The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

by Rich Cohen

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.

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.

He was driven by the same raw energy that has always attracted the most ambitious to America, then pushed them to the head of the crowd.

Grasper, climber—nasty ways of describing this kid, who wants what you take for granted.

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: Star...

Go see for yourself; Don’t trust the report.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

he was a kind of existentialist, skirting the line between wealth and oblivion, health and rot, a rider of railroads, a chaser of time, crossing the country in a boxcar filled with reeking produce. It was life: move the fruit now or you’re ruined forever.

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.”

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. He was like a bike racer riding in the windbreak of a semitruck—the semitruck being United Fruit.

If his name survives, it’s as a footnote in the story of Zemurray. Here was a poor bastard who lacked the nerve, who sold out too early, who quit the game a minute before the number came in.

A banana plant, under the best conditions, can grow twenty inches in twenty-four hours. The thought can make you sick: groves of stems and monstrous leaves expanding while we sleep, desiring, it seems, to cover completely the sunny parts of the world.

A single plant can bear fruit as many as three times a year for twenty years or more.

the fruit does not begin to ripen until picked and cannot be eaten from a tree without retching.

It’s not a tree. It’s an herb, the world’s tallest grass. Reaching, in perfect conditions, thirty feet, it’s the largest plant in the world without a woody trunk.

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

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,

By 1908, United Fruit was shipping thirty-six million stems a year—60 percent of all bananas consumed in the United States.

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.

Honduras is the size of Pennsylvania, with Guatemala on its northern border, El Salvador to the west, and Nicaragua to the south. It’s two hundred miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific at the narrowest point. When Zemurray arrived, there were a half million people in the country, the majority of them poor mestizos, that is, half-breeds. It was a divided nation, with the Atlantic lowlands more properly Caribbean than Central American—seaside, frond filled, populated by the descendants of African slaves—and the highlands reminiscent of the ancient Mayan landscape known to the conquistadores.

He named the country Honduras, which means the depths, though the coastal bays are quite shallow, which is why, in the early days of the trade, before the piers had been built, the cargo ships had to sit a half mile offshore waiting for rafts to ferry out the bananas. In other words, the name “Honduras” was false advertising.

It’s as if the road itself, defeated by nature, walked away muttering. It starts again sixty-five miles hence, on the other side of a chasm. This is called the Darién Gap. It symbolizes the incomplete nature of Central America, the IN PROGRESS sign that seems to hang over everything. Russia is the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Germany is the Autobahn. The United States is Route 66. Central America is the Darién Gap.

(He kept quiet as he tasted because talking only drives up the price.)

The original sin of the industry touched everyone: the way the banana men viewed the people and the land of the isthmus as no more than a resource,

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 col...

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.

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.

He believed in the transcendent power of physical labor—that a man can free his soul only by exhausting his body.

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.

It’s one of the great things about bananas—unlike corn or cotton or tobacco, they have no season, or one season that lasts forever, an endless summer broken now and then by hurricane or drought.

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.

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.

Now you’re here, an entrepreneur of considerable means, but still, somewhere in your mind, the little Jew who snuck in the back door.

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?

“He will telephone division managers in half a dozen countries, correlate their reports in his head and reach his decision without touching a pencil.”

Zemurray never forgot the lesson. It does not matter how many bananas you ship: when you lose your reputation, you lose everything.

Of course, the most important tests of leadership are intangible: How do you handle a crisis, sweet-talk a landowner, manage the rough stuff? Can you stand up to the goons, face down the mercenary who overstays his welcome? Can you figure out whom to bribe and make it stick? Can you plunge the machete all the way to the Collins?

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.

It was a contrast of styles: 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 bana...

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. It was more profitable, too, its share price climbing as the price of U.F. slumped.

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?”

Cutter’s work was done by way of character building, a luxury of the middle class. Zemurray’s work was done in order to survive.