Read Online The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen - Free Book Online Page A

shipping thirty-six million stems a year—60 percent of all bananas consumed in the United States. By then, the company had become a dominant player in Central America.
    *   *   *
    United Fruit dealt with its competition in one of two ways: absorb or crush. Even in the United States, where the dominance of the company was not fully understood—you really had to go down there and see for yourself—people began to ask, Should any company be this powerful? Questions persisted. Finally, a decade after the behemoth incorporated, Andrew Preston’s fears were realized.
    A lawsuit brought by the American Banana Company of Mobile was joined by the Justice Department. It charged United Fruit with violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was meant to break up “combinations” of companies that banded together to corner a market. It’s difficult to imagine a company in more clear violation. Between 1899 and 1905, United Fruit had acquired dozens of independent concerns, rolling them into a monolith that dominated trade. Gone were the mom and pop haggling on the docks; gone were the pushcart operators setting their own prices.
    According to the Justice Department, the formation of United Fruit, this Ottoman Empire of a trust, robbed consumers of a crucial benefit of competitive trade: a better product at a lower price. The U.F. lawyers argued that the size of the company had done just the opposite, resulting in a dependable supply of cheap bananas. In fact, said the lawyers, there were still not enough to satisfy demand, meaning there was plenty of room for any independent trader who wanted to get into the business.
    In 1909, the case reached the Supreme Court. It’s interesting to consider what might have happened if the Justice Department had won its case against United Fruit as it won its case against Standard Oil two years later. If U.F. had been broken up, if the monster had been divided into a half dozen little monsters, American history in Latin America might have been very different. An isthmus without El Pulpo is an isthmus in which the United States is not demonized in the same way. But the Justice Department did not win. Nor did it lose—not on the merits. (There is no way to look at U.F. in those years and see anything but a monopoly.) The Supreme Court instead decided—it was a huge decision, rife with unintended consequences—that it did not have the authority to judge, as most of the actions under review had occurred overseas. According to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote the majority opinion, “A conspiracy in this country to do acts in another jurisdiction does not draw to itself those acts and make them unlawful, if they are permitted by the local law.”
    By growing its product there and selling it here, U.F. had stumbled on the greatest tax-saving, law-avoiding scheme of all time. With this decision, Justice Holmes cleared the way for that crucial player of the modern age: the global corporation that exists both inside and outside American law, that is everywhere and nowhere, and never dies.

 
    7
    New Orleans
    When Sam Zemurray moved to New Orleans circa 1905, it was for the same reason the striver always moves to the big town: for the action.
    The city was at its maximum glory. The people-jammed streets were covered in the smog of industry, the Mississippi crowded with freighters and side-wheel steamers. The wharves were divided into sections: those dedicated to grain and cotton, the outgoing harvest of the plantations; those dedicated to bananas, the incoming harvest of the tropics. As the WPA New Orleans City Guide (1938) described it, “All day long the groaning conveyors lift bunches of bananas from the hold of the ship, and all day long men continue to move in a line carrying them. Darkness falls and the lights flash on; there are long swaying shadows, and the fruit is doubly green in the artificial light.”
    Zemurray lived