John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

The vessel took him to Chile. He could smell money in Chile.

He was the capitalista yanqui. He’d build the railroad from Santiago to Valparaiso. There were guano deposits on the Chincha Islands. Meiggs could smell money in guano. He dug himself a fortune out of guano, became a power on the West Coast, juggled figures, railroads, armies, the politics of the local caciques and politicos; they were all chips in a huge pokergame. Behind a big hand he heaped up the dollars.

He financed the unbelievable Andean railroads.)

When Tomas Guardia got to be dictator of Costa Rica he wrote to Don Enrique to build him a railroad;

Meiggs was busy in the Andes, a $75,000 contract was hardly worth his while,

so he sent for his nephew Minor Keith.

They didn’t let grass grow under their feet in that family:

at sixteen Minor Keith had been on his own, selling collars and ties in a clothingstore.

After that he was a lumber surveyor and ran a lumber business.

When his father bought Padre Island off Corpus Christi Texas he sent Minor down to make money out of it.

Minor Keith started raising cattle on Padre Island and seining for fish,

but cattle and fish didn’t turn over money fast enough

so he bought hogs and chopped up the steers and boiled the meat and fed it to the hogs and chopped up the fish and fed it to the hogs,

but hogs didn’t turn over money fast enough,

so he was glad to be off to Limon.

Limon was one of the worst pestholes on the Caribbean, even the Indians died there of malaria, yellow jack, dysentery.

Keith went back up to New Orleans on the steamer John G. Meiggs to hire workers to build the railroad. He offered a dollar a day and grub and hired seven hundred men. Some of them had been down before in the filibustering days of William Walker.

Of that bunch about twentyfive came out alive.

The rest left their whiskyscalded carcases to rot in the swamps.

On another load he shipped down fifteen hundred; they all died to prove that only Jamaica Negroes could live in Limon.

Minor Keith didn’t die.

In 1882 there were twenty miles of railroad built and Keith was a million dollars in the hole;

the railroad had nothing to haul.

Keith made them plant bananas so that the railroad might have something to haul, to market the bananas he had to go into the shipping business;

this was the beginning of the Caribbean fruittrade.

All the while the workers died of whisky, malaria, yellow jack, dysentery.

Minor Keith’s three brothers died.

Minor Keith didn’t die.

He built railroads, opened retail stores up and down the coast in Bluefields, Belize, Limon, bought and sold rubber, vanilla, tortoiseshell, sarsaparilla, anything he could buy cheap he bought, anything he could sell dear he sold.

In 1898 in cooperation with the Boston Fruit Company he formed the United Fruit Company that has since become one of the most powerful industrial units in the world.

In 1912 he incorporated the International Railroads of Central America;

all of it built out of bananas;

in Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas,

so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas,

and built railroads to haul the bananas,

and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet

steamed north loaded with bananas,

and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.

Why that uneasy look under the eyes, in the picture of Minor C. Keith the pioneer of the fruit trade, the railroad builder, in all the pictures the newspapers carried of him when he died?

when the streetcarmen went out on strike in Lawrence in sympathy with what the hell they were a lot of wops anyway bohunks hunkies that didn’t wash their necks ate garlic with squalling brats and fat oily wives the damn dagoes they put up a notice for volunteers good clean young

to man the streetcars and show the foreign agitators this was still a white man’s

well this fellow lived in Matthews and he’d always wanted to be a streetcar conductor they said Mr. Grover had been a streetcar conductor in Albany and drank and was seen on the street with floosies

well this fellow lived in Matthews and he went over to Lawrence with his roommate and they reported in Lawrence and people yelled at them Blacklegs Scabs but those that weren’t wops were muckers a low element they liked each other a lot this fellow did and his roommate and he got up on the platform and twirled the bright brass handle and clanged the bell

it was in the carbarn his roommate was fiddling with something between the bumpers and this fellow twirled the shiny brass handle and the car started and he ran down his roommate and his head was mashed just like that between the bumpers killed him dead just like that right there in the carbarn and now the fellow’s got to face his roommate’s folks

In Pittsburgh Ward Moorehouse got a job as a reporter on The Times Dispatch and spent six months writing up Italian weddings, local conventions of Elks, obscure deaths, murders and suicides among Lithuanians, Albanians, Croats, Poles, the difficulties over naturalization papers of Greek restaurant keepers, dinners of the Sons of Italy. He lived in a big red frame house, at the lower end of Highland Avenue, kept by a Mrs. Cook, a crotchety old woman from Belfast who had been forced to take lodgers since her husband, who had been a foreman in one of the Homestead mills, had been crushed by a crane dropping a load of pigiron over him. She made Ward his breakfasts and his Sunday dinners and stood over him while he was eating them alone in the stuffy furniture-crowded diningroom telling him about her youth in the north of Ireland and the treachery of papists and the virtues of the defunct Mr. Cook.

It was a bad time for Ward. He had no friends in Pittsburgh and he had colds and sore throats all through the cold grimy sleety winter. He hated the newspaper office and the inclines and the overcast skies and the breakneck wooden stairs he was always scrambling up and down, and the smell of poverty and cabbage and children and washing in the rattletrap tenements where he was always seeking out Mrs. Piretti whose husband had been killed in a rumpus in a saloon on Locust Street or Sam Burkovich who’d been elected president of the Ukrainian singing society, or some woman with sudsy hands whose child had been slashed by a degenerate. He never got home to the house before three or four in the morning and by the time he had breakfasted round noon there never seemed to be any time to do anything before he had to call up the office for assignments again. When he had first gotten to Pittsburgh he had called to see Mr. McGill, whom he’d met with Jarvis Oppenheimer in Paris. Mr. McGill remembered him and took down his address and told him to keep in touch because he hoped to find an opening for him in the new information bureau that was being organized by the Chamber of Commerce, but the weeks went by and he got no word from Mr. McGill. He got an occasional dry note from Annabelle Marie about legal technicalities; she would divorce him charging nonsupport, desertion and cruelty. All he had to do was to refuse to go to Philadelphia when the papers were served on him. The perfume on the blue notepaper raised a faint rancor of desire for women in him. But he must keep himself clean and think of his career.

The worst time was his weekly day off. Often he’d stay all day sprawled on the bed, too depressed to go out into the black slush of the streets. He sent to correspondence schools for courses in journalism and advertising and even for a course in the care of fruit trees on the impulse to throw up everything and go West and get a job on a ranch or something; but he felt too listless to follow them and the little booklets accumulated week by week on the table in his room. Nothing seemed to be leading anywhere. He’d go over and over again his whole course of action since he’d left Wilmington that day on the train to go down to Ocean City. He must have made a mistake somewhere but he couldn’t see where. He took to playing solitaire, but he couldn’t even keep his mind on that. He’d forget the cards and sit at the table with a gingerbread-colored velveteen cloth on it, looking past the pot of dusty artificial ferns ornamented with a crepe paper cover and a dusty pink bow off a candybox, down into the broad street where trolleycars went by continually scraping round the curve and where the arclights coming on in the midafternoon murk shimmered a little in the black ice of the gutters. He thought a lot about the old days at Wilmington and Marie O’Higgins and his piano lessons and fishing in an old skiff along the Delaware when he’d been a kid; he’d get so nervous that he’d have to go out and would go and drink a hot chocolate at the sodafountain on the next corner and then go down town to a cheap movie or vaudeville show. He took to smoking three stogies a day, one after each meal. It gave him something he could vaguely look forward to.