Banana (7 page)

T
HERE WAS A CLEAR SENSE
of manifest destiny in the building of the banana empire. It was both part of and, sometimes, the cause of an increasing assertion of control over Latin America by the United States. The Spanish-American War began one year before United Fruit was chartered. The fighting continued through the summer of 1898, climaxing with the charge by Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, near Santiago de Cuba. On August 12, Spain surrendered, and the United States gained control of the island, opening a naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Over the next thirty-five years, the U.S. military intervened in Latin America twenty-eight times: in Mexico; in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba in the Caribbean; and in Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador in Central America.

The biggest consequence of those incursions was to make the region safe for bananas. One of the first U.S. businesses to enter Cuba was United Fruit. The banana and sugar plantations it established would eventually encompass 300,000 acres. An 1899 article in the
Los Angeles Times
described Latin America as “Uncle Sam's New Fruit Garden,” offering readers insight into “How bananas, pineapples, and cocoanuts can be turned into fortunes.” A later story in that newspaper was more direct. The story's headline read: “Banana Growing…Returns of Wealth from Lazy Occupation Are Immense.” The headline's use of “lazy” makes the story seem like it was reported from a hammock. This assertion was made despite the fact that, while growing the fruit
was
easy compared to other crops, there was not even a hint of smooth sailing when it came to opening plantations or working in them, as thousands of native workers would have testified, had they been allowed to do so.

The workers had no such voice. Though the banana moguls exhibited some altruism, building hospitals and schools for their workers, the notion that the fruit companies were an unqualified benefit to the countries they controlled—as was frequently claimed—was surely disputable. The public knew little about events like the 1912 U.S. invasion of Honduras, which granted United Fruit broad rights to build railroads and grow bananas in the country. They weren't aware that in 1918 alone, U.S. military forces put down banana workers' strikes in Panama, Colombia, and Guatemala. For every direct intervention, there were two or three softer ones, accomplished by proxy through local armies and police forces controlled by friendly governments. One of the few observers to take note of the situation was Count Vay de Vaya of Hungary, who traveled the world as a representative of Pope Benedict XV during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Upon returning from a visit to Latin America, he described the banana as “a weapon of conquest.”

THE NEED FOR NEW PLACES
to grow bananas continued to be stoked by consumer desire. The banana was one of the first convenience foods. It fit nicely into the brown bags and lunchpails of a rapidly urbanizing America. The fruit was agreeable to just about everyone, from infants to old folks. It was also becoming the object of culinary innovation (or at least the creation of memorable treats).

In 1904 David Strickler, an apprentice pharmacist and soda fountain operator at a drugstore in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, began serving a concoction made of three scoops of ice cream nestled between halves of a banana. He charged ten cents for the creation and even had special boat-shaped dishes manufactured for serving the extra-large sundae. (His recipe for the dessert was one banana, cut lengthwise; scoops of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream; a drenching of chocolate, pineapple, and then strawberry sauce; and a final sprinkling of nuts and a trio of whipped cream dollops topped with cherries.)

Three years later, a version of the delicacy appeared at a restaurant owned by E. R. Hazard, 275 miles away, in Wilmington, Ohio. Hazard called his creation a “banana split.” Both towns now claim to have been the birthplace of the confection. Similar assertions have been made by Columbus, Ohio (1904) and Davenport, Iowa (1906). The debate continues, though the Pennsylvania town is reported to possess evidence of the treat's earlier provenance in the form of an invoice Strickler received for the oval dishes. At this writing, the document appears to have gone missing.

GROWERS WERE SO BUSY MEETING DEMAND
that they took little notice of a problem that was nipping at their heels. Beginning at the turn of the century, a malady, later identified as a fungus, started causing Gros Michel plants to wilt and die before they could bear fruit. Panama disease (it began to spread before it was given a name) was incurable and mysterious. It progressed slowly in some regions and moved with devastating speed in others. It wiped out every plantation in the South American coastal nation of Suriname in five years. In other parts of Latin America, the process spanned decades.

That bananas were endangered was as unknown to the typical American as the banana companies' political actions. (The same is true today, as disease spreads and banana companies attempt to win favor from local governments as part of a global trade war that has engulfed the industry). Another difficulty involving the fruit was far more public, however, and closer to home.

The downside to the banana's portability, according to historian Virginia Scott Jenkins, was that there was no place, other than the gutter, to discard what banana marketers had taken to describing as the “sanitary wrapper.” A discarded banana peel quickly became a gooey mess. People actually did slip, fall, and sometimes injure themselves when they stepped on them. What we know as a movie gag was real enough that in 1909 the St. Louis city council passed an ordinance prohibiting persons from “throwing or casting” a “banana rind” on public streets or sidewalks (another regulation the official body passed that year forbid anyone from allowing a “bear to run at large”). In a 1914 letter to his troops, British Boy Scout commissioner Roland Philipps suggested that a youngster's daily good turn might “consist in moving a piece of banana peel from the pavement.”

Such private efforts were of little help. It took a public agency to solve the banana peel problem. In New York, a former Civil War colonel named George Waring used his military experience to fashion the city's department of street sweeping. The wild pigs that once roamed the street, eating any organic matter they could find (this is not a joke), were replaced by uniformed workers, who tidied specific beats and deposited the waste they collected into public composting facilities. The program was the first large-scale recycling effort in the United States, with regulations strictly enforced by the New York Police Department. The system was eliminated during a post–World War I cash crunch; from that point on, banana peels—and anything else discarded in the city—were dumped into the ocean, burned, or sent to public landfills.

Over time, the sidewalk pratfall became less of a genuine hazard and more an essential element of slapstick comedy. Watching someone fly into the air and then go sprawling
was
funny, especially if it wasn't you. It appeared on the vaudeville stage first, then on the screen in 1921, in
The High Sign
with Buster Keaton. The gag was reprised dozens of times, to the greatest and most chaotic effect in
The Battle of the Century
(1927), featuring Laurel and Hardy. The mishap in that film launches what is generally considered the greatest pie-throwing melee in cinema history. Charlie Chaplin, who featured a slip in
The Pilgrim
, released in 1923, also understood that the joke got old quickly. A decade or so later, Charles MacArthur, writer of a film adaptation of
Wuthering Heights
, asked Chaplin how to make something so tired seem new: “How, for example, could I make a fat lady, walking down Fifth Avenue, slip on a banana peel and still get a laugh? It's been done a million times,” MacArthur asked. “Do I show first the banana peel, then the fat lady approaching, then she slips? Or do I show the fat lady first, then the banana peel, and then she slips?” Chaplin's answer: “Neither. You show the fat lady approaching,” he said. “Then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps OVER the banana peel and disappears down a manhole.”

AMERICANS SAW FEWER DISCARDED BANANA PEELS
,
but they ate more and more of the fruit. In the decade following 1900, consumption of bananas nearly tripled—from about 15 million bunches to over 40 million. It was an amazing feat. Bananas so outsold apples and oranges that, in 1913, the U.S. government attempted to tax the fruit at a nickel per bunch. That would amount to $2 million annually at a time when bananas cost less than $1 a bunch at wholesale. (The proposed levy was part of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act, which was designed to raise funds by imposing taxes on the sale of dozens of items.)

The idea was greeted with outrage. United Fruit had worked to make the banana a “fruit of the people,” positioning it as cheap, healthy, and convenient, according to historian Marcelo Bucheli. The company paraded executives before Congress, encouraged grassroots support—the National Housewives League, with 2 million members, made an impassioned plea—and convinced diplomats from banana-producing nations to protest directly to President Woodrow Wilson. On July 13, the
New York Times
weighed in: The banana was not only a staple food—and it was amoral to tax such comestibles—but also one of the few genuine pleasures available to the common man. “They are entitled to their little luxuries exactly because they are poor…[The banana] is not less a food because it is so toothsome and sweet.” In October 1913, Congress passed the law with the provisions on bananas removed. The act's most significant and wide-reaching provision, however—the enactment, for the first time in U.S. history, of a true personal income tax—was kept in place.

The banana was certainly healthy and convenient—and to consumers it was a bargain. They were far cheaper than apples, often selling for a quarter per dozen, about the price of two single apples. That the tropical fruit was cheaper was considered to be a source of both wonder and pride. In a January 27, 1913, editorial, the
Houston Post
asked: “How does it happen that the home-grown apple is placed beyond the reach of the average consumer and that the foreign-grown banana has increased in quality and decreased in price? The banana is a perishable fruit. It must be marketed immediately on importation, and the business is one which requires millions in investment and the risks incident to fleet sailing in water menaced by hurricanes and northers.”

The answer, the newspaper explained, was “no secret.” Bananas were produced on a huge scale and sold directly to consumers. The magnanimous, efficient banana companies understood that “there is more money for them in selling a huge total of product at a low net profit than there is in extracting a high profit from small sales at prices prohibitive to the average consumer.”

To the public, the banana companies weren't just smart or altruistic, they were heroic entities that uplifted every region they entered. A
New York Times
article published in 1924 implied that the reign of United Fruit would be remembered as a pinnacle of human achievement. The story, headlined “Lowly Banana Rebuilds an Empire,” described the presence of U.S. enterprises in Central America as “the rehabilitation of an ancient empire…that flourished long before Columbus.” The story continued: “The opening up of the humid lowlands of Central America by the new seaports, railroads, and banana plantations of the United Fruit Company is more than a story of business faith and commercial enterprise. It is a demonstration of empire building with a new ingredient capable of correcting the mistakes of the past.”

There are some apt comparisons between Central America's Mayas, whose reign peaked between 250 BC and AD 900, and the fruit company. Both introduced revolutionary technology (the Mayas invented written language and the numeric concept of zero), and both carved immense habitations out of raw jungle. When the new empire encountered the old, United Fruit was deferential, even reverent. After rediscovering the ancient city of Quiriga while it cleared jungle in Guatemala, the fruit company paid archaeologists to restore the ruins; the site is now a protected national park.

Yet there was an irony to these seemingly positive works. Relics were restored, but the descendants of the Mayas, many of whom spoke (and still speak) the ancients dialects of their ancestors, were exploited. Frederick Upham Adams, the man who as a child had seen his first banana at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, described the workers as “ignorant and physically deficient.” (Adams's accounts are stirring and well written; they are also heavily slanted toward the point of view of the colonial-minded banana producers.) Life expectancies for banana laborers were decreasing, while United Fruit's control over every facet of life in the region was reaching near-total levels.

The company rewarded those who cooperated, and began to behave with more and more brutality toward those who didn't. There was one clear way to distinguish between those who benefited from the company's growth and those who didn't. The lucky ones nicknamed the company
mamita
. Those who weren't so fortunate called it El Pulpo.