The Fish That Ate the Whale

American Dreams

Of course, you would not make the mistakes Zemurray made. You would harm no one, and disturb nothing, and never pay off, and never kick back, and never compromise or lose your bearings. You would do it in a new sin-free way, win-win, which of course is also part of the American character, perhaps the most defining part: the notion that, if we were only given one more chance, we could finally get it right. It’s what people mean when they speak of American exceptionalism: unlike the Europeans, we do not yet know you can’t be both powerful and righteous. So we set out again and again, convinced that this time we’ll avoid the mistakes of the previous generations. It’s this kind of confidence that gives a people the strength to rule abroad; the moment that confidence goes, the empire is doomed. When Zemurray was young, he seemed to believe he was different. He would make an honest fortune in a way that benefited the impoverished people of the South. His tragedy was not that he was worse than other businessmen, but that, despite all his brilliance and good intentions, he was no better. In the end, what I took from Zemurray’s story, and what made it redeeming, was not the evils and excesses of United Fruit but the optimism that characterized his life, the belief that he could indeed be both triumphant and loved. It’s this infuriating faith that made him such a quintessentially American figure.

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.”

Humble Beginnings

Sam Zemurray spoke with no accent, except when he swore, which was all the time.

He’d arrived on the docks at the start of the last century with nothing.

He worked like a dog and defied the most powerful people in the country. By 1905, he owned steamships, side-wheelers that crossed the Gulf of Mexico, heading south empty, returning with bananas.

He combed trash piles on the edge of Selma, searching for discarded scraps of sheet metal, the cast-off junk of the industrial age, which he piled on his cart and pushed from farm to farm, looking for trades—wire for a chicken coop in return for one of the razorbacks in the pen. After the particulars were agreed on, Sam was told to get moving, Catch and tie that animal, boy. It was Zemurray’s first real job: racing through the slop with a rope in his hand. “In those days,” he told a reporter from Life, “I could outrun any pig in Dixie.” Paid a dollar a week, he kept the job just long enough to know he would rather be the man who owned the hog than the man who collected the junk, and would rather be the man who discarded the sheet metal than the man who owned the hog.

The American banana trade had begun twenty years before, but it was still embryonic. Few people had ever seen a banana. If they were spoken of at all, it was as an oddity, the way a person might speak of an African cucumber today. In this version, Sam peppers the salesman with questions: What is it? Where did you get it? How much does it cost? How fast do they sell? What do you do with the peel? What kind of money can you make?

In future years, Zemurray always spoke of his product the way people speak of things they truly love, as something fantastical, in part because it’s not entirely necessary. When he mentioned the nutritional value of bananas in interviews, he added, “And of course it’s delicious.”

From his first months in America, he was scheming, looking for a way to get ahead. You did not need to be a Rockefeller to know the basics of the dream: Start at the bottom, fight your way to the top. Over time, Sam would develop a philosophy best expressed in a handful of phrases: You’re there, we’re here; Go see for yourself; Don’t trust the report.

Sam did not care for crowds and parties. He had a restless mind and a persistent need to get outdoors. He liked to be alone. You might see him wandering beneath the lamps of town, a tough, lean young man in an overcoat, hands buried deep in his pockets.

The Ripes Business

As far as the merchants were concerned, they were trash. When defining a ripe, Boston Fruit used the following standard: one freckle, turning; two freckles, ripe.

Before refrigeration was perfected, as much as 15 percent of an average cargo ended up in the ripe pile. Sam grew fixated on ripes, recognizing a product where others had seen only trash. It was the worldview of the immigrant: understanding how so-called garbage might be valued under a different name, seeing nutrition where others saw only waste. He was the son of a Russian farmer, for whom food had once been scarce enough to make even a freckled banana seem precious.

Zemurray had $150. That was his stake. He figured it would go further if it was spent on ripes. He was no fool. He knew what this meant—that he would have to move fast, that he was entering a race with the clock. Three days, five at the most. After that, he would be left with a pile of glue. But he believed he could make it. As far as he was concerned, ripes were considered trash only because Boston Fruit and similar firms were too slow-footed to cover ground. It was a calculation based on arrogance. I can be fast where others have been slow. I can hustle where others have been satisfied with the easy pickings of the trade.

In most cases, a fruit hauler would spend a few dollars extra for a bed in the caboose, but since the freight charge used the last of his money, Zemurray traveled in the boxcar with his bananas, the door open, the country drifting by. It seems appropriate: Zemurray sleeping beside his first haul, attending to his product like a baby in a nursery.

Stoplights. Temporary holds. What was supposed to be three days was turning into five, six. With each hour, the bananas became more pungent. He spoke to the conductor, who commiserated, saying, “What a terrible shame.”

Having no money, Sam offered a deal: if the man radioed every operator ahead, asking each of them to spread the word to local merchants—dirt-cheap bananas coming through for merchants and peddlers—Sam would share a percentage of his sales. When the Illinois Central arrived in the next town, the customers were waiting. Zemurray talked terms through the boxcar door, a tower of ripes at his back. Ten for eight. Thirteen for ten.

When he tallied his money, it came to $190. His first real success: after accounting for expenses Sam had earned $40 in six days.

This work was nothing but stress, the margins ridiculously small (like counterfeiting dollar bills), but it was a way in. Whereas the big fruit companies monopolized the upper precincts of the industry—you needed capital, railroads, and ships to operate in greens—the world of ripes was wide open.

It was life: move the fruit now or you’re ruined forever. He became a gambler by necessity—a risk taker, a salesman, a brawler.

…at the bottom of the trade, in the cellar beneath the basement, came the banana peddler, also known insultingly as the fruit jobber. (For the rest of his life, no matter how high he climbed, the executives at United Fruit referred to Zemurray as “the fruit jobber.”) Almost all were foreign born: Jews from Russia, Greeks from Anatolia, Italians from Sicily. It was the only work many could get. Bananas were especially disreputable, with the taint of cholera and the stink of the docks.

He had soon made his name as a uniquely resourceful trader: the crazy Russian who bought the freckled bananas. He was pure hustle. Every morning, before first light, he was at the docks with a pocketful of bills.

He purchased every ripe and overripe and about-to-be-ripe he could lay his hands on. The importers were happy to get money for what, in other towns, was considered trash.

In 1899, he sold 20,000 bananas. In 1903, he sold 574,000. Within a decade, he would be selling more than a million bananas a year.

A few years before, Zemurray seemed like a fool buying garbage. Now look what he’d accomplished! Selling hundreds of thousands of bananas a year, he’d become one of the biggest traffickers in the trade. And he’d done it without having to incur the traditional costs. His fruit was grown for him, harvested, and shipped for free.

By his twenty-first birthday, he had a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. In today’s terms, he would have been a millionaire.

Character & Philosophy

He believed in staying close to the action—in the fields with the workers, in the dives with the banana cowboys. You drink with a man, you learn what he knows. (“There is no problem you can’t solve if you understand your business from A to Z,” he said later.)

…when challenged by a rival who claimed he could not understand Zemurray’s accent, Zemurray said, “You’re fired. Can you understand that?”

Sam, big, deliberate, strong, and slow, stood out from the beginning. Nothing could make him hurry. He had the sort of calm that cannot be taught. Years later, in a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter described Zemurray as “one of the few statesmen among businessmen that I have encountered. He has the qualities that one usually finds in a great personality: simplicity as well as size.”

By then, a group of men had gathered around Zemurray, banana men who seemed to defer to him, though he was the youngest on the scene. This ability to attract followers would prove crucial. Though he said little, he was recognized as a leader. His team was better, stronger, tighter.

A devotee of fads, a nut about his weight, he experimented with diets, now swearing off meat, now swearing off everything but meat, now eating only bananas, now eating everything but bananas. He spent fifteen minutes after each meal standing on his head, which he read was good for digestion.

He never sent letters or took notes, preferring to speak in person or by phone. He was described as shy, but I think his actions are more accurately characterized as careful—he did not want to leave a record or draw attention. His early life in Russia would have taught him that a Jew in the paper is a Jew in trouble.

“It’s just the sort of person he was,” explained Brogan, who worked for Zemurray in South America. “He was one of those guys, part of him is always figuring. You listen to a man like that. He knows something that can’t be taught.”

It was not easy for Zemurray to find his place in the city, which was dominated by an ancient class-conscious, status-obsessed aristocracy. He had money, was smart and not terribly ugly, but everything else was against him. He was a foreigner—a fucking foreigner, as they said on the docks.

He was not a big man in a tourist destination. He was an ambitious man trying to become big in the greatest port in the American South. When he was in town, he was on the docks, trading, questioning, comparing manifests to cargoes, making sure he wasn’t getting ripped off.

He knew everyone by name there but paid special attention to the old-timers who had been in the trade since the days of wind power. Grizzled and tobacco stained, in flop-brim hats, as sunburned as pirates, they were former big-timers now just trying to survive.

The relationship had the markings of an arrangement. Zemurray was thirty-one, successful but alone. He needed a wife. Sarah was beautiful but twenty-five, no longer young by the standards of the day. She needed a future, which meant a good match. A businessman marrying the daughter of a colleague has the added benefit of strengthening ties all around. That’s what people mean when they call marriage an institution.

Though he tried to put people at ease, Zemurray often struck those in power as a man who could not be controlled. If you want to know what he’s going to do, forget what he seems to agree to and figure out what’s in his interest.

Sam was a sharp trader who knew the prize goes to he who does not lose his head or open his mouth too soon. What cannot be accomplished by threats can often be achieved by composure. Sit and stare and let your opponent fill the silence with his own demons.

…he wanted to win. And would do whatever it took. Here was a self-made man, filled with the most dangerous kind of confidence: he had done it before and believed he could do it again. This gave him the air of a berserker, who says, If you’re going to fight me, you better kill me. If you’ve ever known such a person, you will recognize the type at once. If he does not say much, it’s because he considers small talk a weakness. Wars are not won by running your mouth. I’m describing a once essential American type that has largely vanished.

…men who channeled all their love and fear into the business, the factory, the plantation, the shop. Did he love his wife, his children? Of course he did, but he needed the company more. Think of him as a gambler in the midst of a run, whose mind is fixed on the one thing. If he does not look up, it’s not because he is shallow or stupid. It’s because he knows the moment he looks up, the spell is broken and the game is lost.

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.

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.”

Everyone has an Eden, a perfect world lost when they were small. For Sam, it was that wheat farm in Russia, and his father was alive.

The Banana Plant

…the kind of banana he saw in Selma in 1893, the banana that made his fortune, the variety known as the Big Mike, went extinct in the 1960s.

In the jungle, after a heavy rain, you can hear the banana trees growing.

A banana plant, under the best conditions, can grow twenty inches in twenty-four hours.

Which, of course, makes it an ideal crop for a businessman. It’s never out of season. A single plant can bear fruit as many as three times a year for twenty years or more. And when the stem is finally kaput, and by now you’re old and rich, you dig up the rhizome, hack it to pieces, plant each piece, and watch those grow. Thus another twenty years go by.

…the fruit does not begin to ripen until picked and cannot be eaten from a tree without retching. Even in ancient times, those who ate bananas had to harvest them, then wait for the harvest to ripen in palm-frond huts, a system copied by United Fruit.

The Gros Michel, or Big Mike, the banana that built the trade, was a hybrid created in 1836 on a farm in Jamaica. The work of the French botanist Jean François Pouyat, this banana was prized for its taste and durability. With its thick skin and slow ripening time, the Big Mike was easy to ship—throw a few stems on deck, raise anchor, go.

Because the plant is an herb, not a tree, the banana is properly classed as a berry.

…it will, with two exceptions, bear fruit only in the tropics. Iceland and Israel are the exceptions: Iceland because it grows on the slopes of a volcano; Israel for reasons that remain mysterious. Various attempts to farm bananas commercially in the continental United States—California, Louisiana, Mississippi, southern Florida—have failed.

For the first 350 years of its American life, the banana was consumed locally, usually within a mile of its birthplace. The fruit was delicious, but the notion that it might become an export, harvested in the way of coffee beans, was unimaginable.

Even later, when a few stems did materialize, the fruit was seen as a curious luxury—the opposite of the place it held in the South.

“Perhaps not one Norteamericano in ten thousand had ever seen or tasted a banana in 1870.” As late as 1876, bananas were put on display at the World Exposition in Philadelphia in the way of a winged Pegasus. Many historians reference that expo as the moment the banana was introduced to the United States. It was priced by the slice, each wrapped in foil, at ten cents a pop.

When steam power became a reality, merchants finally recognized the banana as a commercial product.

In the industrial age, when food sat in grimy piles in general stores, the banana men sold their product as a natural wonder, the most hygienic of foods, germproof in its skin. It was these men who decided the fruit should be marketed not as a delicacy for the rich but as a staple for the poor. Hence the effort to lower the price. Hence the effort to resist all taxes and duties demanded by the nations of the isthmus. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the sale of bananas doubled and doubled again.

In 1898, Scientific American instructed readers on how to best consume a banana: “The fruit is peeled by slitting the skin longitudinally and giving it a rotary motion with the hands.”

There are thousands of varieties of bananas undiscovered in Asia even today.

Pioneers of the Trade

He bought 160 bunches at 24 cents a bunch. They were loaded onto the deck of the Telegraph. Then Baker raced the clock that started ticking as soon as the stems had been cut.

Baker sold his bananas for $2 a bunch: a tremendous return, a jackpot he tried to replicate for years.

He developed a routine: bananas in summer, mackerel in winter, oysters in spring. In July 1871, he sailed into Boston with the biggest load of bananas the city had ever seen.

When Baker heaved his cargo onto Long Wharf, it was the first time Preston had ever seen bananas. Stacked in piles, they looked obscene. For years, magazines refused to run ads that pictured a banana—a photo of a woman eating a banana was verboten into our own time. Preston bought Baker’s entire haul. The bosses at Seaverns & Morrison were not pleased. I mean, here’s this kid, and yes, he’s a good kid, a hard worker, but he’s blown the budget on a single product, which we don’t know how to store or sell. Okay, fine, he let his heart run away, but then, as soon as that cargo was unloaded, he went out and bought another, then another, as many bananas as Baker could import.

Preston would not stop talking about bananas. Like Baker before him and like Zemurray after, he had spotted a niche. He knew bananas were going to be huge, just knew it!

Preston was right. He quit Seaverns & Morrison and went to work with Baker.

Preston meant to change the model of the business. It had been low volume, high price; he would make it high volume, with cheap bananas sold up and down the economic scale. To achieve this, Baker and Preston had to increase supply and control quality.

In the future, he would ship only the Big Mike: a buyer has to know what he’s going to get. The Big Mike had the advantage of being tough—stack it and it will not bruise. Its skin was moister when peeled than the skin of other bananas, which is why people stopped slipping on banana peels when Big Mike went extinct.

…when they went to the banks, their loan applications were denied as too risky: one bad season, you’re done. They established a partnership of investors instead, each of whom would put up money in return for stock. Boston Fruit was founded in 1885. The original investors were Preston, Baker, and ten other Bostonians, most of whom invested $1,500. By 1897, Boston Fruit had $4 million in assets and was growing fast. Yet the company kept running into the same wall: supply could not keep up with demand. Sooner or later, prices would rise, destroying the business model that made the company successful.

Though Preston and Baker were making big money—by 1899, Boston Fruit controlled 75 percent of the U.S. banana market—they were regarded as akin to mushroom harvesters, entirely dependent on the rain.

“There’s an old saying,” said the bartender. “A man who makes the trip to the Caribbean by land once is a hero, the man who does it twice is a fool.”

Laying track on the isthmus is a nightmare. There is no bedrock in the jungle. As soon as a section of rail had been laid, it began to shift. Now and then, after a big rain, an entire stretch would slide into a valley. Weeds wrapped around the ties, roots buckled the beds. The workers were tormented by heat and disease. More than three hundred died the first year; just four miles of track were completed.

Fifteen years, at least four thousand dead. The conductor stopped short of the Devil’s Elbow, a precarious stretch in the mountains where the track crossed a rickety bridge. He was afraid it would collapse. Minor argued with the man, then grabbed an American flag and sat on the cow catcher. Looking ahead, he shouted, “Go!” The train reached Puntarenas at eleven p.m., where it was greeted by a huge crowd.

He went to see Carl Frank, who explained the business. The early traders did not fear competition. It seemed there would never be enough bananas to meet the demand.

Frank who sold Minor Keith the rhizomes he planted along the Costa Rican railroad. Keith thought bananas would serve as a cheap food for his own workers, but soon realized, as Frank had before him, that there was a tremendous market for bananas in the North. He formed the Tropical Trading and Transport Company to carry his fruit but sold most of his crop to other suppliers. Though he considered himself a railroad man—it was his dream to build a train from New York to Tierra del Fuego—his business was supported by bananas.

It was the nature of train building: you lived at the whim of creditors. You might appear rich, but if a lender called in a loan, you were done. Keith owed millions of dollars to banks, money he borrowed to complete his railroad.

When Andrew Preston, the president of United Fruit, visited Mobile in 1903, he asked to meet Samuel Zemurray, the Russian selling the ripes. No photos of this meeting were taken, no minutes recorded, but it was significant: the titan who began the trade shaking hands with the nobody who would perfect it. Preston later spoke of Zemurray with admiration. He said the kid from Russia was closer in spirit to the banana pioneers than anyone else working. “He’s a risk taker,” Preston explained, “he’s a thinker, and he’s a doer.”

Preston followed Zemurray’s progress…

United Fruit Rises

The Boston Fruit Company, which would become United Fruit, dominated the trade, with a fleet that carried bananas from Jamaica to Boston, Charleston, New Orleans, and Mobile.

…bananas were unloaded by hand, the workers carrying the cargo a stem at a time—from the hold, where the shipment was packed in ice, onto the deck of the ship.

It was backbreaking work, and dangerous, not just for the shoulders and arms but also for the central nervous system. As any banana cowboy would tell you, banana plants are prized nesting places for scorpions.

Sam would have watched closely as the workers formed lines that snaked from the deck of the ship down a ramp, and across the pier to the waiting boxcars. (He wanted to learn every detail of the trade.)

…partnerships were the way of United Fruit, the style that earned the company the nickname El Pulpo, the Octopus. They wrapped their tentacles around every start-up in the industry. In those days, U.F. either owned a piece of you or was intent on your destruction. United Fruit took a 25 percent stake in Hubbard-Zemurray but remained a silent partner.

After the Year Without Bananas, most of the traders who survived were willing to swap independence for security. In its first six months, United Fruit merged with twenty-seven banana companies.

Later called Standard Fruit, the concern, which eventually regained its independence, would become part of Dole, now one of the most powerful companies in the fruit business. For years, the banana trade was defined by these three names: United, Cuyamel, Standard. This was the age of trusts, when steel and oil concerns combined to monopolize their industries. It was also the age of trustbusters, when the government went after any would-be Rockefeller who tried to get a stranglehold on a trade. (The Sherman Anti-Trust Act passed in 1890.) With this in mind, Preston was careful to control no more than 49 percent of the business in any market. He wanted to get big enough to dominate but stay small enough to avoid prosecution.

In the case of a strike or disagreement, the company could simply shut down the commerce of the region.

The company introduced its first refrigerated vessel in 1903, a river freighter named Venus that had been refitted by a Canadian scientist with a primitive contraption of ice blocks, animal hair, air ducts, and fans.

By 1910, United Fruit owned one of the largest private navies in the world: 115 ships…

United Fruit bought vast tracts of jungle in these years, which were cleared and filled with buildings, turned into settlements of clapboard and steel. “It’s in Guatemala that one begins properly to appreciate the great civilizing influence of the United Fruit Company,” National Geographic reported in 1903. By 1905, the banana trade was United Fruit. The company owned the most ships, planted the most fields, had the most money, and controlled both supply and demand: supply by planting more or less rhizomes, demand by increasing the market.

U.F. stationed an agent at South Ferry terminal in New York, where the Ellis Island Ferry landed. Handing a banana to each immigrant who came off the boats, the agent said, “Welcome to America!” This was to associate the banana with the nation, a delicacy of the New World, though none of the bananas were grown in the United States, were in fact as foreign as the men and women coming off the boats. At the same time, U.F. began selling baby food made from bananas, which would hook customers when they were tiny.

There was banana flour and banana bread.

It charged United Fruit with violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was meant to break up “combinations” of companies that banded together to corner a market. It’s difficult to imagine a company in more clear violation. Between 1899 and 1905, United Fruit had acquired dozens of independent concerns, rolling them into a monolith that dominated trade.

In 1909, the case reached the Supreme Court. It’s interesting to consider what might have happened if the Justice Department had won its case against United Fruit as it won its case against Standard Oil two years later. If U.F. had been broken up, if the monster had been divided into a half dozen little monsters, American history in Latin America might have been very different.

By growing its product there and selling it here, U.F. had stumbled on the greatest tax-saving, law-avoiding scheme of all time. With this decision, Justice Holmes cleared the way for that crucial player of the modern age: the global corporation that exists both inside and outside American law, that is everywhere and nowhere, and never dies.

Building Cuyamel

The banana lands were littered with defunct concerns and failed businessmen. You would see them in taverns near the harbor, in dirty suits and panama hats, cadging drinks and boasting: I used to own this; I was once head of that; I was mayor of this; I was boss of that. If you’re going to build in the jungle, build fast. Anything left for a season is lost. It turns first into a ruin, then into a story, then is forgotten altogether.

Because Honduras had no extradition treaty with the United States, Puerto Cortés had become a criminal refuge, filled with Americans on the lam.

Porter arrived in Puerto Cortés a few years before Zemurray. A part-time Texas newspaperman, he stole several thousand dollars from a bank in Austin, where he was a teller, then hid out in the bars on Primera Avenue, soaking up the talk of revolutionaries and banana cowboys, which he turned into the book Cabbages and Kings, published in 1913 under the name O. Henry. It was O. Henry who coined the term “banana republic.”

The mules of Honduras were notorious bucktoothed animals with twitchy ears and black eyes, in constant battle with their riders. His first time on, Zemurray was thrown to the ground. The second time, the animal bit his toe. The third time, the mule dropped and rolled. The fifth time, the mule carried Zemurray to the middle of a river and left him. It remained a point of pride for Zemurray—he eventually licked the famously sour mules of Honduras. As the old banana cowboys liked to say, “You will never understand the banana business until you understand the banana mule, and you can never understand a banana mule.” Zemurray was a habitual limit crasher. He loved feats of endurance, proving himself by watching companions flag, throw up their hands, and say, “Cerveza, señor, it’s time for cerveza.” He crossed Honduras on muleback so he could learn the country, meet its people, scout its property, but also so, years later, a person like me would sit and write “the gringo who crossed the country on a mule.”

Mr. Herbert was Samuel Zemurray, a fruit jobber, a hustler, a man who sees not a nation with a history but a mine ribboned with silver and gold. He arrived with schemes and a bag filled with the tools of the diamond trade. (He kept quiet as he tasted because talking only drives up the price.)

…the way the banana men viewed the people and the land of the isthmus as no more than a resource, not very different from the rhizomes, soil, sun, or rain. A source of cheap labor, local color. One definition of evil is to fail to recognize the humanity in the other: to see a person as an object or tool, something to be put to use. The spirit of colonialism infected the trade from the start.

This was long considered junk land, neither valued nor tended. For $2,000, all of it borrowed, he got five thousand acres. He was soon back in New Orleans, wondering if five thousand was enough. Would it give him the supply he needed to compete with United Fruit? It does not matter if you think it’s enough, Ashbell Hubbard told him. We’re out of money. There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when certain properties become available that will never be available again. A good businessman feels these moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough to act on them even when he cannot afford to.

Zemurray returned to Honduras in the spring of 1910 with a plan, achingly simple, beautifully effective: head north beyond the last paved road, into the delta of the Cuyamel River, flash the roll, and buy as much land as he could until his cash ran out. He was playing with borrowed money. Having tapped out every line of credit in New Orleans and Mobile, he had gone on to banks in New York and Boston. Whoever was lending, he was accepting. He was out there, overextended, vulnerable. He must have worried about the risk but had to know this was his moment: the land would not be this cheap forever.

Zemurray told the locals he would bring them wealth and good jobs. When it came time to hire, he offered a wage ten times the going rate, which angered other employers. In the course of a few months, he accumulated the uncleared acres that would constitute his first plantation.

To the peasants, the land was swamp and disease, nothing that will still be nothing in a hundred years. Sam knew better. Because he was raised on a farm, he realized the meaning of all that black soil beneath the weeds. Because he worked as a jobber, he realized the worth of the fruit that would thrive in that soil. This land, picked up for a song, was in fact the most valuable banana country in the world. The crop wants lowland forest—bananas will not thrive above three thousand feet—and the kind of soil known as loam, as well as good drainage and eighty to two hundred inches of rain a year. Honduras has all that.

He was seeking sweetheart deals that would exempt his company from taxes and duties. Such corrupt understandings were common enough in the business to have a name: concessions, unofficial arrangements without which no banana man could succeed. The trade depended on cheap fruit, necessitating cheap labor, cheap land, and no extra fees. The smallest additional cost—a penny per bunch, say—would drive the price above the market rate set by United Fruit.

…it was drive, ambition, moxie, guts, or whatever you want to call it that pushed him from Selma to New Orleans, then on to the jungle towns of the isthmus, where the genie was loosed and the man went wild. Drive to make money, leave a mark, climb the pyramid, beat the bastards who gave him the high hat. Why bananas? Because it was the nearest product at hand. The Southern markets reeked of them. If he had settled in Chicago, it would have been beef; if Pittsburgh, steel; if L.A., movies. In the end, it does not matter what you’re stocking—selling is the thing.

On a banana plantation, clearing weeds is breathing. Without it, the plantation dies.

Zemurray worked in the fields beside his engineers, planters, and machete men. He was deep in the muck, sweat covered, swinging a blade. He helped map the plantations, plant the rhizomes, clear the weeds, lay the track. He was a proficient snake killer. Taller than most of his workers, as strong and thin as a railroad spike, he shouted orders in dog Spanish. He believed in the transcendent power of physical labor—that a man can free his soul only by exhausting his body.

His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!

Zemurray imported boa constrictors to keep violence in check, believing the presence of the snakes would force his men to stay sober. He eventually built many banana towns, each laid out in the same basic pattern: the houses of the executives on a hill, the more important the executive, the higher up the hill. The manager’s house was at the peak. If the plantation had been laid on flat ground, a hill was constructed.

When he realized no creditor would lend him another dime, he went in search of other sources. If you were Zemurray, an entrepreneur at the key moment, when you knew, just knew, you had to risk everything, that this was your shot, but the banks had turned you down and your money was on the table and you had neither wealthy uncles nor elite contacts, where would you go? The history books and articles say he secured the needed funds from unorthodox sources, borrowed on stringent terms, at rates approaching 50 percent. Which of course means gangsters, wiseguys in flashy suits on the corner of St. Claude and Dumaine.

Hubbard believed the business should be given time to become established. First plant the land we’ve acquired, pay off some loans, then we can think about acquiring more acres. But Zemurray must have realized the business had to get big to survive. Go all in, or get out. Sam was young and wanted to bet everything: great fortunes come from big plays. Hubbard did not have the fortitude for such risks.

When Hubbard couldn’t take it anymore, Zemurray agreed to buy out his share of the company—a 45 percent stake in Cuyamel Fruit. This left Zemurray with 90 percent of the company and United Fruit with the remaining 10 percent.

What was Sam thinking, piling debt on debt, risk on risk? By buying out Hubbard, he was taking it all on his own shoulders. But what did it matter? If he failed by himself, he would lose the exact same amount as if he failed with a partner: everything.

The Honduras Coup

Zemurray was in the process of overthrowing a foreign government—he had been warned by Philander Knox, the U.S. secretary of state, who ordered federal agents to tail him and his cohorts in New Orleans, but didn’t care. If Sam failed, he faced ruin. But if he succeeded, he would become a king in banana land. General Bonilla had been president of Honduras. With the right kind of help, he would be president again.

It was one of Zemurray’s conditions: he wanted his involvement in the operation kept a secret. With this in mind, he was to be identified, if he had to be identified at all, only as El Amigo.

A businessman can live with a certain amount of corruption. Maybe he prefers it. If he’s paying off an official, kicking a percentage back to a bureaucrat who landed him a concession, at least he knows where he stands. In New York, they call it honest graft. In Chicago, they call it the Machine. A deal is a deal. Paid for is owned. But if a bribed official refuses to deliver, or if a bought politician suddenly becomes unbought, how can a man do business? This is the other kind of corruption, the corrupt kind, and it leads to bankruptcy and ruin. It’s not a question of right versus wrong, it’s a question of ethics. If you buy a man, you have a right to expect him to stay bought.

Philander Knox, the secretary of state, devised a plan. He recruited J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful banker in America, to buy all of the outstanding Honduran railroad bonds, satisfying the British banks.

Morgan agreed under the following condition: in return for money and services, officials from the Morgan bank would be seated in the customshouse in Puerto Cortés, where they would collect a duty on all imports. After taking the bank’s percentage, the officers would forward the balance to the Honduran government. Morgan insisted that these terms be written in a treaty and ratified by the congress in Tegucigalpa. This infuriated many Hondurans, who considered the terms a forfeit of national sovereignty.

The Knox plan was good for everyone, in fact, except the people of Honduras and Samuel Zemurray, whose business could not function without the concessions and sweetheart deals that would be forbidden by Morgan.

Zemurray received a message from Washington, D.C. He was to report to the office of the United States secretary of state. He had been in America less than a generation, and here he was embroiled at the highest levels of national affairs. A Jew from the shtetl off for an audience with the czar.

Pretend you’re Samuel Zemurray. You’re thirty-two. You’ve been in America less than twenty years. You lived in Russia before that, in a poor farming town filled with rabbis. Now you’re here, an entrepreneur of considerable means, but still, somewhere in your mind, the little Jew who snuck in the back door. You’re a husband and father, with a young daughter and another child on the way. You’ve been summoned to Washington, called to account by the secretary of state, warned. What do you do? Put your head down, shut up? Sit in a corner and thank God for your good fortune? Well, maybe that’s what you would do, but not Sam Zemurray. He muttered all the way back to New Orleans: these momzers! Don’t get involved? How about I overthrow the fucking government? Is that too involved? You made a deal with the president of Honduras, Miguel Dávila? Well, what if Señor Dávila wasn’t president no more? Consider the audacity! In defying Philander Knox and J. Pierpont Morgan, Sam Zemurray was challenging two of the most powerful men in America.

Zemurray’s mercenary army would have perhaps one hundred soldiers, a ragtag band of guns for hire, a pirate gang in cast-off clothes, every shape and color, every weapon and motivation.

The first attempt on Honduras failed “farcically,” as it was then described. Bonilla feared his patron’s reaction, but Zemurray could not afford to withdraw his support. Having staked everything on the general, he decided instead to figure out what went wrong and fix it. (This is how Zemurray regarded most things in his life: as problems to be solved.)

Secretary Knox must have received news of this sale with a string of expletives. There was not much that could be legally done. Zemurray had covered his tracks so thoroughly that his ownership of the Hornet was hard to prove.

If deployed in battle, the owner of the ship would be in breach of the Neutrality Act, but property could not be seized for what might happen in the future.

The Hornet was anchored at Algiers Point, across from Jackson Square, where it was routinely boarded and searched by Treasury agents—early in the morning when the city was gray in the distance, late at night when the streetlights were yellow, in midafternoon when the river was drowsy and the decks smelled like varnish. Nothing was found: not a map, not a knife, not a document, not a bullet.

Papers were signed, and everyone shook hands. Having promised to pay $40,000, Davadi had become the owner of the Hornet. As the property of a citizen and current resident of Honduras, the ship could take part in the war without violating the U.S. Neutrality Act.

At his order, $55,000 in silver bars was moved to La Ceiba, a city many military experts believed impregnable. The myth of La Ceiba’s invincibility made it a target: its loss would come as a blow. Such a defeat can end a regime. That’s how it was with the banana wars: the enemy wins a battle or two, then everyone switches uniforms.

…the seizure, which would have been helpful to President Dávila a week earlier, hurt him now. Having established a base in Trujillo, the insurgents no longer needed the Hornet. But its seizure made it look to Hondurans like the United States was intervening in a civil war on the side of the government. It was a feat of propaganda…

Christmas sent a note to the U.S. naval commander. He said rebel reinforcements were on the way—Dávila must surrender before the battle turned into a massacre. It was a bluff. There were no reinforcements. But it worked. The Americans carried the message to Dávila and urged him to give up the city. By sundown, La Ceiba was in rebel hands, along with the silver bars of the state treasury.

If the treaty was signed, the United States, Dávila believed, would come into the war on his side. He argued his case before the Honduran congress on February 8, 1911. He talked of honor, tradition, faith—the pillars of the conservative creed. Speaking of the Morgan treaty, he said, “Providence … offered Honduras this opportunity to secure the help of the United States.” There was no applause when he finished, nor boos. It was worse: dead silence. The treaty was defeated thirty-two to four.

A few months later, Bonilla won office in a landslide. He was inaugurated in Tegucigalpa on February 1, 1912. “Bonilla did not forget his benefactor,” reported Life. “One of his first official acts was to have congress give Zemurray concessions covering the next 25 years.” Zemurray’s settlement included permission to import any and all equipment duty-free; to build any and all railroads, highways, and other infrastructure he might need; a $500,000 loan to repay “all expenses incurred while funding the revolution”; as well as an additional 24,700 acres on the north coast of Honduras to be claimed at a later date. No taxes, no duties, free land—these were the conditions that would let Sam Zemurray take on United Fruit.

“No American businessman ever held a foreign nation’s destiny so completely in his hands.” Over time, Zemurray would become more powerful than even the government of Honduras. When that happened, the people would begin to look to him to supply the sort of services usually supplied by the state: water, health, security, etc., things it would prove impossible to deliver. Every great victory carries the seed of ultimate defeat.

Running Cuyamel

…executives at United Fruit were bewildered by reports of the jungle-dwelling Russian who “had been living for weeks on nothing but figs; or [who] was taking a ‘fast cure’ for twenty days; or [who] had been seen standing on his head beside a shade tree in the process of proving (or disproving) that inversion benefits the digestion.”

…sales figures and yields, the length of the average banana, the market rate per stem—Zemurray went through these fast, a scan, a few mental notes, done. He disdained bureaucracy, hated paperwork. “So seldom does he dictate a letter that he requires no full-time secretary,” Life reported. “He will telephone division managers in half a dozen countries, correlate their reports in his head and reach his decision without touching a pencil.”

One morning, as Zemurray was eating breakfast, an apparatchik handed him a thick report, fifty or sixty pages detailing every aspect of the operation. There was a summary on page one, chapter headings, bullet points. Zemurray flipped through the document, frowning, then ripped off the first page and threw away the rest, saying, “Most sensible damn statement I ever saw.”

Having established his position on the isthmus, it was time to work like a dog: build his business, pay his creditors, accumulate his money. By 1913, he had saved enough to buy back the stake U.F. owned in Cuyamel Fruit, a move that would secure Zemurray’s independence.

In 1913, Congress proposed a tax on bananas, which had already become the most widely consumed fruit in America, an astonishing fact considering that not a single banana is grown here.

An additional five cents per stem would return the banana to its original state, a delicacy for the rich. An industry spokesman accused Congress of attacking “the fruit of the poor.”

Though the Justice Department never filed any charges, the investigation had the desired effect: by forcing Preston to sell his shares in Cuyamel, the government created a competitive market.

In later years, when Zemurray had grown powerful, analysts spoke of the mistake U.F. made: they had underestimated a dangerous rival in Zemurray. In fact, the executives at United Fruit, Preston and Keith first among them, understood the genius of Zemurray from the beginning. They had long been dazzled by his rise from the docks, but it was a matter of triage: cut off the leg to save the body; cut free the Banana Man to save the company.

…when the Nicaraguan banana growers boycotted U.F. and prevented its ships from sailing down the big rivers, U.F. broke the blockade, not with its own fleet but with Cuyamel ships. Everywhere workers gathered, bloodied by the police, beaten but not defeated, they attached their misery to the name on the side of the boats carrying away the product of their labor: Cuyamel. It damaged Sam’s name in a country where he’d long been admired as the son-in-law of the beloved Parrot King. Zemurray never forgot the lesson. It does not matter how many bananas you ship: when you lose your reputation, you lose everything.

Whenever he arrived in Honduras, word spread through the plantation: the old man is back! He was respected because he understood the trade. By the time he was forty, he had served in every position, from fruit jobber to boss. He worked on the docks, on the ships and railroads, in the fields and warehouses. He had ridden the mules. He had managed the fruit and money, the mercenaries and government men. He understood the meaning of every change in the weather, the significance of every date on the calendar. There was not a job he could not do, nor a task he could not accomplish. (He considered it a secret of his success.)

…he refrained from giving interviews, addressing shareholders, or attending functions, all of which took him away from his work. He was one of those men who toiled all day every day until they had to be rolled away in a chair. When he failed to appear at a reception in Havana, Cuba, which had been thrown in his honor, a lieutenant tracked him down to the wharf, where he was going over manifest documents with a ship’s purser.

He was wildly ambitious and innovated like mad. As soon as he had full control of his company, he began to visit boatyards. He wanted to build a fleet so he would never again be dependent on other companies to haul his product.

…he built a modern pier that went out past the shallows a quarter mile into the sea.

…he began to invest in other crops: coconuts and pineapples, palm oil, cattle, timber, and sugarcane. It was a hedge against hurricane and drought, as well as the ups and downs of the market.

That’s why Minor Keith never underestimated Zemurray. He recognized him as one of his own, a throwback to the sort of men who built the industry, who went into the jungle with nothing but trinkets and came out with a million dollars. The banana business might be respectable in the North, but it was rough and lawless in the South.

Zemurray often implied that his deals were backed by the U.S. Navy. In other words, he threatened. He did not raise his voice when he made these threats, though he did swear with great exuberance. He whispered so people would have to lean close and concentrate on each word. When he said something was going to happen, it usually did. Even if you were a friend, you would be roughly handled if you got in his way.

When Zemurray asked if the U.S. government could help collect, the diplomat spoke vaguely of the Hague Convention, which might technically allow it. “Mr. Zemurray was pleased upon learning of this Hague Convention,” the official reported, “and seemed to think it afforded a satisfactory guarantee.” It was not American action that Zemurray wanted. It was the credible threat of such action, which might be achieved by the simple spectacle of Sam huddled with a diplomat in the dark corner of the bar.

Zemurray was direct in a way that could come across as ruthless. Speaking of Nicaragua, he notoriously said, “A mule costs more than a deputy.”

So he went to his father-in-law and said, ‘Look, Jake, I want you out of business. I’m going to give you money so you’ll be just fine, but I don’t want you fooling with price. I want to set the price.’ Jake said, ‘I’m not going to give it up. I’m making money.’ Sam said, ‘Well, Jake, you either get out or I’m going to cut my price and drive you out and you’ll be ruined.’”

Zemurray was a transitional figure, a bridge between the world of the privateer and the world of high finance. Cuyamel was not faceless in the way of many modern corporations—Sam’s face was, if anything, too much in evidence. The culture of Cuyamel was his personality. That was the company’s great achievement and its great failing. Its triumphs and overreaching were the triumphs and overreaching of a single human will. It’s why his company was less sinful than many of the other banana companies. Unlike other bosses, Zemurray lived in the jungle with his workers, spoke their language, knew what they wanted and what scared them. (As Zemurray liked to say, “You’re there, we’re here.”) It’s why he was hated and why he was loved. Because he was a person and a person you can disagree with and be angry at but still admire, whereas United Fruit was faceless in a way that terrifies. It’s why banana workers rallied to the big Russian as their own hedge against El Pulpo. It’s why some people in Honduras still speak of Samuel Zemurray with rueful affection.

The Banana War

It was not about numbers. When it came to market share and volume, U.F. was as dominant as ever. Cuyamel was harvesting eight million bunches a year, United Fruit was harvesting forty million; Cuyamel employed 10,000 workers, United Fruit employed 150,000; Cuyamel had a working capital of $3 million, United Fruit had a working capital of $27 million. It was about profit margin, the efficiency of trade, the morale and skill of the employees. It was increasingly clear: Samuel Zemurray had built the better business. Cuyamel was superior to United Fruit in a dozen ways that did not show up on a balance sheet. U.F. was a conglomerate, a collection of firms bought up and slapped together. There was a lot of redundancy, duplication of tasks, divisions working against divisions, rivalries, confusing chains of command. Cuyamel Fruit was the Green Bay Packers by comparison. Every decision was made with confidence and authority. Zemurray could move without waiting for permission or a committee report. He could take risks without fear of losing his job. He could hire or fire with surety because he actually lived in Honduras and knew the situation on the ground.

…the executives who ran United Fruit had taken over from the founders and were less interested in risking than in preserving. Zemurray was the founder, forever on the attack, at work, in progress, growing by trial and error, ready to gamble it all. The difference was best seen on the plantations, where Zemurray was constantly inventing. Most people, looking at a banana, see a delicious fruit. When Zemurray looked at a banana, he saw room for improvement. He innovated banana farming, which had not changed since the first days of the trade…

The most ambitious banana men began to flock to Zemurray. Dozens of them quit United Fruit and caught a ride to Puerto Cortés. Cuyamel was hungry in a way that United Fruit had not been since the retirement of Minor Keith.

Zemurray was at first slow to hire these turncoats, suspecting a trick. But when Victor Cutter, who succeeded Andrew Preston as president of United Fruit, denounced the traitors, Zemurray began to actively court U.F.’s top talent. He told a reporter he loved “poking the monster in the knees.”

Whenever previously challenged, United Fruit had responded in one of two ways: buyout or crush. In 1925, Victor Cutter tried the first option, dispatching Bradley Palmer, a prominent company officer, to talk terms with Zemurray. Turning down the offer, Zemurray said, “Hell, I’m having so much fun, and I’m a young man. Why should I quit?”

A corporation ages like a person. As the years go by and the founders die off, making way for the bureaucrats of the second and third generations, the ecstatic, risk-taking, just-for-the-hell-of-it spirit that built the company gives way to a comfortable middle age. Where the firm had been forward looking and creative, it becomes self-conscious in the way of a man, pestering itself with dozens of questions before it can act. How will it look? What will they say? If the business is wealthy and strong, the executives who come to power in these later generations will be characterized by the worst kind of self-confidence: they think the money will always be there because it always has been. They sit in their private clubs and railroad cars, saying, “Everyone knows all the land north of the Utila belongs to the company.” Or, “What’s that little Russian up to now?”

Though probably the best of the second generation, Cutter was simply not made of the stuff of the old-time banana men.

“A few of the more perceptive students of the trade asserted that the most likely contender for leadership was [not these new U.F. men, but] Sam Zemurray, still being described by [Cutter] as ‘that little fellow in Honduras.’”

…the rivalry between U.F. and Cuyamel came to be seen as a proxy, with the struggle between the banana companies standing for the struggle between Honduras and Guatemala.

By destroying this neutral zone, Sam’s acquisition of the land changed everything. As far as Cutter was concerned, any agreements, formal or informal, that had regulated the competition were null and void. The struggle commenced as a war of pranks, with each company taunting and testing its rival. Agents from United Fruit crossed the river at night, cut water lines, tipped over trucks, ripped up train rails. Zemurray sent his own team of brigands across the Utila to retaliate.

The land, which was on territory claimed by Guatemala and Honduras, seemed to have two separate legal owners.

When this mess of deeds came to light, United Fruit did what big bureaucracy-heavy companies always do: hired lawyers and investigators to search every file for the identity of the true owner. This took months. In the meantime, Zemurray, meeting separately with each claimant, simply bought the land from them both. He bought it twice—paid a little more, yes, but if you factor in the cost of all those lawyers, probably still spent less than U.F. and came away with the prize.

The U.S. State Department asked the presidents of the banana companies to cool the rivalry. The United States feared they would plunge the isthmus into war.

How did Zemurray respond? By making room in his southbound banana ships, not for produce or seed but for hardware, guns, and bullets that found their way to the liberal insurgents who had taken to the hills in Honduras. It was always an option: if the leader is in the pocket of the other guy, change the leader.

Cuyamel Fruit was charged with violating the Neutrality Act. At the trial in New Orleans, the company was defended by Joseph Montgomery, who, as the New Orleans district attorney, had previously prosecuted Cuyamel. This was a preferred Zemurray tactic: if you meet a truly formidable foe, flip him.

When Zemurray realized he would never get permission to bridge the Utila, he did what he’d always done: innovated, building surreally long docks on both sides of the river, then having his engineers design a temporary bridge, though no one was allowed to call it that. The inflatable device could be thrown from extended dock to extended dock in no time, completing the railroad that ended on one pier and began again on the other. According to Life, “The whole contraption could be taken up or down in three hours.” When United Fruit complained to Honduran officials, saying Cuyamel had built a bridge without a permit, Zemurray smiled and said, “Why, that’s no bridge. It’s just a couple of little old wharfs.”

The region seemed set to explode. Armies were mobilized in Honduras and Guatemala. Soldiers in trucks rushed to the border, the treads of their tires caked in mud. At the last possible moment, the diplomats got involved and a sort of peace conference was convened. In normal cases, this would be the head of the League of Nations calling the presidents of the feuding countries to Vienna or Yalta. In this case, it was officials from the U.S. State Department summoning the bosses of the fruit companies to Washington, D.C. The Banana War threatened American interests, breeding hatred for the United States on the isthmus and posing a danger to a region that included the Panama Canal.

The Merger

Wouldn’t such a combination result in prosecution under the Anti-Trust Act? It was the threat of such a prosecution that caused Preston to sell his Cuyamel stake in the first place. Assurances were given. After all, the authorities wanted the companies to merge. It’s how our government operates, lurching from crisis to crisis, trustbuster to peacemaker: now there is not enough competition, now the competition is too chaotic and free.

…his company, which was more than a company—it was his body and soul, twenty years in the jungle, epic journeys on muleback, Mobile, New Orleans, and Puerto Cortés. Cuyamel Fruit was Zemurray in the shape of a corporation, his personality made manifest, his home and his love, where he tested his theories and formed his philosophy: get up first, work harder, get your hands in the dirt and the blood in your eyes.

Twelve pints later, the deal was done. Not a buyout but a merger, with the smaller company becoming a division of the larger. This was the key for Zemurray, not only for reasons of pride but also because it meant none of his workers would be fired, nor any of his plantations shut down. The deal would be structured as a stock swap.

His stake, after the merger, would be valued at more than $30 million. A figure worth considering, as it would make Sam Zemurray, who had arrived in Selma with nothing three decades before, one of the richest men in America.

Zemurray had lived in the tropics and had personally pioneered many of the practices in agriculture and engineering which became the standards for the industry. By contrast, the management of the United Fruit Company had been content, for the most part, to sit in Boston and count the money and watch bananas grow with the same detachment with which an actuary watches the growth and death of populations.”

Zemurray, who would now become the majority owner of United Fruit stock, agreed to retire from the banana trade. United Fruit would be run as it had been: by Victor Cutter and his board of directors in Boston. U.F. management insisted on this. To them, the deal was aimed less at acquiring extra capacity than at driving their greatest competitor from the field. They wanted to get rid of Zemurray, bury him under a pile of stock. Sam agreed to retire, promising to neither work for a rival nor start a new fruit company of his own. A standard noncompete clause.

In the way of a retiring politician or athlete, he promised to embrace his retirement, spend more time with his loved ones, pursue causes and fancies. For once in his life, which had been nothing but sixteen-hour workdays, he would enjoy his success and be happy. It’s possible he believed these things as he said them, but, in truth, Zemurray was not old and was still angry, easy to insult, easy to incense, driven, and restless. Show me a happy man and I will show you a man who is getting nothing accomplished in this world.

“All my life I’ve wanted to be a real season-to-season farmer,” he explained. “I’ve been wanting a farm of my own since I was a little boy looking at the tall wheat fields back in the old country.”

Passing on the Jewish traditions was clearly not that important to Sam. If it had been, he would not have given his son his own name—it’s a very un-Ashkenazi thing to do. But legacy did matter. He wanted to teach his son everything he knew so his son could improve the life and status of the family in the next generation. In this way, Zemurray replaced tradition with progress and Zion with America.

Philanthropy

Among the highest forms of tzedakah is to give anonymously, in a way that does not disgrace the person in need. Whenever possible, Sam gave without affixing his signature: neither press conference nor public announcement nor strings attached. A private man who shunned publicity, he believed charity was sacred but that those things that often surround it—newspaper pomp, ribbon cutting—were tawdry. I don’t know whether Zemurray read the Bible or knew the code, only that he’d clearly been affected by the folk wisdom, what his father told his mother over the dinner table in Russia: that giving with display is not giving, but trading. I give you money, you give me prestige. Philanthropy that does not degrade is done so quietly not even the rescued learns the name of his rescuer.

…among the best schools of its kind in Central America, the Zamorano was tuition free. Graduates were discouraged from taking jobs in the banana industry. Zemurray wanted to build an educated Central American class independent of the trade; the overreliance of the people on the fruit companies had become a problem for everyone. He had a passion for giving money on the isthmus. His charity in Central America included hospitals, highways, power grids, seawalls, levees, orphanages, and schools. There was a saying in New Orleans: “If you want something from Sam Zemurray, ask for it in Spanish.”

…he was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which he criticized only for not going far enough, fast enough. To Zemurray, who spent his formative years in Russia, awash in ideology, who followed from afar the triumph of Mussolini and Stalin and was mesmerized by the rise of Hitler, America did not seem immune. In the first years of the Great Depression, he must have sensed the same dark mood that was spreading across Europe: in the eyes of the crowds, in the grumbling on the bread lines, in the temper of the vagabond armies that haunted the docks. Something had to be done to help these people, work had to be found, or who knows what might happen. Zemurray was a member of the last generation of American tycoons that identified less with Republicans than with Democrats, less with capital than with workingmen. Hence his contributions to The Nation. Hence his involvement with the New Deal.

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.

The Takeover

In 1928, U.F. had made $45 million in profit. In 1932, it made just $6 million, an 85 percent decline.

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…

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.

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?

…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.

…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.

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.”

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.

When it was finally his turn to speak, he chose each word carefully, explaining his ideas in the thick Russian accent that he never could shed.

When Zemurray finished, Wing smiled and said, “Unfortunately, Mr. Zemurray, I can’t understand a word of what you say.” The men at the table started to laugh. Zemurray’s pupils narrowed to pinpricks, his hands turned into fists. He muttered, then stormed out. Perhaps the board members believed Zemurray had been chased away, was fleeing back to New Orleans. In truth, he had only gone to retrieve his bag of proxies. Returning to the boardroom, he slapped them on the table and said, “You’re fired! Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?” What followed was the sort of graveyard silence in which each board member recalculated his own prospects. “You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough,” Zemurray told them. “I’m going to straighten it out.” Much later, analysts pointed out the flaw in the noncompete clause Zemurray signed at the time of the merger: it barred Zemurray from working for a rival or starting a new fruit company, but it did not foresee the outlandish possibility of Zemurray taking over United Fruit itself. “[I didn’t want to watch] the greatest company in the world go to hell in a hand bucket,” Zemurray explained.

By merging with Cuyamel, he had invited the wolf into the house.

It was in these years that Zemurray became known as the dictator of the banana trade, a man who, with a single phone call, could undermine governments. It was a moment of triumph, a decisive coup d’état in a career that was nothing but coup followed by coup. When Zemurray showed up at the first meeting of the new board, he said, “I’m ready to go to work.”

Running United Fruit

Unlike other incoming chiefs—here I’m thinking of CEOs who take over bureaucracy-heavy companies in trouble—Zemurray did not begin his work at company headquarters. He did not spend his first days with accountants, nor coop himself up with reports, nor shout his head off at meetings. He went out on the road, announcing straightaway that he would begin his tenure with a six-week tour of the banana lands. He wanted to visit every country where United Fruit owned plantations, ports, railroads. He wanted to talk to the men in the fields. He wanted to see for himself.

He was putting his own team in position, remaking the behemoth in the shape of his old company. “I realized that the greatest mistake the United Fruit management had made was to assume it could run its activities in many tropical countries from an office on the 10th floor of a Boston office building,” Zemurray told Fortune. “The management had tried to tell every executive in every country exactly what he must do and how he must do it. Executives on the spot were treated like messenger boys. I completely reversed that policy. I laid down what might be called a constitution for the company. This constitution provided for a maximum of home rule in the field. It was established as a fixed policy that if [a plantation manager] could not handle his difficulties reasonably satisfactorily, we would appoint some man who could.”

He solved the problem of half-empty ships, selling some, mothballing some, renting out space in others. A United Fruit ship did not leave port until it was packed. The Great White Fleet, which had been costing the company to operate, began to earn. He had U.F.’s holdings reappraised—the value of the machines and land had collapsed during the Depression—saving millions in taxes. He canceled stipends paid to independent growers who had been augmenting the company’s banana supply. He left fields fallow, further decreasing banana supply, controlling market price. On some plantations, he replaced bananas with sugarcane, a staple always in demand. Realizing the company had become overly dependent on a single product, he looked for other crops to plant: coconuts, pineapples, quinine trees.

It was not these policies alone that turned things around; it was also the energy behind the policies: the six-week tour, the firing and hiring, the tough decisions made about the fleet and the fields. A light was burning in the pilothouse, a firm hand had taken hold of the tiller. United Fruit’s stock price stabilized, then began to climb. It doubled in the first two weeks of Zemurray’s reign, reaching $26 a share by the fall of 1933. This had less to do with tangible results—it was too early for that—than the confidence of investors.

In a time of crisis, the mere evidence of activity can be enough to get things moving. Though Zemurray would stay at the helm for another twenty years, United Fruit was saved in his first sixty days.

Zemurray said, “You put the medicine on the leaves and that cures the disease?” “It’s not that simple,” said the scientist. “Sigatoka is an airborne spore. We think the Bordeaux mixture—” “Please, Sport, don’t confuse me. You put the medicine on the leaves—” “It’s only an experiment.” “We’ll spray five thousand acres,” Zemurray said.

…men had to walk the fields as the mixture was applied, making sure the poison dispersed evenly. Over time, these workers began to experience certain abnormalities. They lost their olfactory sense and their appetite. Everything from shrimp to beans tasted like paste. After a month, they could not keep down food. They wasted away but kept volunteering for the hazard pay. After two months, the men began to turn color. After three months, they were blue. On the plantations, they were referred to as Los Pericos, the Parakeets.

When a plantation fell to disease, he simply reached up for one of the cans on the shelf. In this way, he kept moving from virgin jungle to virgin jungle, forever one step ahead of the disease. U.F. came to possess tremendous stretches of wilderness as a result. By 1940, the company owned 50 percent of all private land in Honduras, but cultivated less than 10 percent of what it owned. The company became a symbol of concentrated wealth in these years, more powerful, in many countries, than the government itself. In its endless quest for disease-free land, United Fruit would become too big for its own good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The war ended on August 14, 1945. V-J Day. In New Orleans, the squares filled with sailors. The men got drunk. The mothers wept with joy. Sam did not know what they were celebrating. The first peacetime shipment of bananas arrived soon after. He did not care. Everyone I spoke to who knew Zemurray—there are fewer each year—told me the death of Sam Jr. was the great tragedy of the old man’s life. He came out of it and got back to work, but he was never the same.

Sam returned only because the future of the company seemed to depend on it. The top job had been given to Thomas Cabot, and Thomas Cabot had failed. The division heads were bickering, the provinces were restive, the leadership was uncertain. Zemurray, who walked the earth when the world was new, was the only man with the requisite authority to make the moves and right the ship.

It’s the one problem he could never solve: having designed a uniquely powerful position for himself at the top of the company, tailored to his character and style, Zemurray could not find anyone else to fill it. United Fruit had been on the verge of collapse when he took control in 1932. He gave the company twenty extra years of life, but it was far from clear it could survive his retirement.

The Israel Vote

…the politics were complicated by the large Arab populations in several of the Latin American nations.

A second was scheduled for November 29, four days after the first vote. It was in these days, a crack of light between dispossession and statehood, that Sam Zemurray went to work, calling key players in banana land, wheedling, cajoling, strong-arming. It was the culmination of his career, the hour when Zemurray could finally use everything he had learned to play a secretly decisive role on the world stage.

The ensuing bribing and lobbying became so intense that President Harry Truman complained to Weizmann of the hardball tactics: Truman found it “unbecoming.” “The pressure was unlike anything that had been seen there before,” Truman wrote in his memoirs. “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me.”

The president of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, later claimed he’d been offered money, “a bribe of millions,” by a powerful businessman associated with the Zionist cause, to vote in favor of partition. (India voted against.)

Knowing about the work of Zemurray, certain yes votes that might otherwise seem mysterious—Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Panama—suddenly make perfect sense. Behind them, behind the creation of the Jewish state, was the Gringo pushing his cart piled high with stinking ripes.

Israel’s War of Independence ended in victory for Israel in January 1949. Sam returned to United Fruit soon after, reclaiming his place at the center of the banana world.

Guatemala & the CIA

He said he would govern by a philosophy of his own invention, which he called “spiritual socialism.” To Zemurray, who had agents scattered in the crowd, every word of the speech would have sounded like a threat. It was Huey Long all over again. The call to strengthen the unions, spread the wealth, break up the large holdings of land.… There were some U.F. executives who worried that Guatemala would go Communist from the beginning. Zemurray rejected such talk. He did not believe that the people of Guatemala, most of them poor Indians, were sophisticated enough to embrace an ideology associated with European intellectuals.

Arévalo, a smart man who understood the limits of his power, was exceedingly careful in dealing with United Fruit. Though he passed land reform legislation, he left it unenforced. He focused instead on crowd-pleasing issues that Zemurray could hardly oppose. A forty-hour workweek, social security guarantees, rights of the unions to organize—all based on the New Deal legislation that Zemurray himself championed in the United States. In 1947, the Guatemalan congress enacted the Labor Code, which, for the first time ever, permitted banana workers to join trade unions.

It was the first peaceful transition of power in the history of the country. In his farewell address, Arévalo ominously warned of the power of the banana company. “The revolution will have to be pushed forward,” he said, “or it will be lost.”

Hundreds of thousands of acres were confiscated from United Fruit, broken into plots, and divided among thousands of peasant farmers. In return, the company was reportedly paid $627,572 in twenty-five-year Guatemalan bonds, which yielded 3 percent interest. United Fruit officials complained to the Guatemalan government and to the U.S. State Department. Even if the seizure were legal, the price seemed grossly unfair. Auditors valued the land at $16 million. The Guatemalans said their appraisal had been determined by the company itself—from its own tax filings.

In the old days, he might have simply hired an army of mercenaries, sailed down to the isthmus, and changed the government. But this was during the cold war, when even the smallest thing was about the biggest, and the U.S. government had its snout in every part of the world. A new day called for a new way to solve an old problem. Zemurray, who tried to retire again a few years before, had returned to handle the Guatemala situation. No one else seemed up to it.

The hiring went both ways, with officials leaving the government to join U.F., and U.F. executives taking positions in the government. Ed Whitman, U.F.’s in-house head of public relations, used to tell his employees that whenever people read “United Fruit” in the Communist propaganda, they mentally substituted “United States,” the implication being that these people were wrong and needed to be corrected.

By 1954, the network of connections had grown so extensive it was hard to tell where the government ended and the company began.

Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of the United States begin? It was impossible to tell. That was the point of all Sam’s hires: If I can perfectly align the interests of my company with the interests of top officials in the U.S. government—not the interests of the country, but the interests of the people in charge of the country—then the United States will secure my needs.

If the system had been working correctly, the Office of Strategic Services would have been disbanded at the end of the Second World War. That’s how it had always happened in the past—when the war ends, the spies are defrocked and sent home. But the system was not working correctly or, more accurately, the war never really ended—it instead faded into another war, the cold war, the way, in a disco, one song bleeds into the next and the people never stop dancing.

…when Greece was threatened by a Communist takeover, President Harry Truman, who had planned to disband the OSS, turned it into the CIA instead, creating a new feature of national life, the civilian spy agency.

Whereas the OSS had been authorized “to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and conduct special operations,” the CIA was given a mandate at once vague and ambitious. The new agency, Truman told Congress, will “help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose on them totalitarian regimes.” In this way, the spy agency went from being a guy who knows stuff to a being a guy who does stuff about the stuff he knows. In this way, the agency, which had been ears and a brain, became ears and a brain and hands. Remember what Pinocchio did as soon as Geppetto carved him a pair of hands? He reached out and pinched the toymaker.

Despite this, the banana lands remained something of terra incognita for the CIA. The OSS had not operated in South America, which had been under the jurisdiction of the FBI.

Some experts consider Zemurray’s overthrow of the Honduran government a model for almost all the CIA missions that followed.

Like the CIA, Zemurray did a lot with a little because that’s the best way to leave no fingerprints—and because a little is all he had.

It was, in fact, hard to distinguish United Fruit from the CIA in those years. The organizations shared personnel as well as equipment and intelligence. Throughout the Guatemala affair, the CIA used United Fruit ships to smuggle money, men, and guns. When the CIA’s funding fell short of its budget, U.F. made up the difference.

Truman put a stop to all such covert programs. In his final years as president, he seemed to become alarmed by his creation, by this rogue Pinocchio, which, given feet as well as hands, ears, and eyes, increasingly operated on its own initiative.

Among the early favorites was Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a general who opposed Arbenz in the presidential election. In his book My War with Communism, Ydígoras Fuentes recalled a visit to his house by three men—two agents from the CIA and an executive of the United Fruit Company. The agents promised to make Ydígoras Fuentes president of Guatemala if he agreed to purge the Communists and restore United Fruit’s property, among other things. The general turned down the offer, calling the terms “abusive and inequitable.” He said it would seem like a naked takeover by the banana company.

Castillo Armas had an interesting biography, always a helpful distraction for the media. (If you don’t want them to find the truth, give them a better story.)

Here was Keith, the former vice president of U.F., collaborating through the ages, with Zemurray, providing the tunnel that saves the general who overthrows the president and restores the banana land. Castillo Armas went to Colombia, then Honduras, where he took many jobs, eventually finding steady work as a salesman in a furniture store, which is where the CIA tracked him down in 1953.

…casus belli…

Never mind that the above passage shows the invasion was fixed before the guns were seized. Never mind, too, that most of the weapons were junk that never would have worked. Spread on the deck of the seized ship, the guns proved the perfect photographic evidence, whipping the American public into a frenzy. As Bernays said, the masses are led by symbols, the most primary of which—you can get as Freudian with this as you want—is the steely shaft of a Commie’s pistol. On April 26, 1954, President Eisenhower, addressing Congress, said, “The Reds are in control in Guatemala, and they are trying to spread their influence to San Salvador as a first step to breaking out of Guatemala to other South American countries.” On June 15, the CIA was given the final go-ahead for Operation Success.

Sam should have known, must have known. The coup in Guatemala violated a rule he had practiced all his life: do not draw unnecessary attention.

At the time of the coup, U.F. led its industry by every measure: in profits, market share, volume (and it wasn’t even close). Within a generation, it would trail Standard Fruit in nearly every category. The overthrow had all the ingredients of irony: meant to prevent the establishment of a Communist beachhead in the hemisphere, it would help create just such a beachhead in Cuba. Meant to make Guatemala friendly for the company, it would engender such hostility that the company was eventually forced to abandon the isthmus altogether.

Hunt later called freeing Guevara, when he should have put a bullet in his head, the regret of his life. Both sides took the same lesson from the war: compassion is weakness, mercy a disease. You must be willing to go all the way.

…five days after Arbenz abdicated—five days!—the Justice Department filed a massive lawsuit against United Fruit, charging the company with violating the antitrust laws.

The White House denied any connection between Operation Success and the legal action, but the point seemed clear: the Eisenhower administration was demonstrating its independence from the banana men. According to Tommy Corcoran, “Dulles began the antitrust suit against UFCo just to prove he wasn’t involved with the company.”

Edward Bernays

Zemurray’s most important hire was Edward Bernays, the man who invented modern public relations.

First: modern society, with its millions, is essentially ungovernable. The public must instead be controlled by manipulation. The men who do this manipulating, in government or not, are the true leaders, philosopher-kings. They need not manipulate all the people, only the few thousand who set the agenda. The drivers of history are not the people, in other words, nor the elite who influence the people, but the PR men who influence the elite who influence the people. “Those who manipulate [the] unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power,” wrote Bernays. “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

In 1933, a Hearst reporter told Bernays that Crystallizing Public Opinion was a favorite book of Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, who, the reporter said, was using Bernays’s ideas to design his campaign against the Jews.

Freud was the PR man’s uncle.

“Although Freud was almost a quarter century my senior, we got along like two contemporaries,” Bernays wrote in his autobiography.

Bernays claimed he crafted his philosophy under the influence of Freud, specifically the notion of a public subconscious, a concept Freud himself would surely have rejected.

Bernays had pioneered a trick he would use throughout his career. If you want to advance a private interest, turn it into a public cause.

He coined the term “public relations.” Before that, practitioners had been known as “press agents.” A press agent is a boozy hack with a big mouth; a public relations expert is a scientist.

Especially irksome to Hill was the convention that kept women from smoking in public, behavior considered unladylike. Hill tried to sell smoking to women as a way to shed pounds, strike a pose, stay alert, but nothing worked. Bernays told Hill that he should instead link his private interest—get women to smoke more—to a public cause. With this in mind, he planted newspaper articles that challenged the taboo against female public smoking, arguing that cigarettes were neither a dirty habit nor a weight-loss tool, but a symbol of empowerment. He took out an ad, calling women to “smoke out”: the female citizens of New York were asked to leave their offices one afternoon and stroll along Fifth Avenue, puffing all the way. This was followed by “smokeouts” across the country.

He described his grand strategy as indirection. If General Motors hired Joe Schmo to sell cars, Joe Schmo would give an interview to Road & Track, telling them the specs of the Thunderbird, engine size in cubic inches, zero-to-sixty, and so on. Given the same job, Bernays would lobby Congress for higher speed limits, making it more fun to own a Thunderbird. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product.

In the 1950s, a consortium of publishers—including Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster—concerned about a dip in numbers, hired Bernays. Did he go into schools and make the case for books? No, he talked to the architects and contractors who were designing the new suburban homes and convinced them a house is not modern if it does not include built-in bookshelves. Indirection.

His belief in indirection kept him focused on the big picture. The fisherman worries about the size of the catch; the philosopher worries about the soul of the river. “I kept insisting to Zemurray that revolutionary movements would spread in Middle America, as they had in other parts of the world,” Bernays explained. “Despite his wisdom and mature judgment, Zemurray kept pooh-poohing this warning. The Indians, he said, were too ignorant; they had no channels of communication, no press or radio, which drew dissidents together in other parts of the world. How could ideas of communism be spread from one person to another—ignorant persons at that—without primary channels of communication?”

…if the company could turn its corporate challenge (Arbenz is confiscating land) into a problem for the United States (Communists are infiltrating the isthmus), the U.S. government would take care of the rest. Never mind that Arbenz claimed no allegiance to the Communist Party; never mind that Arbenz cited Franklin Roosevelt as among his heroes; never mind that many of the Arbenz policies that United Fruit found so offensive were patterned on the New Deal—the signs were evident for those who knew where to look.

Bernays wouldn’t make the world better for bananas, he would make the world better for American politicians, who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world better for bananas. Indirection.

U.F. financed the publication of Report on Guatemala, a sliver of a book written by a journalist who later asked to have even his pseudonym removed. It was delivered to every member of Congress. You could see them in their chairs, feet up, reading the opening line: “A Moscow-directed Communist conspiracy in Central America is one of the Soviet Union’s most successful operations of infiltration outside the Iron Curtain countries.”

Bernays planted stories in big publications in New York, which were picked up across the country. The Herald Tribune, The Atlantic, Time—all ran pieces.

When the Times staffer Sydney Gruson, the paper’s bureau chief in Mexico, became suspicious of these stories and wrote a piece of his own with a pro-Arbenz spin, Frank Wisner, a CIA operative heavily involved in Guatemala, complained to Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA and previously a member of the U.F. board of directors; Dulles spoke to his friend General Julius Ochs Adler, the business manager of the Times, telling Adler that Gruson and his wife, Flora Lewis, were liberals who could not be trusted on this subject. Adler had a conversation with Sulzberger, who then kept Gruson off the story, ordering him to stay put in Mexico, claiming, dubiously, that there might be a Mexican angle to the Guatemala affair. (You following this?) According to Bitter Fruit, Sulzberger described it as a patriotic act.

Shades of Vietnam, shades of Iraq, shades of every war in which the consent is manufactured, in which people are cattle-prodded down the warpath with words like MENACE (zap!), CONTAGION (zap!), DOMINOS (zap!).

“In almost every act of our daily lives,” wrote Bernays, “whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

Bernays’s plan began to show results by the summer of 1951. The situation on the isthmus, unheard of a few months before, moved onto the national agenda, where it was described not as a threat to a corporate interest, nor as a threat to the region, but as a threat to the American way of life.

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.

Decline & Legacy

Standard Fruit—later purchased by Dole—…

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His fortune was estimated at $30 million, half of which was donated, per his instruction, to the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans.

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.

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.”

The scandal, which came to be known as Bananagate, drove the president of Honduras from office.

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.

Lindner moved the company to Cincinnati and changed its name to Chiquita Brands International, Inc. In 2001, the company declared bankruptcy.

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.

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?