Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  What emerged during six days of testimony and florid oratory from the two barristers was a portrait of a highly principled company brought to moral paralysis for a decade in a genuine confusion of ethics and self-interest. Yes, the company ultimately launched a boycott against São Tomé cocoa—but that couldn’t excuse ten years of dithering. William Cadbury could offer few explanations for all the procrastination, except to blame the Foreign Office. He’d been following instructions from important men at Whitehall and he thought he’d been behaving in the national interest. But in the end, the Foreign Office hung him out to dry.

  Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, when called to testify, could shed no light on any such arrangement. Much to the astonished chagrin of the Cadburys, Grey claimed he could hardly remember any meetings with the chocolate companies and could offer no explanation as to why Cadbury Brothers had failed to boycott São Tomé years earlier. The Foreign Secretary had been called as their star witness.

  In the end, the Cadburys had to fall back on their longstanding reputation for fairness and high moral principles over many years of business dealings. In the closing moments of the trial, it seemed that this might be enough. The judge’s instructions to the jury urged that, should they find in favour of the plaintiff—that the Standard had indeed libelled the chocolate-makers—they should award “sufficiently substantial damages.” The jury did rule in Cadbury’s favour. But the victory was bittersweet. The jurymen awarded damages of “one farthing.”

  Henry Nevinson continued to investigate and to rail against the chocolate companies in a campaign that was more advocacy than journalism. In his diary for June 3, 1910, Nevinson recorded a conversation with two cocoa traders who seemed to confirm that Cadbury Brothers had cynically avoided any boycott of the Portuguese until they were satisfied that Gold Coast plantations were ready to meet their needs for raw product. He also wrote that the Fry company seemed to have finalized a huge contract for São Tomé cocoa “the very day before the boycott was announced & continued to draw on it for many months.” During the trial, Cadbury’s principal buyer admitted under cross-examination that it would have been “difficult” and “awkward” to obtain beans from anywhere else before 1909, but it was still possible, if one wanted to pay a premium. And that was the fundamental problem: The bottom line in business was, as always, the bottom line.

  A number of contemporary scholars, including Satre, have concluded that it was a lack of alternative bean sources and not skepticism over Nevinson’s report that made the Cadburys delay action for so long. The appalling corollary is that the Quaker cocoa companies of Britain dragged their feet and dodged the issue for nine years before they finally stopped using slave cocoa.

  Despite worldwide condemnation of slavery, and laws against it, as many as eight million Africans died from overwork or were slaughtered by their masters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Uncalculated numbers perished on the Portuguese islands while the Cadburys temporized and stalled. Even after the British companies withdrew, slavery continued on the islands for many more years, and Angolans were still being forced into labour until the 1950s.

  São Tomé was not the most abusive of colonies, nor was Cadbury Brothers the most hypocritical of companies. But Cadbury had elevated chocolate, in the public mind, to a special status—a token of affection, a symbol of simple joy, a sensual yet innocent pleasure. It was Cadbury more than any other chocolate company that had rebranded chocolate and defined its public image. Cadbury’s role in slavery and human exploitation was indirect. Their behaviour, compared with that of the pillagers of gold and ivory and diamonds in the Congo and southern Africa, was commendable. But Cadbury’s history and its philosophy and its product imposed a higher corporate standard. The company’s corporate moral failure left them vulnerable to the jibes of journalists like Nevinson, the mockery of their cynical political opponents and the judgment of posterity: If high-minded Quakers could be tainted by the cocoa business, what realistic hope existed that there could ever be integrity in the world of unrestricted commerce?

  Chapter Four

  THE GEOPOLITICS OF A HERSHEY’S KISS

  “All the other chocolate makers, you see, had begun to grow jealous of the wonderful candies that Mr. Wonka was making, and they started to send in spies to steal his secret recipes. The spies took jobs in the Wonka factory, pretending they were ordinary workers, and while they were there, each one of them found out exactly how a certain special thing was made.”

  —ROALD DAHL, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  MILTON SNAVELY HERSHEY HARDLY SEEMED DESTINED for greatness when he was growing up as a poor farm boy on the eastern seaboard of the United States. But then again, this was nineteenth-century America where anything was possible. Milton’s great-grandfather had fled persecution in Switzerland in the seventeenth century, along with other people of the Mennonite faith, and he had sought refuge for his family in the New World. The British Quaker William Penn had promised religious freedom for all in his new colony, and the Mennonites, feeling quite at home with the pious Society of Friends, settled among them in Pennsylvania.

  Hard-working, dutiful and dour, Milton’s mother, Fanny, taught her son that the only pleasure he should seek was that of reading from the Bible and that he should struggle to avoid more frivolous pursuits. But Milton’s father had other ideas. Romantic, whimsical and utterly unreliable, Henry Hershey encouraged his son to read widely and question everything. Though born a Mennonite, Henry was preoccupied with the secular world of the nineteenth century, preferring modern skepticism to the certainties of faith. He read the New York Times every day, along with any book that he could find among the cornfields and dairy farms of Derby Church, Pennsylvania.

  Henry might still have endeared himself to his purposeful and pragmatic wife if he hadn’t managed to squander her resources, and those of her family, on various inventions and get-rich schemes. On the somewhat sensible side, he once tried his hand at planting fruit trees. There were trout brooks and canned vegetables—all worthy ventures that went bust for reasons beyond Henry’s control. If his wife felt any goodwill towards his endeavours, she lost it when Henry attempted to invent a perpetual motion machine. Fanny Milton was chronically cross but unable to challenge her husband for his vagaries since he was never around. In addition to his other qualities, Henry had a tendency to wander off, usually returning more broke than when he left.

  The Hersheys had one other child—a daughter, Serena. When the little girl died of scarlet fever at the age of four, all of Fanny’s and Henry’s conflicting hopes and dreams for the future came to rest on young Milton. They bickered constantly about his education, and Henry dragged his son from school to school while Fanny insisted that the boy needed to settle down and learn how to run a farm. She loathed her husband’s library, and much later—when it seemed he was finally gone for good—she happily burned all his books. For his part, Henry had nothing but scorn for Fanny’s faith, calling his fellow Mennonites “the gray-minded people who cannot rejoice.”

  With so much disruption in his schooling, Milton acquired only the most rudimentary reading and writing skills and had no knowledge of the farm business at all. By the time he reached puberty, his parents concurred (one of the few occasions) that the only hope for the young lad was for him to learn a trade. Henry’s love for the printed word persuaded him that his son should apprentice in a newspaper office, but the plan was a disaster. Milton was as unfocused and whimsical as his father and couldn’t set his mind to the precise work of typesetting. He managed to jam the machines (deliberately, according to some accounts) and he soon lost his first job. Whatever plan Henry had in mind for Milton after that fiasco, he never got the chance to exercise it. Soon after, Fanny showed him the door, and Henry wandered off to seek his fortune elsewhere.

  As far as his mother could figure out, the only thing that seemed to interest young Milton was candy. Every Saturday, when the family took their farm produce to market, Milton would u
se whatever money he had earned running errands for people to buy himself sweets—nougats, sour balls, licorice and lollipops. But Milton’s addiction to sweets also gave Fanny an inspiration: her son would go to work for Joe Royer at his Ice Cream Parlour and Garden and learn how to make candy.

  As soon as he arrived at Royer’s shop, Milton found his calling. He was no scientist, and he had none of the qualifications of the great candy-makers of the world, but he loved the alchemy of sugar mixed with flavours, the boiling and mixing, the transition, at a specific temperature, from liquid to perfect solid.

  His spinster aunt gave Milton $150 to set up his own business, but he proved to have as much aptitude for money management as his father. He sold too many products. Along with basic items such as candied fruit and dried nuts, Milton tried to make and sell a vast range of sweets, including throat lozenges (his father had advised him that these new medicinal candies were the future) and French Secrets—bonbons with sentimental verses written inside the little paper wrappers. Milton couldn’t stay ahead of the creditors; in particular, he fell behind in his payments for imported sugar, the mainstay of his enterprise. The business sank into insolvency, and Milton collapsed with nervous fatigue.

  Henry Hershey had gone out west, like many restless Americans who sought their fortunes, and Milton soon joined him there. But it was Milton, not his father, who struck gold. The young Hershey got work with a candy-maker in Denver, Colorado, who specialized in particularly fine-tasting caramels. Through stealth and curiosity, Milton learned the man’s secret: the Denver confectioner was adding fresh milk to the product. Most caramels were manufactured with paraffin, which rendered them chewy but added little else. Milk made the candy smooth and creamy, even buttery. Milton hurried back east, where he worked by day for a candy-maker and by night for himself, cooking up batches of these caramels. His mother and aunt joined him and, with the last of their funds, they set up yet another business. Since there were no family members left who would lend the young Milton money, this was probably Milton’s last kick at the can.

  The story from here is the stuff of legends—the mythical American dream realized. An Englishman happened to sample Hershey’s wares one day and pronounced them the best caramels he had ever tasted. Would Hershey be interested in exporting his product to England? The order was huge, the profits substantial. Milton Snavely Hershey was an overnight success story.

  The Lancaster Caramel Company swiftly grew and became a major enterprise. There were no more cash flow problems. When Hershey went to a major New York bank with a request for $100,000, the bank offered him $250,000. The factory sprawled over 450,000 square feet, and the company soon set up branch plants in three other cities. Hershey’s caramels were sold in Japan, China, Australia and Europe as well as the United States. In 1890, at the age of thirty-three, Hershey was a wealthy man. He married a delicate young candy-counter girl named Kitty and set up his family members in big houses. He left his factory supervisors in charge of production while he ventured out to travel the world with his new bride. His aim was to satisfy his fascination with all the things his father cherished: books, theatre, painting and architecture. Milton imagined he could travel and learn for the rest of his life, and he certainly had the wealth to do so. But he became enchanted not with Europe’s arts and letters but with its candy business and, in particular, chocolate.

  Hershey had already tried adding cocoa powder to some of his caramels, and he had certainly tasted hot cocoa before, but the divine confections sold in Europe were like nothing he had ever experienced. Sweet memories of European chocolate haunted him, and when he saw chocolate-making machinery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago he was smitten. Amidst the amusement rides and the cotton candy was a Dresden chocolatier named J.M. Lehmann, cooking up batches of toothsome goodies for the crowds. Hershey bought him out.

  He assembled Lehmann’s equipment back in Lancaster, and with products from the Walter Baker Company (America’s leading cocoa-grinder) in neighbouring Massachusetts, Hershey set up his own modest chocolate-making enterprise in the back of his caramel factory. Though he hired a chemist, Hershey was suspicious of “experts,” and he wouldn’t follow any of the conventional practices of the time. He was going to reinvent the chocolate business.

  A chemist in Switzerland by the name of Henri Nestlé had recently perfected a method for blending dairy milk with cocoa solids to produce a product called milk chocolate. Nestlé had been experimenting with removing some or all of the water from cow’s milk in order to make baby formula. But he discovered that condensed or powdered milk would also blend well with cocoa butter. After he teamed up with an entrepreneur and found some capital, Nestlé’s milk chocolate became the hottest item on the candy shelf—a smooth, easily digestible sweet treat.

  Hershey wasn’t above stealing the idea for making creamy caramels, but he wanted to craft an original American version of the milk chocolate. He conducted his own back-room experiments to separate butter from the solids, to condense milk and to blend it with sugar and cocoa butter. In his mind, he was starting from scratch, dismissing the centuries of technique that had preceded him. Hershey wanted to be the Henry Ford of candy—to create a chocolate bar that he would sell for a nickel and that almost anyone in America could afford to buy. And he did it.

  Bars of rich milk chocolate, stamped with what would become an iconic name in the candy business—Hershey’s—started to roll off the assembly line. Hershey unloaded his caramel business for a million-dollar profit and turned his full attention to chocolate-making. First there were Hershey’s milk chocolate bars, then Hershey’s milk chocolate with almond bars, then tiny Hershey’s Kisses, each individually wrapped and with that distinctive little twirl on top. It didn’t matter what the Europeans had done; this was America, and Hershey was a chocolate pioneer.

  The Pennsylvania farm boy was soon rich beyond his dreams, but also bored. Like his father, he needed the constant stimulation of new projects and new inventions. His next endeavour would be far more challenging than reinventing candy.

  While he was travelling in England and learning about chocolate, it appears Hershey encountered some of the social engineering of the Quaker candy barons. He would certainly have heard of the garden city movement, including Cadbury Brothers’ model community in Bournville and though he never did explain the source of his inspiration, Hershey became determined to create a town of his own in the shadow of his candy factory. The idea was presented as his own utopian vision: an all-American community where there would be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.”

  His financial advisors told him he was crazy. But he no longer had to listen to them. He was rich and, experience had demonstrated more than once, he had good instincts. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Milton set about to build what would become Hershey, Pennsylvania. He bought a few hundred acres of cornfields in his home township of Derry, in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch territory and started building in 1903. Within two years, the town of Hershey had become one of the most daring social experiments of the age, and true to Milton’s expectation, it far surpassed anything the Cadburys or the Rowntrees had achieved back in England. The streets were broad, and every house had expansive green lawns. (Milton would sometimes tour the neighbourhoods to ensure that people were maintaining their properties to his satisfaction). There was indoor plumbing, electricity and steam heat—luxuries for most American factory workers, who were more accustomed to coal lamps and outhouses. All of it was available at an affordable rent or through low-interest loans from the Hershey Trust Bank.

  The centrepiece of Hershey was, of course, the factory, where the odour of melted chocolate wafted from the giant copper kettles and infused the town with a surreal cloying sweetness—for candy lovers, even breathing was a pleasure. But there was more: an amusement park with rides; a lake-sized swimming pool; a community centre housing an enormous theatre with a grand marble lobby; a bandstand; a golf course; gardens modelled on those in Versailles; and a netw
ork of trolley lines linking up with neighbouring communities. Hershey, Pennsylvania, attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors who came to eat chocolate, listen to music, swim in the artificial lake and envy the people who lived and worked there. For all of his employees, there were insurance benefits, health care and retirement plans. Old-fashioned American capitalists were shocked. Fortune magazine called Hershey’s enterprise immoral, suggesting that such generosity “saps a community’s self-reliance and injures its pride.”

  What did Milton Hershey want in exchange? Happy, clean-living and above all else loyal employees who would turn tons of cocoa beans into rich milk chocolate and help to make him the king of chocolate in the United States. He got his wish. Within five years of his factory opening, the Hershey Chocolate Company had annual sales of over $5 million, while employing twelve hundred people who worked in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, with nary a complaint. It was an industrial miracle, reinforced by Hershey’s fervent belief in the idea of progress.

  When he and Kitty discovered they couldn’t have children, they established an orphanage and took in homeless boys. The children attended the Hershey Industrial School and lived with house parents, where they were better off—at least financially—than most of the children in town. Hershey wanted them to have everything he lacked as a boy.

  By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Milton Hershey was a living legend—one of the best of the rags-to-riches success stories that made the United States the Promised Land for immigrants. Hershey’s generosity was scorned by other capitalists, but he was celebrated by the leading intellectuals and social activists of his time. And in the end, nobody could argue with achievement. His town was a success, business was booming, and he got richer every day.

  But as Hershey basked in the success of all his ventures and the praise of his admirers, his fellow chocolate-makers in Britain were getting a different kind of feedback from the public. Muckraking journalists had exposed a sordid secret in the chocolate trade. Chocolate, no matter what the cost in the candy store, had a hidden price in human misery. The candy business was becoming complicated. People in Britain had started asking hard questions about the real cost of cocoa and its sinister sources. Working people were growing impatient with the paternalism of the better bosses—the Rowntrees and the Cadburys—and their cozy arrangements with workers. The king of cocoa in America would find he was not immune from censure and disparagement.