Jungle Capitalists by Peter Chapman

Author:Peter Chapman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847676863
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-10-12T10:00:00+00:00

Sam Zemurray aimed to go out on a high note. His bananas symbolised capitalism: small luxuries that led to far more. Communism promised only the dullest in utility and even failed to deliver that. With his world set on the path to fortune and fun, Zemurray decided to retire again. In so doing he planned to reconcile with his roots and old enemies.

No reference books on Jewry in the US South mentioned him and his role in US entrepreneurship. Maybe he preferred it this way. He wore ‘no conspicuous prominence on his sleeve,’ the rabbi of the New Orleans synagogue he attended later recalled. On the other hand Zemurray had appreciated that visit by Chaim Weizmann, Zionism’s missionary, twenty-five years before. They had shared an interest in mathematics and music and, as an escapee from Russian anti-Semitism, Zemurray had found himself inspired by Weizmann’s message. So in the late 1940s he helped fund and organise the purchase of the Exodus, the boat that would take migrants to the emerging state of Israel.

Zemurray had no obvious successor as company chief. He had never taken to Boston. He could have made an elegant home of any of the brownstones in the Back Bay but preferred the long-term rental of a suite in the staidly grand Ritz-Carlton, overlooking the Common. At such times as he’d needed to recover ‘lost energies’, he had retreated to New Orleans to fast for days, weeks it was claimed, on water alone.

Zemurray had never apparently sought the acceptance of the Brahmins, however, he had good sense recognising that they ran Boston and that it would be as well for one of them to run United Fruit. If he had been looking for someone of the right blood, he didn’t go for half measures; he chose a Cabot.

Thomas Cabot was a pleasant enough fellow. His later autobiography had a friendly foreword from Robert McNamara, President John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser at the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Before that McNamara had reorganised the Ford Motor Company. Old Henry Ford had borrowed United Fruit’s mass-market ideas but lingered too long and McNamara had been hired to save the company. Zemurray worried that he, like Ford, had stayed too long but thought he saw something in Cabot that would produce success.

Cabot appeared as effortless old money. Scott Fitzgerald would have admired and despised his jaunt through the decades, with horse-riding and travel. He did have an industrial background, with his side of the family owning carbon-black factories that belched smoke over rolling hills in Pennsylvania. Cabot had run them, not in a manner to leave him exhausted but he seemed to know some of the arts of management.

United Fruit’s managers failed to agree. When Cabot took over he did reveal some very interesting ideas. Give up Central America, he said, because it was lost to disease. He wasn’t far wrong. Big Mike was close to extinction. Cabot suggested United Fruit should relocate distantly south across the Andes: perhaps that would keep the bugs away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.