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

by Rich Cohen

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.

In years of meeting tycoons, I had met few who combined as he did the ability to think abstractly and to translate ideas into actions.”

no longer on the ground with the machete and vaqueros, he had gone into the shadows, where he operated as a puppet master, watching, waiting, giving a tiny nod—plausible deniability—that serves as the green light.

The campaign began with a media blitz, a press junket, a pamphlet, a film. “The Public Relations Department had only one task,” wrote Thomas McCann, “to get out the word that a Communist beachhead had been established in our hemisphere.”

want you all to be damn good and sure you succeed,” Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and a few others. “When you commit the flag, you commit it to win.”

Operation Success was not a war—it was a shadow play, a farce. It was three weeks of smoke and mirrors, flash and noise. It was the United States making a point about communism and Eisenhower drawing a contrast with Truman. It was the United Fruit Company getting back what it had lost.

Arbenz went on the radio to explain the nature of the struggle. It’s not about ideology, he said, it’s about money. It’s not about the United States, it’s about El Gringo, the Banana Man. “In whose name have they carried out these barbaric acts?” he asked. “What is their banner? We know very well. They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company.”

It was less a war than a walk in the country, afternoons of daisy picking, a parade in the mountains. Guatemala 1954 would be the last of the easy overthrows.

He was not sure if he should surrender, or retreat to the hills, or take his own life. He was not sure anyone would notice or care. That was the beauty of psychological warfare—it devoured the enemy from within.

The wanderings of Jacobo Arbenz, his life in exile, symbolize the fate of the isthmus, squeezed between the ideologues and the banana men.

Rarely does a skirmish end so decisively, with the disputed issues resolved in such a satisfactory fashion. It was the most lopsided victory in the history of United Fruit. Too lopsided. Did Zemurray realize the danger his company faced, not as a result of its losses but as a result of its wins?

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.

The lessons taken from Guatemala would be remembered in Havana: the danger of weakness;

Both sides took the same lesson from the war: compassion is weakness, mercy a disease. You must be willing to go all the way.

But times had changed. The old magic was gone. Whereas the company had once been considered the tip of the spear, the cutting edge of American capitalism, staffed with clean-cut men bringing civilization to the waste places, it had since come to be seen as a relic, a leftover from the colonial world destroyed in the Second World War. It was an image problem that became acute. U.F. was increasingly considered an embarrassment, a throwback to the ugliest days of old lamplit America.

The antitrust suit was settled in 1958, when U.F. agreed to sign a consent decree. While admitting no wrongdoing, the company promised to establish, within ten years, a competitor at least one-third its own size in Guatemala. To accomplish this, U.F. promised to sell 33 percent of its fields and facilities to an “independent fruit company.” This would mean the end of United Fruit as it had been envisioned first by Preston, then by Keith, then by Zemurray. It took a generation to work out the details. Not wanting to advantage its main competitor, Standard Fruit—later purchased by Dole—United Fruit eventually sold the remainder of its properties in Guatemala to Del Monte, then a distant third in the trade. Within a few years of the sale, United Fruit had fallen out of first place in market share, a position it had held since the start of the century. The lead went back and forth after that, but United Fruit never regained its dominance. In 1950, the company cleared $66 million in profit. By 1955, that number had fallen to $33.5 million. In 1960, United Fruit earned just over $2 million. The story that began in the right-of-way along the Costa Rican railroad had come to an end.

The United Fruit Company’s dominance in Central America made a mockery of regional governments, and was humiliating and infantilizing in ways that were hardly understood at the time. It was worse than the old European colonialism, which at least came with a sense of obligation. Those who lived in the banana lands were ruled not by foreign nationals bringing “civilization” and the word of God but by businessmen who looked on their fields with a cold moneymaking precision.

Sam did not see himself this way, of course. He considered himself a bearer of modern industry, creating jobs and wealth in a place deprived of both. But there is the world as you see it and the world as it is.

It was not all Zemurray’s fault: he had inherited a machine built by his predecessors. If he had questioned the workings of this machine, he would have been a great man, but he was not a great man; he was...

He did not question the machine because he did not understand what it was doing to the people who lived in its gears. When things got so hot the truth could not be missed, he saw himself, for one terrible moment, ...

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 bes...

These are the words of a card shark who has realized, at dawn, that the power has shifted, that the pictures on the face cards have lost their meaning. The boss who dominated for decades became a person at the mercy of historical forces, the...

Sam Zemurray has two legacies: as a leader in the business world of America, he was a stunning success, a pioneer, everything he considered himself; as a leader in Latin America, a man so powerful he becam...

Having traced the genealogies of powerful local leaders, he showed that the countries of Central America have always been ruled by a handful of families, each of which can trace its roots back to a conquistador who traveled with Cortés. Starting around 1910, these families, who long ruled in partnership with the military, began to be replaced by banana men, who used their wealth and influence to strike their own deals with the generals, overthrowing the aristocrats, becoming aristocrats themselves.

Unlike the old families, the banana royalty had no roots in the region. In this way, the ancient regime was superseded by a band of capitalists, who got rich and got out, and whose only obligation was to the shareholders back in Boston or New Orleans. (“All we cared about was dividends.”)

Everything that happens makes the past a different story. For Stephanie’s daughter, her great-great-grandfather will be a relic, less known to her than the dead presidents of the United States. That’s the way a living, breathing, jungle-clearing, government-toppling banana man turns into just another picture on the wall.

To me, Sam Zemurray’s life is the true story of the American dream—not only of the success but of the price paid for the ambition that led to that success. By the people of the isthmus, by the men who battled him in the Banana War, and by Zemurray himself. Did Sam really think he could get away without paying? He scaled the heights, but lost so much in the process—

From his porch in New Orleans, he could watch a lifetime of toil swept away by the incoming tide:

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.

“Zemurray finally sold out all his Fruit Company stock. He was too old to fight battles. [His] career was bracketed by men who failed to grasp what United Fruit was about and who failed at leadership.”

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

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

He was buried in Metairie Cemetery—you drive past it as you head into the city from the airport—beside his wife, son, and granddaughter Anne. It’s a storied cemetery, where Zemurray lies among the most colorful figures in the history of the city.

The disease was not cured but was made irrelevant by the introduction of a banana called the Cavendish, which grows wild in Southeast Asia. Though inferior to the Big Mike in many ways—it’s neither as tasty, nor as big, nor as hardy—the Cavendish is unaffected by Panama disease. It has a much higher yield, too. A Cavendish rhizome produces twice as many fingers as a Big Mike, meaning the banana companies could operate on half as much land, with obvious political implications.

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.

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

He merged the company with others he already owned and called the conglomerate United Brands, which he ran from an office in the Pan Am Building above Grand Central Station in New York.

On Monday morning, February 3, 1975, Eli Black filled his briefcase with heavy books, told his driver to take him to the Pan Am Building, rode the elevator to the forty-fourth floor, locked his office door, removed his overcoat, hat, and scarf, smashed a window with his briefcase, cleaned up the shards of broken glass, tossed his briefcase through the broken window, then followed it out.

The mystery was resolved that April when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against United Brands, which, according to the complaint, paid the president of Honduras $1.25 million to reduce the banana tax and destroy the cartel, with another $1.25 million to be paid later. “Black knew he had fallen far short of success in every area that mattered to him,” wrote Thomas McCann. “The former rabbi was embroiled in bribery and corruption. The great achievement of his business lifetime, United Brands, was struggling to stay afloat in a sea of debt. His directors were in revolt, his management had lost respect for him, his friends had deserted him, his personal finances were at least as bad as those of the company, his ability to win people’s confidence disappeared, and he had nowhere left to turn.”

That’s the end of United Fruit. I mean, yes, more happened, and happens still. The company bounced from owner to owner. After posting a $200 million loss in 1983, it was taken over by Carl Lindner, a billionaire investor who began his career in his father’s ice-cream shop. Lindner moved the company to Cincinnati and changed its name to Chiquita Brands International, Inc. In 2001, the company declared bankruptcy.

The story of Sam Zemurray is the story of New Orleans. It was booming when he found it and it’s foundered since he died. It’s a body without a soul. It’s a skinny man in fat-man pants.

it’s been mummified, pickled, turned into a diorama that tells the story of its own existence.

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

What does it say about America? It’s a question I have asked myself repeatedly as I researched, interviewed, traveled, and wrote. In the end, I decided that his career is the history of the nation, the promise and the betrayal of that promise,