The fish that ate the whale The life and times of America's banana king

Rich Cohen

Book - 2012

A biography of the little-known antihero, Samuel Zemurray (1877-1961), the disgraced mogul of the much hated United Fruit Company who aided the creation of Israel, funded many of Tulane University's buildings, and had a hand in the rise of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Rich Cohen (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
xiii, 270 p. : maps ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9780374299279
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

AMID the vast outpouring of literature about America's banana empire in the Caribbean, no one seems to have written a full-fledged biography of the remarkable Samuel Zemurray, who guided the United Fruit Company through perilous times. Rich Cohen has rectified that oversight. Cohen, the author of "Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams" and "Sweet and Low: A Family Story," now gives us the fascinating tale of "Sam the Banana Man," a poor Russian Jew who emigrated to Alabama as a teenager and ended up controlling much of Central America. After starting out as a humble banana peddler in Mobile in the 1890s, Zemurray moved up to become a major importer in New Orleans, shipping in fruit from his firm's plantations in Honduras. When the Honduran president, Miguel Dávila, placed obstacles in his path in 1910, Zemurray simply hired some mercenaries, orchestrated a sham revolution and replaced Dávila with a more compliant president. Cohen duly condemns Zemurray's colonialist arrogance but also admires his chutzpah. At times, Cohen waxes almost Kiplingesque as he celebrates the man and his myrmidons: "I want here to sing an ode to the banana cowboy, that wild, unshaven, hell-raising fighter of yore, terror of the isthmus, hired gun in time of conflict, filibuster in time of revolution, arrived from the streets of New Orleans and San Francisco and Galveston, no good for decent society, spitting tobacco juice and humping extra shells in his saddlebag. These roughnecks found a benefactor in Zemurray, who rode and drank with them." Zemurray was first a customer, then a major competitor of United Fruit, though his own firm was much smaller. In 1929 he sold out to his rival for 300,000 shares of United Fruit stock and retired to New Orleans, where Huey Long assailed him as a corrupt plutocrat. Meanwhile, the Depression was laying waste to United Fruit's balance sheet. As the value of Zemurray 's stock plummeted, he decided it was time to foment another revolution. He staged a boardroom coup and installed himself as chief executive, prompting The New York Times to call him "the fish that swallowed the whale." Zemurray led United Fruit back into the black. He also had a hand in the founding of Israel. But his final triumph, in Guatemala, would leave a dark legacy. There, United Fruit confronted a democratically elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, who began redistributing the firm's uncultivated lands to peasants. This time, instead of hiring armed mercenaries, Zemurray hired the public relations guru Edward L. Bernays to paint Arbenz as a Communist, while urging the Eisenhower administration to intervene. In 1954 the C.I.A. staged a coup that toppled Arbenz, touching off a cycle of revolution and reaction that lasted decades and claimed thousands of lives. Zemurray died at 84 in 1961, just a few months after the C.I.A.'s Bay of Pigs fiasco had demonstrated the limits of his approach to empire management. In Cohen's hyperbolic and often speculative telling, Zemurray looms as such a titan that even the United Fruit co-founder Minor C. Keith, "the uncrowned king of Central America," recedes into Zemurray's shadow. Cohen scarcely mentions the Vaccaro brothers, Zemurray 's fellow immigrants and fierce rivals, who founded Standard Fruit. And Cohen banishes Zemurray's relative-by-marriage Lillian Hellman to the obscurity of an endnote, even though Zemurray loomed large in her life and also, it seems, in her literature. For a balanced, comprehensive, soberminded assessment of Zemurray's career, readers should consult the many histories of United Fruit in its heyday. But Rich Cohen books constitute a genre unto themselves: pungent, breezy, vividly written psychodramas about rough-edged, toughminded Jewish machers who vanquish their rivals, and sometimes change the world in the process. Within this specialized context, Cohen's Zemurray biography admirably fills the bill. Mark Lewis is writing a book about America's colonial experience in the Philippines.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In this gripping biography it's as page-turningly exciting as any thriller Samuel Zemurray, once the most powerful banana importer in America, comes off as a sort of real-world Charles Foster Kane (if Kane had been in the fruit trade and not a newspaperman). Zemurray was not above fomenting rebellion in foreign countries to ensure that he had a ready supply of bananas, and he was such a ruthless and clever businessman that he went head-to-head with the mighty United Fruit itself an extremely powerful entity and emerged victorious. Cohen's lively and entertaining prose style (a ripe banana you have left in the sun that has become as freckled as a Hardy boy; juke joints that stayed open from can till can't) provides the perfect vehicle for this story of the surprisingly cutthroat world of the banana trade; it is nearly impossible to put the book down, and that's something you don't say about a lot of biographies and especially biographies of businessmen. For anyone who enjoys a good life story, this one is an absolute must-read.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Cohen provides a boatload of angles for his biography of little-known antihero, Samuel Zemurray (1877-1961), presenting his story as a parable of American capitalism, an example of the American dream in decline, the story of 20th-century America, a quintessentially Jewish tale, and "a subterranean saga of kickbacks, overthrows, and secret deals: the world as it really works." Fortunately, Cohen (Sweet and Low) backs up his hyperbole. Once a poor immigrant buying ripe bananas off a New Orleans pier, Zemurray became the disgraced mogul of the much hated United Fruit Company. Along the way, he aided the creation of Israel; funded many of Tulane University's buildings; and had a hand in the rise of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Cohen claims Zemurray was to New Orleans what Rockefeller was to New York, but the better comparison may be to Robert Moses, who bulldozed both land and people to build many of New York's roads, parks, and bridges. The reader gets to decide not only whether the ends were worth the means, but whether the means were worth the ends. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, William Morris. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This spirited book introduces readers to Samuel Zemurray (1877-1961), known in his prime as "Sam the banana man." A Russian Jew who emigrated to Alabama in 1891, Zemurray eventually settled in New Orleans, where he grew to be head of the United Fruit Company. Known as the "octopus," United Fruit virtually ruled Central American republics in the first half of the 20th century, all because of banana exports. Cohen (contributing editor, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone; Sweet and Low: A Family Story) offers a lively biography of Sam and his empire, leaving the man and the company open to scrutiny and criticism while giving readers a remarkable profile of "a living, breathing, jungle-clearing, government-toppling banana man." Cohen also discusses bananas, their cultivation, gathering, shipping, sale, and consumption-a supply-and-demand success story for Zemurray and others like him. VERDICT This is popular history and biography at its best, making for an easy verdict: this book will appeal strongly to lay readers and scholars alike. Highly recommended to all. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]-Boyd Childress, formerly with Auburn Univ. Lib., AL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

1 Selma     Sam Zemurray saw his first banana in 1893. In the lore, this is presented as a moment of clarity, wherein the future was revealed. In some versions, the original banana is presented as a platonic ideal, an archetype circling the young man's head. It is seen from a great distance, then very close, each freckle magnified. As it was his first banana, I imagine it situated on a velvet pillow, in a display alongside Adam's rib and Robert Johnson's guitar. There is much variation in the telling of this story, meaning each expert has written his or her own history; meaning the story has gone from reportage to mythology; meaning Sam the Banana Man is Paul Bunyan and the first banana is Babe the Blue Ox. In some versions, Sam sees the banana in the gutter in Selma, Alabama, where it's fallen from a pushcart; in some, he sees it in the window of a grocery and is smitten. He rushes inside, grabs the owner by the lapel, and makes him tell everything he knows. In some, he sees it amid a pile of bananas on the deck of a ship plying the Alabama River on a lazy summer afternoon. The most likely version has Sam seeing that first banana in the wares of a peddler in the alley behind his uncle's store in Selma. 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? But none of the stories mentions a crucial detail: did Zemurray taste that first banana? I like to imagine him peeling it, eating the fruit in three bites, then tossing the skin into the street the way people did back then. Tossing it and saying, "Wonderful." 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." Putting us at a further remove from Zemurray is the fact that 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. Sam Zemurray was born in 1877, in the region of western Russia once known as Bessarabia. It's Moldavia today. He grew up on a wheat farm, in a flat country ringed by hills. His father died young, leaving the family bereft, without prospects. Sam traveled to America with his aunt in 1892. He was to establish himself and send for the others--mother, siblings. He landed in New York, then continued to Selma, Alabama, where his uncle owned a store. He was fourteen or fifteen, but you would guess him much older. The immigrants of that era could not afford to be children. They had to struggle every minute of every day. By sixteen, he was as hardened as the men in Walker Evans's photos, a tough operator, a dead-end kid, coolly figuring angles: Where's the play? What's in it for me? His humor was black, his explanations few. 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: 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 . Though immensely complicated, he was, in a fundamental way, simple, earthy. 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.) In a famous exchange, when challenged by a rival who claimed he could not understand Zemurray's accent, Zemurray said, "You're fired. Can you understand that?" Selma, Alabama, was the perfect spot for a kid like Sam: an incubator, a starter town, picturesque yet faded, grand but still small enough to memorize. A manufacturing center in the time of the Confederacy, it had since been allowed to dilapidate. There was a main street, a fruit market, a butcher shop, a candy store, a theater with plush seats, a city hall, churches. There were brick houses with curtains in the windows and swings on the porches--the white side of town. There were shotgun shacks, blue and yellow and red, fronted by weedy yards--the Negro side of town. There were taverns and houses of worship where Christian gospel was mixed with African voodoo. There were banks, savings and loans, fraternal orders. There was a commercial district, where every store was filled with unduly optimistic businessmen. Though the biography of Zemurray's uncle has been forgotten, we can take him as a stand-in for the generation of poor grandfathers who came first, who worked and worked and got nothing but a place of honor in the family photo in return. Sometimes described as a grocery, sometimes as a general store, his shop was precisely the sort that Jewish immigrants had been establishing across the South for fifty years. Such concerns were usually operated by men who came to America because they were the youngest of many brothers, without property or plans. These people went south because, in the early days of the American republic, it was not inhospitable to Hebrews. Many began as peddlers, crossing the country with a mountain of merchandise strapped to their backs. You see them in ancient silver prints and daguerreotypes, weathered men humping half the world on their shoulders, pushing the other half in a cart--bags of grain, dinnerware, tinware, lamps, clothes, canvas for tents, chocolate, anything an isolated farmer might want but could not find in the sticks. When they had saved some money, many of these men opened stores, which meant moving all that merchandise under a roof in a town along their route. Even now, as you drive across the South, you will see their remnants baked into the soil like fossils: an ancient veranda, a ghost sign blistered from years of rain--LAZARUS & SONS, HOME OF THE 2 PENNY BELT. These men were careful to open no more than one store per town, partly because who needs the competition, partly because they worried about attracting the wrong kind of attention. They stocked everything. What they did not stock, they could order. The most successful grew into great department stores: S. A. Shore in Winchester, Alabama, founded by Russian-born Solomon Shore, father of Dinah; E. Lewis & Son Dry Goods in Hendersonville, North Carolina, founded by Polish-born Edward Lewis; Capitol Department Store in Fayetteville, North Carolina, founded by the Russian Stein brothers. Others, having started by extending credit to customers, evolved into America's first investment banks. Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry Lehman, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, began as a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1844. Lazard Frères, founded by three Jewish brothers from France, began as a wholesale business in New Orleans in 1848. The store owned by Zemurray's uncle was probably of this variety: having begun as a young man carrying merchandise, it grew into a neat grocery on Broad Street. Selma closed early. By ten p.m., the bustling of the marketplace had given way to the swamp stink and cicadas, but there was always action for those who knew where to look: in the private clubs where merchants played faro and stud, in the juke joints that stayed open from can till can't. According to those who knew him, 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. He stacked shelves and checked inventory in his uncle's store. Now and then, he dealt with the salesmen who turned up with sample cases. He stood in the alley, amid the garbage cans and cats, asking about suppliers and costs. There was money to be made, but not here. He interrogated customers. He was looking for different work and would try anything, if only for experience. His early life was a series of adventures, with odd job leading to odd job. Much of the color that would later entertain magazine writers--Sam's life had the dimensions of a fairy tale--were accumulated in his first few years in Selma. He worked as a tin merchant. Well, that's how it would be described in the press. "Young Sam Z. bartered iron for livestock, chickens and pigs." According to newspaper and magazine accounts, he was in fact employed by a struggling old-timer who was less tin merchant than peddler, the last of a vanishing breed, the country cheapjack in a tattered coat, sharing a piece of chocolate with the boy. Now and then, he might offer some wisdom. Banks fail, women leave, but land lasts forever. 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. A series of jobs followed, tried on and thrown off like thrift-store suits. He was a housecleaner and a delivery boy. He turned a lathe for a carpenter. By eighteen, he had saved enough to send for his brothers and sisters, half a dozen pale young Jews who turned up in Alabama in the last years of the nineteenth century. But his real life began only when he saw that first banana. He devised a plan soon after: he would travel to Mobile, where the fruit boats arrived from Central America, purchase a supply of his own, carry them back to Selma, and go into business.   Copyright (c) 2012 by Rich Cohen Excerpted from The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.