United Fruit Company

Examples of United Fruit Company in the following topics:

• The Banana Wars

  • Honduras, where the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, saw the insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925.
  • The first company that concluded an agreement with the Honduras government was the Vaccaro Brothers Company (Standard Fruit Company).
  • The Cuyamel Fruit Company then followed that lead.
  • The United Fruit Company also agreed to a contract with the government, which was attained through its subsidies (the Tela Rail Road Company and Truxillo Rail Road Company).
  • The most popular avenue was to obtain a grab on a piece of land in exchange for the completion of railroads in Honduras; this explains why a railroad company conducted the agreement between the United Fruit Company and Honduras.

• Promoting Peace Abroad

  • After World War I, manufacturing companies faced hard times as they attempted to convert from wartime production of weapons and planes to peacetime manufacturing of goods.
  • Harding and Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who became president following Harding’s death in 1923, fostered the growth of U.S. companies.
  • American meat packers moved to Argentina; fruit growers established themselves in Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala; sugar plantation owners went to Cuba; rubber plantation owners to the Philippines, Sumatra, and Malaya; copper corporations to Chile; and oil companies to Mexico and Venezuela.
  • Coolidge represented the United States at the Pan American Conference in Havana, Cuba, making him the only sitting president to visit the country.
  • The treaty, ratified in 1929, committed signatories including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to "renounce war, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another."

• The Louisiana Purchase

  • The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States overnight, provided an outlet to the sea for the products of the western states, and ensured a place for the United States among the world's largest powers.
  • Because the Appalachian Mountains formed a natural barrier and made passage to the West nearly impossible, Daniel Boone established the Wilderness Road in 1775, when he created a trail for the Transylvania Company from Virginia through central Kentucky.
  • Yeoman agriculture, as depicted by the Democratic-Republicans, was a system of farming in which an independent (white male) farmer owned his own land and the fruits of his labor (and therefore, could impartially participate in the political process).
  • Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States at a sum of less than 3 cents per acre.
  • The purchase also had several long-term detrimental effects on the United States.

• Economic Conversion

  • Its purpose was to regulate the production of materials during World War II in the United States.
  • Factories that made silk ribbons now produced parachutes, automobile factories built tanks, typewriter companies converted to machine guns, undergarment manufacturers sewed mosquito netting, and a roller coaster manufacturer converted to the production of bomber repair platforms.
  • Automobile factories stopped manufacturing civilian models by early February 1942 and converted to producing tanks, aircraft, weapons, and other military products, with the United States government as the only customer. 
  • By June 1942 companies also stopped manufacturing metal office furniture, radios, phonographs, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and sewing machines for civilians.
  • Typewriters, gasoline, bicycles, footwear, silk, nylon, fuel oil, stoves, meat, lard, shortening and food oils, cheese, butter, margarine, processed foods (canned, bottled, and frozen), dried fruits, canned milk, firewood and coal, jams, jellies, and fruit butter were rationed by November 1943.

• Mill Towns and Company Towns

  • One of the first company towns in the United States was Pullman, Chicago, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits.
  • The town, entirely company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library, churches, and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents.
  • Another famous company town was McDonald, Ohio, which was created by the Carnegie Steel Company to house and serve the needs of its employees in the Youngstown, Ohio area.
  • At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population.
  • Mill towns, sometimes planned, built, and owned as a company town, grew in the shadow of the industries.

• The Industrial Revolution

  • The Industrial Revolution, which reached the United States by the 1800s, strongly influenced social and economic conditions.
  • The Industrial Revolution began in the United Kingdom, and mechanized textile production spread from Great Britain to continental Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century.
  • Reliance on horse power for machinery in the United States soon gave way to water power; this resulted in a concentration of industrialization developing in New England and the rest of the northeastern United States, where fast-moving rivers were located.
  • The profound economic changes sweeping the United States led to equally important social and cultural transformations.
  • Wage workers formed their own society in industrial cities and mill villages, though lack of money and long working hours effectively prevented the working class from consuming the fruits of their labor, educating their children, or advancing up the economic ladder.

• The Roaring Twenties

  • In the period following World War I, the United States experienced three consecutive Republican presidential administrations: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
  • The Roaring Twenties was a fruitful period for the arts, music and writing.
  • The first national radio networks came into being during this period, with the launch of the National Broadcasting Company in 1926 and the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1927.

• Carnegie and the Steel Industry

  • His first job in the United States was as a factory worker in a bobbin factory.
  • Later on he became a bill logger for the owner of the company.
  • Eventually he progressed up the ranks of a telegraph company.
  • Gary's Federal Steel Company and several smaller companies to create U.S.
  • Schwab), was the largest such industrial takeover in United States history to date.

• American Republicanism

  • In the midst of the Revolutionary War, American leaders realized that, in order to function as a cohesive, unified nation, the United States needed a philosophy of government and rule that would safeguard the rights and liberties of citizens from political tyranny.
  • American republicanism is a multifaceted ideological conception that provoked stark disagreement among those who enshrined it as the foundation of the United States political system.
  • In the 1790s, during the years of the early United States Republic, these figures would vehemently disagree with each other not only over how republicanism should be politically structured (embodied by the struggle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the ratification of the Constitution), but also, over various definitions of proper civic virtue.
  • Merchants, industrialists, financiers, and entrepreneurs were therefore the future of the United States republic and the influence behind the United States' foreign relations.
  • Yeoman agriculture, as depicted by the Democratic-Republicans, was a system of small-share farming in which an independent (white male) farmer owned his own land and the fruits of his labor.

• Pragmatism

  • Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States in the 1870s.
  • Peirce claimed that in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "[you must] consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception.