The Fish That Ate the Whale (32 page)

Doris and her husband had a child, Samuel Zemurray Stone, and he, too, became a scholar of Central American history. A member of the Princeton Class of 1954, Sam Stone published several books, including
The Heritage of the Conquistadors: Ruling Classes in Central America from Conquest to the Sandinistas
and
Telltale Stories from Central America: Cultural Heritage, Political Systems, and Resistance in Developing Countries.
It's strange to read Sam Stone's books about the isthmus. He wrote as if he had no connection to the story, as if every person gets a clean start. Some passages feel like condemnations of his own grandfather, the source of the wealth that made such musing possible. “Many outsiders continue to repeat that these countries need and want foreign investment,” wrote Stone, who died in Costa Rica in 1996, “and the constant discord between the United Fruit Company … and most of the Central American governments passes almost unnoticed in the United States.… In spite of a variety of expressions of such sentiments, United States (and Japanese) corporations in Central America, due to the small size of the Isthmian countries, still aspire to become the biggest employers. Although they provide foreign exchange and create jobs, it hurts the Central American to make him feel he has not been capable of utilizing his own resources, and foreign interference in national politics adds insult to injury.”

Sam Stone's most interesting theory regards the political dynamics of the region. Having traced the genealogies of powerful local leaders, he showed that the countries of Central America have always been ruled by a handful of families, each of which can trace its roots back to a conquistador who traveled with Cortés. Starting around 1910, these families, who long ruled in partnership with the military, began to be replaced by banana men, who used their wealth and influence to strike their own deals with the generals, overthrowing the aristocrats, becoming aristocrats themselves. Unlike the old families, the banana royalty had no roots in the region. In this way, the ancient regime was superseded by a band of capitalists, who got rich and got out, and whose only obligation was to the shareholders back in Boston or New Orleans. (“All we cared about was dividends.”)

Sam Stone had two children, the great-granddaughters of Sam the Banana Man, whom they never knew: Alison Stone of El Salvador, who is on the board of Tulane, and Stephanie Stone Feoli, a historian of Latin American art, who lives in New Orleans, where I met her while working on this book. We talked in a coffee shop on the campus of Tulane. In her forties, slender and pretty, she did not have much to say about her great-grandfather—a few legends, a few myths, a general sense of him as a hero to some, a more complicated figure to others. Talking to her, you realize that Samuel Zemurray occupies a strange middle ground. He died a long time ago. There are very few people alive who knew him face-to-face. But he's not yet the true historical figure he will become when the last living witness is gone. There are four rungs: newly dead; dead but remembered; dead and all those who knew you dead; dead and all those who knew those who knew you dead. When I asked Stephanie Feoli about her great-grandfather's legacy, she told me it was too soon to tell. Everything that happens makes the past a different story. For Stephanie's daughter, her great-great-grandfather will be a relic, less known to her than the dead presidents of the United States. That's the way a living, breathing, jungle-clearing, government-toppling banana man turns into just another picture on the wall.

At the time of his death, Sam Jr. was married with two young children, Anne and Sam III. In the years that followed, the family evaporated. Anne went first, in a car crash. She was a young woman, newly married. It was another disaster piled on the shoulders of Sam Jr.'s widow, Margaret Thurston Pickering, who was fragile to begin with. She traveled in elite circles, flirting with madness. She served on the staff of Norbert Wiener, a storied scientist at MIT, and worked at
The Atlantic
as a manuscript reader. Her last address was the Robert B. Brigham Hospital in Boston, where she died in June 1968, at age fifty-four. Her obituary, which ran in the
Times
(“Mrs. Zemurray Jr., Widow of Major”), made no mention of her daughter, which struck me as sad. It was as if Anne Zemurray had never been born.

This left only Sam III, a little boy alone, the sole survivor. I have seen him in a picture that ran in
Life
in 1951, where he is posed with his sister and grandparents—Sarah and Sam—on a field in the Zemurray plantation. You look at this picture as if looking back at the past, the past not only of this family but also of the country and of the South: the boy at the feet of the tycoon, his grandmother and sister, the dogs, the stiff smiles, the mackinaw coats, the tall grass and oak trees. It's a vision from another world. I saw him again in a documentary about the house at 2 Audubon Place. Dignified and old, he looked distant and thoughtful. But the years in between are something of a mystery. Sam III's family was among the most notable in the South, but he drifted away.

When I tracked him down in Savannah, Georgia, where he has lived with his wife for many years, he was stewing over an NPR interview he had recently heard in which a historian described Samuel Zemurray in the worst terms. “Robber baron,” that was the word that particularly galled Sam III. He repeated it as if stunned by the collision between his family narrative—Sam, the fish that ate the whale—and the public narrative that has taken shape over the years. At first, this made Sam III eager to talk to me. He would clarify, explain, set the record straight. We made plans, considered dates. I would fly down, sit on the porch, stay in a country motel, drive a rented Taurus to his house each morning, drink lemonade with mint leaf. Perhaps I would buy a seersucker suit. But as time went by, Sam III took longer and longer to return my calls, and I never could pin him down to a date. Then he stopped returning calls altogether. I left message after message, sent e-mail after e-mail.

I finally got a call from a relative of the Zemurrays. He had been in touch with the family and wanted to explain why Sam III had gone silent. This is from memory—I was in a hotel in Miami—so I won't use quotation marks, but here's the gist: Sam III and the people around him had decided it was not in his best interest to talk. Sam had suffered a lot of tragedy in his life—so many people around him had died—and in such a situation, the healthiest course is probably to avoid the past altogether.

*   *   *

Among other things, I had wanted to ask Sam III about the patriarch's heritage, and his work for Israel. Did any of this survive in the family, or was it like the skim on top of the pond that cooks off by eight a.m.?

When you ask why the Jews, of all the people of the ancient world, have persisted into modern times, you can come up with various reasons: maybe it's the power of the tradition, maybe it's the will of God, or maybe it's just that Jews had no choice, were locked in ghettos, confined to towns and professions where they had to marry other Jews. Even when the walls came down in Europe, Jews were hemmed in by prejudice and fear. But in America, where we're all mutts, Jews were offered real freedom: not only to worship and travel and work, but from history. Jews could be Jews in America, or they could stop being Jews, which, for many, turned out to be the ultimate emancipation.

To me, Sam Zemurray's life is the true story of the American dream—not only of the success but of the price paid for the ambition that led to that success. By the people of the isthmus, by the men who battled him in the Banana War, and by Zemurray himself. Did Sam really think he could get away without paying? He scaled the heights, but lost so much in the process—first his son; then his family, which came apart a sheet at a time. As Arthur Miller wrote in
The Price
, “If you don't understand the viewpoint, you don't understand the price.” For Zemurray, that viewpoint, to some degree, would always remain the world as seen from the window of the farmhouse in Russia, where every Jew knew that without a family, without a legacy, without a son to say Kaddish over you in the end, even the greatest man was nothing.

*   *   *

Of course, Sam Zemurray's public legacy was not his children or grandchildren. It was his work, all gathered under the banner of United Fruit. Which must have made it painful to see the company fail in the final years. From his porch in New Orleans, he could watch a lifetime of toil swept away by the incoming tide: Guevara, Castro. This was a man who left and returned several times—because work is life and retirement is accepting the shortcomings and failures as part of the permanent record. When Zemurray took over United Fruit in 1932, the company was fading. It would have gone under if he had not breathed it full of energy. He gave it twenty-five years of prosperity. But it was his spirit that kept the beast moving. When he went away for good, the company began to die.

Zemurray sold all his stock in United Fruit soon after he retired. He wanted a clean break, to end his life in the business, and so on, but it was more than that. Zemurray did not feel his money was in good hands at the company. He knew what was coming after him and did not like it. He had the melancholy of a person who has no choice but to leave the world in the wrong hands. The men who would follow him were smaller, weaker, products of a different culture. “When the disparities between styles became too great,” wrote Thomas McCann, “Zemurray finally sold out all his Fruit Company stock. He was too old to fight battles. [His] career was bracketed by men who failed to grasp what United Fruit was about and who failed at leadership.”

 

21

Bay of Pigs

A corporation is a product of a particular place and a particular time. U.S. Steel was Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Microsoft was Seattle in the 1980s. It's where and when their sense of the world was fixed. The company brain is hardwired. Which is why a corporation, though conceivably immortal, tends to have a life span, tends to age and die. Unless remade by a new generation of pioneers—in which case it's a different company—most corporations do not outlive the era of their first success. When the ideas and assumptions prevalent at the time of their founding go out of fashion, the company fades.

United Fruit/Cuyamel was a product of Central America circa 1911. No matter the problem, the top executives behaved as if they were still operating in the Honduras of Manuel Bonilla. A concession, a bribe, a mercenary army, a revolution—always the broad sword, the blunt instrument. It was a methodology that became impossible in the wake of Guatemala, though few seemed to realize it until they tried the same trick in Cuba.

Fidel Castro's father, Ángel, worked for United Fruit as a tenant farmer, growing sugarcane for the company and sending his son to U.F. schools. Fidel was a product of El Pulpo, in other words, ripening beside the stalks, the son of the caretaker who will return to depose the master and walk in muddy boots across the carpets of the big house. In 1959, Castro nationalized every U.F. plantation, building, and piece of equipment in Cuba. The company estimated its losses at $60 million. The CIA, still commanded by Allen Dulles, put together a plan. Approved by Eisenhower, green-lighted by Kennedy, it amounted to a group of Cuban exiles, Brigade 2506, landing in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, sparking a popular uprising that would hopefully overthrow Castro. Called Operation Zapata, it was led by Howard Hunt, who secured money, guns, and ships from United Fruit. According to McCann, a New Orleans–based seaman named J. Arthur Marquette, who served as U.F.'s go-between with the CIA, met with Robert Kennedy. Marquette later complained about Kennedy's arrogance and “dirty long hair.”

Zemurray was not involved in this. He was old and ailing, had sold his stock. If he played a role, it was by his absence. In the fiasco that followed, Zemurray was in the same position as Eisenhower: both men created a system no one else could control; both had been irreplaceable.

Brigade 2506 reached the Bay of Pigs on the morning of April 17, 1961. Fourteen hundred men were carried on four ships, two of them supplied by United Fruit. It was a bad place to attack, isolated, with reefs close to shore. Several skiffs were damaged before the exiles even made it to the beach. They had to wade in heavy equipment. Many reached land exhausted. They dug foxholes and tried to survive as bombs fell. Dulles asked the president for emergency air support. Kennedy refused—this is where he drew the line with the agency. Brigade 2506 surrendered the following morning: 114 dead, 1,200 taken prisoner. U.F. lost both its ships. It was the company's last attempt at regime change, a pathetic bookend to Honduras in 1911.

United Fruit started selling its property in the Torrid Zone soon after. What Arbenz had taken by force, the company began relinquishing on its own, returning to the model that preceded Preston and Keith: instead of owning land, hospitals, and towns, instead of dealing with the challenge of life on the isthmus, the company would contract local farmers—“associate producers”—to supply bananas. U.F. sold 37,440 acres in 1962, a year after the Bay of Pigs. By 1967, the company, which once owned three million acres on the isthmus, owned less than eighty-two thousand. By 1970, the company was out of the region as a landowner altogether.

I visited Honduras, stood in the ruins of the compounds, wandered through the banana towns, which were as forlorn as ghost towns in Colorado. It was a kingdom that ended in the way of the British Empire, slowly, then all at once. Everyone came, then everyone left. The country is just as poor as the first banana man found it, rutted roads lined with shanties, overgrown fields, empty swimming pools. The golf courses of the fruit company have been abandoned. Switch grass grows tall on the fairways.

 

22

The Earth Eats the Fish That Ate the Whale

Thomas Lemann, who worked for Zemurray in the final years of his life, is one of the few people still living who spoke to the Banana Man as Moses spoke to the Lord. He last saw Sam at a funeral in 1961. “He couldn't walk anymore, not even with a cane,” Mr. Lemann told me. “And he could barely talk. He was in a wheelchair. He had been powerful, but it was gone. When I bent down to shake his hand, he couldn't even hold my grip. His mouth was open and his eyes were glazed.”