From Rags to Riches: The Remarkable Rise of Sam the Banana Man
The narrative arc of Samuel Zemuri, more commonly known as Sam the Banana Man, illuminates the complex interplay between entrepreneurial ambition and the insidious machinations of corporate imperialism. Emerging from the docks of Mobile, Alabama, this penniless immigrant transformed a mere observation of discarded fruit into a burgeoning empire, ultimately orchestrating a coup in Honduras to secure his dominance in the banana trade. Yet, his ascent was not merely a tale of individual triumph; it serves as a poignant exploration of how personal ambition can intersect with, and indeed manipulate, the very fabric of national sovereignty and international relations. Zemuri’s journey from the hustle of selling ripening bananas to commandeering the United Fruit Company epitomizes the raw, unchecked power wielded by capitalists in the early 20th century, revealing the harrowing consequences of mercenary pursuits masquerading as corporate interests. Join us as we delve into this riveting saga, where the pursuit of profit transcended the realm of commerce and irrevocably altered the political landscape of Central America.
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Takeaways:
- The story of Samuel Zemuri, popularly known as Sam the Banana Man, illustrates the profound impact of a single individual's ambition on entire nations, showcasing the intersection of entrepreneurship and imperialism.
- Through his keen observation of discarded bananas, Zamuri discerned a lucrative opportunity that would ultimately lead him to amass a formidable fortune, transforming a perceived waste into wealth.
- Zamuri's audacious actions, including orchestrating the overthrow of a Honduran government, exemplify how corporate interests can wield immense power over sovereign nations, often blurring the lines between business and statecraft.
- The narrative intricately connects the rise of the banana as a staple in American society with the darker implications of corporate dominance and the establishment of banana republics in Central America.
- The consequences of Zamuri's endeavors reverberated far beyond profit margins, as they contributed to decades of political instability and violence in Guatemala, fundamentally altering the region's socio-economic landscape.
- Ultimately, Samuel Zemuri's life serves as a complex and cautionary tale about the ethical dilemmas inherent in the pursuit of success, embodying both the American Dream and the potential nightmare it can entail for others.
Selected Bibliography
Chapman, Peter. Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007.
Cohen, Rich. The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.
Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Revised and Expanded Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2005.
Striffler, Steve. "Samuel Zemurray." In 64 Parishes, edited by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Accessed October 2023. https://64parishes.org/entry/samuel-zemurray.
Zinn Education Project. "June 27, 1954: Elected Guatemalan Leader Overthrown in CIA-Backed Coup." Zinn Education Project. Accessed October 2023. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/jacobo-arbenz-guzman-deposed/.
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker A:Hello, y'.
Speaker A:All, it's me.
Speaker A:It's me.
Speaker A:It's Dr. G. Imagine this.
Speaker A: It's: Speaker A:The air on the docks of Mobile, Alabama is thick.
Speaker A:It's heavy with humidity.
Speaker A:The smell of salt, tar and something else, something sweet, almost cloying.
Speaker A:It's a smell of opportunity.
Speaker A:But it is also, at the time, the smell of waste.
Speaker A:Standing there watching the dock workers unload a cargo ship is a 14 year old boy.
Speaker A:He's a recent immigrant, penniless, having arrived in America from the Russian empire just a few years earlier with nothing but the clothes on his back.
Speaker A:His name is Shmiel Zimuri.
Speaker A:Though America will soon know him as Samuel Zamuri.
Speaker A:He watches as the workers inspect the massive bunches of exotic new fruits.
Speaker A:The banana.
Speaker A:They're looking for imperfections.
Speaker A:One freckle and a banana was considered to be turning.
Speaker A:Two freckles and it's ripe.
Speaker A:And any banana deemed ripe is considered garbage.
Speaker A:It won't survive the long, slow train journey to the grocery stores of American heartland.
Speaker A:So they're tossed aside, left to rot in the Gulf coast heat.
Speaker A:Piles of them, thousands of them.
Speaker A:To the shipping magnates, this is just the cost of doing business.
Speaker A:To the dock workers, this is just trash.
Speaker A:But to this young, hungry immigrant, pun intended, it is an epiphany.
Speaker A:Where everyone else sees garbage, Sam Zemuri sees treasure.
Speaker A:He understands something they don't.
Speaker A:The problem isn't the fruit.
Speaker A:It's time.
Speaker A:If you can beat the clock, you can make a fortune.
Speaker A:And that fortune would be made by a man that would become to be known as Sam the Banana Man.
Speaker A:Welcome to Star Spangled Studies.
Speaker A:And in this episode, we're going to take a look at Sam Zimuri.
Speaker A:Sam the Banana Man.
Speaker A:Now, that single observation that Sam had on that hot Alabama day was the spark that ignited a fruit empire.
Speaker A:The boy who started his career selling that rotting fruit would go on to build his own massively wealthy company, the Kuyamau Fruit Company.
Speaker A:And then in one of the most audacious corporate raids in American history, he would seize control of the very giant that had once thrown those bananas away.
Speaker A:The powerful Boston based United Fruit Company.
Speaker A:So today we're going to tell this incredible story of Sam Zemuri.
Speaker A:Sam the Banana Man.
Speaker A:But this isn't just a rags to riches tale, although it is that Zemuri's life is a case study in the raw, unchecked power of American corporate interests in the early 20th century.
Speaker A:It's a story that reveals how the pursuit of profit could lead a private citizen to fund mercenaries or overthrow foreign governments and ultimately bend United States foreign policy to his private will.
Speaker A:Zemuri's story is the story of how the banana went from an exotic novelty to a staple of the American breakfast table.
Speaker A:But it is also the story of how entire nations in Central America were turned into company towns, their politics and economies beholden to a single American corporation.
Speaker A:It's the story of the birth of the banana republic.
Speaker A:So today we'll follow Zemuri's journey in three parts.
Speaker A:First, we'll look at the hustler, the brilliant, street smart entrepreneur who built an empire from scratch and launched his own private invasion of Honduras.
Speaker A:Then we'll meet the titan, the corporate raider who took on the biggest player in the game, the United Fruit Company, and won.
Speaker A:And finally, we'll uncover the kingmaker, the powerful CEO who used the full might of his company and its connections to the highest levels of the United States government to topple a democracy in Guatemala.
Speaker A:This is the story of Sam the banana man.
Speaker A:And it's a story that tells us more about the intersections of capitalism, immigration and American power than you could possibly ever imagine.
Speaker A:So let's go.
Speaker A:To understand how Samuel Zemuri became a man who could topple governments, you first have to understand how he sold his first banana.
Speaker A:After his epiphany on the docks, he scraped together a hundred and fifty dollars, his life savings basically, and bought as many of the discarded ripes as he could.
Speaker A:The importers were happy to get anything for what they considered garbage.
Speaker A:Now Zemuri had a mountain of rapidly ripening fruit and a ticking clock.
Speaker A:His solution was pure, unadulterated hustle.
Speaker A:He rented space in a boxcar on the Illinois Central Railroad just heading north.
Speaker A:But just having transportation wasn't enough.
Speaker A:You had to sell your product before it turns to mush.
Speaker A:How do you do that?
Speaker A:You can't exactly set up a fruit stand on a moving train.
Speaker A:So Zemuri went to the local Western Union office with a proposition.
Speaker A:He told the telegraph operator that if he wired ahead to merchants and grocers in the town along the railway line, offering cheap bananas delivered right to their doorstep from the train, he'd give the operator a cut of the sails.
Speaker A:And the operator agreed.
Speaker A:This was brilliant.
Speaker A:As the train moved north through the small towns of Alabama and Mississippi, Zumuri had a ready made market.
Speaker A:He sold the ripest bananas to the closest towns and the slightly less ripe ones to towns a couple hundred miles down the line.
Speaker A:He lived by the clock, knowing any delay would Ultimately ruin him.
Speaker A:On his very first trip, he turned a profit.
Speaker A:Within a few years, his business had exploded.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A: By: Speaker A: , which in: Speaker A:Sam the banana man was born.
Speaker A:He was a master at identifying a market inefficiency and exploiting it with speed and innovation.
Speaker A:But he soon realized that his business model had a fatal flaw.
Speaker A:It was completely dependent on his suppliers, the big shipping companies, especially United Fruit, who were starting to realize that there actually was some value in the ripes that they had been discarding and that Sam the banana man was taking advantage of.
Speaker A:If he wanted to grow, he couldn't just be any seller.
Speaker A:He had to control the entire process, from the tree to the train car.
Speaker A:Now, this is a concept that business schools now call vertical integration.
Speaker A:It means controlling every step of your supply chain, from the production to the distribution.
Speaker A:For Zemuri, it meant he had to stop buying other people's bananas and start growing his own.
Speaker A:So he moved his operations to the bustling port of Nolans, or New Orleans.
Speaker A:This was the gateway to Latin America.
Speaker A:He partnered with a man named Ashbel Hubbard and together they acquired a steamship company and eventually took over a small outfit named the Cuyamel Fruit Company.
Speaker A: Then in: Speaker A:He borrowed huge sums of money, some outrageously high interest rates, and bought 5,000 acres of raw, un undeveloped jungle along the Kouyumel river in Honduras.
Speaker A:This wasn't a boardroom acquisition.
Speaker A:Zemuri was a hands on owner.
Speaker A:He went onto the ground in Honduras.
Speaker A:He oversaw the clearing of the jungle, oversaw the planting of the banana shoots, the building of railroads and the bridges to get the fruits that he was going to grow.
Speaker A:To put port.
Speaker A:He worked in the fields alongside the Jamaican and Honduran laborers he hired, Sweating under the same tropical sun.
Speaker A:They called him the gringo.
Speaker A:But he was there on the front lines of his empire.
Speaker A:And it's right here in the jungles of Honduras that Zemuri's story takes a pivotal turn.
Speaker A:The same relentless drive that fueled his American dream success story was about to be turned against a sovereign nation.
Speaker A:It raises a question that echoes throughout the 20th century.
Speaker A:At what point does an entrepreneur's ambition cross the line from building a business to breaking a country?
Speaker A:For Zemuri, that line was obliterated.
Speaker A: By: Speaker A:But a political storm was brewing.
Speaker A:The President of Honduras, Miguel de Vila, was trying to stabilize his country's finances.
Speaker A:Honduras was deeply in debt to European bankers and to avoid foreign intervention, the US government, under a policy then known as dollar diplomacy, was encouraging American financiers, men like J.P. morgan, to buy up that debt.
Speaker A:The deal itself is very simple.
Speaker A:Morgan or other financiers would lend countries money, in this case Honduras, and in return the US agents would be placed in Honduran customs houses to collect the tariffs need needed to repay the loan.
Speaker A:For Zemuri, this was a disaster.
Speaker A:His entire business model in Honduras was built on special deals that he had cut with local officials.
Speaker A:Deals that gave him exemptions from the very taxes and import duties that Morgan and the loan was designed to collect.
Speaker A:He lobbied Washington furiously, but the US Secretary of State, a man named Philander Knox, had no time for this upstart banana importer.
Speaker A:Knox summoned the then 32 year old Zemuri to his office, told him to stay out of the politics of this and then to make sure that Zemuri got the message, put Secret Service agents on his tail in New Orleans.
Speaker A:The US government then had basically drawn a line in the sand.
Speaker A:A lesser man would have probably backed down.
Speaker A:But Sam the banana man was not that man.
Speaker A:If the government of Honduras was going to be a problem, he would simply create a new government in Honduras.
Speaker A:What happened next sounds like something out of a novel.
Speaker A:It sounds like fiction.
Speaker A:Zemuri devised a plan to overthrow the government in Honduras.
Speaker A:He found his front man, a man named Manuel Bonilla, the former Honduran president then living in exile in, you guessed it, New Orleans.
Speaker A:And he was eager to get his power back.
Speaker A:For the military muscle, Sam Zemuri hired one of the most notorious soldiers of fortune in the hemisphere, a man named Lee Christmas, a mercenary general for hire with a reputation for loving a good fight.
Speaker A:Now that he had his general, he needed an army.
Speaker A:So Zimuri bought a surplus US Navy warship, the USS Hornet.
Speaker A:Zimuri secretly began loading it with hundreds of mercenaries for hire, well as rifles and ammunition.
Speaker A:And he kept the USS Hornet in a secluded spot just outside of New Orleans.
Speaker A:One night, while being tailed by Secret Service agents, Christmas and Bonilla led the agents on a wild goose chase through the city's most famous of red light districts.
Speaker A:And when the agents finally gave up and went home, the conspirators slipped away.
Speaker A:They boarded Zemuri's yacht and they rendezvoused with The USS Hornet, just offshore.
Speaker A:Under the COVID of darkness, they set sail for Honduras.
Speaker A:This was a private act of war, funded and directed by an American fruit salesman.
Speaker A:Zemuri's view of the political landscape he was invading was famously and brutally pragmatic.
Speaker A:He is widely credited with saying, quote, in Honduras, a mule costs more than a deputy.
Speaker A:Whether he said those exact words or not doesn't really matter, but they perfectly capture his cynical, transactional approach to power.
Speaker A:In Central America.
Speaker A:You didn't persuade politicians, you bought them.
Speaker A:And if they wouldn't stay bought, you replaced them.
Speaker A:The coup was a swift success.
Speaker A:Christmas and his mercenaries, joined by local rebels, seized the northern port's cities.
Speaker A:The De' Via government, facing a rebellion it could not quell, collapsed.
Speaker A:And in its place, Manuel Bonilla was installed once again as the new president.
Speaker A:And his first order of business was to repay his benefactor.
Speaker A:He granted Zimuri and his company massive lands concessions and more importantly, a 25 year lease, guaranteeing that he would pay virtually no taxes.
Speaker A:So let's pause for a moment here because this is a crucial turning point.
Speaker A: The coup in Honduras in: Speaker A:This wasn't the US Marines landing on a foreign shore.
Speaker A:It was a fruit company's private army.
Speaker A:The United States government was officially against this intervention.
Speaker A:They even tried to stop it.
Speaker A:This event established a new, dangerous precedent.
Speaker A:A powerful American capitalist could act independently of and even in defiance of the US State to protect its profits.
Speaker A:It was another of a Wild west type of era of corporate imperialism.
Speaker A:And Sam the Banana man was its most audacious pioneer.
Speaker A:He secured his investment and in the process, kind of acquired a new country.
Speaker A:With Honduras now firmly under his thumb, Sam the Banana man and his kuya Mel Fruit Co.
Speaker A:Grew at a phenomenal rate.
Speaker A:He was now a major player in the banana trade, which put him in a direct collision course with the undisputed king of the industry, the United Fruit Company.
Speaker A:The United Fruit Company was a corporate behemoth.
Speaker A: It was founded in: Speaker A: And by the: Speaker A:In the countries where it operated, it was simply known as El Popo the Octopus, for its sprawling tentacles that reached into every corner of political and economic life.
Speaker A:As historian Peter Chapman argues in his book Jungle Capitalists, United Fruit was a pioneer of a particularly ruthless form of global capitalism.
Speaker A:It set the precedent for how many multinational companies would operate in the developing world using tactics like bullying, bribing and buying out any and all of the competition.
Speaker A:Zemuri was one competitor they couldn't seem to crush.
Speaker A:Though the rivalry between the Kuyamel and the United Fruit Company became legendary.
Speaker A:They fought over land, they fought over water rights, they fought over railway concessions along the disputed borders between Honduras and Guatemala.
Speaker A:The conflict grew so intense, with armed company guards facing off against each other in Central America that it threatened to spill into open warfare.
Speaker A:The situation became so unstable that the U.S. state Department was forced to step in and mediate between the two American companies to prevent them from starting an actual war overseas.
Speaker A: Finally, in: Speaker A:They purchased the Cuyabel Fruit Company from Zemuri for $31.5 million in United Fruit Fruit stock.
Speaker A:In today's money, that's well over half a billion dollars.
Speaker A:The deal made Sam Zimuri one of the richest men in America.
Speaker A:But it came with one crucial condition.
Speaker A:He had to retire from the banana business.
Speaker A:So at the height of his powers, Sam the Banana man was now out.
Speaker A:He was now one of the United Fruit's largest individual shareholders.
Speaker A:But he was on the sidelines, watching others run the company.
Speaker A:He knew better than anyone, El it didn't take long for him to grow restless.
Speaker A:Men like him always do.
Speaker A:And then the world changed.
Speaker A:Not long after, Sam the Banana man became one of the richest men in the world.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:The world changed.
Speaker A:The economic catastrophe that brought the world to its knees also ravaged the United Fruit Company.
Speaker A:Demand for bananas plummeted.
Speaker A:The company's stock price collapsed, falling by over 90%.
Speaker A:Zemuri's massive fortune, which was all tied up in that stock, evaporated.
Speaker A:He saw his net worth drop from over $30 million to less than $3 million almost overnight.
Speaker A:He watched in agony as the company's board of directors, a collection of what he saw as stuffy old money gentile blue bloods from Boston, completely mismanaged this crisis.
Speaker A:These were bankers and lawyers who, in Sam's view, didn't know the first thing about bananas.
Speaker A:He knew the business from the ground up.
Speaker A:From the soil of the plantations to the docks of Nolan's.
Speaker A:He tried to offer advice, to share hard won knowledge he'd gained over decades.
Speaker A:But the board, looking down on this rough edged Jewish immigrant with his thick Russian accent, arrogantly dismissed him.
Speaker A: a board meeting in January of: Speaker A:Zemuri once again tried to explain his strategy of turning the company around.
Speaker A:The chairman of the board, a man named Daniel Gold Wing, cut him off.
Speaker A:Mocking his accent, Wing said, quote, Unfortunately, Mr. Zimuri, I can't understand a word of what you say, end quote.
Speaker A:This brought the laughter of the other board members.
Speaker A:It was a humiliating put down.
Speaker A:But it was also the last mistake the board of United Fruit would ever make with Sam Zemuri.
Speaker A:Because while they had been running the company to the ground, Zemuri had been quietly in the shadows making his move.
Speaker A:He had been traveling the country, meeting with other disgruntled shareholders and using his own diminished funds to buy up as much of the company's depressed stock as he could get his hands on.
Speaker A:And he had been collecting their proxies, meaning their right to vote their shares for them.
Speaker A:Zemuri stood up at that Boston boardroom.
Speaker A:He had reached into a bag and pulled out a thick stack of papers, the voting proxies that gave him an effective control of the company.
Speaker A:He slapped them down on the mahogany table.
Speaker A:Then, looking directly at the chairman who had just mocked him, he delivered one of the most legendary lines in the history of American business, according to Rich Cohen, the author of the Fish that Ate the Whale, a biography that paints Zemuri as a tough as nails outsiders who would end up outwitting the stuffy establishment.
Speaker A:Zemuri leaned in and he said, quote, you gentlemen have been effing up this business long enough.
Speaker A:I'm going to straighten it out.
Speaker A:End quote.
Speaker A:Mic drop.
Speaker A:He then looked at the chairman and he added, quote, you're fired.
Speaker A:Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?
Speaker A:End quote.
Speaker A:And double mic drop.
Speaker A:It was one of the most dramatic hostile takeovers in corporate history.
Speaker A:The scrappy immigrant from the docks of Mobile had just seized control of the powerful blue blooded fruit institution that had tried to sideline him.
Speaker A:The press called it the Fish that swallowed the Whale, hence the title of the book.
Speaker A:Samuel Zamuri.
Speaker A:Sam the banana man, was now in charge of El Polpo, the octopus.
Speaker A:And he was about to wield its immense power in a way that would change the course of history for an entire nation.
Speaker A:Stay tuned.
Speaker A:Foreign at the helm, the United Fruit Company roared back to life.
Speaker A:Getting a second lease.
Speaker A:He was the hands on leader.
Speaker A:He visited the plantations, he started streamlining the operations, and he restored the company to profitability in the Depression.
Speaker A:But the same ruthless pragmatism that had defined his rise would now define his reign as king of the banana empire.
Speaker A:And that reign would reach its dark zenith in the nation of Guatemala.
Speaker A: up happening in Guatemala in: Speaker A:We need to set the stage much earlier.
Speaker A:For decades, Guatemala had actually been ruled by a series of brutal US backed dictators who were more than happy to serve the interests of the United Fruit Company.
Speaker A:The most notorious of these was a man named Jorge Ubico, a repressive strong man who gave the company vast tracts of land and violently crushed any attempts at labor organizing.
Speaker A: But in: Speaker A:This launched a period known in Guatemala as the ten years of Spring, a decade of unprecedented democracy and social reform.
Speaker A: And in: Speaker A:Now, Arbenz was a former army officer, a moderate reformer who wanted to transform Guatemala from a feudal, dependent nation into what he called a modern capitalist state.
Speaker A:His central policy, the cornerstone of his presidency, he said, was going to be land reform.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Now, when you hear land reform in a Cold War context, your mind might jump to radical communist style collectivization.
Speaker A:But decree 900 was actually nothing of the sort.
Speaker A:It was a moderate capitalist law.
Speaker A:It stipulated that the government would expropriate large uncultivated tracts of land from the biggest landowners and redistribute them to hundreds of thousands of landless Guatemalan peasant farmers.
Speaker A:And crucially, the owners would be compensated for that land.
Speaker A:There was just one problem to this, of course.
Speaker A:The single largest landowner in Guatemala was the United Fruit Company.
Speaker A:The United Fruit Company held over half a million acres of the best farmland in the country.
Speaker A:But here's the kicker.
Speaker A:By the company's own admission, a staggering 85% of that land was deliberately left uncultivated.
Speaker A:They kept it fallow to prevent potential competitors from from emerging and to keep the land prices artificially low.
Speaker A:Decree 900 aimed squarely at the vast idle holdings.
Speaker A:This is where the story takes a truly revealing turn.
Speaker A:The Arbenz government, following the letter of its own law, offered United Fruit compensation for the land that it was expropriating.
Speaker A:The amount they offered was about $1.2 million.
Speaker A:United Fruit and the U.S. state Department were outraged.
Speaker A:They countered with a demand of nearly $16 million.
Speaker A:That's a huge discrepancy.
Speaker A:Where did the Guatemalan government get its number?
Speaker A:Well, they got the number from United Fruit's own tax filings.
Speaker A:For years, United Fruit had been fraudulently undervaluing its own land on its tax forms.
Speaker A:To avoid paying its fair share to the Guatemalan government.
Speaker A:Now their own tax dodging scheme was being used against them for the compensation of the lands being expropriated.
Speaker A:It was a moment of stunning hypocrisy.
Speaker A:The conflict was not about an unfair seizure of property.
Speaker A:It was about United Fruit being confronted with its own long standing corruption.
Speaker A:Faced with a democratically elected government that wouldn't play by their rules, Sam Zemuri went back to a trusty playbook.
Speaker A:United Fruit and Sam the banana man decided to do what they did.
Speaker A:Change the government.
Speaker A:But this time it wouldn't be a private adventure.
Speaker A:With a surplus warship and mercenaries.
Speaker A:This time Zimuri would leverage the full power of the United States government.
Speaker A:The company launched a two prong attack.
Speaker A:The first was a massive public relations campaign.
Speaker A:Zemuri hired a man named Edward Bernays.
Speaker A:And if that name sounds familiar to you, it probably should.
Speaker A:Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and is widely considered the father of public relations.
Speaker A:He was a master of manipulating public opinion.
Speaker A:Bernays orchestrated a brilliant and deeply cynical propaganda war.
Speaker A:He planted fake stories in major American newspapers like the New York Times.
Speaker A:He funded a bogus independent research study that supposedly proved Arbenz was a Soviet puppet and flew influential journalists down to Guatemala for carefully managed tours designed to show them the communist menace down there.
Speaker A: ng to America in the grips of: Speaker A:To many Americans, Guatemala's democratic land reform was not reform at all but a Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere to bring communism ashore.
Speaker A:The second prong of Zemuri's attack was political.
Speaker A:And here United Fruit connections were unparalleled.
Speaker A:The US Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration was a man named John Foster Dulles.
Speaker A:The director of the CIA was his brother Allen Dulles.
Speaker A:And you've probably heard Dulles before.
Speaker A:It's the name of an airport if among other things.
Speaker A:But before joining the government both of these Dulles brothers had been partners at the powerful Wall street firm Sullivan and Cromwell.
Speaker A:And who was one of Sullivan and Cromwell's biggest clients for decades?
Speaker A:You guessed it, the United Fruit Company.
Speaker A:The lines between the company's private business interests and now America's national security interests didn't just blur.
Speaker A:They completely dissolved.
Speaker A:As historians Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger meticulously documented in their classic book the bitter fruit.
Speaker A: The: Speaker A:They drew on the declassified CIA documents and they show that the Cold War was not the cause of the intervention, but it was the justification.
Speaker A:It was the perfect pretext for protecting United Fruits.
Speaker A:Bottom line, President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to launch what was called then Operation PB Success.
Speaker A:And this was the plan to overthrow Arbenz.
Speaker A:The CIA armed and trained a small rebel force of a few hundred Guatemalan exiles in neighboring Honduras, led by an army officer named Carlos Castillo Armas.
Speaker A:But the rebels themselves were almost a sideshow.
Speaker A:The real weapon was psychological warfare.
Speaker A:The CIA established a clandestine radio station just over the border called the Voice of Liberation.
Speaker A:For weeks it broadcast a stream of sophisticated propaganda and fake news into Guatemala.
Speaker A:It reported on massive battles that never happened, on popular uprisings that didn't exist, and on columns of rebel soldiers that were going to march on the capital that really weren't there.
Speaker A:Meanwhile, the CIA piloted planes that flew over Guatemala City dropping anti communist leaflets and a few small bombs designed not for tactical damage, but to create maximum psychological terror that the war was on their doorstep.
Speaker A:The Guatemalan army, a force of several thousand well trained soldiers, could have crushed Castile Armas tiny rebel force in a matter of hours.
Speaker A:But they ended up never fighting.
Speaker A:The officers listening to the Voice of Liberation radio became convinced that they were actually facing a massive US backed invasion force and that defeat was inevitable.
Speaker A:Their morale collapsed.
Speaker A:They turned on their own president, demanding Arbenz resign his position.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:His words leave no doubt about who he believed was responsible.
Speaker A:He said, quote, the United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us.
Speaker A:In whose name they have carried out these barbaric acts.
Speaker A:What is their banner?
Speaker A:We know it well.
Speaker A:They have used the pretext of anti communism.
Speaker A:End quote.
Speaker A:With Arbends gone, Castillo Armas was installed as the new dictator.
Speaker A:His first acts were to repeal decree 900, return all the land to the United Fruit Company and arrest and execute thousands of his political opponents.
Speaker A:Guatemala's ten years of spring were over.
Speaker A:The coup plunged Guatemala into a brutal 40 year civil war.
Speaker A:A period of military dictatorships, right wing death squads, genocide against the indigenous Mayan population that would ultimately claim the lives of more than 200,000 people.
Speaker A:All to protect the profits of a banana company.
Speaker A:So let's recap the extraordinary arc of Samuel the banana man.
Speaker A:Man Zemuri, the penniless immigrant boy on the docks of Mobile, built a business on discarded fruit.
Speaker A:He was a ruthless entrepreneur who launched a private coup in Honduras to protect his investments.
Speaker A:He was a corporate titan who staged a legendary hostile takeover of one of the biggest companies in history and in his industry.
Speaker A:And finally, a powerful kingmaker who successfully marshaled the forces of the CIA and the US Government to overthrow a sovereign democracy in Guatemala.
Speaker A:His story is, in many ways the very definition of the term banana republic.
Speaker A: e American writer o. Henry in: Speaker A:A banana republic is a country whose economy is dependent on a single export commodity and whose politics are dominated by foreign corporate interests in that commodity.
Speaker A:Samuel Zemuri didn't invent the concept, but his actions in Honduras and Guatemala perfected it, turning it into a grim reality for millions of people.
Speaker A:The legacy of these actions is deep and painful.
Speaker A: The: Speaker A:It is a direct cause of the decades of violence and instability that has followed.
Speaker A:And it created a profound and lasting mistrust of the United States throughout Latin America.
Speaker A:A mistrust that echoes to today.
Speaker A:But Zemuri's story also serves as a chilling lesson in the power of a corporation to shape public opinion and national policy to serve its own bottom line.
Speaker A:The tactics pioneered by United Fruit and Edward Bernays, the aggressive lobbying, the manipulation of the media, the masterful framing of private corporate interests as vital national security interests, have become the standard playbook in our modern world.
Speaker A:Now, Sam the Banana himself was a figure of staggering complexity.
Speaker A:In his later years, he became a major philanthropist.
Speaker A:He donated millions of dollars to institutions like Tulane University in New Orleans.
Speaker A:In fact, to this day, the president of Tulane University lives Samuel Zamuri's old mansion.
Speaker A:As a Jew who had escaped the persecution of the Russian Empire, he also worked tirelessly after World War II, using his wealth and his fleet of ships to help thousands of Jewish refugees escape Europe.
Speaker A:So how do we remember him?
Speaker A:Was Sam Zemuri Sam the Banana man, the ultimate embodiment of the American dream, a testament to the idea that any poor immigrant, through grit and genius, could achieve unimaginable success?
Speaker A:Or was he a cautionary tale of how that dream, when pursued without moral restraint, can become a nightmare for others?
Speaker A:Perhaps he was both.
Speaker A:But his life stands as a powerful and unsettling reminder that the global systems of commerce we often take for granted are not neutral.
Speaker A:They were built by men and women.
Speaker A:But maybe men like Samuel Zemuri and his story shows us that the price of a simple, everyday product, the banana on your kitchen counter, can sometimes be the sovereignty of a nation and the lives of its people.
Speaker A:This is Dr. G. Thanks for listening to Star Spangled Studies, and I'll see y' all in the past.
Speaker A:Sam.
