Bitter Chocolate (12 page)

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 use 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 network 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.

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.