The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  * * *

  Sam found the only check on his power in his wife, Sarah Weinberger, the daughter of the Parrot King. Life described her as “a quiet, plainly dressed, self-effacing woman, who practices housekeeping as a fine art.” Sarah did indeed see herself as a maestro of the near-at-hand. She stayed at home when Sam traveled, raised the family when he was gone. If she suffered, she suffered quietly. Like a range of distant hills, she was the background against which the action is staged—a member of the last generation of American women to take their domestic role so seriously that they have vanished.

  Sarah Weinberger-Zemurray wrote a handful of books on the domestic arts—One Hundred Unusual Dinners and How to Prepare Them, for example—which, considering the place her husband occupied in the dream life of banana land, stand as a counterpoint to One Hundred Years of Solitude. As García Márquez was imagining a tempest that would clear the landscape of plantations and gringos, Sarah was imagining Shad-Roe and Asparagus Soup (Menu 38): “Beat the cream stiff and put 1 tablespoonful in each serving”; Giblet Gumbo (Menu 21): “Use feet (skinned and toenails chopped off). Cut feet in half, skin the gizzards”; Consommé with Avocado Balls (Menu 77): “Mash avocado with salt and pepper to taste, shape into balls.”

  One Hundred Unusual Dinners was published in 1938 by the Thomas Todd Company of Boston. It’s a cookbook, but most of the recipes would torment a professional chef. Imprecise and vague, they read less like directions than like visions of archetypes. Here’s the light: you build the tunnel. The meals themselves speak of an indulgent time, when everything was jellied, fried, and covered in cream. The menus might explain Sam Zemurray’s tortured relationship with food, his diets, vegetarianism and constant swearing off. Reading the details of his cures—only bananas and water; only figs; only lettuce and toast—alongside his wife’s calendar of smothered entrées is like catching an echo of an old argument. Here you have not just two menus but two ways of life: the calorie-rich, cream-heavy indulgence of the domestic world versus the spare manner of the banana cowboy.

  According to articles and photos, Sarah Weinberger was a stout matron, a paragon of the Jewish South. She wore dun-colored dresses that swept the floor and big-soled shoes that could be heard at a distance. Her hair was usually pinned into a bun, a cushion that, one afternoon, a million years before, on a beach on Padre Island, Texas, say, when her shoulders were tanned to freckles, a boy might have described as spun gold, but had since faded to ash. She was young, but only for a minute. On formal occasions, she was the woman in back of the family photograph. To people of that vintage, the camera was an untrusted mechanism that required utter stillness. In my mind, Sarah, seen only at full length, is a stand-in for every Jewish grandmother of three or four generations back, a product of old America, with a keen sense of propriety and undying faith in progress, suggested every time she looked at her son and said, “Sam! My God, he’s taller than you!”

  While Sam was raising bananas, Sarah was raising human beings. Doris, born in 1909, crossed the Gulf of Mexico with her father several times when she was a girl. To most children, this would be a trip through the wardrobe: on this side, the austere rooms of 2 Audubon Place; on that side, the banana frontier, where vaqueros drink rum beneath the tin roof of the shanty. Staying on the isthmus, in the house of the boss, behind electrified wire, might make some children haughty, but it fascinated Doris. She wanted to know everything about Honduras, its people and politics, the story of it lost civilizations—subjects that would become the great passions of her life.

  Sam Jr., remembered mostly as a physical presence, was a young man written in all capitals. Born in 1913, he became everything a father could want: handsome, smart, admired. Five feet tall in the fifth grade, six foot one in the tenth grade, he just kept growing. Sam Jr. was six foot six when he entered Tulane. He played on the school’s football team, which was among the best in the nation. He was captain of the boxing team. His friends called him Pig Iron. His great love was airplanes. He would sit on the edge of the runway and watch the Curtiss Carrier Pigeons and Ford Tri-Motors take off. He earned his pilot license when he was really still a boy. His father bought him a prop plane that sounded like a buzz saw. Sam Jr. would fly to the plantation, where the old man, sitting on the porch, would watch the plane cross the sky and land on the strip behind the pine trees. While studying for a business degree at Harvard, Sam Jr. met Margaret Thurston Pickering, a member of a prominent family. She was the granddaughter of William Henry Pickering, an astronomer who predicted the possibility of flying machines (correct), the presence of a ninth planet (correct), the presence of vegetation on the moon (incorrect). They were married on June 25, 1936, in the Harvard Memorial Chapel by C. Leslie Glenn, a Presbyterian minister. They settled in New York.

  Sam Jr. was the world to his father, the point of all the work and the gift he would leave behind when he was gone. He was the future. He was America. Tolstoy described a child as a sphere of vulnerability, another place the world can hurt you. It’s possible that Zemurray loved his son too much.

  * * *

  As the occupant of the grandest house in New Orleans, Zemurray had obligations, a role to play. He had given to charity as soon as he had money, but now is when his real career in philanthropy began. For a man like Zemurray, this was less a matter of warmhearted sympathy than an aspect of the complete life: a requirement. In some ways, the world was better back then. It did not matter if you were kind or as mean as a snake—you were supposed to give, so you gave. That’s all.

  Though apparently not religious, Zemurray was, in important ways, as Jewish as can be. His philanthropy was an example: it was not how much he gave, it was the way he gave. He seemed to be aware of the concept of tzedakah, the obligation to give as spelled out in Deuteronomy and explained in the Deuteronomic Code—a man needs a code or else lives willy-nilly, like an animal—which requires tzedakah from every Jew, even the struggling. If you have a little more than nothing, divide that little more into ten parts and give one away. For a righteous life, tzedakah is more important than prayer or trips to Jerusalem or professions of faith. Don’t tell me how you feel; show me what you’ve done. In the Bible, the guidelines are explained in reference to agriculture: if you have one hundred vineyards, leave ten unharvested for the poor; if you have ten olive trees, leave one unbeaten for the poor. This would have spoken to Zemurray, a man who considered himself a farmer first and last.

  Among the highest forms of tzedakah is to give anonymously, in a way that does not disgrace the person in need. Whenever possible, Sam gave without affixing his signature: neither press conference nor public announcement nor strings attached. A private man who shunned publicity, he believed charity was sacred but that those things that often surround it—newspaper pomp, ribbon cutting—were tawdry. I don’t know whether Zemurray read the Bible or knew the code, only that he’d clearly been affected by the folk wisdom, what his father told his mother over the dinner table in Russia: that giving with display is not giving, but trading. I give you money, you give me prestige. Philanthropy that does not degrade is done so quietly not even the rescued learns the name of his rescuer. For this reason, we’ll never know how much Zemurray gave, or to whom. Life said, “Zemurray has given millions for philanthropic purposes—usually in secrecy.” We know of only the public projects and causes, those that could not be advanced without attracting a crowd.

  There was, for example, Tulane, which Zemurray was determined to turn into one of the world’s great universities. He made his first gift in 1911, when he donated $32,000 to the school to fund a department of hygiene and tropical medicine. He wanted to help cure the Torrid Zone diseases that now and then devastated New Orleans. The population of the city had been punished by yellow fever in 1905. You could not go ten minutes that summer without hearing horns and drums as the funeral processions went through the streets to the cemetery beyond the old city ramparts. In 1925, Zemurray made another contribution, building a dormitory for girls that is still i
n heavy use today. Named for Zemurray’s daughter, it’s called Doris Hall. As in, I’ll meet you inside Doris. He put up $40,000 for a girls’ gymnasium in 1932, when Sam Jr. was a student, then kicked in another half a million for projects various and sundry. He sat on the school’s board for years and was involved in key decisions, some good, some terrible. (In the 1950s, he opposed a plan to desegregate the university.) In other words, in addition to money, he gave expertise, time. When I was a student at Tulane, it seemed half the school was named for members of his family. Two buildings named for his daughter, New Doris Hall and Old Doris Hall; a complex for his son-in-law, the Stone Center; a dorm for the patriarch himself, Zemurray Hall. Walking through the campus was like wandering though a family album, though most of the students hardly noticed. People accept the world as they find it. For them, Zemurray was not a man on a mule. He was a building where you got so drunk you wondered if you were actually living this life or were just a figment in another person’s dream. All this nameplating might seem contrary to the ideal of anonymous giving, but most of the titles were affixed after the Banana Man died. I think he would have hated it.

  * * *

  More charity:

  Zemurray gave money to establish a clinic for troubled children in New Orleans, funded the city’s first hospital for “Negro” women, and, at the urging of his daughter, made a $250,000 gift to Radcliffe College to endow a professorship at Harvard, an endowment that resulted in the first woman professor on the Arts and Sciences Faculty of the university. It’s called the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science. He gave vast amounts to The Nation magazine, which had fallen on hard times, and more to found the Zamorano, the Panamerican Agricultural School, which is a short drive from Tegucigalpa. Still considered among the best schools of its kind in Central America, the Zamorano was tuition free. Graduates were discouraged from taking jobs in the banana industry. Zemurray wanted to build an educated Central American class independent of the trade; the overreliance of the people on the fruit companies had become a problem for everyone. He had a passion for giving money on the isthmus. His charity in Central America included hospitals, highways, power grids, seawalls, levees, orphanages, and schools. There was a saying in New Orleans: “If you want something from Sam Zemurray, ask for it in Spanish.”

  Perhaps most significant, he helped create the Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane, a center with origins in Omoa, where a plantation manager set a grinning little idol on Zemurray’s desk.

  What the fuck is it? asked Zemurray.

  I don’t know, said the manager, but we keep finding them in the fields.

  Tell you what, said Sam. I’ll give you a dollar for every one you bring in here.

  In this way, Zemurray amassed one of the most important collections of Mayan artifacts in the world: idols, statues, dinnerware, and hundreds of tchotchkes boxed and sent to New Orleans, where they were among the founding treasures of MARI. Several years after Sam funded the center—now called the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies—the WPA guide described him as “an interested man of wealth who preferred to remain anonymous.”

  * * *

  In the 1930s, Zemurray was increasingly drawn, against his will, kicking and screaming, onto the public stage. His wealth and position seemed to demand it. Though he long steered clear of American politics—he had the foreigner’s dread of drawing attention—he was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which he criticized only for not going far enough, fast enough.

  To Zemurray, who spent his formative years in Russia, awash in ideology, who followed from afar the triumph of Mussolini and Stalin and was mesmerized by the rise of Hitler, America did not seem immune. In the first years of the Great Depression, he must have sensed the same dark mood that was spreading across Europe: in the eyes of the crowds, in the grumbling on the bread lines, in the temper of the vagabond armies that haunted the docks. Something had to be done to help these people, work had to be found, or who knows what might happen. Zemurray was a member of the last generation of American tycoons that identified less with Republicans than with Democrats, less with capital than with workingmen. Hence his contributions to The Nation. Hence his involvement with the New Deal. He traveled back and forth to Washington, D.C., sat through government meetings, served on federal commissions. It was not that, looking at the crowds, he thought “That could be me”; it was that he realized “That is me”—if the dice took one more turn, if the switchman slept though the morning call and the ripes turned brown. He helped write the codes enforced by FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which paid American farmers to leave fields fallow. He served on the Board of Economic Welfare and advised Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture. On occasion, he met with the president himself. He was one of the unofficial advisers some people had in mind when they referred to the commander in chief as President Rosenfelt.

  But Zemurray’s most notorious struggle was waged at home, against the governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, the plump, red-cheeked country boy in overalls, with colic and grin, the scourge of fat-cat businessmen who promised to burn it all down and take it all away.

  Huey Long grew up in Winnfield, Louisiana. His father was a farmer, as was his father, as was his father. He won a scholarship to Louisiana State University but could not afford the textbooks so went on the road instead, working, variously, as a salesman of canned goods, a hawker of elixir medicine, and an auctioneer. He had a wonderful voice, a beautiful way of phrasing. He entered politics in 1918 as an elected member of the Louisiana Railroad Commission, where he made his name in fiery public hearings. By twenty-five, he was the dreaded foe of Standard Oil. He had the advantage of being underestimated, condescended to, and dismissed as a buffoon, all the while amassing a huge popular following. A. J. Liebling described him as “a chubby man [with] ginger hair and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. It was an uneasy color combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt. His face faintly suggested mumps.” He broadened his attack from Standard Oil to corporations in general; from corporations in general to the corporatist mentality; from the corporatist mentality to the handful of oligarchs and politicians who were remorseless and cunning in their control of our markets and lives. He referred to them as the “Old Regulars” or “the Ring.” When Long ran for governor, he promised to kick out the bosses and soak the rich, the parasites, relieve them of their ill-gotten gains and remind them of the people on the farms and in the small towns who one day, and that day is coming, brother, will shake off the old regulars like so many fleas. He campaigned under the slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”

  “How many men ever went to a barbecue,” he asked in a speech, “and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you’ll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain’t got no business with!”

  It’s not just what Long said, but also how he said it. His face was expressive in a way unimaginable in the pallid politics of today. He spoke with his hands, got his whole body into it. Goofy yet strong, he seemed like he was having a great time. Here’s the crucial quality often overlooked by historians of the era: Huey Long was funny; comedy was a big part of his appeal from the beginning. He delivered his kickers not to shouts but to laughter. The man who wanted to make the bastards pay was the scariest thing of all: an evil clown.

  Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928. He had been prominent in the state for years, but the Depression turned him into a star. With a quarter of the American people out of work, his talk of upending the establishment, of making the whalelike corporations disgorge bellyfuls of fish, rang like a bell. He shouted, cajoled, threatened, becoming a national figure in the process. In the 1930s, after many years as a Roosevelt man, he began to distance himself from the Democratic Party. He hinted at
making his own presidential run. To some, Long was the best hope for a more equitable distribution of wealth. And yet, even at the height of his power, he remained small-town, fixated on Louisiana. Though he served in the U.S. Senate, his internal map of the world, the friends and foes who really mattered, the secret hierarchy that controlled everything, was focused on a handful of clubs in New Orleans. To Long, “the people” meant the farmers of Louisiana, and “the establishment” meant a dozen or so machine politicians who had sworn to defeat not just Long but Long-ism, that terrible uprising of the rabble-rousing trash.

  Long was truly hated by his opponents. It had less to do with policy than with taste. To them, Huey stood for everything crass. “They despised him,” John Barry wrote in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. “In the evenings they literally sat around their drawing rooms discussing ways to murder him.”

  By 1930, Long was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, challenging the incumbent Joseph Ransdell for the Democratic nomination. In the course of this campaign, Long believed he uncovered the shadow force bankrolling all his enemies. “Our opposition undertook to form a coalition of practically every political element in the City of New Orleans to overcome whatever lead I might have in the country outside that city,” Long wrote in Every Man a King, his autobiography. “The opposition was well on its way toward effecting such alignment, when I discovered the power behind the throne.”