The Fish That Ate the Whale (14 page)

In the end, Dávila conceded power to a Honduran functionary named Francisco Bertrand, who would serve only until a presidential election could be held. A few months later, Bonilla won office in a landslide. He was inaugurated in Tegucigalpa on February 1, 1912. “Bonilla did not forget his benefactor,” reported
Life
. “One of his first official acts was to have congress give Zemurray concessions covering the next 25 years.”

Zemurray's settlement included permission to import any and all equipment duty-free; to build any and all railroads, highways, and other infrastructure he might need; a $500,000 loan to repay “all expenses incurred while funding the revolution”; as well as an additional 24,700 acres on the north coast of Honduras to be claimed at a later date. No taxes, no duties, free land—these were the conditions that would let Sam Zemurray take on United Fruit.

“Deposing [José Santos] Zelaya's government in Nicaragua [in 1909] had required the combined efforts of the [American] State Department, the navy, the marines, and President Taft,” wrote Stephen Kinzer in
Overthrow
. “In Honduras, Zemurray … [did] the job himself.”

By financing the overthrow of Dávila, Zemurray did more than relieve himself of taxes and duties: he entered his name in the black book of Latin American history. He had taken ownership of a nation, whether he realized it or not. As Kinzer explained, “No American businessman ever held a foreign nation's destiny so completely in his hands.” Over time, Zemurray would become more powerful than even the government of Honduras. When that happened, the people would begin to look to him to supply the sort of services usually supplied by the state: water, health, security, etc., things it would prove impossible to deliver. Every great victory carries the seed of ultimate defeat.

As for the issue that caused the war in the first place: Zemurray tried to refinance the national debt of Honduras himself, working with banks in New Orleans and Mobile to buy out British bondholders. In the end, he was able to chip away at the fringes, but the bulk remained and grew, accumulating interest. As of 1926, Honduras still owed $135 million on the railroad that went nowhere.

*   *   *

Manuel Bonilla did not serve his full term in office. Having contracted a strange tropical disease, he turned power back to Francisco Bertrand, fell into a fever, and died on March 21, 1913. Lee Christmas was at Bonilla's side, weeping and holding his hand.

Christmas, who'd risen to great power in Honduras, lost his influence when Bonilla expired. Christmas was fifty years old, living in the Palm Hotel in Puerto Cortés. His peak moment had been the surrender of that city. From there, every step was a station on the way to Calvary: government postings, marriages, divorces, gunfights, brawls. He split with Zemurray in 1916. No one knows the exact details. There was an argument, curses, threats. Christmas stormed out of the office in Omoa. Maybe he'd come for money, maybe a job. Zemurray probably told him his services were no longer wanted. (Why hire mercenaries when you own the army?) Because they're impossible to control, men like Lee Christmas are a threat to business. If you want to survive, you must drive them from the country. Perhaps Christmas felt he could intimidate Zemurray as he had intimidated everyone else in his world. But Zemurray was younger than Christmas, bigger and nervier. He was not the sort of person you can intimidate.

Christmas returned to New Orleans to volunteer for the U.S. Army during the First World War. He thought he would be sworn in as an officer, his experience on the isthmus being a boon, but was rejected as too old. He went to Washington, D.C., where, because he was famous, he was able to make his case to President Woodrow Wilson. He then returned to New Orleans and again tried to enlist. After being rejected a second time, Christmas issued a public challenge, calling out any man forty years of age, the army's cutoff, who wanted to fight.
Let them show themselves, and let them be thrashed!
He moved to Guatemala, then back to New Orleans, where he became an inventor, securing patents on a rattrap that worked without bait and a railroad safety device that shut down the engine the moment the engineer took his hand off the throttle, which must've been inspired by his own terrible accident. In 1921, he sued
Encyclopædia Britannica
for libel, citing an article on Central America that said Christmas had been killed in the battle of Maraita in 1907. He asked for $100,000 in damages. The publisher corrected the text but paid no money. He moved to Nicaragua, where he invested in oil wells (they went dry) and home remedies, the last of his money going for shark oil, which he considered an elixir. This venture ended when dozens of sharks, which he was holding in a pen off Puerto Cortés, escaped in a storm and terrorized the coast.

He fell ill in 1922. It started as a vague listlessness, ennui, but turned into fever. He was misdiagnosed, wrongly prescribed. In New Orleans, a doctor told him he had tropical sprue, a blood disease that would steadily weaken him. He collapsed in New York, where he had gone to meet a potential business investor. He was treated at St. Vincent's hospital but could not pay the bill. Guy Molony, who had become superintendent of the New Orleans city police, wired him money and a train ticket home.

He received a full transfusion of blood, donated by Molony, when he returned. This made headlines around the country and struck people as wonderful. It restored him for a time, but soon he weakened again. There were two more transfusions, each less effective than the last. He got in a fight with his wife near the end and left on a train like the dying Tolstoy. He turned up at the door of a long-lost son in Memphis, who put him back on a train for New Orleans. He was too weak to get off the train by himself and cried when he had to be carried. He cried again when he learned that his wife, who had been among the first ladies of Honduras, had taken a job selling radios on Canal Street. He was admitted to Touro Infirmary in January 1924. “When a man becomes my age in the United States,” he told Molony, “he's only good for fertilizer.” He died a few weeks later. There was a huge funeral. The pallbearers were aging mercenaries. Minor Keith sent a letter to be read, in which he called Lee Christmas “my ideal of manliness and courage.” For the second time in thirty years,
The New York Times
ran his obituary.

 

11

To the Isthmus and Back

Let me show you a picture of Samuel Zemurray's primary residence circa 1912: a white bungalow with a zinc roof in the shade of a coconut tree on the north coast of Honduras. When a storm blows through, which is most afternoons, the rain drums on the roof and the water hangs like a curtain from a steel awning, beneath which Sam sits reading reports. He's up early each morning and eats a breakfast of raw vegetables and bananas. In other cases, I might not linger on what a man had for breakfast, but such details fascinated and confused Zemurray's competitors. In
Empire in Green and Gold
, Charles Morrow Wilson claimed executives at United Fruit were bewildered by reports of the jungle-dwelling Russian who “had been living for weeks on nothing but figs; or [who] was taking a ‘fast cure' for twenty days; or [who] had been seen standing on his head beside a shade tree in the process of proving (or disproving) that inversion benefits the digestion.”

As for the reports—sales figures and yields, the length of the average banana, the market rate per stem—Zemurray went through these fast, a scan, a few mental notes, done. He disdained bureaucracy, hated paperwork. “So seldom does he dictate a letter that he requires no full-time secretary,”
Life
reported. “He will telephone division managers in half a dozen countries, correlate their reports in his head and reach his decision without touching a pencil.” A corporate legend told the Cuyamel executives everything they needed to know about their boss. One morning, as Zemurray was eating breakfast, an apparatchik handed him a thick report, fifty or sixty pages detailing every aspect of the operation. There was a summary on page one, chapter headings, bullet points. Zemurray flipped through the document, frowning, then ripped off the first page and threw away the rest, saying, “Most sensible damn statement I ever saw.”

In the years that followed the coup, Sam spent most of his time in Honduras. He had a wife in New Orleans, a daughter and a son, but must have felt he had no choice. Having established his position on the isthmus, it was time to work like a dog: build his business, pay his creditors, accumulate his money. By 1913, he had saved enough to buy back the stake U.F. owned in Cuyamel Fruit, a move that would secure Zemurray's independence.

Selling back these shares was unusual for United Fruit, but the company was forced by outside events. In 1913, Congress proposed a tax on bananas, which had already become the most widely consumed fruit in America, an astonishing fact considering that not a single banana is grown here. Called the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Bill, it was usually referred to as “the banana tax.” This was during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who believed the revenue generated by such a tax would close the gaping hole in the national budget.

Did the leaders of the banana industry raise a stink?

Of course they did.

An army of lobbyists, most of them on the payroll of United Fruit, descended on Washington waving documents, quoting figures, and making their case. The banana tax will ruin the business as it has long been practiced: dirt-cheap bananas sold at tremendous volume, unbelievable prices achieved by concession, cheap land, peasant labor, and NO TAX. An additional five cents per stem would return the banana to its original state, a delicacy for the rich. An industry spokesman accused Congress of attacking “the fruit of the poor.”

Probably in response to the ruckus raised by lobbyists, the Justice Department opened its own investigation of United Fruit. The Feds believed that by colluding to fix prices and crush competition, the company was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. As the Justice Department pursued the case, U.F. searched for ways to make the company look like anything but what it was: a monopoly. Simply put, United Fruit had to demonstrate there were other firms that could compete, that the field had not been cleared by price war and buyout. It was with this need in mind that Andrew Preston sold Sam Zemurray the shares United Fruit still held in Cuyamel. If Zemurray could be shown to be truly independent, perhaps the charges of antitrust would be disproved and the investigation stymied.

Congress lingered on U.F.'s sale of its Cuyamel shares during hearings before the House Committee of the Merchant Marine and Fisheries. It struck many as an effort to fool the government: a drug dealer tossing a parcel into the bushes as the cops close in.

Preston denied such suggestions. A congressman pressed, demanding the reason for the sale of the Cuyamel shares.

“I think Mr. Zemurray desired it,” said Preston. “He is a man of speculative ideas, and he thought he could do better if he had the entire property, and on the recommendations of our people, I think it was sold to him.”

Though the Justice Department never filed any charges, the investigation had the desired effect: by forcing Preston to sell his shares in Cuyamel, the government created a competitive market. It did this by assuring Zemurray the freedom to develop into a genuine competitor. In later years, when Zemurray had grown powerful, analysts spoke of the mistake U.F. made: they had underestimated a dangerous rival in Zemurray. In fact, the executives at United Fruit, Preston and Keith first among them, understood the genius of Zemurray from the beginning. They had long been dazzled by his rise from the docks, but it was a matter of triage: cut off the leg to save the body; cut free the Banana Man to save the company.

Zemurray must have been elated to free himself from United Fruit. It meant independence and control. What's more, he believed the association with El Pulpo had damaged his reputation. A few years before, when the Nicaraguan banana growers boycotted U.F. and prevented its ships from sailing down the big rivers, U.F. broke the blockade, not with its own fleet but with Cuyamel ships. Everywhere workers gathered, bloodied by the police, beaten but not defeated, they attached their misery to the name on the side of the boats carrying away the product of their labor:
Cuyamel
. It damaged Sam's name in a country where he'd long been admired as the son-in-law of the beloved Parrot King. Zemurray never forgot the lesson. It does not matter how many bananas you ship: when you lose your reputation, you lose everything.

*   *   *

Sam Zemurray lived in two worlds: the world of family and society in New Orleans, and the jungle world of pure escape, hard work, machete fights, and booze on the isthmus. Some years, he sailed back and forth half a dozen times. He stood on the prow of the ship, thrilled by the first sight of New Orleans, its smokestacks and warehouses appearing around the bend in the river, but was probably more thrilled to leave it behind, to plunge into the primitive South of harbors and coasts, change into his work clothes, and find himself surrounded by roughnecks who had come to the isthmus because it was the last place a man could be free. They called it the Banana Frontier because it recalled America before California had been divided into lots, before the grasslands had been wrested from the cowboys and handed to the merchants.

Central America was a fantasyland where nostalgic North Americans could live their dream of Western wilderness. There were old hands who had been on the isthmus long before the incorporation of the United Fruit Company, men who had come looking for a personal El Dorado and realized too late they were ruined for any other kind of life. There were managers who came to get their cards punched and planned to stay no more than a season or two but got stuck. There were rowdies who had come on a spree, to dress in khaki and carry a gun. There were college men who came for the job but stayed for the stuff, how far the dollar could go, a life of leisure, servants, and clubs.
Unifruco
, the United Fruit magazine, which was as slick as
The New Yorker
, speaks of company men returning to an earlier stage of American history on the isthmus, of living as men used to live before the women took over and softened us with their rules and finery, of confronting nature in the spirit of Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, of again seeing the forest as primeval, wild, and mysterious.