Epic life of the New Orleans ‘Banana King’ unfolds in a sweeping new biography

Samuel Zemurray strode through a life of blazing tropical colors, but in the half-century since his death, the image of the New Orleans Banana King has faded to black and white.

These days, Zemurray survives in the silvery shadows of period photographs, and in the memories, grown pale, of the remaining handful who knew him as an old man. He exists in the ledgers of Tulane University, Touro Infirmary and other institutions that he showered with gifts. Some part of him is memorialized — or is he mocked? — by the white terra cotta garlands and cornucopia that frame the entry at 321 St. Charles Ave., once the regional headquarters for his United Fruit Company.

Much of the man — self-made millionaire; father and husband; New Deal Democrat; and Jewish immigrant from a long-lost Czarist Russia — has also been shrouded by the black reputation that settled over the multi-national corporate behemoth that he headed for decades. Go to Central America, where United Fruit once called the shots, and Zemurray is still “El Gringo,” the puppet master who built hospitals and overthrew governments, who bribed officials, squeezed tax concessions, met payrolls and constructed railroads.

How big was Zemurray? At one point, his United Fruit owned 70 percent of all private land in Guatemala. He employed 100,000 people in a dozen countries and commanded the largest private navy in the world. He was an oval office confidante of Franklin Roosevelt. He battled Huey Long. He played a huge, behind-the-scenes role in the founding of Israel. And, yet, this immigrant with the Russian accent remained an outsider, too — one who never quite broke into the upper crust social world of New Orleans and Boston, where his North American business interests were centered.

For the whole picture — good, bad, colorful and cautionary — look to the new, grippingly readable biography from Rich Cohen: “The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King.”

http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2012/06/epic_life_of_the_new_orleans_b.html#incart_more_entertainment

http://www.nola.com/175years/index.ssf/2011/10/1910_new_orleans_goes_bananas.html