Bananas, p.10
Bananas, page 10
United Fruit measured its annual prosperity in standard ways: stems exported, bunches sold, prices on the stock market board. What might be termed its ‘machete index’ was more informal though a useful rule of thumb. In the realm of big knives, United Fruit was the largest machete buyer in the world. Each of its plantation labourers, mozos, ‘peasants’, had to have one purchased from the company store. United Fruit itself bought them from the Collins Company of Collinsville, Connecticut, the ‘world’s greatest machete maker’. English and German models were cheaper but United Fruit was a down-home New England firm. Collins’s three salesmen sweated their way around the region with their heavy samples cases, jumping on and off riverboats and labouring along plantation trails. In a good year, they sold United Fruit 36,000 machetes. Yet in 1931 during the Depression, the company bought only 24,000, a reduction in demand of a third.
Zemurray’s fortune collapsed more dramatically. Shares worth thirty-three million dollars at the time of the merger slumped in value to two million. He also faced other, more political threats. Louisiana governor Huey Long, the ‘Kingfish’, had him in his sights. Long was a swampland populist with a thing about fascism. He was the ‘small man’s’ man, but not Sam’s kind of man. He had swept to power after the Mississippi flood of 1927 when the grandees of New Orleans had allowed the deluge of poor areas of town in order to save their own. Though the governor had never professed much of an interest in foreign affairs, lately he seemed to have found one. US marines had engaged these many years in fighting wars in Central America, he said, for ‘that corrupt banana peddler Zemurray’.
The Banana Man took to pacing the New Orleans waterfront with a dwindling bank account and no power base. He spoke to captains of the Great White Fleet, more jaundiced by the day. They sailed up from Central America with holds half full. They had to cut back on oil, slow their journeys and risk what cargo they had going rotten.
Zemurray wrote to United Fruit’s board, buzzing with suggestions. The Wasps ignored him. When he travelled to Boston for a shareholders’ meeting the top table professed not to understand a word he was saying because of his Russian accent. For the time being, he withdrew but quietly proceeded to win the support of other discontented shareholders. In early 1933, he attended the next quorum of the board. It had just finished a discussion on irrigation in Honduras. Everyone had previously agreed that he would not intervene in such mundane company matters but no one had said anything about his taking United Fruit over. Zemurray skimmed his collection of share certificates and majority voting rights down the long polished oval table, announcing in guttural yet graspable tones: ‘You gentlemen have fucked this company up long enough.’
With Zemurray’s takeover, the United Fruit story acquired a new dimension in colour. The Banana Man was good copy for journalists. United Fruit had been stuck in its narrow mentality, a sealed unit. It released information such as short histories of the banana and recipes for its use. In 1929 it had also created its ‘education department’ to get teaching packs into schools. United Fruit, whether through the Boston blue-bloods in their clubs or the supervisors on its plantations, kept itself cut off until such time as it chose to communicate.
Zemurray welcomed the press attention, possibly as a means of deflecting the predatory tendencies of Governor Long. East-coast journalists headed south to New Orleans to absorb the atmosphere of the Big Easy: the ‘greatest banana port in the world’. Strapping dockworkers, ‘Negroes, Maltese, Italians’, worked in an air ‘pungent with smells from every land’. After the scribes had journeyed with the Great White Fleet to arrive in Central America, their impressions became less sanguine.
It was a tough world. Male expatriates drank whisky to deter diseases of one kind or another. Back home they had been good clean boys who had gone off to learn about management. In Central America they carried .38s to protect themselves from the workforce. Drunk on payday, a machete-wielding mozo was dangerous enough but what happened if one of those guns fell into his hands? Labourers’ quarters were positioned beyond shooting distance of overseers’ houses. In the event of disputes there was also an unwritten code that was not exactly the due process of law: if a mozo killed a mozo he’d be moved to another farm; if a white man killed a mozo he’d be sent to another country; if a mozo killed a white man he’d be ‘accidentally shot’.
One description of a United Fruit banana division spoke of a ‘vast feudal estate’ composed of drab artificial settlements similar to factory towns. Labour camps, long lines of miserable and hot bunkhouses stood next to smoky railway yards and noisy machine shops. United Fruit’s company areas resembled boom towns that, as banana cultivation deteriorated and moved on, became the ‘decadent villages’ that had marked the US’s industrial expansion of the nineteenth century. So this was progress. And there was no anti-trust thinking here. All power was centred on the ‘great corporation’. United Fruit decided everything, not least the shade of paint on its trim business quarters: a ‘malarial yellow’, some called it.
There was a brighter side. The plantations’ expatriate workers had beaches and bridle paths, pools or offshore diving bells to enjoy. In Honduras, Tela was a garden spot, with a new golf course manicured by goats. Twenty-five miles away Trujillo had its Spanish fort, against whose wall William Walker, would-be King of Nicaragua, had met his end in the 1860s. More pleasant was the nearby port of Puerto Castilla, United Fruit’s pride and joy that had been developed from nothing. It had a yacht club and its own jazz band, bow-tied and in starched cuffs, the ‘Banana Six’.
Journalists’ attentions wandered as the ‘seasoned fruit men’ who showed them around wanted to talk about the fine alkaline soil of the northern Honduran coast and how it was not susceptible to disease. But what was that over there? An expanse of ‘sere, yellow trees’, acres and acres of them. And was it true that in Bocas del Toro in Panama the Great White Fleet wasn’t letting passengers off to sightsee because of the visible effects of disease? Well, yes, but Bocas del Toro was always a dump anyway.
Zemurray’s experiment with the press proved to be a disaster. United Fruit’s world was going rotten. In the Central American region, banana disease had claimed a total of one hundred thousand acres. Honduras had an area under banana cultivation of ninety-six thousand. United Fruit had lost the equivalent of Honduras.
United Fruit had been warned. In the late 1920s, when Panama disease had finally arrived in Honduras, the people from the US Department of Agriculture had also turned up. Their findings were no more welcome than they were. Monoculture was not working and banana production was out of ‘equilibrium’; alternative crops were needed. Honduras had been the last to succumb to Panama disease but in the mid-1930s became the first territory hit by sigatoka. The two diseases combined to disastrous effect and where the life of a plantation at the turn of the century had been up to ten years, now it was less than three. The company departed from vast areas and in 1935 even abandoned Puerto Castilla.
The manner of United Fruit’s retreat was, in itself, disastrous. Jobs, livelihoods and whole communities vanished. United Fruit ripped up railway tracks and threw them into the ocean. This was wanton destruction; what purpose could possibly be served? Bridges were dismantled, their wooden supports left to rot by the sides of rivers. Any materials United Fruit wanted to keep for itself it loaded on trucks and was gone.
What was it doing about the people it left behind? Nothing. What was it doing about the diseases that had caused this problem? Nothing. Did the company want to do anything about disease? Perhaps such affliction was to its commercial advantage because it deterred potential competitors. Why would United Fruit expend vast amounts on research into disease control if rivals stepped in to reap the reward?
United Fruit’s response when disease had taken hold was to move on to new land, to a new country if need be, and to carve out another part of Central America’s infinite jungle. As the thought began to occur that perhaps the jungle was not so infinite anymore, Zemurray finally addressed the problem. He found a solution, which was called ‘Bordeaux Mixture’ and that combined copper sulphate, water and lime. Zemurray’s experts cautioned him against its overuse but he had it pumped on the plantations in increasing quantity. It was a cocktail with quite a pleasant name, but the giveaway was in the title of those employed to spray and pump it: veneneros, or for want of a better translation, ‘poisoners’.
United Fruit’s annual reports and meetings did not dwell on the negatives. Disease didn’t ‘sell’. Besides, in the mid-1930s things were looking up for the company as the Depression began to lift. The advertising industry had helped by recently redefining the popular symbol of household wealth. This had previously been the ‘full dinner pail’. The term was thought too closely identified with the working class, and depressing given how many people were out of work. The new cheerier symbol was to be the ‘full cereal bowl’ and would prove far more useful to United Fruit. Bananas would yet burgeon in the breakfast bowls of the nation.
In Central America United Fruit kept moving. Its retreat from disease looked like a rampaging advance. Under Keith and Preston, production had migrated west from the Caribbean islands to Central America. Now United Fruit pointed the banana further in the direction of the setting sun.
In Guatemala the company had had land for a long while on the Pacific side of the isthmus. It had not used it and, as usual, kept it mainly to ward off competitors. Those that tried to compete had either been put out of business by the freight rates charged them on Keith’s railway, or by United Fruit purchasing the favours of whichever dictator was in power.
The latest was General Jorge Ubico, who was a man of pride and bearing. He compared himself to Napoleon, had his nose and affected a Bonaparte hairstyle. In the world of ideas he despised Hitler as a lower-class upstart and was a disciple of Mussolini. Anyone who could bring discipline to such a people as the Italians, he contended, had lessons for the Guatemalans. In United Fruit, General Ubico had a party that made the railways run on time while he applied firm direction from the centre. The fortunate few Guatemalan children who attended school were clad in military uniform. He chose the music for the national symphony orchestra and progressed on speaking tours of the country accompanied by piped bands. Most of those coerced into the nation’s plazas to listen were Guatemala’s Mayan majority who did not speak Spanish and had no idea, nor cared, what he said.
Ubico would not listen to the pleas from his oligarchy to stop United Fruit’s spread to the Pacific: the company set up its complex of plantations on the Pacific at Tiquisate. It was state of the banana-art with the latest in irrigation and other technology, above all the powerful pumps that delivered Bordeaux Mixture in the volume thought necessary.
In the Pacific coastal lowlands, no less hot than those on the Atlantic, Tiquisate had well-appointed expat housing on concrete pylons to allow the flow of air and to guarantee the continuing flow of young Americans coming for purposes of character reinforcement. ‘New employee’s home: Engineer Bump’ read the caption on the proud company photo of one such two-storey structure to be used by young engineer Almyr Bump, recently arrived in Tiquisate from the US.
A cartoon appeared in a local magazine to mark the arrival of United Fruit. It showed the isthmus straddled by a grinning tentacled monster. From Atlantic to Pacific its reach was everywhere and United Fruit would never shake off this image of El Pulpo, ‘the octopus’.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites 1935 as the year when the term ‘banana republic’ first came into use. A fictional tale in the July issue of Esquire magazine had included a conversation between two of its characters and a retired military figure, an ancient-mariner type who had grabbed their attention: ‘We strung along with Major Brown on the inhuman aspects of war in the banana republics.’
O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings had actually beaten Esquire by thirty-odd years but it was fair to say that by now the term had a new meaning. The republics of Central America were less the cheery haunts of O. Henry, Lee Christmas and Machine-gun Molony than the benighted locales of United Fruit.
In the depths of Depression in the first half of the 1930s, Central America had sunk to a new level of dependency on United Fruit. The states borrowed money from the company to keep national budgets afloat. Meanwhile, the company reduced its dependence on them. United Fruit looked elsewhere to diversify and in Africa, for example, it grew African palm for the manufacture of palm oil.
Banana republics became characterised as places of inhuman wars and dictatorships, which was not altogether far from the truth, but now the term implicitly disparaged their inhabitants for succumbing. Conversely the protagonists came out of it rather well. Commentary from the US, if made at all, came from a position of assumed superiority.
At home, United Fruit inspired awe. Its ‘contact man’ pulled the strings in all Central American capitals, wrote Fortune magazine: ‘If the finance minister were to overdraw his account, or the archbishop wanted six nuns transported from Germany; if the president’s wife wanted her gallstones removed, or the minister’s wife liked fresh celery from New Orleans, or the president wanted three blooded cows served by a blooded bull; if anyone wants almost anything, then United Fruit’s “contact man” is the one who can quickly get it.’
Also at this time, the OED made its reference to another new turn of phrase: ‘going bananas’. It meant a developing state of derangement and was peculiarly in tune with what had been happening.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to pull the US out of Depression, a band of US business moguls had picked up on United Fruit’s wackier ideas. They objected to Roosevelt’s New Deal. His programme entailed a lot of expensive plans to build bridges across San Francisco Bay and other such schemes to get unemployed US citizens back to work. The moguls believed in the prevailing economic theory that you left well alone; for that matter, you left ‘bad’ alone, too. It would cure itself. In the ways of the jungle, the weakest went under and the most able survived, leaving everyone better off. As for Roosevelt’s ideas, they were costing a lot of taxpayers’ money and since so many ordinary taxpayers were out of a job more of the burden fell on the moguls and big companies. Some of them had resolved to put a man more to their own liking in the White House. They did not conspire to throw Roosevelt out completely, but to have their man work alongside him in order that he might see sense.
Their plan was to make a banana republic of the US. They had chosen their own ‘Major Brown’ figure and he ‘strung along’ with them for a while. He was Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler and he had the right credentials. He was a retired marine with thirty-three years’ service in Central America.
Alas for the plotters, he knew too much about the inhuman aspects of Central America’s wars. ‘For the benefit of Wall Street,’ he wrote in his book, War is a Racket, ‘I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics.’ Butler turned state’s evidence, claiming a cabal of bond salesmen, bankers and industrialists wanted to overthrow the president and take the US to war. He alleged the involvement of famous names, among them J. P. Morgan, the bankers, but many others besides. Butler took his claims to Washington and the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee. It accepted his story. ‘There was no doubt that General Butler was telling the truth,’ the committee’s co-chair later recalled.
Yet the affair blew over and before long few people would remember it at all. The plotters dismissed Butler’s claims as fanciful madness: ‘moonshine’. President Roosevelt, meanwhile, knew that if his New Deal was to get the money it needed it would require a deal with big business. As later events showed, Roosevelt was also at odds with what he saw as Butler’s looney anti-war isolationism. The brigadier general died a little before Pearl Harbour, consigned quietly to history as having indeed ‘gone bananas’.
In the build-up to the Second World War, Sam Zemurray engaged in his own opposition to Roosevelt. The Banana Man did not agree with the president’s wishes for Central America. In overseas affairs Roosevelt had his ‘Good Neighbor’ policy designed to develop good relations between the two halves of the American continent. The idea was that the US would buy more of Latin America’s raw materials, bananas included. In return, Central America and Latin America in general would buy more US manufactured goods. This mutual arrangement would promote economic recovery.
To swing the process along, the northern half of the Americas imported Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian song and dance star. Though scantily clad by the standards of the north, she was hardly raw talent. She wowed the crowd in her opulent tutti-frutti hat and for a while things seemed to go rather well.
Sight for sore eyes that Carmen Miranda was for those who had endured so many depressing years, she didn’t fit with United Fruit’s view. There were other ‘Good Neighbors’ with whom to do business, although they were a little further away. Over in Europe, Hitler’s Germany was vigorously re-arming and industrialising. Germans were getting wealthier and were a very good market for bananas. The Nazis would only pay in bonds exchangeable for German manufactured goods, so United Fruit needed Central America to take as many of those products as possible. With transport costs, however, they might be more expensive than similar goods from the US.
United Fruit decided to see what it could do. In Guatemala it controlled the rates charged to have goods sent as freight by rail. These rates went through curious contortions, such that German goods proved remarkably cheap in the market place compared with their counterparts from the nearby US. United Fruit’s business with Hitler boomed.
President Roosevelt was furious. Rather than helping the US’s economic recovery, United Fruit had chosen to assist Germany’s revival under the Nazis. As the US prepared to enter the Second World War, it viewed United Fruit as a hostile power and a second Roosevelt put anti-trust investigators on the company’s case.
