On February 5, 1975, Eli Black, the chief executive of the agricultural conglomerate United Brands, died by suicide after jumping from the window of his office skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. United Brands was an unusual company, owning a range of subsidiary agricultural producers. Central to its holdings was the notorious United Fruit, the world's largest producer of bananas, which had a long history of violence toward any workers who sought to organize in the Latin American countries where it owned a quarter of a million acres. United Fruit was perhaps best-known for its role in 1954 in pressing the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala, after Arbenz sought to implement a program of land reform. But Eli Black was an unusual executive. He was a former rabbi who had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York and whose father had been a shohet (a kosher poultry slaughterer). In his brief, compelling book about Black and United Brands, Matt Garcia argues that Black sought to build an agricultural business that might live up to the social ideals he'd inherited from his religious upbringing. “Enlightened self-interest, ” Black wrote in an article in the late 1960s, “must now be identified with the public good” (81). Or, as he said in a 1973 speech at Harvard Business School, it was time for “socially conscious, responsible corporate executives” to devote themselves to “socially conscious programs” (179). When it came to United Brands, as it turned out, this was an idealism that proved nearly impossible to realize. Garcia sketches Black's childhood in New York City, where his family (then the Blachowiczs) arrived in the mid-1920s. The family consistently prioritized the religious education of Eli, the only son, sending two daughters to work to give him the time to study. They navigated the world of American Judaism, with its Modern Orthodox and Conservative synagogues that emphasized Jewish tradition while permitting the relaxation of certain of its most stringent rules. Eli became a rabbi to a Long Island congregation in 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, and Garcia suggests that he was always ambivalent about whether he would remain a rabbi: even while serving his congregation he started taking business classes at Columbia Business School, married a woman who was part of a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation (one of the first denominations to encourage bat mitzvah for Jewish girls), and changed his name legally to Black. He gave speeches in support of Zionism and seemed to long for a greater public role than he felt was available to him as a rabbi. “He didn't think sermons changed anyone's attitude about anything, ” Garcia quotes one friend recollecting (29). Business seemed to be a better way to make a difference in society. In 1945, Black resigned from his congregation and went to work on Wall Street, first at Lehman Brothers and then at American Securities Corporation, a firm owned by the son of Julius Rosenwald, the philanthropic executive who had combined building Sears, Roebuck with financial contributions to African American schools after Reconstruction. There, Black became increasingly responsible for investments in the thriving postwar industry of food production. In 1967, he engineered a takeover of Morrell, then the fourth-largest meat producer in the United States—an enterprise very different from his father's labor as a kosher butcher on the Lower East Side. Afterward he bought United Fruit, despite the company's unsavory public image, and then InterHarvest, the largest group of lettuce producers on the West Coast. The resulting agricultural conglomerate was named United Brands. In this position, Black made the momentous decision to recognize and negotiate with the United Farm Workers (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, defecting from the Grower-Shipper Association (the trade group for California agriculture) and rejecting the Teamsters, which was also seeking to organize agricultural workers. The decision made good business sense: Chavez recognized the political weakness of United Brands, given the history of the United Fruit Company, so Black had reasons to seek good relationships with the new union. But Garcia suggests that Black's motivation extended to his social idealism: he wanted to associate himself and his company with the UFW, believing that “carrying Chavez's eagle emblem” on his bananas would indicate to customers his company's commitment to the well-being of its employees (123). In the years that followed, Black invested time and energy in contract negotiations, served as a trustee of the union's Martin Luther King Fund (which supported education for farmworkers and their children), and gave money to the National Farm Worker Service Center to aid distressed farm families. Beyond this, he cultivated personal relationships with Chavez and UFW staffer Anna Puharich, inviting both to his annual Passover Seder, which featured Haggadah readings about the moral responsibilities of corporations. This was at a moment when the UFW sought to form strategic relationships with a number of liberal business and political leaders, and the beautiful, well-connected Puharich seems to have played a key role in this, especially for Black. The two occasionally traveled together in Black's private airplane; Black sometimes gave Puharich financial information about the company that she could then pass on for use in contract negotiations. However, the relationship shifted in late 1972, when Black sent Puharich a gift of a bracelet—a gesture that seemed to cross a line, for Puharich sent it back, saying she appreciated but could not accept it. This was around the same time that Chavez's own behavior became increasingly erratic; not long after, Black withdrew from the MLK Fund and stopped putting as much effort into the union. As Garcia puts it, “Eli found that his association with a just cause and a famous civil rights leader had its limits” (150). Black worked equally hard to improve the image of United Fruit in Central America, focusing on Honduras, where many of its plantations were located. For example, he spent 25, 000 on a company film titled Yanqui Go Home, which addressed the company's role in the region while emphasizing that it had reformed and that workers at United Fruit now had union representation, paid vacation days, and other benefits (129). The union in question was fiercely anticommunist, closely allied with the AFL-CIO under George Meany and its anticommunist organizing efforts and connected to the State Department's attempts to limit Soviet influence in Central America. While Black invested in worker housing and visited the banana fields, the political role of the union meant that he never really had to confront substantial working-class discontent. Things fell apart in the early 1970s. Like many conglomerates, United Brands had trouble realizing profits across its many activities, which set off substantial conflicts within the ranks of the firm as lower-level executives began to challenge Black's authority. Black turned to accounting magic to paper over the shortfalls. He shuttered a major meatpacking plant, leading to public outcry and denunciation from the union. And most troublingly, United Fruit bribed the Honduran government to lower the tax on bananas. This news did not break until after Black died, but he knew it would be coming to the surface soon. Garcia's account of Black's life illuminates the ambitions and illusions behind the vogue for social accountability in business in the late 1960s and early 1970s, situating them in the context of this movement. Especially notable is the way he shows how personal relationships—such as those with Chavez and Puharich—were mobilized for an ostensible social good but ultimately did as much to serve Black's self-interest (and self-image) as to create lasting improvements for farmworkers. The account suggests the limits for labor of relying on the virtue and goodwill of executives when trying to make sustained changes. At the same time, Garcia is limited by the available evidence. He was never able to gain access to personal letters, diaries, or other papers of Black's. As a result, it's not really clear whether Black decided to end his life because he was disillusioned with the difficulty he found in trying to build socially responsible businesses—as Garcia implies—or whether he was simply depressed about the roiling conflicts in his company, knew that its bribery would soon become public knowledge, and feared the public humiliation and defeat. What does stand out in the book is how different Black's midcentury business world really was from our contemporary corporate scene. For Black, it made sense to dream of using business as a lever for social change. By contrast, Black's son, Leon Black, also became a Wall Street executive. He worked in junk bonds at Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he oversaw the leveraged-buyout craze of the 1980s. Then he founded Apollo Advisers, a private-equity firm. There he helped pioneer the especially ruthless style of deals that hinge on loading companies up with debt and then selling assets, cutting jobs, and breaking labor unions to pay it all back. To top it all off, Black resigned from Apollo in 2021, after his girlfriend alleged that she had been trafficked through Leon's connection with Jeffrey Epstein. From the early days of Leon Black's career to the scandal that has (for the moment) ended it, there has been no lip service to the public good, no suggestion that authority and wealth had some obligation to better society, and no claim that the profit interest of the firm might be in tension with social responsibility. Through his account of Eli Black, Garcia has revealed how much the framework of capitalism itself has changed from the norms and expectations of the mid-twentieth century.
Kim Phillips‐Fein (Sun,) studied this question.