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Sam Zemurray's brief direction of United Fruit has been vigorous, aimed to bring United Fruit stock up above the 26 figure it sold for last week. In 1931 the company earned only $6,700,000 compared with its profits of $20,000,000 in 1928. In the first half of 1932 it earned only $1,500,000. Mr. Zemurray has not cut salaries; last year before he took charge they were cut 10% and another 15%. But he has cut personnel 25%, has sharply curtailed loans to independent planters from whom United Fruit buys bananas. He has revalued United Fruit properties at $50,000,000 less than the Bostonian reckoning, thereby enabling the company to save millions of dollars in depreciation charges and to show correspondingly higher earnings. Since tariffs have practically eliminated profits from Cuban sugar and Depression has shrunk the profits of the 98 steamships of the Great White Fleet, nearly all the company's revenue has come from bananas, more than half of which the company raises itself on its plantations in Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Jamaica, Colombia. Last year's shipments were about 50 million bunches, ten million less than in 1931, which were five million below 1930. Throughout the plantations on the Caribbean Mr. Zemurray has replaced many United Fruit men with veterans of his Cuyamel.
United Fruit's new President Hart is learned, studious, convivial. After leaving M. I. T. he tried farming in Jamaica, later managed the Cartagena-Magdalena Railway in Colombia (which United Fruit has just taken over from the government). In 1908 he became a director of Old Colony and United Fruit. He is famed for his ability to mix Jamaica's famed planters' punch (one part lime, two parts syrup, three parts rum), is a moving spirit in the Club of Odd Volumes, whose headquarters is a former stable on Beacon Hill. He has written three books on the Caribbean, owns many an odd volume, belongs to a dozen learned societies and most of Boston's swank clubs. He likes to sail and fish. He is the only member of the United Fruit directorate whose father was a member of the original Boston Fruit Co. which was formed in 1899. He was 65 last week.
Far different from President Hart and the other Caribbean-ruling Bostonians is United Fruit's de facto head, Sam Zemurray. He is thin, bony, angular, with black domineering eyes and a hawk nose. Tropical-sun-tanned, he might be a Spaniard. He speaks English with a slight accent except when he is cursing, speaks Spanish with no accent at all. He is quiet in public, precisely dressed, has never been interviewed and likes to be left alone. His name appears neither in Who's Who nor in the New Orleans Social Register. His daughter Doris two years ago married Roger Thayer Stone of Boston, last summer furnished Mr. Zemurray with a grandson at 56. His son, Samuel Jr., last year played tackle on Tulane's football team, was its light-heavyweight boxer. Now he is at Harvard. Mr. Zemurray, when in Boston, lives at the Ritz. In Tangipahoa Parish 50 mi. north of New Orleans he has a vast country place, stocked with wild deer, pheasant and quail. Its artificial lakes are planted with duck potato to lure wildfowl. It also has a golf course on which its owner occasionally breaks 100. Mr. Zemurray endowed a Department of Middle American Research at Tulane for $1,000,000, gave it the famed Gates collection of Mayan relics.