A History Teacher Reacts | The Banana Republics by Sam O'Nella Academy

[Music] [Music] hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher reacts video me mr terry as i continue my search for historical knowledge found here on the internet all right today we are heading back to the awesome salmonella academy and we got another video from him and it is titled the banana republics so i'm excited to get into this and to see what he kind of is going to do with it now historically speaking of banana republic often refers to a nation that has been economically dependent on exporting usually a fairly rare kind of commodity and earlier times bananas were one of those it was kind of seen as an exotic product that again only grew in certain areas and again one of these nations or regions that has that is totally economically dependent on the export of that which can cause a lot of problems people can try to exploit you plus you're kind of putting everything into one thing uh economically which means that if that thing becomes not a commodity that it can really make things difficult for a country so i mentioned to see what he does with that if if that even is the direction he's taking with that's just the historical context but we'll check this out and see if i can add anything and i'll let you know what i think and we'll go ahead and get started here in a second now the original video is down below make sure that you go down there okay do it now uh that would be great and as you can get the view like subscription over to salmonella even if you're subbed to him definitely give him the view time and the support that way so these awesome channels can continue to do the awesome things that they do here and if you haven't sub to my channel love to have you around thanks for liking and subbing let's go ahead and get started the banana republics hey kids do you like fashionable high quality apparel at an affordable price well too bad because that's not what we're talking about today i'm going to learn you like the clothing ring about the real still around banana the story begins during the turn of the 20th century in central and south america agriculture is kind of a big deal right now you've got a ton of little plantations all over the place growing bananas sugar pineapples that kind of thing and they're doing all right for themselves no big deal but then you know the good things about this region of the americas uh economically speaking and agriculturally speaking is that climate can be similar to things in like tropical regions of africa or southeast asia because they're on a similar line latitude and similar climate you can grow things over there that you couldn't grow more north of of that region and like the northern hemisphere for the most part so that makes those regions agriculture very important it's also a reason why they became home to generations and centuries of slave labor to grow these types of products duration happened and it changed everything because now produce could be kept fresh for way longer in transit meaning the fruit companies could suddenly open up their business to the international market their biggest new trade partner being the united states this massive opportunity gave rise to three main companies known as the united fruit company that's the bml fruit company and the vacaro bros i don't know growing shipping and selling fruit i know that united fruit company i mean they're they're like the reason why you get imperial efforts by like the united states who like give this enormous company and a huge asset to the economy of the united states and if they have an interest in some other region you know places like america can find themselves trying to like militarily intervene there overthrow governments to protect the economic interest it's that kind of men blending of capitalism but also like the government and making money and combining those into like imperialism in a way three firms made just obscene amounts of money a lot of which went towards buying out smaller family-owned farms and plantations this allowed them to make even obscene amounts of money until eventually the only competition that remained was each other and then [ __ ] got real the year is 1910 one of the companies i mentioned koyamel was doing most of its business in the country of honduras when the president of honduras miguel davila decided to give a land grant to the vacaro bros in exchange for helping to build some roadways in doing so they basically stole a bunch of koyumel's potential plantations and gave them to a competitor so samuel zamuri owner of koyumel said to himself dang i hate those guys if only there was some way for a guy like me to significantly influence the world around him for his own personal gain wait a minute so he used a portion of his mcduck ass quote mercenary army which he gave to one of his friends former honduran president manuel benia power of the purse here man you can go ahead and finance your own armies if you want to can you imagine that today if you had corporations walmart all of a sudden had an army to be able to protect their economic interests or something like that powerful times huh together they overthrew the entire [ __ ] government of honduras yeah i should have called it anyway bonilla took power and gave very generous concessions to koi and malin united as thanks but then america saw this and they were like hey that's not very freedom of you young man to which zemery replied it's okay we're gonna help this country succeed after all politics and business are essentially the same thing while i suppose it's not our place to be policing the governments of other nations yet still though maybe oh also also nanners all right i'm sold so with their interests secured the businesses continue to thrive this is what american imperialism and no american influence imperialism looked like so the united states had uh this this this policy where they mostly were just going to focus on the americas can be a sphere of influence right monroe doctrine and a lot of it looked like this there's lots of different types of imperialism economic imperialism where it's focused on not necessarily spreading culture or something like that but for economic interest for trade partners and this is kind of that taste of american imperialism that happened right around the turn of the century around that around the era of teddy roosevelt but since they got cut so many breaks by the government very little of their commerce actually ended up benefiting honduras as a whole in fact the national debt of honduras got so bad that the government ended up not being able to perform a lot of its functions so in response the three fruit companies stepped in and said no worries and decided to basically build the nation's infrastructure for them including roads railways shipping lights telegraphs telephone lines radio towers they even switch the whole country off to the us dollar so you're basically seeing companies step in and do the things that governments traditionally do like infrastructure public works you don't see uh companies necessarily step in to do that but of course what you're gonna you know you'd probably see is they want influence in the government though not they're just paying this stuff for nothing they're gonna want something in return right keep in mind this wasn't out of the goodness of their hearts it was mostly just to make their own businesses function more efficiently but it was helpful either way anyway no power over their plantations but also a monopoly over nearly every major industry in the country many other central american nations soon followed this pattern creating a corrupt sort of symbiosis whereby the fruit companies get huge tax breaks and land grants in exchange for a modernized infrastructure and payoffs to the rich minority and so the banana republics were born sounds like a pretty sweet gig right and it was for the upper five percent of the populations who happen to hold some direct share in the plantations or shipping lines yeah they're saying i mean the only benefit you're getting is all right you have a new road and stuff but maybe the economy isn't growing very much maybe there's not it's not trickling down on the effect of higher wages or more jobs or something like that that that seems to be the the fear that they're that they're having though life mostly consisted of working on land that wasn't even theirs in exchange for dirt poor wages so that's how things were for like a decade and a half at some point coimel was bought out by united but then zamore became the owner of the whole thing somehow and the vacaro company was renamed as standard fruit then one day in 1944 the country of guatemala had a democratic revolution and the newly elected leader juan jose arevalo wasn't happy with how the companies treated his people so he implemented several reforms like a minimum wage law and universal suffrage and while the populists got a lot of benefit out of this united fruit most certainly did not because more rights for their workers means less profits for the business as a whole yeah then guatemala got a new process i mean if you're a company that essentially rules the country which is basically what they're doing like honduras and stuff like that you you can have influence over yeah labor laws right you want to keep for your for your i guess to benefit your company wages low and maybe certain just i guess worker right stuff stuff that you saw here in the 1900s where you saw labor strikes and push get for more labor reform and stuff like that you wouldn't have maybe as much of that motivation if your country was ruled by a company specifically right and it seems like that's that's what's happening and in these countries and one of the things that seems to be negative about some of these banana republics akobo arbenz and he continued these reforms and united continued to get the metaphorical shaft until finally in 1953 they decided to go to the usa for help oh eisenhower yo what's up this jacobo guy he's he's making us pay minimum wages well that doesn't sound very good for business that's not all though he's also taking our unused land and giving it back to the people does that sound familiar oh dear you don't think by the way it's looking dwight i say he's a dirty oh god collectivizing don't say it commie comey comey yeah go get him dwight he did it he said it holy [ __ ] you actually did it world star from that point onward guatemala was ruled by a series of us-backed dictators yeah you got that you have to see hat hair the rest of the video this kind of situation happened in several other places and times as well almost always driven by some combination of red fear and yellow loaf i won't give any more details for the sake of time but that doesn't mean they weren't big deals so you might be wondering where did these companies go surely the clan of banana shenanigans can't still be around today well that's where you're wrong they're still in operation just under different names standard fruit changed their name in 1991 to become none other than dole food company oh i was a kid i used to play we always do and i used to lots of good games i'm kind of cruel tired sub to my gaming channel it's terry gaming more gaming stuff stick an ape at a ball for their own amusement well now i know those bastards as for united one day in 1976 their ceo decided he couldn't take the heat anymore so he jumped out the [ __ ] window that's a real thing look it up then some other guy bought the company and renamed it to drum roll please chiquita banana that's right ladies and gentlemen the face knew as an innocent fun-loving dancer slash fruit merchant is actually a ruthless tyrant who overthrows democracies and undermines bases specifically anyway that's all for today until next time i'm salmonella and thank you for watching that was super informative actually that was i i didn't know some of the depth of some of the um specific deals that were made for these banana republics but it was really good to see what what actually happened um with these companies literally took control of these these nations right um but you saw what it would immediately seem to to give was social issues right um big inequalities in in probably um well in wages but income gap being huge rich in the poor very big and maybe it's not as much protection of workers rights and stuff like that or maybe not at all and you see that but you know how do you how do you uh how can you get involved well i remember when they're talking about the 50s here you're talking about the cold war right you want the united states to intervene on any side all you got to do is say that there's a threat of communism and people lose their minds which it's part of the red scare of the 1950s where you just said that c word there communism and stuff happens you can you could things happen there look at mccarthyism if you've learned about that but that's more of a topic for another time but interesting to see this era of like imperialism in a way or if you even want to call that corporate imperialism either way but see that and then see how that blended into the cold war because all of a sudden if you started seeing things like hey we need more equal wages and more equal earnings and and more protection for workers rights all of a sudden people started thinking oh man that sounds like elements of communism and that was such a bad word in the 1950s but you see how those discussions turn into cold war conflicts in a way and this was a big thing because anything you had like that people started talking about socialism communism because you're talking about uh trying to make equality economically among people and stuff like that i was going around all over the world who's in latin america as in africa and is in asia so you're seeing how that ties in together so i think that was really cool to see that and i think that's something i can take away when i kind of bridge this this era of imperialism and then decolonization which happens after the world wars and you can see how those changes affected these types of countries um and the whole political rhetoric of the time so that was really good that was though i really i think took a lot out of that but i loved how he just like um eisenhower's losing his mind and stuff like that that was great so as you can see with now now i have no hat all right well with that guys uh that's gonna wrap it up for us the original videos down below if you didn't do it yet go ahead and click that make sure we get the support over to sam there and um yeah links to other stuff down below join our discord community um other links to other kinds of fun stuff down there too so all right with that we will see you guys all later bye [Music] you

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 519,702

Keywords: react, history

Id: eoZv-8ofmk4

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020