Ed Whitman was known to everyone as Whit. When I moved to his publicity and advertising department, I was nineteen years old. I’d been with United Fruit for less than a year. And I was an exception—a very young guy in a corporation of old men, a status I would constantly be reminded of over the years. When I became a vice president in 1969, I was the youngest VP in the company’s history. I like to think my youth gave me a unique perspective on an aging company: I joined early enough to meet the old-timers and get to know the history of the firm, but I was there long enough—twenty years—to see it transform in ways that paralleled many changes in America itself during that time.
Businesses are a lot like people. When companies are born/founded, they are like children: fearless, open to new ideas, and willing to take risks, fall, and get up again. They are eager for adventure and above all flexible. As companies get older, they slow down, become more cautious and more set in their ways. They grow risk averse and want more comfort in their life and less work. The older they get the more rigid and tradition-bound they become. And, like people, most companies don’t live to be a hundred.
In 1953, when I moved to Whit’s department, United Fruit was in the cautious older phase. It was in decline both domestically and in the tropics, where it sourced its product—bananas. (The way United Fruit did business gave rise to the phrase “banana republic.”). Management was old, tired, and complacent. It was still a Fortune 500 company, but profits had begun to decline, and dividends were shrinking. The banana market was changing and so was the political environment. The company’s monopoly on bananas was not so big as it once was. The market was getting more competitive. Central America was also changing, going from oxcarts to jet airplanes in a little more than a decade. Among many other changes, workers were demanding more money and better benefits. The world was changing. United Fruit was not.
But within this hidebound company, I was young enough and eager enough to learn how I could change. From the start I was determined to learn everything I could about United Fruit, from top to bottom. This wasn’t IBM or Boeing. We were low tech, not high, so the way to get ahead was to learn as much as I could from the inside. While working, I took college courses at the NYU School of Commerce—not philosophy or literature, but subjects that would help me on the job—accounting, marketing, advertising, finance, business. I read everything I could about business, though there was very little in those days. And I funded it myself. There were no tuition refund programs in those days, but at eighteen dollars a credit I could handle the tuition. And I earned extra money on weekends working for my uncle Arthur’s plumbing, floor waxing, and TV repair business.
Whit also helped. There was there no formal training program at the company, but he enabled me to spend up to three weeks at a time in other departments, including sales, freight traffic, purchasing, accounting, steamships, and pier operations. That time allowed me to learn the basics. I became a reporter for the company’s in-house magazine, which gave me more experience and a few extra dollars. It also let me see the whole of the company and how its pieces fit together. When I was eventually transferred to Boston, I became known as the young man who knew more about the company than anyone else. Of course, I loved that distinction and did everything I could to enhance and promote that reputation.
The business and financial aspects of United Fruit’s operations were handled in Boston by cautious, conservative Brahmins who had substantial political clout at all levels of the federal government. The actual business of growing bananas, on the other hand, was left to swashbuckling men, mostly adventure-seekers who were tough, often flamboyant, and attracted to the romantic nature of the tropics. When the Boston men wanted to influence a political outcome, they did it quietly, covertly, behind the scenes, through personal contacts and persuasion. In the tropics, political objectives were effected through bribes, force, and even revolution. That was the way it was when I joined the company, and that was the way it was after I left.
Among the many lessons I learned from the beginning was that political outcomes were key to the company’s history. That swashbuckling attitude in the tropics was a relic of a time when the company—like the US itself—did what it wanted to in Central America. United Fruit was born at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when US foreign policy south of our borders was aggressive and intrusive, marked by foreign adventures and invasions of countries throughout the hemisphere and the so-called Banana Wars in Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. And Cuba, of course. This was also the time when the Panama Canal was built, an American idea that involved taking land from Colombia by force and giving it to Panama in order to dig the canal at the narrowest point in the isthmus.
United Fruit acted in the same spirit, using its political connections to create, by whatever means necessary, conditions that benefited corporate success. It was a company shaped in the era of gunboat diplomacy, and it maintained this shape into the 1950s. It was an old-fashioned firm in many ways. The Brahmins and swashbucklers were themselves a throwback. There were few women. Most of the secretaries were male. The company boasted of promoting from within and supporting career employees, as if those practices were virtues. A man who remained in the company’s employ for twenty years could expect to be kept on until retirement—no matter how incompetent or impaired he might be or become. There were almost no Blacks or Jews, Asians, or people from the Middle East. There were many more Protestants than Catholics and very few Latinos in the US. College degrees were a rarity and looked down on—to the extent that I kept my college attendance a secret, even from Whit.
This was the company I was thriving in and learning about. A company with its best years behind it. With an older, male staff that was failing to move with the times. In the late fifties, Fortune published an extensive piece on the company titled “The Ripe Problems of United Fruit.” One of the company’s top executives, the vice president in charge of tropical operations, was asked how United Fruit was going to solve its many problems. His answer? “Grow more bananas.” By then I knew that growing bananas was the least of my company’s problems.
I learned about United Fruit’s uneasy alliance with politics within my first week in the advertising and publicity department. Our primary mission had to do with the expropriation of uncultivated land in Guatemala. Our task was to get the word out that a communist beachhead had been established in the Western Hemisphere and would spread to other Latin American countries if it was not contained. It posed a real threat to the United States. I believed it. This was the era of Joe McCarthy and the Rosenbergs. The Cold War was raging. And United Fruit used the political situation to its corporate advantage. There is no doubt in my mind that that our efforts had a deep impact on public opinion in the US and contributed to the overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, who was removed in a covert CIA operation.
Arbenz had run on a platform of agrarian reform at a time when such reform was happening in nonindustrial nations all over the world, from Central America to communist China. This reform included expropriation of 178,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit. Though Arbenz offered the company compensation, the value was far lower than its worth, so United Fruit saw the reform as an existential threat to its business. Our job in publicity was to put the best possible face on the company and the worst on the Arbenz regime. Our strategy for shaping public opinion came from Edward L. Bernays, who called himself the father of public relations. In the nineteen-twenties, Bernays had written Propaganda, a book illustrating how the thinking, habits, and opinions of the masses could be manipulated. It was said that it was carefully read and often quoted by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s top propagandist, until he discovered that Bernays was a Jew.
Working in the publicity and advertising department, I had a ringside seat at this important period in American history. I completely bought the notion of a communist threat overwhelming Central America. I felt that what I was doing was patriotic. Blame it on my youth. I was nineteen and naive. Or blame it on the fact that it was the era of Senator Joe McCarthy or on the Korean War, where American soldiers were dying in the fight against a communist opponent, or on the Cold War with Russia or the federal prosecutions of communist spies like the Rosenbergs. That was the time we lived in. Those were the accepted truths of foreign policy, and I believed them and did my part to spread the word about the Guatemalan threat.
In the fifties the American press was largely conservative and pro-business, but the liberal media was on the rise. United Fruit had a bad reputation among liberals. But because Bernays had the reputation himself of being an influential liberal, he was able to use that influence to shape opinion on the left, not just about the company but, more important, about American foreign policy in Central America. For example, he persuaded New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger that the communist threat in Guatemala was dangerous. Sulzberger assigned a leading editor to look into the matter and made an “inspection tour” of Guatemala, where he witnessed firsthand a “communist riot.” The timing of this so-called riot was extraordinary and resulted in a public relations coup for Bernays, part of an overall strategy to shape media opinion and benefit United Fruit. In addition to the Times, he targeted several other major newspapers, as well as magazines, the wire services, and radio and television networks.
The campaign included guided press tours of Central America to visit successful companies operating in the tropics and engage in interviews with presidents and top government officials. Whit led these trips, which were limited to a dozen or so journalists, who would fly from New York to, say, Bogota, and work their way up the isthmus from Panama to a couple of Central America countries. These were relaxed, first-class junkets, comfortable and fun-filled experiences for up to two weeks. Everything was carefully orchestrated to produce positive press once the journalists got back to their jobs. It worked. A stream of favorable pieces resulted.
I helped handle the logistical aspects of these junkets. I saw how even very liberal publications like the New Leader spread the message of the communist threat and helped United Fruit maintain its hold on land and power in Central America. I also saw how the company took ads in Latin American Report, published by the CIA operative William Gaudet, who would exert a pernicious influence within United Fruit for the next ten years.
I watched while United Fruit influenced American policy in those countries where its bananas were grown. There is no doubt that communism played a role in Guatemalan politics and no doubt that the company’s activities worked hand in glove with a CIA-run plan to overthrow the Arbenz government in a 1954 coup and stifle the land reform and other policies that would harm United Fruit’s business. (Howard Hunt, a prime mover in the Watergate break-in, was one of the CIA operatives in Guatemala during that coup.) The head of the CIA at the time, Allen Dulles, was also close to the chairman of the board of United Fruit. Dulles’s brother, John, was Secretary of State. This was an operation that was approved by the highest levels of our government. In order to focus attention elsewhere, the Eisenhower administration initiated an antitrust suit against the company within weeks of the overthrow of Arbenz, but it was merely a public slap on the wrist. The damage was done. Historians confirm that, seventy-five years later, Guatemala is still suffering the effects of what we helped to do in 1954.
After the overthrow of the Arbenz government, life in the public relations department slowed down considerably. But Edward Bernays and his company maintained his relationship with United Fruit, and soon I got a chance firsthand to learn how he operated.
One day Bernays asked Whit if I could be transferred to his office for approximately three months. He said he “saw something” in me and thought I had the makings of something or other and he was willing to train me in the Bernays techniques of publicity and persuasion. He told Whit that the experience could make me a more valuable employee to the United Fruit. I don’t think Whit believed him, but Bernays was a hard man to say no to. The next day I started work at his office on 64th Street in Manhattan, just off Fifth Avenue.
The building was uncared for and shabbily furnished. There were worn rugs, squeaky floors, and dirty windows. The offices were dusty and dirty, and the bathrooms were filthy. The staff of four viewed me suspiciously, wondering what I was doing there. It was a strange and unhappy place. Not only did they not like me, but they did also not like each other. I was there about a month, and all I did was menial: filing, stuffing press releases in envelopes, working on large mailings, running errands. I had almost no contact with Bernays, and there were times when I felt he was avoiding me. I received none of the training or experience I was supposed to be getting.
I realized that Bernays had brought me there just to do these menial chores. I was no-cost labor. The day I realized that was the day I walked into his office and told him that I planned to return to United Fruit at the end of the week. He was very stern and told me I would go back when he told me I could go back. That he had made an agreement with my boss, and I should return to my desk. Two days later he called me on the intercom and told me to come down to his office immediately. He was seated behind his big desk and told me to sit down. Nothing happened for three or four minutes. Suddenly, he handed me a book and said, “What have I just handed you?” I replied, “This is Mrs. Roosevelt’s book. Her new book, I think.” He immediately said, “That’s the wrong answer. You have failed on that question. The correct answer is, ‘You have handed me a book, Dr. Bernays.’ I did not ask you what the title of the book was or who wrote it.”
He had an honorary degree from a college and liked to be called “Doctor.” Next, he said, “Let’s see if you can pass a couple of other tests. How many pages are in the book?” I told him there were four hundred pages, and he said, “Very good. Now, can you tell me what is 25 percent of four hundred?” A hundred, I replied. “Very good again. You are indeed a smart one.” He handed the book back to me and asked that I turn to page 100 and hand it back to him. I did as he asked. He reached into the pocket on his vest and took out a silver pen knife on a thin silver chain and cut down the spine through the binding, north to south at the 100-page mark. He did that three more times until the book was in four equal pieces in front of him.
As I wondered what he was up to, he asked his secretary to get Dean Barrett of Columbia University Journalism School on the phone. Minutes later, Dean Barrett was on the line. I listened while Bernays told him he was looking for four of his top students who would like to earn twenty dollars that weekend. All they had to do was read a hundred pages and write a two-page synopsis. The dean agreed. “Good,” Bernays said to him. “My young man will bring the pages up to your office this afternoon along with the four twenty-dollar bills, and he’ll return on Monday morning to pick up the eight pages that your students have written.” After hanging up, Bernays turned to me, reached into his pocket, pulled out eighty dollars and told me to go to the Marine Midland Bank and get four brand new twenties. He insisted that they must be new and uncirculated. He said new money looked better and smelled better and was more memorable.
On the subway up to Columbia to deliver the package of the four pieces of the book and the four twenties, I was pondering this “lesson,” the only one I’d received from the great Edward L. Bernays in all the time I’d been working in his office. I delivered the package on Friday and picked up the eight pages on Monday. Two days later he was on a TV panel show to discuss the book. Bernays was brilliant. He was by far the star of the panel. It was obvious that he was the only one who had “read” the book. He quoted from it and was able to comment on its strengths and weaknesses. The next day, he called me down to his office and asked me what I had learned. I gave him some kind of answer; I don’t remember what. Once again, he told me that I had given him the wrong answer, and he was disappointed in me. He said the correct answer is that you should never do anything yourself when you can hire someone else to do it.
Well, we weren’t talking about mowing the lawn. What Bernays did not realize was that I had learned a lesson all right, but not the one he thought he was teaching me. I saw that what he did was fundamentally dishonest. That he had no compunction about taking the work and opinions of four smart journalism students and claiming them as his own. His actions were a perfect illustration of dishonesty. In time I would realize that dishonesty was at the root of his so-called genius, and the way he helped shape public opinion about the fate of a country and a region—all for the sake of a corporate profits—was dishonesty practiced on a global level.