Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  The slave trade had ended formally in the mid-1840s, after 250 years of blatant exploitation. Abolitionists and idealists celebrated an important turning point in human history—the triumph of decency and justice. But the victory was deceptive. There were new anti-slavery laws in most European countries and an outright ban in Britain. And yet slavery in other forms continued.

  Until at least 1918, “indentured labourers,” also known as coolies, were exported to the islands of the Caribbean from Asia. At least a half-million East Indian labourers arrived at British colonies in Jamaica and Trinidad during this time, while Cuba imported a quarter of a million from China. European and American shipping merchants offered work to men and women fleeing famine and depravation in their own countries. They were offered “contracts,” as the Portuguese had done for Africans in Angola to circumvent laws against slavery. The indentured labour business was a sham, but the contracts and the acquiescence of frightened, starving people gave the exercise a veneer of legitimacy that managed to fool an all-too-willingly blind world of consumers into complacency.

  The labour merchants treated the Asian workers like animals: they were held in pens, branded, chained and herded onto ships that bore a striking resemblance to the African slave vessels of bygone days. The coolies in the Americas, like the Angolans in São Tomé and the Asians in the Transvaal, would have to work for years before they received any pay. If they were lucky, they might earn just enough to make their way back to their countries. Few of them ever tried it. With nothing to return to after years abroad, many of them stayed on beyond their “contracts,” clearing land for new plantations to satisfy the insatiable demand for both sugar and cocoa. The indentured coolie system was, as George Cadbury’s own newspaper had declared, “slavery under a different name.” Yet, here it was, largely unreported, on the cocoa-producing islands of the Caribbean. There was no crusading Henry Nevinson here to take up the cause.

  The Cadburys purchased two estates in the British colony of Trinidad in 1897, just as the damning reports about labour abuse in São Tomé were growing too loud to be ignored and as the company was scrambling to find other less controversial sources of raw materials. They also entered a joint venture ownership with the Scottish distillery C. Tennant and Company for the Ortinola Estates in Trinidad, one of the largest on the island.

  In the archives of York University in England, Rowntree Company records include files and photos from its own plantations in the British colony of Jamaica. There are also photographs of Cadbury’s cocoa farms in Ortinola (oddly enough, published in the Rowntree Company newsletter to show their employees in York what the future Rowntree farms would look like). The pictures reveal rows of miserable-looking workers raking cocoa beans. The ethnicities are mixed, but the photo captions are explicit: “Coolies Sorting Cocoa—Ortinola Estates;” “Coolies ‘Dancing’ Cocoa—Ortinola Estates.” The latter shows about sixty workers standing on a pile of fermenting or drying beans, their stern-faced Creole managers close behind them.

  As the British government reduced the tariffs on cocoa beans in order to stimulate the chocolate industry, Britain also allowed contractors in its Caribbean colonies to buy up large tracts of Crown land—most of it virgin rainforests—and to clear-cut the area for more cocoa plantations. To their credit, the British companies invested in the colonies to improve crop quality and attempt to avoid the cocoa tree diseases that had closed down other cocoa-producing regions in Spanish America. But the coolie system was endemic to the region.

  Since the days when Spanish monks hid their operations deep in their monasteries and guarded their recipes closely, the chocolate business had evolved a cult of unparalleled secrecy. There were good reasons for it, and they weren’t all in the kitchens and the labs, as the São Tomé scandal would reveal. The controversy over slavery drove the companies even further underground, and today it’s virtually impossible to pin down exactly where the high-minded Hershey was getting his cocoa beans. It’s safe to assume, though, that much of the supply was coming from the Caribbean, taking into account geography and hemispheric politics. The Caribbean was relatively close. And the Monroe doctrine, asserting American hegemony in the region, guaranteed a certain predictable security of trade.

  Hershey was one of the few companies in the United States that actually processed cocoa. With the exception of the Baker Company, most of the other—and smaller—manufacturers purchased their cocoa butter and powder from Hershey. But pinning down where Hershey got its cocoa would become even more of a guessing game as the business of commodity trading went global. Traders in Amsterdam, Hamburg and New York were consolidating cocoa beans from the Caribbean and West Africa—a practice known as bulking. Significantly, the Portuguese producers from São Tomé were able to continue a flourishing trade in cocoa beans—concealing slave-made product among supplies from other locations—long after their woeful labour practices had been exposed and the industry agreed to boycott their product.

  In 1910, Joseph Burtt, the investigator retained by Cadbury to check on the Portuguese, was asked to testify before a U.S. Ways and Means Committee hearing in Washington to describe what he had seen in São Tomé. He was happy to oblige. He told congressmen that he had found as many as forty thousand Angolans working on São Tomé plantations—in shackles—and that he had seen the bones of the dead lining the slave route from Angola to the island. The committee chairman asked Burtt why the slaves didn’t just run away: “What would happen to them? I never had any slaves,” said the chairman. “What would happen to them?” Burtt told him he couldn’t even begin to imagine, having seen so many corpses and so much death. He never saw a slave attempt to simply run away. “They might be treated like gentleman for aught you know,” stated the chairman.

  Despite the chairman’s facetiousness, the Senate passed a toughly worded resolution: that the U.S. president be given the authority to “forbid by proclamation the entry of cocoa into the United States or her possessions when it is shown to his satisfaction that the same is the product of slave labor.”

  The Americans were acutely sensitive on the subject of slavery at that time. They had, in living memory, fought a bloody civil war over states’ rights, and many Southerners had considered the ownership and employment of slaves to be inviolable. The abolitionists won the cause and the war and, while the realistic among them were undoubtedly aware of the myriad ways to continue enslavement under less provocative terminology, they were determined to make a bold show of opposing it in all its forms.

  Labour practices in the Americas were becoming an American responsibility. European influence in the hemisphere was breaking down as a result of independence movements in the colonies and a muscular American policy that prevented the old European powers from doing much about it. Where it suited their interests, Americans were asserting military and economic power in the former European colonies—and nowhere with more enthusiasm than in an old Spanish colony a hundred kilometres off the Florida panhandle.

  Cuba was considered central to the “American way of life.” American sugar barons had invested tens of millions of dollars on the island, and in the late nineteenth century American capitalists bought Cuban revolutionary bonds issued in New York City to help overthrow Spanish authority.

  Cuba declared its independence in 1902, but its sovereignty was a fiction from the start. Washington asserted power over Cuba’s foreign relations as well as domestic matters of “life, property and individual liberty.” In reality, American sugar barons ruled in Cuba while tens of thousands of Chinese coolies and African slaves, working for subsistence wages, maintained their lush plantations. The real beneficiaries of this arrangement were the lords of the U.S. candy and soft drink industries.

  While it’s hard to say exactly where Hershey got his cocoa, there’s no mystery about where he got his sugar. American businessmen purchased hundreds of thousands of acres of Cuban farmland for sugar crops and flattened the ancient rainforests. Cuba became an importer of basic foods as its farming
sector turned into a monoculture committed to a single market. Hershey bought 65,000 acres of sugar fields in Cuba. His holdings stretched so far along the northern coast of the island that he built his own railroad. Near the coastal town of Santa Cruz del Norte in Yumuri Valley, Hershey built Central Hershey Cuba, a town for his workers, just as he had done in Pennsylvania. It had running water and electricity. He provided health services and built a baseball diamond for the town. While it was never quite as grand as the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, it was far above the standards for the region. But Cuban land was cheap, its labour force captive, and American capitalists such as Hershey ruled as absolute monarchs on their plantations. Through the U.S. control over Cuba, Hershey could secure his sugar supply in such volumes that he actually became one of the largest suppliers of sweetener to the Coca-Cola Company.

  In the first decades of the twentieth century, Milton Hershey was at the top of his game, a self-made man with the heart of a philanthropist. His model city in Pennsylvania was part of a sophisticated marketing strategy. A spinoff town in Cuba gave him security in the vital flow of sugar to his factories. He had a virtual monopoly in the American chocolate market. But the world was evolving. A whole new generation of cocoa barons was on the rise—and with them came a new spirit of sophisticated ruthlessness that would overwhelm the visionary Milton Hershey.

  Forrest Mars, the heir apparent to the American chocolate throne, was born in 1904, the only child in the unhappy and short-lived marriage of Frank Mars and Ethel Kissak. Frank was running a failing candy business in Minneapolis at the time of his son’s birth. Soon afterwards, Ethel divorced her bankrupt husband and sent Forrest to live with her parents in the then remote Saskatchewan mining town of North Battleford.

  Forrest proved himself to be the ace student in his one-room prairie schoolhouse where his teachers were convinced he would go places. After graduation from high school, the only place to go was back to the United States. There were few educational opportunities for a poor prairie scholar in early twentieth-century Canada, but the University of California at Berkeley saw Forrest’s potential and gave him a partial scholarship.

  Forrest was too restless and too ambitious to sit for any length of time in a classroom. His real calling was in sales, and he was soon making a small fortune as a campus wheeler-dealer, buying and reselling any merchandise he could get his hands on, from neckties to cigarettes. The Berkeley campus proved too limited, and he started peddling his wares on the street. Forrest was the archetypal American salesman. He had his father’s passion for business, and eventually the two linked up in Chicago. The circumstances weren’t auspicious—Frank had been arrested for illegal advertising. His hapless daddy bailed him out.

  Frank had been running a relatively successful chocolate business in the 1920s when his son resurfaced in his life. Forrest’s mother had more or less poisoned her son’s memory, but still, father and son had a lot in common and decided to go into business together. Forrest would later insist that he gave his father the concept for the chocolate bar that turned the small company into an empire. The young Mars claims he invented the idea for solidifying a malted milk drink and then coating the nougat filling with chocolate. It was the birth of the Milky Way, an instant winner that turned a profit for the Mars men of $800,000 in its first year on the market. The bar was quickly followed by another nougat-filled chocolate-coated treat—Snickers. It was another home run, which would be repeated with Three Musketeers.

  The magic couldn’t last. Blood and genealogy aside, Forrest Mars hated his father and, more significantly, couldn’t stand to share the glory of their chocolate creations with anyone. “I told my dad to stick the business up his ass,” Forrest later claimed. Frank gave Forrest $50,000 and the rights to sell the Milky Way in Britain. They went their separate ways and never met again.

  Unlike the pious Milton Hershey, who had to figure everything out for himself, Forrest Mars had a knack for appropriating the ideas of other people. He went to Switzerland and got a job on the Toblerone factory floor, where he absorbed everything he possibly could about the high-end chocolate manufacturer before going on to get a job at Nestlé. He learned a lot—most usefully never to allow outsiders near his own factories. In later years, he outlawed visitors to his plant and kept outside work crews under strict control when they were on the premises. They were compelled to enter and leave the plant wearing blindfolds. Mars knew from his own sleuthing how common and how rewarding it was to spy.

  After Nestlé, Forrest Mars went on to Britain with a plan to compete in the big leagues there. But by the 1930s, Cadbury Brothers, recovered from its public relations disasters of the early decades of the century, was a vast multinational operation, with plants throughout the former British Empire. Rowntree was also booming, thanks to the popularity of its Kit Kat and Aero bars and the ubiquitous Black Magic chocolate boxes. With the $50,000 his father had handed him, Forrest set up a little operation north of London, in the town of Slough, where he began to make a modified version of the Milky Way. He called it the Mars Bar.

  Forrest was, at heart, an empire builder. He was soon expanding into other lines, including dog food. By the eve of the Second World War, he was the third largest candy manufacturer in Britain. Then, faced with war, the British government imposed a special tax on foreigners that made it unprofitable to stay. It was time to head for home anyway. Frank Mars was dead (Forrest didn’t attend his father’s funeral), and Forrest figured the time was right to take over the family business. He had the experience. He had the expertise. It would take all that—and all his bravado and guts—to survive a looming crisis in candy land.

  They had names that would strike terror into the hearts of cocoa producers: “witches’ broom,” “capsid,” “swollen shoot,” “black pod rot,” “cocoa wilt.” These were the vivid names of diseases that rampaged through the cocoa plantations of the Caribbean in the first half of the twentieth century. Just as Mexico had lost its advantage in cocoa production when its crop was virtually wiped out, now the new plantations in the Caribbean were facing the same fate. Disease devastated the economies of the islands and forced chocolate-makers to look elsewhere for their products. Africa became the logical choice, even for Milton Hershey.

  By the 1930s, cocoa was well established in West Africa, still ruled by the European powers. France controlled Côte d’Ivoire; Nigeria was under British authority. Both produced some cocoa, but no colony was as productive as the land called the Gold Coast—also under the administrative sway of the British. The Cadburys, after the scandals of São Tomé and the Portuguese, had developed productive plantations there in partnership with independent African farmers, and the Gold Coast now led the world in cocoa production.

  In 1936, there was a hiccup on the international commodities market. The global crop yield was less than anticipated. Prices for cocoa beans jumped to a record thirteen cents a pound. Milton Hershey panicked. Worried that the value of beans was going to rise even further, he started hoarding. He was buying and stockpiling all he could get his hands on when prices tumbled in 1937. He panicked again and calculated that if he bought up even higher quantities, he could take control of the pricing mechanism by manipulating supplies. It was a brave but deeply flawed idea.

  Word got around that Hershey was the only purchaser in the market, buying everything available at his own inflated price. Soon he was buried in offers to sell. It went on for months before Hershey realized that he was buying nothing. He’d played into the hands of market speculators who were gambling that Hershey would one day soon have to unload the cocoa at a significantly lower price than he had paid for it. Then they’d buy it back. It’s called futures trading, a phenomenon that would now take over commodities markets like cocoa and make fortunes for those who knew how to play the game. But Milton Hershey didn’t understand it, and he lost $10 million.

  According to the archives of the company, Hershey was profoundly resentful that gamblers had had him. “He was not the type to show
anger,” said one anonymous employee quoted in archival documents. “But he never forgot what he thought was the whole world against him. He was bitter.”

  In the end it didn’t matter. With war looming, the British government seized direct control of Gold Coast cocoa—and most other commodities throughout the empire—and began to regulate prices and shipments of beans for the “war effort.” The price controls were good for the manufacturers; they had a predictable supply of cheap raw materials. As always, the economic burden landed on the people at the bottom, the primary producers in distant, undeveloped lands.

  Hershey and the other chocolate-makers were able to manipulate farmers in Africa, but their control at home wasn’t quite so secure. The times were changing. Democracy in the marketplace, and on the factory floor, was cutting into the historic influence of the old-style capitalist proprietors. The effect of good intentions and proprietary munificence was just about exhausted.

  Workers in Europe and North America took decades to find their common voice and the means to exercise collective power. But unions were gaining strength and workers were demanding concessions as a matter of fundamental rights, not the goodwill of benevolent capitalists. Milton Hershey was at a loss to understand the strife that was becoming part of the labour-management dialogue in the United States. Workers were going out on strike, turning violent when they didn’t get what they were asking for. Managers were employing goons and Pinkerton security agents to intimidate ordinary working people and to physically harm them when necessary.