mark Varouxakis, traveling companion and translator; Mark Kilroy, who hosted me in New Orleans and was a friend throughout; David Spielman, for his enthusiasm, counsel, and terrific help with research; Stephanie Stone Feoli and her husband, Ludovico Feoli, chair of the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane; E. Wyllys Andrews, a retired Tulane professor in Latin American studies; Eamon Kelly, the former president of Tulane; Richard Greenleaf at Tulane; Marjorie Cowen at Tulane; Samuel Zemurray III; Peter Jacobson; William Hess, the president of the American Zionist Movement; Morris Leibman, who, working for the Justice Department, investigated the Huey Long assassination; Gadi Marle, who explained Zemurray’s contributions to Zionism from an Israeli perspective; Manuel Bonilla III, the grandson of the former president of Honduras, who lives in Tegucigalpa; and Thomas McCann, a firsthand witness to many of the events I’ve described.

  Special thanks to my friends at FSG: Miranda Popkey, Jesse Coleman, Debra Helfand, Lisa Silverman, Charlotte Strick, Jeff Seroy, Sarita Varma, and especially Jonathan Galassi, who did what only he can do with a manuscript. I’m truly indebted to Cynthia Cotts. She fact-checked this book in a way that would make Albrecht proud. Cynthia challenged me editorially as well, making me do, metaphorically, those last fifty push-ups that Coach Ditka tells us can be the differe
nce between kicking ass and getting your ass kicked. Effusive thanks to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, who is wonderful. Thanks also to those who helped in ways more general and perhaps more demanding: Jessica Medoff, who read this book about a billion times; David Lipsky, who was up all night in the pilothouse; Jonathan Newhouse; Graydon Carter; Dana Brown; Julie Just; Kevin Baker; Jerry Weintraub; Herb and Ellen Cohen; Sharon and Bill Levin; Steven Cohen and Lisa Melmed; Renee Blumenthal; Robert Blumenthal; David Blumenthal; Cary Goldstein; Alec Wilkinson; and Ian Frazier. And also to my sons Micah, Nate, and Aaron, who helped me plant a banana tree behind our house in Connecticut, the progress and swift demise of which taught me a crucial lesson about the banana business and art in general: if you don’t get the thing in the right soil, it’s going to die. And, of course, to Francis Albert Sinatra.

  Notes

  Prologue

  Custom House Street: Custom House Street is now called Iberville.

  it was known as Storyville: Storyville was closed at the order of the U.S. Navy during the First World War. It had become a danger to sailors, many returning from leave with syphilis. The area was cleared in the 1930s to make way for public housing. The Iberville Projects are perhaps the most dangerous blocks in the United States. Tourists in New Orleans who mistakenly wander into these streets, which have been made to look something like the streets of the French Quarter—but it would have to be late, and you would have to be drunk—occasionally meet with foul play. When I toured some Zemurray “sites” with a friend who happens to be a New Orleans cop, he refused to accompany me into the Iberville Projects “’cause the sun is going down, and I love my kids.”

  a company printed a blue book: See Rose, Storyville; Carter, The Past as Prelude.

  a man in a dinner jacket played piano: Many consider Storyville the birthplace of jazz. It was in bordellos, where the clientele needed mood music, that American jazz really got going.

  “Well, compadre, this is the first time”: Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; Kinzer, Overthrow.

  The engines started and the boat glided: Sources include Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; McCann, An American Company; Deutsch, The Incredible Yanqui; Federal Writers’ Project, New Orleans City Guide (1938); Kinzer, Overthrow; Asbury, The French Quarter; Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans; “Bonilla to Lead Revolt”; “Bonilla Gone with Hornet.” I also hired a boat and followed the route the mercenaries took out of the city.

  1: Selma

  According to those who knew him: For example, Frank Brogan, who worked for Zemurray in New Orleans and Honduras.

  According to newspaper and magazine accounts: Kobler, “Sam the Banana Man.”

  2: Ripes

  During the next delay: Sources for these stories include ibid.; Chapman, Bananas; as well as interviews.

  3: The Fruit Jobber

  Almost all were foreign born: Early last century, a jobber, pushing a cart on Hester Street in New York, hawking his wares in pidgin English, woke the jazz drummer Frank Silver, who shared it with his friend Irving Cohn, who turned it into the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

  It was the only work: In 1905, when yellow fever swept New Orleans, the banana men became scapegoats. There was even talk of banning the trade from the city. In response, industry leaders organized a tour of the isthmus. Politicians from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were ferried to the banana ports in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, where they were entertained by brass bands and shown towns that were clean and fever free. A photo diary of the trip is in the Tulane University Latin American Library.

  “one of the few statesmen”: Freedman, Roosevelt and Frankfurter.

  “He’s a risk taker”: These words were spoken before the U.S. Congress, at hearings to determine whether United Fruit constituted a monopoly.

  4: Brown to Green

  In him, Zemurray would have recognized: On Ashbell Hubbard, see Moore, History of Alabama and Her People, Vol. 2.

  With Thatcher: Sources for this section include Karnes, Tropical Enterprise; Dodd, Tiburcio Carías; Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold; Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; May and Plaza Lasso, The United Fruit Company in Latin America; as well as magazine and newspaper articles.

  5: Bananas Don’t Grow on Trees

  The scientific name for the plant: Sources on the history and biology of the banana include Adams, Conquest of the Tropics; Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold; Unifruco, the United Fruit magazine; and discussions with agronomists at the botanical garden in La Ceiba, Honduras.

  “Northeast India, Burma”: Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold.

  It’s an herb: My son Aaron tells me bamboo is the tallest grass in the world, but I am fairly certain I’m right. He is eight, but that’s not why I think he’s wrong.

  That’s what happened to the Big Mike: For recent developments in the saga of the Cavendish, see Peed, “We Have No Bananas.”

  In 1516, Friar Tomás Berlanga: Chapman, Bananas; Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold; Koeppel, Banana.

  When Berlanga was made bishop of Panama: Davies, Fyffes and the Banana.

  6: The Octopus

  He landed in Port Antonio, Jamaica: On the founders of United Fruit, see Crowther, The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics; Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold; Adams, Conquest of the Tropics. For a contemporaneous look at Captain Baker, see The World Today, a monthly magazine that ran a profile of the captain in Vol. 6, January–June 1904.

  For now, let the Keiths be heroes: On Minor Keith, see Stewart, Keith and Costa Rica; Crowther, The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics; Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold; Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; Adams, Conquest of the Tropics.

  This made him a hero in Costa Rica: See Stewart, Keith and Costa Rica; also, “Minor C. Keith Dies.” Much of Keith’s fortune was wiped out in the stock market crash of 1929—lucky that he died the summer before, believing his family would be rich forever. His widow, by the end of her life, had to take in washing.

  Minor argued with the man: The fact that he carried an American flag seems significant. For years, a painting of this scene, done by a famous Costa Rican artist, hung in the National Museum in San José, Costa Rica. It was later moved to the Customs House, then to the home of a private citizen. It disappeared fifty years ago.

  “Gentlemen, please pardon me”: Keith’s railroad has become a tourist attraction in Costa Rica. It remains the most romantic way to cross the isthmus. See Elliott, “Costa Rica’s Jungle Train.”

  “A conspiracy in this country”: American Banana Co. v. United Fruit Co.

  7: New Orleans

  Erudite and refined: See Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans.

  U.F. had private facilities: Federal Writers’ Project, New Orleans City Guide (1938).

  The most colorful of them: On Jake “the Parrot King” Weinberger, various newspaper stories and books were helpful, including Crowther, Romance and Rise of the American Tropics; Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold; Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; Adams, Conquest of the Tropics. Several articles from The Daily Picayune were helpful as well. Also important was my own interview with Frank Brogan.

  Mother’s Birth Place: Mexico: Galveston, named Galvez Town for Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid by José de Evia, the explorer who planted the Spanish flag there in 1785, was part of Mexico when Zemurray’s mother-in-law was born.

  8: The Isthmus

  Zemurray traveled to Honduras: On Zemurray’s timeline: It can be difficult to establish exact dates for the early years. Sources occasionally disagree—a byproduct, no doubt, of Sam’s passion for secrecy. For example, The Banana Men (Langley and Schoonover) has him first visiting Honduras in 1910, while Bitter Fruit (Schlesinger and Kinzer) puts him there in 1905. According to An American Company (McCann), Zemurray traveled to Honduras in 1905, then returned to buy land in 1910. After comparing various accounts with newspaper articles and documents, I have arrived at a timeline I consider the most authoritative possible.

  Pue
rto Cortés had become a criminal refuge: For information on Puerto Cortés in the wild years, see Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; Crowther, The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics; O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings; Smith, O. Henry.

  “That segment of the continent”: O. Henry negotiated a deal with American law enforcement and returned to the United States after making restitution.

  It remained a point of pride: This story comes via Frank Brogan, as do several others in this section.

  Following the coast, he sailed past: The three companies that would dominate the modern trade—they have now become Chiquita Brands International, Dole Food Company, Inc., and Del Monte Foods.

  In a letter to Queen Isabella of Spain: Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

  “Rain, thunder, and lightning”: Columbus had his fourteen-year-old son with him on the trip. See Thomas, Rivers of Gold, and Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

  Neither Cortés nor his father: For information on Cortés, see Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Thomas, Conquest.

  If I have used the word “Cordillera” a lot: “Cordillera” comes from the Spanish word cordón, “cord,” as in the cord of muscle that runs up the spine of the isthmus.

  9: To the Collins

  “Sam adapted himself to the ways of life”: “Zemurray vs. Boston.”

  Without it, the plantation dies: See United Fruit Company, The Story of the Banana; Crowther, The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics.

  They’re there, we’re here!: McCann, An American Company. This was a favorite phrase of Zemurray’s. It seemed to encapsulate his greater complaint about how most men do business.

  There was a club for top executives: This story comes from Telltale Stories from Central America by Samuel Z. Stone, Zemurray’s grandson.

  “I noticed that the railroad depots”: García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale.