Bananas, p.7
Bananas, page 7
At the same time, the Caribbean islands were proving problematic. They were full of smallholders who got in the way and produced inefficiently by United Fruit’s standards. They were apt to complain to their governments about the company’s overbearing presence. In Cuba the company stopped growing bananas and planted sugar cane instead. United Fruit’s banana production was migrating west towards the wider open spaces of Central America, and would continue to do so.
United Fruit went on the warpath in Panama. This was near the disputed border with Costa Rica. It would have been easier just to see the area as United Fruit territory, yet, rashly, a US rival had chosen not to do so. The provocatively named American Banana Company, ABC, attempted to set up in Panama by the frontier with Costa Rica and near United Fruit’s plantations. Having competently cleared jungle and laid railway line, ABC simply hadn’t done its homework about the general lie of the land. Costa Rican troops appeared one day, ejected ABC and handed its assets to United Fruit.
ABC sought legal redress in the US. Its chances looked good. In 1909 Teddy Roosevelt had been succeeded by the administration of President William Taft, who was prepared to get tough on big company bullying. Standard Oil would be broken up in 1911. But United Fruit? Taft was a lawyer from provincial Ohio. He said he had never wanted the job of president and pined for the day when he could leave it and go home. He had no general interest in foreign affairs, let alone the particularities of Central America. Against such an executive backdrop ABC took United Fruit all the way to the Supreme Court. The case was thrown out, with such distant squabbles considered ‘beyond jurisdiction’.
United Fruit sensed it was time to get back on the offensive in Honduras. Panama disease had spread further across Central America and just reached Guatemala. Honduras was the only major producer left free of the plague.
Minor Keith sallied forth with what was fast becoming his party piece: a railroad-for-land scheme. Honduras would get its railway to Tegucigalpa and virtually anywhere it wanted; Keith would get large swathes of the country. By now, however, the Hondurans had the working examples of Costa Rica and Guatemala to go by and turned him down.
In 1910, therefore, United Fruit adopted a different approach. Sam Zemurray suddenly arrived in Honduras. To some extent he was on a mission of his own. He was determined to go back into the jungle and enrich himself further by producing his own bananas. But he was heavily indebted to United Fruit, with whom he had been in clandestine alliance since United Fruit had sold his company back to him in return for an IOU.
Zemurray had two hundred thousand dollars to invest, some of which had been raised from banks in Mobile, New Orleans and New York. The rest came from ‘secondary financiers’, loan sharks charging interest rates of fifty per cent. He bought expanses of virgin land and went to Tegucigalpa to claim the usual tax concessions. Without them, the jungle clearance work, the drainage and irrigation, the building of railways and workers’ huts and all the other paraphernalia of banana production would have been simply impossible.
For some reason, difficult to understand from the perspective of the Banana Man and United Fruit, the Hondurans turned him down. Zemurray was especially perplexed; he faced financial ruin.
O. Henry was first to use the term ‘banana republic’, in his only novel, Cabbages and Kings (1904). The popular and prolific US short-story writer referred to the ‘maritime banana republic’ of Anchuria, which was his imaginary version of Honduras. He portrayed it as a place of friendly natives and loveable rogues, the latter mainly from the United States.
O. Henry had lived in Puerto Cortés and met these adventurers. He was on the run from the law himself, and later returned to the US to face a charge of stealing funds from the bank in Texas where he had worked as a clerk. He served a three-year jail sentence, though subsequent suggestions were that his offence was more a bookkeeping error than a crime. When he wrote Cabbages and Kings, and was being charitable about its characters, he was seeking similar redemption for himself.
O. Henry wrote at the end of his book of a coup d’état in Anchuria orchestrated by the ‘Vesuvius Fruit Company’. He described the company in mildly critical but overall understanding tones: ‘the power that forever stood with chiding smile and uplifted finger to keep Anchuria in the class of good children’. And its coup was for the best of reasons: by the gift of the company a tyrant was removed, the right man found to replace him and everyone’s best interests served.
The tale played well to his readership. If US public opinion developed a contemporary view on United Fruit’s role and that of the US itself in Central America, O. Henry played his part in framing it.
In Cortés he came across the likes of Lee Christmas, son of a Louisiana cotton planter from near Baton Rouge. Christmas had come to Honduras to drive trains on John C. Trautwine’s railway but was colour-blind and at some disadvantage in a vocation dependent on signals and flags. He went into mercenary matters, had a knack for it and enjoyed uncommon luck. In one rebellion Christmas had been captured and put before a firing squad. ‘Don’t bury my body!’ he responded to the request for his final wish: ‘so the buzzards can shit me on your heads’, or words to similar effect. His captors were impressed, possibly unnerved, and let him go.
Christmas had worked for ex-President Bonilla, now banished. He had been made a general, rode a white horse on ceremonial days and a dark blue uniform tailored in Paris. He had been Bonilla’s head of security in Tegucigalpa. Christmas had once foiled a plot against Bonilla, so it was written, when he stormed the congress, arrested several deputies and threw them in jail. But he was more at home in the sweaty climes of the coast. The company he kept included Guy ‘Machine-gun’ Molony of New Orleans. Molony had gone to fight with the British in South Africa during the Boer Wars at the turn of the century. Twice injured, once nearly fatally, he had returned to be nearer home and hawk his passion for rapid fire around the revolutions of Central America. Both Christmas and Molony relished such fights. It was just a question of finding someone to finance them.
When, in 1910, Sam Zemurray materialised in Honduras with his two hundred thousand dollars and his plan for jungle development, it turned out that it was not the Hondurans who rejected his request for tax concessions at all. Honduras was only playing to a script written by Washington, and what happened next amounted to the United Fruit Company and Zemurray making war on their own government.
Such revolutions as had deposed ex-President Bonilla in 1907, and such ruses as had left railwayman Trautwine a rich man, had also left Honduras deeply in debt, not least to bankers in Europe. Washington feared that those bankers’ countries might just be inspired militarily to intervene on their behalf and collect the money.
To deter such a threat, the US government had a plan, part of its present policy of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’. Some reputable agency, appointed by Washington, would occupy Honduras’s custom houses and, with the full agreement of the home country, maximise and collect its tax revenues. For an agreed and generous fee, this agency would make sure that foreign bankers and other creditors were paid and, therefore, eliminate the need for aggressive intervention. The scheme was in the hands of President Taft’s foreign affairs specialist, Philander Knox, the secretary of state, and it was called the ‘Knox Plan’.
The reputable (if not universally regarded as such) agency appointed to set up shop in the Honduran counting houses was J. P. Morgan, the bankers. When Zemurray requested tax concessions, therefore, it was J. P. Morgan that turned him down. It was a bank and it was in Honduras for the serious purpose of organising the nation’s finances, not listening to fanciful schemes of plantations rising from the jungle.
Zemurray reacted furiously. A lone entrepreneur, he argued, he faced bankruptcy at the hands of a ‘nasty trust’. He was the spirit of American enterprise, not some ‘favourite son of J. P. Morgan’, he raged: ‘I’ve never even met Mr Morgan.’ He sent lobbyists to meet whoever they could while loitering in the halls of Congress. He came to Washington himself, and took his plea directly to secretary of state Knox. No record suggests he ever met Knox. According to Zemurray, their encounter led to a meeting of minds. Knox, he said, even gave the nod to his next course of action, which was hardly likely since it entailed rudely abandoning the Knox Plan. The Banana Man planned to buy a boat, fill it with assorted mercenaries and crooks and overthrow the US-supported Honduran government itself.
Bonilla waited in exile in New Orleans. With him were Christmas and Molony, minus his machine-gun, since they were under observation by the US secret service. Zemurray purchased a large motorised yacht called the Hornet, built in the 1890s for one of the railway robber barons. It had also seen service for the US Navy in the Spanish-American War. On an uncommonly cold winter’s night around the New Year of 1911, Bonilla and friends waved the Hornet off from the quay. The boat’s master had lodged an official sailing plan for a small excursion eastwards along the Gulf Coast.
Bonilla, Christmas and Molony repaired to Madame May Evans’s lodgings of entertainment on Basin Street in the old quarter. The secret service agent tailing them watched shivering from across the street till the early hours. When he phoned his office – ‘It’s nothing but a drunken party’ – he was told to go home. Within minutes, Bonilla’s party had left Madame May’s to take a fast launch also provided by Zemurray. They outpaced a watching vessel of the coastguard and caught up with the Hornet off Biloxi, Mississippi.
The three friends landed near Roatán in the Honduran Bay Islands. They joined rebel forces to begin an assault on the nearby port of Trujillo. William Walker, ‘King of Nicaragua’, had been put against its castle wall and shot in the 1860s. A question hung over whether this mission would enjoy better luck. A gunboat, the USS Tacoma, seized the Hornet. Bonilla and comrades, however, were allowed to go on their way. The Tacoma’s lingering offshore presence proved a better deterrent to the Honduran defence forces, many members of which did not emerge from their coastal forts.
United Fruit landed a company of men and guns raised by Minor Keith from company plantations in Guatemala. Puerto Cortés, meanwhile, was alert to the appearance of adopted sons Christmas and Molony from across the eastern horizon. In sporadic fighting one US resident was killed. Talks to ‘separate the sides’, or rather, to arrange for the government’s step-down, were held aboard the USS Tacoma. Thus a force of ‘patriots’ marched off triumphant on the ascending road to Tegucigalpa.
His plan scuppered, Knox promised a ‘full investigation’. At the same time, President Taft had no desire to get involved in such far-flung events. Washington adopted the course of least resistance. What was the point in doing otherwise? All that was happening was that control of a small and largely unknown country’s affairs was passing from the hands of a large US banking house to an aspirant bunch of Banana Men. At first blush, it even appeared that the cause against oppressive big business was being served.
The Honduran coup successfully carried out, Zemurray had no trouble getting his tax concessions and go-ahead to develop his lands. Elections were staged to confirm Bonilla as president and he granted Zemurray whatever he wanted. The Banana Man was put in charge of national finances, his first job being to raise the government loan that would pay his expenses incurred in the invasion.
Perhaps the keenest protests against the coup came from an unlikely quarter. The US entrepreneurs of the Atlantic Coast had initially supported the exercise. It had seemed perfectly fine to them that a force with interests like theirs was keeping Honduras ‘in the class of good children’. Until they realised just who that force was. Behind Sam Zemurray loomed the might of United Fruit.
The company denied all involvement in events. Yet, for a party that had nothing to do with anything, United Fruit was handsomely rewarded. Zemurray presented the company with two large concessions of land, at Tela and Trujillo. With them the Banana Man cleared his debts – and United Fruit was soon hacking its way into the Honduran interior.
The Honduran invasion marked an important development in United Fruit’s world. Costa Rica and Guatemala had previously succumbed to banana republicanism through a mix of happenstance, ill fortune and stealth. Panama had had its ‘insurrection’, but conspiracy and violence were more the means by which Honduras had been pulled into the company fold. For good measure, US marines, briefly sent to Honduras to ‘keep the peace’, were soon landing south along Central America’s Atlantic coast in Nicaragua, a country deemed to have been causing too much trouble in the region. The marines were to stay in Nicaragua for over twenty years.
The events of 1911 in Honduras brought to an end what might be termed the United Fruit Company’s ‘nice guy’ period. There would be little more of that. United Fruit had established its power and was of every mind to wield it.
* If many read it, few copied him. Most of the world’s railways are built on either a standard or narrow gauge. Trautwine had his own, known as ‘bastard gauge’.
6
Taming the Enclave
United Fruit much preferred to do things its way, which on its distant enclaves was generally possible. Inefficient and bungling, the state lacked the company’s understanding and touch, and any interference was ignored.
One sphere in which United Fruit excelled was in the handling of labour. It had its own labour laws and any that its host countries might have had were suspended in United Fruit’s areas. It hired, fired and controlled through its own security forces, a network of charge-hands, superintendents, police and spies. The latter were known as oidos en el suelo, ‘ears in the ground’, whose function was not only to be listening out for political troublemakers, but also those who complained too much about working conditions.
United Fruit had recruited far and wide in its effort to discover the most cost-effective and productive workforce. Minor Keith’s first experiments with ill-fated recruits from the sleazier side of New Orleans had succeeded in little more than reducing the size of the US criminal fraternity.
In Costa Rica, General Guardia had urged him to import reliable Europeans, especially Swiss, Germans and British. Instead Keith had pursued the cheaper option of getting Costa Rica to overturn laws forbidding Asian immigration. Itinerant Chinese had built the US’s transcontinental railroad but had raised fears that suddenly hordes of them would flood into Central America and the Caribbean. The Chinese were duly allowed into Costa Rica, to become the worst treated of all workers on the railroad. Regarded as racially inferior, they suffered the more for being far from home and from anywhere where they could lodge a complaint. ‘I present to you in irons the following Chinese,’ wrote a works superintendent to Keith of one group who had committed some unspecified offence, ‘whip them as you see fit.’
The Italians Keith hired from Piedmont were thought to be of a higher breed. His application to the Costa Rican government to allow them in commended them for being ‘from a cold climate’: they were in the habit of working hard to keep warm. They would also be ‘bettering the racial stock’ of Costa Rica by mixing ‘with the rest of the natives’. He drew a comparison with the government recently importing pedigree cattle to improve local herds.
Race became a key issue. In Guatemala, Highland Indians were ‘weak’. At home they might walk miles each day up and down their volcanoes carrying firewood and water, but they couldn’t adapt to conditions on the plains. Ladinos didn’t arrive looking for work on the banana plantations till the jungle had been cleared and the hospital built. Held to be among the most useless were Afro-Americans, ‘uppity’ and spoiled by their association with US life. Other black labour was indirectly tainted. Caribbeans who had worked on the Panama Canal under US management had been ‘pampered’ by the experience.
Thus the British West Indian surged to the top of the most popular worker list, not only because of his physical resilience. He was said to be ‘extremely courteous’. This was attributed to a ‘triumph of empire’, its assumed old decencies and manners, and also to Keith’s ‘charisma’. Keith took on a guise akin to that of an imperial viceroy. With his plans to build a railway the length of the region, he acquired a new nomenclature: the ‘Cecil Rhodes of Central America’.
The reality behind the legend was that the Jamaicans caused trouble and they complained about conditions, sometimes to the British back in Jamaica and occasionally to passing ships of the Royal Navy. They could always take a steamer home, or move on to different work in, say, Panama. But work at home was not plentiful or well paid. If they could find employment on the Caribbean islands, amid the sugar gluts and other economic crises, they were likely to be paid twenty cents a day.
United Fruit paid such wages for one to two hours’ work. Yet the company did not lose. Following the Civil War, United Fruit served the function of ‘exporting’ and, as it were, ‘rebranding’ slavery. The old system had become regarded as both brutal and inefficient. It was expensive to have a workforce around whether there was work to be done or not and expecting bed and board. In the new era, United Fruit provided basic bunkhouse facilities, hired and fired at will and had its workers spend their wages at the company store. United Fruit paid in ‘scrip’, pieces of paper for exchange at the store where the company named its prices. The stores made good profit. Their standards varied, some being just rough counters where workers bought basic items. Others were department stores, with silk shirts and ties on the counters, tropical suits and felt hats displayed on dummies and, in some, comfy chairs peculiarly ranged on upper shelves. Prices for such items were out of reach for all except the white managerial few.
