Eli Black, founder and CEO of United Brands, was a little-remembered corporate dealmaker active from the 1950s to the early 1970s. He was famous less for his accomplishments than for the way he ended his career—by jumping out of his office window in midtown New York City in February 1975. His company had been losing money, senior managers were in revolt, many workers despised him, and the world would soon learn that he had bribed the dictator of Honduras for tax concessions.

Without exactly whitewashing this record, Matt Garcia tries in his new biography to burnish Black’s reputation as a corporate leader and social visionary. Garcia portrays him as a deeply religious Jew who drew on the lessons of the Talmud to “fuse business with social responsibility,” give “hope to the downtrodden,” and inspire “a belief that labor and management could work together to improve the conditions of workers and feed the world” (p. 208).

A central theme of the book is that the “imperatives of turning a profit and serving investors” made achieving these lofty goals difficult, if not impossible. Acknowledging but downplaying Black’s faults, Garcia concludes, “Eli’s suicide might be seen as a tragic consequence of an unshakable, if overly idealistic, faith in American capitalism” (pp. 208–209).

Garcia, a professor of Latin American studies at Dartmouth College, became interested in Black while writing an award-winning history of Cesar Chavez and his farm worker movement. United Brands owned the largest lettuce producer-shipper in California, where the United Farm Workers (UFW) union was based. Black broke with other producers and signed a labor agreement that significantly advanced the UFW’s organizing.

Born in Poland in 1921, Black came to the United States at 3 years old and was raised like hundreds of thousands of other Jewish immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side. The son of a kosher poultry butcher, he followed many forebears and trained to be a rabbi. Years later, according to one close business associate, Black said dismissively that he pursued his religious studies only because it was “the family business” (Thomas McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit [New York, 1976]).

Garcia attributes much deeper significance to this training, even though, as World War II ended, Black abandoned the rabbinate in favor of investment banking. In Garcia’s telling, “Eli” was not simply motivated by escaping poverty. Instead, “Eli may have dared to believe that taking the wisdom he gained … into the financial system would result in a more hopeful, equitable existence for everyone” (pp. 204–205).

Garcia builds on such speculation with little hard evidence from letters, memoirs, or interviews about Black’s motives. In 1967, Black took over a major Iowa producer and soon began a ruthless anti-union campaign that ended up destroying an entire community. Yet, Garcia idealizes Black as a generous soul who “may have” acted out of “a sense of urgency … to expand accessibility of food more equitably within and beyond the boundaries of the United States” (p. 42). Garcia muses that Black “probably [told] himself that his playing the acquisitions game would lead to improvements that would be spread around to those whom his business ventures touched” (p. 61).

Black’s next big successful acquisition in 1969 was United Fruit Company, the “Octopus” of the title. The company was widely reviled in Central America, where it was the largest producer of bananas, for its monopolistic and anti-union practices and cozy relations with right-wing governments.

Garcia fails to reflect upon parallels with the takeover of United Fruit in 1932 by another poor Jewish immigrant, Samuel Zemurray. His biographer describes how Zemurray’s belief as a young man that he “would make an honest fortune in a way that benefitted the impoverished people of the South” was derailed by “corruption, brutality, propaganda, wars, and overreach…. His tragedy was not that he was worse than other businessmen, but that, despite all his brilliance and good intentions, he was no better” (Rich Cohen, The Fish that Ate the Whale, the Life and Times of America’s Banana King [London, 2012]).

Garcia does cite two major examples of Black’s enlightened business behavior. One was his decision to sign with the United Farm Workers. That decision may have stemmed, Garcia surmises, from Black’s “reflection on Jewish forebears escaping the bonds of servitude.” Or, as Black told one of his executives, he may simply have viewed his relationship with Cesar Chavez as good “public relations” (McCann, An American Company). Garcia himself concedes that Black feared a UFW-led boycott “would disrupt the company’s reputational makeover” (p. 114).

Black also supported a relatively generous contract with a banana worker’s union in Honduras. Beyond altruism, Black may have been influenced by the fact that the union’s leader was an anti-Communist who had been vetted and trained by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded labor program.

Garcia’s book is well-written and informative, not only about Black but also about a remarkable era of frenzied merger activity. That said, readers should approach it with some caution. On a central matter of United Fruit’s history—its role in the CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s government in 1954—Garcia fails to cite the two most prominent historical works or their conclusion that the company’s woes did not trigger that intervention (Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention [Austin, 1982]; Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 [Princeton, 1991]). In another vignette, Garcia credits Black with supporting production of an unusually “candid” film acknowledging United Fruit’s troubled history. But United Fruit’s former publicist recalled Black strongly opposing the film and eventually stopping its distribution (McCann, An American Company).