I just finished reading The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King, by Rich Cohen. It’s been on my shelf ever since the spine stopped me in my tracks at a library book sale.

I’m just going to say it…

This. Story. Is. Bananas.

Sorry. I couldn’t help it.

Going in, I knew:

a bit about this story and that it’s infuriating
there would be some overlaps with Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
it would be a quick read because I surely wouldn’t need or want to doodle much

It turns out:

the story is beyond infuriating but I didn’t expect to laugh as much as I did (which, to be fair, was not at all)
there were unexpected overlaps with other books
I wanted to draw everything

Flip through my sketchbook.

Then scroll through some doodles below.

There is no way I could summarize this book here. Nor is that ever my goal. I’m not even going to try. These doodles don’t represent important parts of the book. They’re just a few things that jumped out at me. In no particular order. And super-duper simplified. Just read the book.

Nobody slips on banana peels anymore

That stopped when Big Mike (a banana variety) went extinct.

To level-set, you should know bananas don’t grow on trees. They are an herb that can grow up to 30 feet tall. And it’s a berry, not a fruit.

It brought me joy to see the steamship and Fulton Street mentioned within the same few sentences, because hey! I know that street is named for the guy who brought the steamship to life! Robert Fulton!

The big players

For years, it was the big three:

Cuyamel-Fruit Co.
Standard Fruit & Steamship Co.
Would eventually become Dole. (More on that in a sec.) Look at their cute little mascot!
United Fruit Co.
Was this logo for real? It feels a little on-the-nose. I spent too much time trying to find out but then gave up.

John Sherman appeared via the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. (He’s the Ohio icicle who asked James Garfield to nominate him him for president. A request that backfired.)

Sanford Dole doesn’t really have much to do with anything in the doodle above. His cousin James founded Dole. I’ll never pass up an opportunity to doodle his magnificent forked beard though. Sanford was the only president of the Republic of Hawaii. And he kind of sort of banned the Hawaiian language. Exercising tremendous restraint here to not take you on a tangent about that.

H. L. Mencken and Lee Harvey Oswald both worked for United Fruit

Jason Statham showed up

… in my image searches for Lee Christmas, a mercenary hired by United Fruit. Turns out The Expendables characters are named for real people. Who knew?

Zemurray did it himself

As Stephen Kinzer wrote in Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, “deposing Zelaya’s government in Nicaragua [in 1909] had required the combined efforts of the State Department, the Navy, the Marines, and President Taft. In Honduras, Zemurray [did] the job himself.”

Raising a stink

By 1913, bananas were the most popular fruit. And they weren’t even grown in America! Enter the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Bill. Wilson hoped it would fix the budget.

“Did the leaders of the banana industry raise a stink? Of course the did,” writes Rich Cohen, in one of the many lines that made me giggle.

I don’t know if any of this happened on a phone. Even if it did, it wasn’t on a banana phone. And even if banana phones were a thing then, it wouldn’t be like depicted below because:

Phones didn’t look like this back then
I drew the hand the wrong way, so it’s like someone else is holding the phone up to Wilson’s ear.*

*As I’ve mentioned previously, if you’re here for hyper-realistic hands you are in the wrong place, my friend.

It would be grrrrrreat if you’d cool it

Frank B. Kellogg ran the State Department and feared war, which was less than ideal because war is terrible. Or, more accurately, because the Panama Canal is right over there and a war would muck that situation up.

I don’t know if this Kellogg is related to the Battle Creek Sanitarium / cereal Kelloggs. I do know that this guy probably didn’t quote Tony the Tiger. But it would be grrrrreat if he did.

Huey Long showed up!

I first encountered Huey Long reading about FDR. Former president and Chief Justice William Howard Taft called him “one of the most brilliant legal minds to appear before me.”

I did not know he co-wrote his campaign song or that Randy Newman recorded it (decades later, obviously). It’s pretty catchy.

Long’s campaign slogan was “Every Man a King” and he wanted to soak the rich, which to Zemurray sounded like “Let’s soak Zemurray.”

I read the nearly-full page paragraph about his assassination on my yoga mat waiting for class to start… with my jaw pretty much on the yoga mat. I’m not going to spoil it for you.

Augh!

Round and round we go… “lurching from crisis to crisis” (Cohen’s words) from “AUGH! Not enough competition!!” to “AUGH! It’s too chaotic and free!” (not Cohen’s words).

Jacobo Árbenz stood up to Sam The Banana Man

… and paid the price.

What a cluster

As Cohen points out “by 1954… it was hard to tell where the government ended and the company began.” Government officials went to work for United Fruit. United Fruit execs went to work for the government.

No surprise — the Dulles brothers were all tangled up in there, too. As an attorney, John Foster Dulles helped secure “the most lopsided deal in the history of Guatemala.” Eventually became President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. His brother Allen was on the board of United Fruit and did some legal work for them. He was also Eisenhower’s CIA head. Cool, cool, cool. What could possibly go wrong with these bozos running the show? (I’m not a fan. I’ll show my work below.)

I can’t spell Guatemala. Usually, I turn the middle vowel from an A to an E clumsily after the fact. This time, I didn’t even notice I messed up until now. I mean no disrespect.

Zemurray deliberately chose hires that aligned United Fruit’s interests not with the United States’ government… but with the interests of our top guys in government.

Gulp.

Notes about the Dulles boys

I haven’t liked these guys since I read about them in Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. Kinzer’s All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror cemented my opinion.

Where President Truman wanted the U.S. to be considered friendly (and he understood that intervening could lead unpredictable results), President Eisenhower was more hands-off letting the Dulles brothers do their thing. Together, the Dulleses headed up both overt and covert operations. They were skilled in the art of f*ck ing around and finding out. But the “finding out” part was nothing either of them had to worry about. They valued quick results and seemed unconcerned with potential long-term effects. And, friends, there were long-term effects.

I took some liberties with my first Dulles doodle. I don’t think they had horns. Probably just forked tails. I’ve been wrong about people before though. If you think my impression of these guys is off-base, I welcome you to try to change my mind.

All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer

Yikes. This guy…

Edward Bernays:

basically invented public relations and believed in control through manipulation
said “our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we’ve never heard of”
loved indirection … like “President Árbenz promises land reform? And that will hurt United Fruit big time? OMG COMMUNISM!” It mattered not at all that there was no evidence of communism. Or that Árbenz looked up to FDR. It just mattered that United Fruit made things better for the top guys in the U.S. government… who would do the same for the CIA… who would “make the world better for bananas.” Everybody wins!*
lived to 103 and is now in my list of 100 Centenarians
wrote a book that (inadvertently) gave Joseph Goebbels loads of ideas to design his whole campaign

*As long as “everybody” included only those with a stake in United Fruit

Truman: a big obstruction

A bigger obstruction to United Fruit than even President Árbenz himself. He put the kibosh on the covert stuff.

I made this little chart when I read All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer. As Cohen is quoted in the doodle below, toward the end of his presidency, Truman “seemed to become alarmed by his creation, his rogue Pinocchio, which, given feet as well as hands, ears, and eyes, had increasingly operated on its own initiative.”

Buuuut then Ike was president

No more obstruction.

Operation Success was just like Operation Ajax, but with bananas (instead of oil)
The CIA and United Fruit were pretty indistinguishable from one another at this time
- The CIA smuggled stuff (cash, men, guns) aboard United Fruit ships
- United Fruit helped financially when the CIA lacked sufficient funding and areyoufreakingkiddingmewhyisthisathing
- Both pro-status quo

Kermit Roosevelt — who I’d previously read mistakenly and most embarrassingly had a radio station blast out the Star Spangled Banner post-coup! — turned down an opportunity to be a part of Operation Success because he’d “[come] to fear the hubristic mood” (Cohen’s words) of Ike’s administration. From the little I know about Kermit, I do not believe he was lacking in hubris himself. I feel like this is tantamount to me not liking someone because they “doodle too much about presidents.”
I’d forgotten about the doodle below, where my little paraphrasing Kermit cautions about not overdoing the overthrowing… and the Dulles brothers hear what they want to hear.

All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer

Literal smoke and figurative mirrors

Sigh.

We dropped smoke bombs and “Get out!” flyers from WWII planes and piped in war sounds from hidden speakers (etc., etc.) leading to President Árbenz stepping down… aaaaaand a civil war that lasted nearly four decades and killed 200,000.

And then five days later…

… the DOJ went after UF. Perhaps to cover up that they were in cahoots with U.F. in the first place..? Dunno. At this point, it was hard to know who was using who in this situation.

Nevertheless… when Cuba nationalized all of U.F.’s holdings in Cuba (all $60 million of it), the CIA (led by Allen Dulles) hatched up a little plan… which Ike approved… and JFK got moving:

Operation Zapata

E. Howard Hunt got the money and guns and stuff …

[pause for effect]

… from United Fruit.

Needless to say, the Bay of Pigs invasion did not go as planned. But I’m sure you know that already.

I had no choice but to add The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King, by Rich Cohen to my list of books I try to assign to others. Have you read it yet? Let me know in the comments below.