Chocolate Wars

by Deborah Cadbury

  “The climax of the farce has now been reached,” Nevinson fumed. “The requirements of legalized slavery have been satisfied. The government has ‘redeemed’ the slaves that its own Agents have so diligently and profitably collected. They went into the Tribunal as slaves, they have come out as contracted labourers. No one in heaven or earth can see the smallest difference.” But he raged, the “blackest of crimes” has been committed, apparently under the full protection of the law.

  Although Nevinson took care to conceal the purpose of his visit, he was convinced he had been poisoned during his stay in Benguala and was suffering from “violent pain and frequent collapse.” Nonetheless, he crawled onto the steamer to follow the slaves’ journey to São Tomé. He was able to observe them from the upper deck: They were bedecked in “flashy loincloths to give them a moments pleasure,” a contemptuous token of their new status as “voluntary” labor. But the servicais were not deceived. They knew São Tomé was okalunga—hell on earth.

  Nevinson estimated there were 30,000 “voluntary” slaves on São Tomé and another 3,000 on Principe. Their conditions were harsh; the work unrelenting. On average one adult in five died each year, “their dead bodies lashed to poles and carried out to be flung away in the forest.”

  After his six-month investigation, Nevinson published his account in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in August 1905. It made for harrowing reading. That same year, the Portuguese islands briefly became the world’s top cocoa producers, but the cruelty and misery behind the figures was becoming all too transparent. This was not, said Nevinson, “the old fashioned export of human beings . . . as a reputable and staple industry.” This he acknowledged had disappeared. Nonetheless, “The whole question of African slavery is still before us,” he concluded. It had merely gone underground; disguised, modified, and legalized, but still a loss of liberty. To Nevinson, the enduring horror of it all was “part of the great contest of capitalism.”

  Cadbury and other Quaker chocolate firms were put on the spot. Their own research had yet to make headway. William Cadbury had met with directors of the other Quaker chocolate firms, and they had appointed an investigator, Joseph Burtt, who was due to leave for Africa. Despite Nevinson’s revelations in Harper’s, the young and idealistic Burtt was keen to press on. He was convinced a second independent report was necessary before they could challenge the Portuguese authorities. Traders in Lisbon flatly denied Nevinson’s account. Was it possible, Burtt reasoned, that Nevinson misjudged the situation, perhaps because he spoke no Portuguese or because of “the nervous and overwrought condition of his mind?” Burtt thought this could explain why Nevinson feared he was at risk of murder. Such “a delusion,” he said, was common to those “who have been overdone in Africa.”

  It was not long, however, before Burtt too was “overdone” in Africa. After six months in São Tomé and Principe, he fell seriously ill with tropical disease. His fever was so high he could not walk and had to be transported in a hammock for part of the journey. A doctor was sent from England to help him travel across Angola and on to the Transvaal to investigate labor in the gold mines, but their progress was slow.

  In his letters to William Cadbury in 1906, Burtt essentially confirmed Nevinson’s findings. It was an undercover operation, he said, that involved deceit and corruption at every level of the Portuguese administration. “No imported labourer in São Tomé has ever been returned to the mainland of Africa,” he confirmed. “Children who are born on the estates are the absolute property of the owners.” In the villages in Angola, where slaves were seized, there was such dread concerning the fate of any missing person, that his “family go through a service of the dead on his behalf.” It was quite clear that the slave trade was every bit as horrific as Nevinson had recounted.

  William Cadbury returned to Lisbon to put pressure on the authorities. Once again, he was faced with denials or requests for more time to implement reforms. In response, George Cadbury Sr., Arnold Rowntree, and other cocoa directors appealed to the British Foreign Office to confront the Portuguese government.

  On October 26, 1906, William and George Cadbury Sr. secured a private meeting with the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. They told him that the English cocoa makers were united in their desire to act together and were keen to ensure “that any step we take will be in harmony with any premeditated action of the British Government and be of real use in helping to solve the great African labour problem.” Grey promised to help and “was very kind and courteous,” George noted. In November, however, he received a letter from the Foreign Office urging his discretion on the matter. Grey wanted the Cadburys “to refrain from calling public attention to the question” until he had a chance to read Burtt’s report and “to speak to the Portuguese minister himself on the subject.” The Cadburys had to contain their impatience.

  Unknown to the Cadburys, the Quakerly concern to end slavery immediately was entangled in a far bigger web. Even though the Foreign Office had promised to put pressure on the Portuguese, there were other British interests at stake that affected negotiations— notably labor problems in the mines in South Africa. The British government was trying to strike a deal with the Portuguese to employ workers from Mozambique in their gold mines in the Transvaal. They were therefore in no hurry to antagonize the Portuguese authorities. The Foreign Office was stalling for time.

  Burtt returned to England in the spring of 1907 and reported his findings to the leading cocoa manufacturers. Records show that on May 2, he convinced the Rowntree board “beyond all doubt” that the workers on São Tomé were held in “a condition of practical slavery,” and that “cruel and villainous” methods were used to procure the labor. On June 27, leading directors of the Quaker chocolate firms met to discuss the problem. Seated at the table were Seebohm Rowntree, the author of Poverty; his cousin Arnold Rowntree; Edward Cadbury, who had just exposed appalling working practices in Britain in Sweating and Women’s Work and Wages; his cousin, William Cadbury; Roderick Fry; and Francis Fry. They debated whether the Foreign Office could be trusted to resolve the issue. Was there any way the British could stop the slavery once and for all? Should the cocoa manufacturers organize a boycott—a move that William and others argued against, claiming that it would achieve nothing but “the comfortable assurance that we have wiped our hands of all responsibility in the matter.” At heated meetings on June 27 and again on July 4, they decided to give the Foreign Office more time and try to use their buying power as leverage.

  Meanwhile everything that the Quaker brand of chocolate stood for—the promised land of justice and welfare for all—was beginning to be called into question in the British press. Rumors began to circulate that the idyllic Bournville village with its happy workers producing a delicious chocolate bar rested on the unspeakable misery of African slaves. As for George Cadbury, the chocolate “uncle” who created homes for cripples, was it possible that he was in fact nothing more than a “serpentine and malevolent cocoa magnate?”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Chocolate Man’s Utopia

  DERRY CHURCH, PENNSYLVANIA

  While the cocoa magnates of England were preoccupied with Quaker idealism and social reform, the slumbering American market was waking up to a chocolate tycoon of its own.

  Hershey had returned to the Pennsylvania haunts of his childhood. Exploring the region around Derry Church by horse and wagon, he found an isolated farming community still lost in the last century, lacking the trophies of modernity such as gas and electricity. While his family and critics were astonished at the idea of building on a massive scale in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, Hershey could only see the potential. It was good dairy country. His milk chocolate factory would be surrounded by farms that could supply all the fresh milk he needed.

  In 1903, Hershey arranged a survey of 4,000 acres and bought parcels of land wherever possible, starting with 1,200 acres. A local architect, C. Emlen Urban, was hired to start work on the designs. The factory alone would provide
six acres of floor space filled with the very latest equipment with the capacity to make 100,000 pounds of chocolate each day. It was an extraordinary gamble, but there was no room for caution or uncertainty in Hershey’s thinking. His father’s advice still echoed in his mind: “If you want to make money, you must do things in a large way.” This would be no regional concern such as his rivals were engaged in. Hershey was going to sell his chocolate across America from coast to coast. His chocolate would be more accessible, too; he would sell it at bus stops, in train stations, and from street vendors and cafes as well as sweetshops and grocers. And with mass production, he aimed to lower the price so everyone could afford it. Hershey’s would be chocolate for the people.

  Hershey delighted in mulling over the plans with his architect. He knew what he wanted. If money could buy beauty and grandeur, then he would have it. The factory—the humming hub of the enterprise—would look palatial with elegant limestone buildings set back from Chocolate Avenue by a sweeping lawn the size of a football field. It would make Cadbury’s little cottage factory in the country, in those few green fields known as England, look a little out of date, a little last century by comparison. The town would also be built on a Hershey scale. The ambitious design boasted two main thoroughfares, Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, intersected by streets named after exotic locations where Hershey bought cocoa: Areba, Trinidad, Caracas, Java, Para, Granada. . . . Like Bournville, the charming homes would have gardens and be built to differing designs set well back from rows of maple trees that lined the streets. He planned shops, a library, an athletic ground with a grandstand, and a 150-acre park of landscaped grounds with an enormous pavilion for skating and dancing. The world would come just to look.

  It was a vision that put the spotlight on Hershey in a new debate about what the fulfillment of the American dream was all about. This was the age of the gilded millionaires: railroad tycoons like Vanderbilt, oil kings such as Rockefeller, meatpacking magnates such as Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour, or William Clark in mining. The sale of Andrew Carnegie’s steel company for $200 million in 1901 almost certainly made him the richest man in the world. Wealth on this scale was unprecedented. Newspapers and magazines lapped up stories of the lifestyles of the new millionaires, prompting a moral debate: Was it right for the fortunate few to possess such staggering wealth while millions faced unimaginable poverty? Was this the embodiment of the American dream or a grotesque distortion of it?

  John Davison Rockefeller, who was made rich beyond imagining as Standard Oil’s kerosene became “the Light of the World,” conveniently accepted Calvinist thinking on the matter. Success was his due; it reflected God’s will. “God gave me my money,” he said. He struck an increasingly controversial figure, caricatured in the press as an industrial emperor and accused of monopolistic practices. But he also gave money to charity and was building a reputation for philanthropy. In the 1890s, he helped to transform the University of Chicago with a donation of $80 million, and in 1901, he founded New York’s Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which later became Rockefeller University.

  Andrew Carnegie spelled out an entire theory of philanthropy. In 1889, he published “Wealth,” the first in a series of articles for the North American Review, in which he set out his view that the rich had a moral obligation to look after the poor. “The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the labourer . . . today measures the changes which have come with civilisation,” he wrote. He contrasted this with older cultures, such as the native Sioux. The wigwam of a Sioux chief, the most senior person in an Indian village, differed very little from the tents of his poorest braves. Carnegie tried to explain how these changes came about in almost Darwinian terms. There was a “law of competition” in the continuing economic struggle as wealth is accumulated in the hands of the capable few. But such laws also served a moral purpose: It was the responsibility of the rich man to give his fortune away. The same effort that had gone into making the millions should be spent on distributing it to benefit the community. Needless to say, his article sparked a furor, with other captains of industry refusing to fall in line with his views.

  Ironically, despite Carnegie’s professed views on wealth, he failed to put an end to the horrific working conditions in his own steel mills but rather used his theories to justify them. It was his duty, he said—especially if he was going to give his money away—to make his business as profitable as possible. With this in mind, his managers cut wages, increased hours, and ran the mills with ruthless efficiency. According to Cosmopolitan in 1903, inside his mills “were pits like the gaping mouth of hell, and ovens emitting a terrible degree of heat. . . . The injuries sustained are of a frightful character.” Carnegie continued to preach his “Gospel of Wealth” in speeches, and his series of essays was reprinted, but his views were not always appreciated. A theologian at Dartmouth College, William Jewitt Tucker, was appalled at the patronizing idea that millionaires were the best equipped to dispense the wealth they had made from the labor of others. “I can conceive of no greater mistake, more disastrous in the end to religion if not to society,” he wrote, “than of trying to make charity do the work of justice.”

  Milton Hershey’s grand scheme would show them all. He would build the perfect American dream. His workers would benefit from the beautiful surroundings of his model town at Hershey, and his chocolate works would offer every conceivable modern comfort. His staff would be among America’s working elite. As the walls of his factory began to rise from empty cornfields in 1903 and 1904, the trim figure of Milton Hershey could be seen everywhere trekking through the mud and the dirt. With each day his utopia became more tangible and real. How could it be other than good?

  But the would-be chocolate king was in trouble. Hidden from view in the research department, his struggle to create a milk chocolate recipe was intensifying. Hershey’s headquarters for chocolate research was concealed in a test plant behind his old family home near Derry Church. Apart from a Jersey herd, the facility had its own dairy, milk-processing plant, and large warehouse filled with kettles and vacuum pans for testing different chocolate mixtures. The grounds were patrolled by security each night to ensure there were no intruders. Absolute secrecy was essential to guard the humiliating fact that there was little to guard. Success was elusive, but the world must not know.

  Like the Swiss before him, Hershey wrestled with the problems of milk processing. Experiments with cream and whole milk failed, so he turned his attention to skimmed milk. The key was to find a way to evaporate the water from the milk in such a way that it could be smoothly mixed with the sugar and cocoa fats. After heating the milk, its flavor almost invariably became poor, burned, or scalded. If the milk managed to condense successfully, it could turn lumpy when mixed with the chocolate ingredients as the cocoa oils mixed with water in milk. Even if the testers succeeded in making a chocolate bar, it could turn rancid. And then there were the potential pitfalls associated with scaling up production. How would they handle the daily input from the milk of 15,000 cows? Could they expand milk processing for mass production? How could they prevent a large batch from spoiling?

  With Hershey generous but mercurial, kindhearted but always on a short fuse—shortened still further with worry—his small staff was uneasy. They commonly worked through the night; impromptu sleeping arrangements were set up in the barn so an experiment could be watched through the small hours. While their boss’s benevolence was beyond doubt, they knew that just one tiny slipup could be cause for instant dismissal.

  There are slightly differing accounts of Hershey’s breakthrough. The heroic version has Hershey working late one night with John Schmalbach, a colleague from his caramel factory. After several hours of laborious failures, Schmalbach seized the initiative and tried a very slow evaporation of nonfat milk over low heat. He succeeded in reducing the water content of the milk and added the sugar to create a sweet, creamy concoction with no hint of a burned flavor. Better still, they found t
he mixture could be blended with the ingredients from the cocoa bean without spoiling to produce a smooth milk chocolate. Hershey was thrilled. In his view, the faintly bitter flavor could not be bettered. When the experiment was repeated with the exact same temperatures and timing, it worked again. Slightly sour, distinctly original: the perfect American milk chocolate bar.

  According to a more cynical view, the origins of the Hershey’s milk chocolate bar are less romantic. Hershey happened to acquire a large batch of milk powder from Europe, which had slightly soured by the time it crossed the Atlantic. Reluctant to waste such a large amount, he used it to make chocolate and found that it sold well. Company officials have always denied that soured milk powder played any part in the breakthrough formula.

  Whatever really happened that led to that distinctive Hershey taste, mass production was the next step. With his factory almost complete, Milton Hershey was poised to become the Ford of chocolate. Ironically, the one person who would have particularly treasured this moment was missing: Milton’s father, Henry Hershey. The man who always advocated going for the grand scale, died in February 1904 as the elusive American dream was finally being created all around him. He had a heart attack in the unpaved streets of the half-built town.