Banana by Dan Koeppel Page A

grown just about anywhere land could be cleared and a railroad could be laid. If a government became particularly balky, the company would simply threaten to go next door.
    But one thing United Fruit couldn’t control was nature. Not long after bananas added themselves as a third party in cereal and milk, the troubles growers were beginning to have with an aggressive malady became public. One headline in The New York Times read: “Banana Disease Ruins Plantations—No Remedy is Available—Whole Regions Have Been Laid Waste and Improvements Abandoned by Growers.” Fallow farms weren’t just fallen stems and the dried-out remains of banana leaves. Railroad tracks were torn up, and boxcars sat unused and rusting. The houses banana executives lived in stood empty, and the villages where banana workers worked were turned into ghost towns. The New York Times article went on to compare the scene to “a leper colony.”

CHAPTER 13
No Bananas Today
    W ITH LAND FOR THE TAKING in Central America, there were few signs at home of a banana shortage. The fruit had become so beloved that—as in Uganda today—people began to sing songs about it.
    It began in New York City’s Tin Pan Alley. The district was more than just a place where music was created. It was, said a 1983 article in American Heritage magazine, where the idea of a pop hit came into being. (The historic song-writing zone, whose name came from the clattering din that filled the streets surrounding it, was actually a moving melodic marketplace. It started in downtown Manhattan but by the 1950s had migrated north to Times Square, where it finally vanished at the dawn of the rock-and-roll era.) Thousands of ballads, show tunes, and novelty ditties were churned out in the Alley by ambitious lyricists, up-and-coming composers, and reprobate vaudevillians.
    As with the banana industry, Tin Pan Alley was powered by revolutionary technologies that brought the general public items once available only to the rich. The first commercial radio station opened in Pittsburgh in 1922. Prices for the Victrola “talking machine,” a record player, had dropped to as little as $15 for compact and stylish units (in current dollars, about the same price as today’s basic iPod). Americans were developing a nearly insatiable appetite for musical entertainment, cut in spiraling grooves on flat discs and cylinders made of shellac (and later of vinyl). “The consumption of songs in America is as constant as the consumption of shoes, and the demand is similarly met by factory output,” wrote the New York Times in 1923.
    Most of the tens of thousands of songs produced by Tin Pan Alley are long forgotten. Those that remain in memory are classics: Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” along with George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
    â€œYes, We Have No Bananas” will never be viewed with such piety. But it was a much bigger sensation.
    The song was churned out in the spring of 1923 by composers Frank Silver and Irving Cohn. It first became a hit on sheet music, designed to be performed at home (printed songs were the karaoke of their time). During the following months, at least four different recordings of the song emerged, most famously by the hugely popular comic singer and actor Eddie Cantor. “There is a calm and deliberate, even a scientific, inquiry into why 97.3 percent of the great American Nation, at the present advanced state of civilization, devotes itself zestfully and with unanimity to singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’” the New York Times article went on to say. The news story offers several possible causes, including vapidness, a national inferiority complex (manifested in a preference for lowbrow music), “infantile regression,” and “mob psychology.”
    The origins of the song that led to this alarming state of affairs