Bananas Read online

  Just six years later, in 1905, an article on bananas in Scientific American pointed out that “only a few years ago the banana was a luxury in many northern families. Although fairly common on the city markets, it was too expensive to be generally used by most families living in and near the small towns; but now so abundant and cheap as to be a common article of commerce in every corner grocery store, while in the cities it is frequently referred to as the poor man’s fruit.”66 The twentieth century was to see a phenomenal growth in the banana-importing industry with the rise of giant multinational corporations. Bananas became the cheapest fruit in the grocery store throughout the year, taken for granted by consumers. The banana lost its exotic image and disappeared from the formal dinner table as it became the most widely eaten fruit in the United States.

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  POLITICS AND

  BananaS

  THE TREMENDOUS GROWTH OF THE United States after the Civil War stimulated foreign trade and made capital available for overseas investment. Americans were hungry for more space, more land, more markets, more resources. Foreign trade was a symbol of national power. The navy and foreign service expanded to protect the lucrative businesses, while many citizens called for more colonies and a more activist foreign policy. Expanding rapidly in the late nineteenth century, American cities became centers of foreign commerce and cosmopolitan culture.

  Many Americans believed that selling, buying, and investing in foreign markets was critical to the economic health and development of the country. They reasoned that the problems of overproduction and unemployment that led to the depression of the 1890s could be relieved by opening foreign markets to American agricultural surplus and manufactured goods.

  Several entrepreneurs in the transportation business experimented with importing tropical products such as fruit and lumber. One problem they faced was the cultivation of an adequate and steady supply of these products for exportation in areas lacking the necessary workforce and the infrastructure of roads, railroads, harbors, and port facilities. In the 1870s Charles Frank (or Carl Franc), a Pacific Mail Steamship Line steward, began to develop banana plantations in Panama. In the 1880s Lorenzo Dow Baker, a Cape Cod fishing captain, in partnership with Andrew Preston, a Boston produce agent, established a market for bananas in Boston and laid the foundation for the United Fruit Company. Baker encouraged banana growing in Jamaica by carrying bananas on his return voyages to New England markets. Others, like Santo Oteri and Salvador D’Antoni, sailed schooners loaded with bananas from Honduras to New Orleans.1 In 1900 D’Antoni and the Vaccaro family in New Orleans created the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company. The Standard Fruit and United Fruit companies came to dominate the American banana markets during the first half of the twentieth century.

  The growing popularity of bananas in the United States pushed entrepreneurs to expand banana production in Central America and the Caribbean islands as well as to search for ways to grow bananas at home. Producers experimented with banana plant products in an effort to exploit the new resource fully.

  Scientific American, in 1896, suggested that “almost every part of the plant can be used for some useful purpose: the stalk forms an excellent material for the manufacture of paper, or the fiber might be extracted; the peel of the fruit will make excellent indelible ink; the green fruit dried can be converted into wholesome flour.”2 The author suggested that “green bananas, boiled tender, if given to the hens cut up, will make them lay more eggs than any other food.” An article in Harper’s Weekly that same year suggested that the shoots of the banana plant could be cooked as greens, and that “its stalk yields a valuable fibre which is woven into textile fabrics, twisted into rope, and manufactured into paper.”3

  The lust for colonies and imperial adventure fueled the Spanish American War in 1898. This in turn opened the banana market wider for American companies. An 1899 article in Scientific American, with the title “The Banana as the Basis of a New Industry,” noted that “the banana grows well in our new possessions in the West Indies, and we have no lack of delicious fruit which has great food value as well. Unfortunately, however, bananas do not stand long sea voyages, and the result is that a considerable market is closed to them.”4 This situation did not last long as steamships were quickly replacing sailing schooners in the Caribbean trade.

  American fruit companies taught Americans to eat bananas at the same time as they encouraged the people of the Caribbean basin to grow bananas on a commercial basis. Local banana growers in Jamaica, Cuba, and elsewhere expanded their cultivation of banana plants in response to the increasing North American demand for the fruit. Many independent growers were able to profit with very small investment.

  Once the demand for bananas had become firmly established, fruit-importing companies found that in order to remain competitive they had to invest in land, in more and bigger refrigerated ships, and in adequate storage and loading facilities in Central American ports. As banana cultivation spread inland, transportation systems including railway networks and deep-water ports were designed and built. U.S.-based companies such as United Fruit and Standard Fruit negotiated land concessions, tax exemptions, use of other natural resources, and free import of numerous products with the host governments of the Central American banana-growing countries.5 In the process, most small-scale local producers were either absorbed or forced out of business.

  Much of the suitable banana-growing land was found in sparsely populated Caribbean lowland. This meant that U.S. companies had to import a labor force, construct company towns, provide stores, hospitals, and schools, construct telegraph and telephone systems, and generally build the entire infrastructure for a modern community. Indigenous people, displaced from their jungle lands and ways of life, were hired as low-wage laborers on the new agricultural factory plantations. They were joined by many Jamaican and East Indian men, hired to work on the Panama Canal, who migrated to the central American mainland banana plantations when the canal was finished. This markedly changed the ethnic makeup and social structure of Central America.

  At first, much like the American West, Central America appeared to have limitless resources. For many Americans, it was the new frontier. The fruit companies concentrated on increasing worker productivity in the face of a limited local labor pool and problems of importing labor from the Caribbean islands, the East Indies, and the United States. Technical innovations included railroads, overhead conveyor systems, steamships, deepwater piers, and eventually on-site boxing of the fruit. The constant push to modernize, industrialize, and streamline production was an effort to keep down costs and avoid unionization among the workers.

  The United States acquired few colonies in the Caribbean and Central America, but was able to develop an informal empire based on economic and political control rather than by formal annexation. By 1914 investments by U.S. citizens in Latin America amounted to $1.26 billion. American exports to Latin America exceeded $300 million, and imports from Latin America had increased even more. Between 1900 and 1917, American troops intervened in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Haiti to protect United States investments and businesses. North American companies controlled the tariff revenues and budgets of these countries, renegotiated foreign debts with American banks, trained national guards, and ran elections. Investments in sugar, tobacco, transportation, and banking were most apparent, but the banana business was a lead player in the international game.

  Banana-growing enclave economies came to be a central feature of many of the countries of the Caribbean basin.6 The banana business had little direct effect on the national economies as a whole, since the economic result was limited to the banana-plantation zones.7 Workers spent their wages in company stores while supplies and equipment were imported by the company rather than purchased within the country or region. The banana plantations had very little direct impact on the manufacturing and retail life of the host country. Bananas and coffee often accounted for 80 percent of the exports of Central Ame
rican countries but the economic benefits were limited to members of the governments in power. Often the United States companies had managed to acquire so many concessions in taxes and importing rights that very little banana revenue remained in the country where the fruit was grown. The term “banana republic” was coined around 1935 to describe a corrupt and hopeless puppet dictatorship in a country whose government was unduly influenced by United Fruit and other American fruit-exporting companies.8

  As North American corporations operating in Latin America grew in size and power, many were accused of economic imperialism. United Fruit Company was the chief target and was known to many as El Pulpo, the Octopus. By 1927 United Fruit operations had expanded to include the production and transportation of a variety of tropical products, including about half the bananas consumed in the United States.9 In 1930 United Fruit owned 63 percent of the 103 million bunches of bananas imported.10 In 1946 the company owned 465,000 acres of improved land—of which 130,000 acres were planted to bananas—in Cuba, Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic.11

  Standard Fruit was United Fruit’s strongest competitor. It was begun in 1899 when four Sicilian immigrants (the brothers Joseph, Luca, and Felix Vaccaro, and Salvador D’Antoni) who lived in New Orleans started importing bananas. They chartered a 188-ton British steamship, Premier, and on its first five-day voyage from La Ceiba, Honduras, in February 1900 it brought 6,000 stems of bananas into New Orleans. At first the partnership only brought a cargo to New Orleans every two to three weeks. The company survived because it was so small that it was ignored by larger rivals.

  The Vaccaro Brothers developed business relationships with Italian immigrants who had moved to Honduras to farm in the 1870s. By 1905 Honduras held first place in the world’s production of bananas.12 Some shippers ordered bananas far in excess of their actual needs so that they could select only the best, leaving thousands of reject stems to rot on the beaches. Vaccaro Brothers initiated a policy of paying for whatever was ordered, whether or not loaded on the ship. This policy guaranteed the goodwill of the local farmers and assured a steady supply of fruit. Despite the growing monopoly of United Fruit in Honduras, Vaccaro Brothers was able to survive by dealing honestly with small, independent farmers.13

  When the Vaccaros incorporated their business in 1906, it operated ten miles of railroad in Honduras, sold tropical fruit, and carried passengers by ship to Mobile, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The business continued to expand, averaging one shipment a week for a total of one million stems of bananas a year.14 By the 1920s the company interests in Honduras included sugar mills, liquor manufactures, and industrial plants producing vegetable oil, soap, and fertilizers from the seeds of cotton, coconut, and other products grown on company lands or produced by local farmers.15 Vaccaro Brothers reorganized in 1924 and 1926, becoming the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company.16

  In 1964 the Vaccaro family was bought out by the international firm of Castle and Cooke, Inc., and became a wholly owned subsidiary in 1968. Standard Fruit bananas are now marketed under the Dole label.17 (Castle and Cooke was incorporated in 1894; based in Hawaii it had interests in shipping, sugar, pineapple, nuts, seafood, and real estate.18) Dole and United Fruit—now Chiquita Brands International—continue to be the major importers of bananas to the United States and remain competitors to this day. In March 1973 Dole bananas moved to first place in United States sales, ahead of United Fruit for the first time with 45 percent of the market to United’s 35 percent.19

  A third major American fruit-import company, the Cuyamel Fruit Company, was founded by a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray who began trading in bananas in Selma, Alabama, around 1890. He moved to Mobile and later to New Orleans where he speculated in “ripes,” buying soft bananas at a low price and selling them quickly.20 In 1902 Zemurray obtained a concession of public land in Honduras and began raising his own bananas for export.21 Zemurray established the Cuyamel Fruit Company in 1910 and built the business to a dozen ships carrying bananas from Honduras to New Orleans and other ports. Cuyamel also built railroads, warehouses, and sugar refineries in Latin America, seriously challenging United Fruit Company.22

  In 1929 the rivalry between Cuyamel and United Fruit was so intense that the U.S. State Department suggested a conference in Washington, D.C. The conference produced a plan for the merger of the two companies, with United Fruit buying out Cuyamel and Zemurray receiving about $20,000,000 worth of United Fruit Company shares.23

  In addition to competition with rival companies, negotiating with foreign governments, and the ups and downs of growing and transporting bananas, the banana companies faced occasional challenges from the United States government as well. In July 1913 the Senate Finance Committee, recognizing the recent tremendous growth in banana imports, included the fruit in the proposed Underwood-Simmons Tariff. Bananas would be taxed at five cents a bunch with the hope of raising a million dollars annually.24 The final bill would levy one-tenth of one cent per pound on bananas. The bill also included taxes of ten cents a bushel on imported apples, peaches, and other fruits. The press and lobbyists for the fruit companies claimed that the new tariff, which was supposed to be President Wilson’s measure to reduce the cost of living, would actually raise the cost by taxing the “fruit of the poor man.” The public responded vigorously.

  The New York Times reported that the Atlantic Fruit Company was concerned that the tax would be destructive to smaller dealers and would result in strengthening the position of United Fruit Company, creating a monopoly. The banana tax “would bring hardship upon the poorer classes as bananas are the poor man’s luxury.”25 A letter to the editor from Byron W. Holt, chairman of the Tariff Reform Committee of the Reform Club, complained that one of the campaign promises of the Democratic Party was to reduce the cost of living and that a tax on bananas would do the opposite. The writer stated that medical authorities assure us that a banana

  has a very high nutritive value. It can be obtained all year around—when other fruit is out of season, scarce, and high priced, the cheap and wholesome banana can always be had. It can be cooked in a variety of ways, and the methods of cooking it are rapidly increasing. It is one of the few foods the price of which has not increased in the last ten years. The consumption is greater in the poorer districts of large cities than of any other fruit. Its sale is rapidly increasing—from 18,000,000 bunches in 1900 to 42,000,000 in 1912.26

  Holt pointed out that as bananas could not be grown commercially in the United States, no new American industry would be established under the protection of such a tariff.

  A public meeting, under the auspices of the Banana Buyers’ Protective Association, was held at Cooper Union in New York City to protest the banana tax. After a band concert in the square, the meeting was addressed by Miss Julia Greenfield, age sixteen, who read a letter she had sent to President Wilson. Mrs. Julian Heath, President of the Housewives’ League, and Miss Sophie Irene Loeb also spoke on the economics of the banana. Mrs. Heath claimed that the current cost of five cents for four large bananas would increase to five cents apiece under the new tariff. Miss Loeb pleaded with everyone to write to the President in protest. Harry Weinberger, Secretary of the Buyer’s Association, gave an impassioned speech:

  Will this tariff result in Broadway being lined with banana trees? … Grapes may fill the cup in Summer, apples and oranges may make indoor cheer in the Fall and Winter; the watermelon may cool and satisfy the thirst, the pineapple may keep step with the peach and the plum, and in serried ranks come forward for our delectation in the Summer time, but the only fruit that comes every day in the year, year in and year out, almost unvarying in price, within the reach of all, nutritious, healthy in its germ-proof coat, is the golden ranks of the incoming tide of bananas, 40,000,000 bunches a year, 2 to 4,000,000,000 golden satisfiers of American desires. Does Congress expect to cheapen the banana for the poor man by a tariff? They may as well add salt to the ocean, paint the li
ly or add a color to the rainbow, as try to benefit the consumer in this way. We say to Congress tonight “Smite us not with a tariff on bananas, while giving us honeyed words of love.”27

  Resolutions were adopted at the meeting protesting the attitude of the United States Senate in regard to the poor man’s fruit.28 The New York Times, in a separate article with the headline “Flying to Defend the Banana,” commended the officers of the Housewives’ League, and noted that the “wonderful extension of the banana trade that has marked recent years has been nothing less than a national blessing. Desperately, therefore, as the Senators are looking for sources of revenue to make up for injudicious exemptions, they should spare the banana.”29

  A delegation of prominent citizens of Jamaica traveled to New York and Washington to protest the tax. In New York they were hosted by Joseph Di Giorgio, a fruit importer, who was quoted as saying that the “imposition of this tax will be a great hardship on the poor, especially the factory workers of New England and the miners of the middle western states.”30

  Senator Williams defended the tax on bananas on the basis that they were not a basic article of food, that they were dealt in by a trust (United Fruit Company), and that the tax was so small that it would not be reflected in the price to the consumer. The New York Times defended the United Fruit Company “trust” stating that

  the conduct of the trust has not exposed it to attack except at the hands of its trade competitors and of prejudicial politicians. The progressive cheapness of price and increase in supply, and improvement in quality in the years when the “trust” has been active show that. Never were bananas better or cheaper or more plenty than in the year when it is proposed to punish the trust by making its goods dear to its customers. Whether or not bananas are a “basic” article of food depends upon definitions and classifications. In any case, people who count their pennies do not live on basic articles of food alone. They are entitled to their little luxuries exactly because they are poor, and their luxuries are few. Consistency regarding the taxation of foods, basic or otherwise, is not a virtue of tariff makers, but the argument for free foods applies to bananas as well as to others. It is not less a food because it is toothsome and sweet.31