Talking ‘Ripes’ and Riches with Rich Cohen, Author of ‘The Fish That Ate the Whale’
By Patrick Sauer
Photo © 2011 Pascal Perich
There are iconic names we associate with the growth of America, business tycoons who forced the country, and even the world, to bend to their capitalistic demands. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Sam Zemurray...
What’s that? You've never heard of Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray? Not surprising. He’s a little-known Russian immigrant who saw a way to exploit the banana market by selling “ripes” to the masses. That simple idea, moving bananas before they went bad, “seeing nutrition where others saw only waste,” provided the humble beginnings for one of the craziest under-the-radar American business sagas in history. Zemurray’s remarkable life is captured in “The Fish That Ate the Whale,” the engrossing biography from Rich Cohen.
Up from the pile of ripes, Zemurray's United Fruit would grow so powerful, and so wealthy, that the United States government itself aided him in overthrowing the Honduran government. Zemurray was a contradiction in terms: a self-made man who favored a stronger New Deal while looting Central America; a forward-thinking entrepreneur who got to know his workers yet kept boa constrictors in camp to keep them in line; a “bridge between the world of the privateer and the world of high finance,” in Cohen’s estimation. In a nutshell (banana peel?), Zemurray’s life coincides with the growth of the American Empire. And while he may not have had a seat at the breakfast table with the other colossuses, The Banana Man has a better story to tell. Cohen shared his thoughts with Biographile on how one man and his favorite herb explains “the history of the nation.”
Before we get into "The Fish That Ate the Whale," tell us a bit about your writing career, particularly what drives you to biographies...
Well, I guess it just seems to me that every person’s life has the shape of a story, and, even when I try to get away from that, I find myself drawn to the basic chronology of a life. You have a beginning, a lot of middle and, in every case but one or two, you have an end. There has yet to be any sort of experimental writer who has bested that structure, or gotten free from it. So, in trying to figure out how to live my life, I inevitably look at people who came before me and want to see how they did it, what went right and went wrong, and they call that biography.
How do you go about choosing your subjects, are there general traits you look for? Risk-taking outsiders seem to be recurring characters...
I am not sure how I choose my subjects. All of a sudden, one day, it’s in my head that this is the person or era or thing I want to write about. Looking back, I see that every person I have written about shares basic qualities. Now and then, it seems I keep writing the same story over and over again -- the story of the outsider, the man who was discarded, the stone that the builder refused . . . I think, also, that just about every person I have written about is a person that would have interested me at ten. When I was in bed and supposed to be asleep, my father and his Brooklyn friends used to sit up late talking and laughing in the kitchen below my bedroom. I think all of the things I have written, the books, have been an attempt to get into that room and listen to that talk.
You authored the great gangster tome "Tough Jews," as well as books like "Israel is Real" and "Machers and Rockers," and large chunks of this book are about Sam Zemurray's commitment to Zionism, why does Judaism play such a major role in your writing?
I’m not sure. It’s a little mysterious to me. I never set out to be a Jewish writer, or to write on Jewish themes. It’s just who I am. There’s been no escaping it. I’m interested in why people and things are the way they are and my faith and the history of my relatives has been a huge part of my world view. It’s freedom and lack of freedom—you can’t get away from it. I feel like I understand this world better, a little better, than I understand others. All of these people could be my cousins.
Did you approach the "Fish That Ate the Whale" differently than your other biographies, or your family memoir "Sweet and Low?"
It was based much more on research -- the world was exotic, the time long ago, so I could not make use of personal experience. But every book is written in its own way, and becomes its own experience. The history of Central America and New Orleans, the trips to Honduras and Guatemala, all of that was wonderful.
What is it about physically tracing Zemurray's path that helped you as a writer?
You want to see everything he saw -- go to all the places that were important to him, talk to the people, interview whomever is still around. To me, all the really good stuff comes from interacting with the world. There is a time when you close yourself in a room and write, but, before that, and for a long time, you want to go everywhere, and see everything, and talk to everyone.
Where did you first hear of Sam "The Banana Man," and at what point did you start seriously digging into his past for the book?
I was a freshman at Tulane in 1986. There were buildings on campus named for Zemurray and his family. The official residence of the University president was Sam’s mansion. You’d go in there, and it was like stepping back into another age, when the banana tycoon was king. It fascinated me that this old southern school, so far from my home, new and strange, had as a benefactor the sort of Russian Jew you might find in a Saul Bellow novel. When I was a sophomore, I took a class called Jewish American Novel, with a professor named Joseph Cohen. (No relation.) He told us the story of Zemurray, specifically the work he did in securing the UN vote for partition that cleared the way for the modern state of Israel. It fascinated me, and I have collected Zemurray stories ever since. A few years ago, when I was writing “Israel is Real” I was trying to describe the relationship between the pre-state Zionists and their counterparts in America; that is, the Russians who went to the USA instead of Palestine. Zemurray seemed like a perfect personification of that relationship. That’s when I began to research him. As I got into his story, it seemed clear to me he was a book. “The Fish That Ate The Whale” grew right out of “Israel Is Real.”
At its height, the size and scope of United Fruit Company is astonishing -- and it wasn't that long ago -- yet Zemurray isn't a revered name in American business, why is that?
He had the immigrant sense to leave no evidence, attract no attention. My friend Ian Frazier had a line in his story about grizzly bears that I think can be repurposed for the banana man: a bear in the newspaper is a bear heading for a fall. Zemurray did not write letters, did not keep a diary, did not leave a lot of paper. He was a figure of the shadows. He gave a few interviews, and those were helpful, but he was careful and kept low. When he worked with Zionist agents in the 1940s, his one condition was that his name never be mentioned. When he was involved in the overthrow of a government in Honduras, he was referred to only as “El Amigo.” Not being famous was one of his great successes.
Sam the Banana Man was a fascinating mixture American business archetypes: The classic Horatio "up by the bootstraps" Alger, the immigrant tale, the take-no-prisoners 19th-century robber baron, the start-up maven, and even the efficient 21st-century technocratic entrepreneur. Is he the perfect vehicle to represent the history of American business?
I think so. That’s what really attracted me to him. I love the classic American types. To me, he was all of it, the best and worst of the American dream. He was brilliant, he was tough, he was filled with restless energy, he was better than what came before, and yet his dream became a nightmare for many of the people who happened to live in the banana lands.