Banana Cowboys

The United Fruit Company and the Culture of Corporate Colonialism

James W. Martin

• Editorial: University of New Mexico Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780826359438
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

The iconic American banana man of the early twentieth century—the white "banana cowboy" pushing the edges of a tropical frontier—was the product of the corporate colonialism embodied by the United Fruit Company. This study of the United Fruit Company shows how the business depended on these complicated employees, especially on acclimatizing them to life as tropical Americans.

CHAPTER ONE

From Scramblers for Fruit to Banana Empire, 1870–1930

The tropical world of the banana company town has generated many fictionalized accounts.¹ O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings (1904) sets a series of tales in Coralio, a sleepy coastal town in the first literary “banana republic,” Anchuria. Political intrigues occasionally visit Coralio, and the American presence, besides a few purchasing agents for the Vesuvius Company, is confined to a coterie of ne’er-do-wells and intriguers, some of them given in to the indolent charms of the “lotus”—the languid allure of the tropics.² The most famous literary banana town, Macondo, serves as a central motif in Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), where the casual visit of an innocent American butterfly collector to the sleepy, war-ravaged village precipitates a series of stunning transformations. The ostensible lepidopterist, Mr. Herbert, invited to dine with the Buendía family, tries a curiously delicious fruit. Cloaked in his scientific innocence, the family pays the odd outsider little mind. Soon after his departure, the banana company arrives like a force of nature and Macondo becomes an overnight export-driven boomtown. Life behind the bananera’s gallinero electrificado—the electrified chicken-fence separating the breezy verandahs, swimming pools, and wide avenues of the American zone from the old town—moves along aloof from its surroundings, a placid gloss over the company’s biblical powers of transformation and destruction and its brutalization of laborers.³ These literary prototypes, Coralio and Macondo, could bracket this study of United Fruit: on one end, the backwater with one toe in the international fruit trade; on the other end, the maximum expression of US corporate penetration in early twentieth-century Latin America, the full-blown banana enclave, its fate intricately intertwined with markets and decisions made across the sea. The brackets surround the last two decades of the nineteenth century (the United Fruit Company was incorporated in 1899) and the early 1930s, when global economic depression forced a series of transformations in the UFCO’s enterprise. Over the course of those years, the banana trade went from an ad hoc, windfall-based trade to the province of highly capitalized, vertically integrated corporations with vast reach and technological capabilities exceeding those of most nations. The UFCO stood at the apex of this remade world. Banana Cowboys’s stories focus on this period, and the current chapter lays the groundwork by surveying the origin and rise of United Fruit’s empire.

The motives and forces that drove the UFCO’s creation and expansion start in the 1870s and 1880s, when its parent companies made their first forays into the tropical commodity trade. United Fruit was a part of a larger wave of mergers around the turn of the century that arose from the introduction, in 1899, of the New Jersey–based holding company, a revolutionary corporate mechanism that allowed for more highly capitalized, farther-reaching combinations than ever before. The UFCO was initially formed as the combination of the two largest banana traders of the time, the Boston Fruit Company (BFC), owned and managed by Andrew Preston and Lorenzo Dow Baker, and the railroad and banana empire of Minor Cooper Keith. The former had spent fifteen years expanding its reach in Jamaica, building a significant banana fleet of its own, and consolidating its hold over fruit distribution in the US Northeast. Keith had been building railroads in Central America since the 1870s and had amassed a series of agricultural properties in Costa Rica and Colombia, which then included present-day Panama.

Looking back on the company’s origins in its prosperous 1910s and 1920s, United Fruit publicists and apologists described the company’s rise in heady terms, as a manifestation of the US mission to modernize and uplift a backward region, complete with the racial overtones common to expansionist rhetoric of the time. Frederick Upham Adams, writing a classic study of the UFCO in 1914, prognosticated that the future inhabitants of the lowland tropics would bow with gratitude before the company’s achievements, and “will realize that all this was made possible by the American citizens who were the pioneers in this Conquest of the Tropics.” Adams emphasized “the quickening spirit of Yankee enterprise” as the driving force behind the company’s expansion.⁴ United Fruit emerged not from the racially or culturally construed energies of its founders, but from a concrete set of circumstances those hard-nosed Yankee businessmen faced in the banana trade of the late nineteenth century. The difficulties these smaller enterprises faced, in particular how they learned to grow and move millions of tons of perishable cargo over long distances, decisively shaped the first true US corporate empire in Latin America. By the mid-1880s, the future founders of United Fruit realized that the profitable movement of bananas into US markets from an enormous tropical hinterland depended on steady, measurable supplies of fruit and a tightly coordinated transportation system. To their eye the only acceptable way to organize such a system rested on a white, Anglo-Saxon–managed division of labor. Documentation on the internal operations of Keith’s enterprises is scanty, but the BFC has left a significant collection of internal correspondence going back to the 1880s. A glimpse into the origins and expansion of the UFCO and a principle parent company provides vital background to the stories to come and offers insight into different dimensions of the transition from family-operated firm to transnational corporation in the Caribbean Basin.

The Roots of the Tropical Fruit Trade

Bananas, an Old-World cultivar with long roots in the New World, began arriving in US ports in the mid-nineteenth century as ancillary cargoes to more reliable commodities such as sugar. In the age of sail, the fruit’s perishability ensured its sporadic arrival to US consumers and its status as a rare luxury. The parent companies of the UFCO moved into banana production from their roots in transportation. In 1871, New York–born Minor Cooper Keith, who cut his teeth raising cattle along the Texas coast, arrived in Costa Rica under contract to build a railroad linking the central valley to the Caribbean coast, a titanic engineering achievement that was only completed in 1890.⁵ With a strong foothold in Puerto Limón, the country’s Atlantic port, Keith sought to make his railroad pay by shipping bananas north. In 1872, he sent his first consignments from Costa Rica to New Orleans. By the late 1880s, the basic features of the banana enclave were in place under his purview. Keith had acquired several large parcels of land around Limón, which he dedicated mostly to bananas. He introduced the Gros Michel, the first commercially viable banana, a first step toward standardization in the trade. Although he purchased much fruit from independent growers, Jamaican workers, managed by white overseers, formed the heart of the labor force. Keith formed separate companies to handle banana cultivation in Colombia, which would later form the UFCO’s Santa Marta and Bocas del Toro divisions. His various enterprises made up the western axis of the banana trade, one running between Central America and Colombia to New Orleans.

The eastern axis, based primarily in Jamaica, would be dominated by Boston-area interests. In 1870, Cape Cod–based merchant sea captain Lorenzo Dow Baker became one of the first who realized that the tasty, nourishing fruit could fetch a fair price on northern wharves. Baker acquired lands in Jamaica, but like Keith, he depended on independent growers to establish the trade.⁶ With greater supplies reaching US markets in the 1880s and 1890s, fruit became cheaper and more popular with the consuming public, thereby intensifying the trade. To take advantage of the growing commodities trade of the 1880s, future United Fruit cofounders Andrew Preston and Baker—Baker a shipper/grower and Preston a Boston fruit salesman—joined forces. Preston’s and Baker’s business relationship united two geographies and three areas of expertise: banana cultivation, an understanding of transoceanic shipping, and access to North American markets. By the late 1880s, the Bakers (by then son Lorenzo Jr., known as “Loren,” had joined the business as a fruit broker and plantation supervisor in Port Morant, Jamaica) had a solid foothold in tropical fruit cultivation. Unlike Keith, the Bakers and Preston maintained a lively written correspondence from these years, which provides insight into the internal decisions behind the creation of what would become the largest agricultural business in the world.

The first set of decisions concerned fruit supplies. Relationships with those independent growers in Jamaica brought much anxiety to the Bakers, for they represented an unstable link in the supply chain. One of the junior Baker’s main responsibilities in the 1880s and 1890s lay in smoothing relations with these growers, large and small. Boston Fruit faced a contentious array of planters who naturally sought to better the terms of their contracts with competing shippers. Competing on this distressingly open market required continual face-to-face contact. The senior Baker frequently prodded his son to keep up these contacts with planters. “We want to keep hold of the large producers as much as possible,” he wrote in 1885, and advised that Loren “occasionally see those people and see that they are not getting dissatisfied.” Apparently, the cantankerous elder delegated a good portion of these diplomatic duties to his son, who knew how “to massage the little growers much better than I can.”⁷ Cementing relationships with one big planter could stabilize the company’s fruit supplies in a locality, but maintaining the arrangement in the face of cutthroat competition required constant vigilance of other buyers. “If we can govern Noyes,” wrote Baker Sr. of one large grower, “we can in measure govern Port Morant … [and] keep out that great opposition or competition.”⁸

From the perspective of Boston Fruit’s leadership, independent growers large and small often mistimed harvests, despite written instructions from company headquarters at Port Antonio, orders themselves received by telegraph from Boston. The company effectively moved information across space, but what planters chose to do with that information was another matter. Baffled, company leadership railed against the failure of these suppliers to appreciate the functioning of a transoceanic productive system. The only means by which Boston Fruit’s buyers could shape the timing of harvests was to persuade independent planters to leave fruit on trees until as late as possible. Judging from the frequent complaints, many growers refused to make such fine distinctions. Baker Sr. routinely admonished his son to have growers “keep the fruit on the trees until it comes to perfection,” a moment that differed depending on the fruit in question.⁹ Poorly timed harvests produced low-grade fruit. Preston communicated the difficulties of making grade while depending on independent planters to Baker Jr. in the early 1890s: “I hope you may be able to secure it [fruit] in some way as we shall need it badly here IF it is full clean and bright which fact I pressume [sic] you can establish if you have control of the cutting. The time is past when importers can make a profit on thin and ordinary fruit.”¹⁰ (Emphasis in original.)

By the 1890s, the novelty of tropical fruits, at least for East-Coast consumers, had worn off. Sellers had developed grading standards for tropical fruits, and the increased trade reduced the market for overripe and irregular bananas, a mainstay of earlier days. In the face of consistent consumer demand, maintaining a profitable market depended on predictable, steady flows of high-quality fruit.¹¹

Errors in harvest timing, usually brought about by the vagaries of wrangling multiple independent suppliers, resulted in snarled transportation. Ships could sail to the United States overloaded or wait days at port for cargoes. Either logistical mistake could destroy the profitability of highly perishable bananas. Before the advent of refrigerated maritime transport, holds overpacked with bananas reached high temperatures and hastened spoilage. Ripening bananas chemically generate heat, a process accelerated by cramped, underventilated spaces. Cargoes that exceeded orders from vendors also produced wastage. In the 1890s, Andrew Preston repeatedly sent bitter complaints from Boston to agents in Jamaica about hundreds of surplus banana bunches rotting on US piers.¹² Some of the company’s own agents still misunderstood the workings of the increasingly regularized fruit trade.

Problematic relations with fruit suppliers, along with sheer distance to market, constrained the BFC’s ability to expand its reach beyond Jamaica. The company’s ships occasionally plied the northern coast of Panama in the 1880s and purchased bananas in the Bocas del Toro area, Minor Cooper Keith’s territory in those years. Accounts of this route reveal that for Boston Fruit’s capacities, at least, distance from market troubled the Bocas trade. The lack of refrigeration made the route from Panama too long for some cargoes of bananas. From the Bakers’ perspective, a smooth coordination of harvests and loading operations might have made the Bocas trade work, but supply and loading lay beyond the company’s reach. In 1887 the senior Baker added that the Central American trade was unprofitable on these grounds and because of the energy required to maintain good relations with growers.¹³ A few months later, he wrote that the company had dropped the Bocas trade in order to focus on Jamaica, where “everything will be done to insure a steady regular service.”¹⁴ It is unclear whether the BFC resumed its Panama contacts in the 1890s, but by the time the company united with Minor Cooper Keith’s interests to form the United Fruit Company in 1899, improvements in shipping technology had made the western Caribbean a far more important banana-producing area than the Antilles. For the time being, Central America represented enticing, unfulfilled promise.

Given these obstacles to geographical expansion, Preston and Baker Sr. believed that the key to stabilizing fruit supplies and qualities would be to expand their direct control over cultivation in Jamaica, a move toward “vertical integration,” the acquisition of more links in the commodity-production cha...