Banana (8 page)

I
F UNITED FRUIT WAS INVENTIVE,
with Minor Keith figuring out how to draw profit from the jungle and Andrew Preston developing technologies that put a banana in every lunchbox possible, then Samuel Zemurray was a gold-plated tough guy. Though the immigrant—who was born Schmuel Zmurri in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russia (now Chişin
u, Moldova), arrived in the United States in 1892, and transformed himself into a banana tycoon in less than twenty years—wasn't a thug, he certainly knew how to use rowdies and persons of ill-repute to his advantage.

Zemurray's ambitious rise began with hard labor: His first job was selling household merchandise on his back, door-to-door, in Mobile, Alabama. He quickly found that there was more profit in fruit than pots and pans, carving a tiny niche in the banana market by buying bruised and too-ripe-to-transport bananas and selling them to local grocers. His first load, a full boxcar, cost him $150. His profit after selling that initial shipment of fruit: $35.

By 1910 Zemurray was importing fresh bananas to the United States, but his operation was nothing like United Fruit's. Instead of a gleaming fleet of white ships, Zemurray worked his way up to a pair of ramshackle steamers; instead of nation-sized chunks of land, Zemurray's cargo came from a modest five thousand acres of cleared forest in Honduras, alongside the Cuyamel River. Zemurray named his company Cuyamel Fruit Company after the waterway. He ran into trouble almost immediately and not with competing banana companies or reluctant local officials: The U.S. government objected to Zemurray's presence. Honduras was in debt, and the American secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, was working to have J. P. Morgan and Company take over the Honduran customs service. The scheme would have allowed any tariffs or duties collected in the Central American nation to be directly funneled to the U.S. bank. Zemurray was worried that Morgan would overtax him—his banana business ran on tight margins, just like United Fruit's—and appealed for an exception. Knox not only rebuffed the banana entrepreneur but warned Zemurray, who did not like to be warned of anything, to keep in line.

Today, Honduras is one of the poorest and least-visited countries in Central America; the countryside remains sleepy, and the banana plantations seem little changed from how they must have looked almost a century ago. The Honduras that Zemurray grew his first bananas in was more like a free-for-all. With no extradition treaty to the United States, the country became a haven for “people on the run,” wrote Lester Langley and Thomas Schoonover in 1995, in
The Banana Men
. That meant an assortment of “Americans, Chinese, Syrians, and Turks; soldiers of fortune and tropical tramps,” they explain, adding, “Honduras was especially attractive to bank embezzlers.”

The country and much of the region was also filled with mercenaries—usually from the United States—who acted as police, militiamen, and enforcers; they'd played a huge part in the frequently violent relationship between the United States and Central America in the nineteenth century. The soldiers-for-hire were known as filibusters, after a Dutch term meaning “freebooter” or “pirate.” The most infamous of these was William Walker, who shot his way into the presidency of Nicaragua, where he tried to establish a slave state. After being deposed, he was captured in Honduras and executed by firing squad. Other privateers didn't simply escape Walker's fate—they prospered. Zemurray, whose nickname was the rather benign Sam the Banana Man, employed two of the most legendary of these Central American filibusters: Lee Christmas and Guy “Machine Gun” Molony.

The thirty-seven-year-old Christmas had lived in Honduras for several years. He'd worked as an engineer on the banana railroads—he'd been fired from a similar job in the United States because he was color blind and couldn't read the signals on the tracks—and happily jumped into an insurrection when a battle between government forces and rebels suddenly erupted around his train. Christmas already had grievances with Honduran officialdom, so he threw his lot in with the insurgents, acquitting himself by killing several soldiers and ending up as one of the region's most feared fixers—available and well used in multiple exploits and escapades, both domestically and in neighboring countries.

Molony was quite a bit younger than Christmas, but he made a good partner. At age sixteen, he ran away from his native New Orleans to fight in South Africa's Boer War, gaining an aptitude with his namesake weapon. On his return to the United States, Molony became a police officer but found the work uninteresting: not enough action. He resigned and set off for Central America, according to his personal papers, now archived at Tulane University, seeking “adventure…fame…or the hope of future material rewards.”

Both Molony and Christmas had experienced plenty of both (and the rewards too) by the time Zemurray sought them out, as he searched for a way to outsmart both the U.S. State Department and the sitting Honduran government. (Knox, suspicious that Zemurray would ignore warnings to stay away from Honduras, had dispatched U.S. Secret Service agents to New Orleans, where Zemurray lived at the time, to monitor the banana entrepreneur.)

In the context of over half a century of American adventures in Central America, what Zemurray planned might have seemed commonplace, but it remains one of the most audacious escapades of the era. According to his United Fruit Historical Society biography, Zemurray and the two mercenaries met at a New Orleans bawdy house. While the Secret Service agents monitored the brothel's front door, the three men slipped out the back, making their way to a waiting boat. Laden with ammunition, the conspirators sailed south. On their arrival in Honduras, the trio—who'd also brought along former Honduran president Manuel Bonilla, who Zemurray had recruited for the plot—drummed up supporters and mounted an insurrection. Six weeks later, Bonilla was again in control of the country. One of his first acts was to sign a bill that allowed Zemurray to operate, tax free, across a broad portion of the nation. (After the fighting ended, Lee Christmas settled down, becoming a general in the Honduran army, and marrying Ida Culotta, the eighteen-year-old daughter of one of Zemurray's colleagues.)

UNITED FRUIT DIDN'T LIKE COMPETITION
,
and it usually dealt with rivals in the standard way: It crushed them in price wars. It had gained partial control of the British banana market by purchasing part of Elders & Fyffes, the company's largest rival in Jamaica (the company, now simply Fyffes, remains the United Kingdom's largest banana importer, though Chiquita sold it to an Irish conglomerate in 1986). In 1912, United Fruit drove Atlantic Fruit, its chief rival in Costa Rica, into bankruptcy, taking possession of the stricken company's land, workers, and railroads.

But Sam Zemurray was too small. Andrew Preston, the proper Bostonian, barely admitted to knowing who the foreign-born, Jewish Zemurray was when he testified at a congressional antitrust hearing in 1910. Even though United Fruit also had holdings in Honduras, it still didn't appear to regard Zemurray as a proper rival (and wouldn't, for at least fifteen more years). The company had other battles to fight. American soldiers were stationed on its behalf as police officers in Panama in 1918 and as union busters in Guatemala—where it was granted a hundred-kilometer-wide ministate—two years later. Troops were twice called on to “monitor” elections in Honduras and returned to Panama in 1925 to break up a plantation strike.

BY THE LATE 1920S
,
United Fruit was worth over $100 million. It had 67,000 employees and owned 1.6 million acres of land. It had business interests in thirty-two countries. It operated everything from churches to laundries. It had strung 3,500 miles of telegraph and telephone lines, including a system of ship-to-shore transmission it invented specifically for the purpose of making sure banana loaders were ready, at the docks, when cargo vessels came in. Time is of the essence with perishable fruit. As soon as the workers received the signal, they'd work, without rest, for up to seventy-two hours, harvesting and loading the fruit. The company was selling bananas as far away as Paris and was also becoming a market leader in sugar, cocoa, and coffee. In addition to running his fruit business, Andrew Preston was president of two banks, one insurance company, and a steel manufacturer. Minor C. Keith had become so powerful that he was called by many “the uncrowned king of Central America.”

Bananas continued to change life in the United States. Items that we consider mealtime standards today didn't exist until United Fruit invented them. Company research found that mothers were feeding mashed bananas to their babies, for example. So United Fruit hired doctors to endorse the practice and launched advertisements to drive the point home. In 1924, writes Virginia Scott Jenkins, the company scored what would be its biggest culinary hit: The United Fruit test kitchens suggested that the perfect breakfast for a busy, modern family would consist of bananas sliced into corn flakes with milk. It wasn't just the recipe that broke new ground. It was also the coupons, pioneered by the company, packed inside cereal boxes (redeemable for free bananas that the cereal companies, not the fruit importer, paid for). The company made sure that children knew about bananas, too. It set up an official “education department,” devoted to publishing textbooks and curriculum materials that subtly provided information about the fruit.

United Fruit also added a new element to its political strategy. If military action was impractical (U.S. troops might be unavailable or force precluded by situations on the ground), Central America's geography became an ally. The region's countries were small and easy to move between. There were plenty of natural ports on both the eastern and western coasts, and bananas could be grown just about anywhere land could be cleared and a railroad could be laid. If a government became particularly balky, the company would simply threaten to go next door.

But one thing United Fruit couldn't control was nature. Not long after bananas added themselves as a third party in cereal and milk, the troubles growers were beginning to have with an aggressive malady became public. One headline in
The New York Times
read: “Banana Disease Ruins Plantations—No Remedy is Available—Whole Regions Have Been Laid Waste and Improvements Abandoned by Growers.” Fallow farms weren't just fallen stems and the dried-out remains of banana leaves. Railroad tracks were torn up, and boxcars sat unused and rusting. The houses banana executives lived in stood empty, and the villages where banana workers worked were turned into ghost towns. The
New York Times
article went on to compare the scene to “a leper colony.”

W
ITH LAND FOR THE TAKING
in Central America, there were few signs at home of a banana shortage. The fruit had become so beloved that—as in Uganda today—people began to sing songs about it.

It began in New York City's Tin Pan Alley. The district was more than just a place where music was created. It was, said a 1983 article in
American Heritage
magazine, where the
idea
of a pop hit came into being. (The historic song-writing zone, whose name came from the clattering din that filled the streets surrounding it, was actually a moving melodic marketplace. It started in downtown Manhattan but by the 1950s had migrated north to Times Square, where it finally vanished at the dawn of the rock-and-roll era.) Thousands of ballads, show tunes, and novelty ditties were churned out in the Alley by ambitious lyricists, up-and-coming composers, and reprobate vaudevillians.

As with the banana industry, Tin Pan Alley was powered by revolutionary technologies that brought the general public items once available only to the rich. The first commercial radio station opened in Pittsburgh in 1922. Prices for the Victrola “talking machine,” a record player, had dropped to as little as $15 for compact and stylish units (in current dollars, about the same price as today's basic iPod). Americans were developing a nearly insatiable appetite for musical entertainment, cut in spiraling grooves on flat discs and cylinders made of shellac (and later of vinyl). “The consumption of songs in America is as constant as the consumption of shoes, and the demand is similarly met by factory output,” wrote the
New York Times
in 1923.

Most of the tens of thousands of songs produced by Tin Pan Alley are long forgotten. Those that remain in memory are classics: Irving Berlin's “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” along with George M. Cohan's “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

“Yes, We Have No Bananas” will never be viewed with such piety. But it was a much bigger sensation.

The song was churned out in the spring of 1923 by composers Frank Silver and Irving Cohn. It first became a hit on sheet music, designed to be performed at home (printed songs were the karaoke of their time). During the following months, at least four different recordings of the song emerged, most famously by the hugely popular comic singer and actor Eddie Cantor. “There is a calm and deliberate, even a scientific, inquiry into why 97.3 percent of the great American Nation, at the present advanced state of civilization, devotes itself zestfully and with unanimity to singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,'” the
New York Times
article went on to say. The news story offers several possible causes, including vapidness, a national inferiority complex (manifested in a preference for lowbrow music), “infantile regression,” and “mob psychology.”

The origins of the song that led to this alarming state of affairs are somewhat cloudy. The melody was adapted from an 1860s sheet-music hit called “When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home,” which in turn was derived from, of all things, Handel's “Hallelujah Chorus” (you can actually hear traces of the classical work in the banana song if you hum one, then the other, in the same key:
hal-le-lu-jah…yes-we-have-no
). But there are several variations on the origin of the final singsong hit.

The most widely accepted version puts Frank Silver on a date; while visiting his girlfriend's home, he's bemused, then perturbed, by an underfoot kid brother who keeps repeating the title phrase, explaining that the amusingly mangled verbiage was something he'd heard uttered by an immigrant fruit vendor. A second starting point places Cohn and Silver at a speakeasy called the Blossom Heath Inn, forty minutes by train from Manhattan in Lynbrook, Long Island. In that account, the title is coined by a Greek grocer named Jimmy Costas, who used the phrase as a sort of verbal shoulder shrug when his shelves were fresh out of the tropical fruit. A 1931 account of the song's beginnings, published in
Harper's Magazine
editor Frederick Lewis Allen's
Only Yesterday
, mixes the two yarns: The keynote phrase was coined by an Italian fruit seller, repeated in a newspaper cartoon, and test-marketed by the songwriters in the Long Island suburbs before it finally made it to Broadway.

The song's symbolic origins, however, lie not in specific people or places, but in the question it suggests: Are bananas available?

The answer was yes—they're not.

Why would a grocer with plenty of supply—the song mentions onions and cabbages as well as “all kinds” of fresh produce—be unable to meet demand for what had, in the previous two decades, become America's favorite and most widely available fruit?

The malady that turned banana plantations into dust was beginning to have an effect on supply. These occasional shortages were barely noticed by shoppers, because banana companies were continuing to acquire land and plant new crops. But that process was accelerating to the point where a few public blips began to appear. It didn't mean an overall slowdown in banana consumption or an increase in prices. Instead, Americans got a happy song. Yet in the banana-growing nations, the results were increasingly harsh.