Anti-Communist Bananas: The United Fruit Company versus the Guatemalan Revolution

Abstract

After a few years working for the United Fruit Company (UFCO), lawyer Thomas Corcoran took a moment to gloat. UFCO President Samuel Zemurray hired Corcoran in mid-1948, hoping to use the lawyer’s vast experience as one of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal advisors or ‘fixers’ to lobby on behalf of the company. Between his government connections and his work for companies such as Pan American Airways, Corcoran seemed perfect to convince U.S. officials to defend the company’s interests in Guatemala, where intense nationalism targeted this multinational corporation’s banana-producing empire.1 Writing to Zemurray in early 1952, Corcoran described his recent efforts to convince U.S. politicians and the public that Guatemalan nationalism was nothing more than communism. He boasted, “We have both parties on a bi-partisan basis calling in the House for the ‘elimination’ of the Guatemalan cancer” of communism. Republican and Democratic congresspersons were lecturing “the other Latin American nations that it is to their own interest that the elimination be effected.” Furthermore, he helped place a “good New York Times story,” another “good” one for the United Press newswire throughout Latin America, and one for Newsweek. Now, Corcoran needed Zemurray to encourage the “solid organization of New England through the influence of the First National Bank and elsewhere” and the “solid organization of the Gulf Coast particularly in Louisiana and Texas to keep the excitement concrete in the minds of the Congress.” Finishing his letter, he asked if Zemurray would “consider writing a little note of appreciation to John McCormack,” the Democratic Representative from Massachusetts and House Majority Leader.2