Hershey: The Man Behind the Chocolate

There must be a human instinct to lionize people who left a deep imprint on the world. In death our founding fathers became saints, so much so that we sometimes almost forgot they were human. But then reminders (ill-tempered missives, evidence of slave rape) would resurface to shake us of our illusions. Today’s college students may be shocked to learn that Charles Lindbergh received a medal from Hitler, that Henry Ford was vociferously anti-Semitic, or that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton made racist remarks in public. But the man who built an American chocolate empire in the first half of the twentieth century didn’t even have to die to become a legend; he was effectively canonized while he was still alive.

Milton Hershey, the Pennsylvania farm boy who found a way to make inexpensive chocolate, was nearly always spoken of in gushing, reverent tones in the company town he engineered, and the national press followed suit. Now, 60 years after his death, many people still practically genuflect when they say his name. When the proposed sale of the majority stock in his company went up for sale two and a half years ago, endangering the industrial utopia he built, his name was national news.

Hershey was undeniably charitable, and much of his reputation is deserved. But the accepted Hershey story is so sweet that one is forced to wonder what it forgets, ignores, or covers up. In Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams (Simon & Schuster, $25), Michael D’Antonio begins to retrieve the human Milton Hershey from the fog of legend.

If Hershey had been satisfied to sit on the millions he earned churning out Kisses and Mr. Goodbars, his rags-to-riches story wouldn’t be remarkable enough to sanitize or sully. But he truly challenged the image of the industrial captain as robber baron. The son of a woman from a strict Mennonite family and a man whose résumé read like a laundry list of Gilded Age get-rich-quick schemes (oil prospector, silver miner, perpetual-motion-machine deviser), Hershey dropped out of school at age 12. After a brief stint at a print shop where, according to D’Antonio, “he purposefully let his hat fall into the press and got himself fired,” he found work at a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, confectioners in 1872. From that day until his death he was in the candy business, if not always profitably. After failed ventures in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, he finally achieved success in Lancaster in the 1890s making and selling caramels. But he sensed that the future of candy would be in mass-producing chocolate, then still a luxury item. Before he even discovered a workable recipe, he bought 1,200 acres in Derry Church, Pennsylvania, a few miles from his birthplace, and began constructing both a chocolate factory and a model town.

D’Antonio diligently puts Hershey’s life in historical context, explaining how the Utopian and Progressive movements shaped his desire to design a company town impervious to urban evils. He built street upon street of tidy houses and an amusement park, zoo, museum, and opulent, 2,000-seat theater, all for the enjoyment of his employees. He also founded a school for orphan boys and entrusted it with his majority share of Hershey stock. Today the Milton S. Hershey School, which provides room, board, clothing, laptops, and post-secondary tuition for its 1,500 low-income male and female students from around the country, has a larger endowment than any American prep school and all but six American universities.

But as D’Antonio points out, Hershey’s generosity was accompanied by a controlling streak. He acted as a dictator, however benevolent, in the town that took his name. “Owners couldn’t use their property for any ‘offensive purpose or occupation,’” D’Antonio writes. “Piggeries, saloons, and blacksmiths were expressly forbidden—and they could not build a fence without M. S. Hershey’s approval.” The author also describes the boss chastising workers caught in the few, non-Hershey-owned establishments in town that served alcohol.

Make no mistake: Hershey, while unauthorized by the company or Hershey’s estate, is not the sort of biography that dishes scandalous dirt merely for the sake of besmirching an American icon. But D’Antonio seems frustrated by how much Hershey’s story, while certainly more philanthropic than most, has been sweetened by his legend keepers. Hershey restores some of the sourness inherent in any real life. For example, Hershey’s success is commonly ascribed to his hard work and foresight; D’Antonio gives him credit for that but also notes that aggressive marketing and industrial espionage certainly helped. He draws parallels between Hershey’s expensive, if not ruinous, enjoyment of gambling and his bold, sometimes nearly disastrous business deals.

The closest he edges to salaciousness is his treatment of the lingering illness that debilitated and finally killed Hershey’s wife, Catherine, at 43. The Hershey Community Archives describes her condition as “locomotor ataxia,” explaining that “the precise symptoms and consequences were a mystery and a modern equivalent is not known.” D’Antonio reveals locomotor ataxia to be a result of untreated syphilis, which he obliquely implies she may have contracted during a stint as a teenage prostitute, encouraged by her mother for the extra income.

Marked by a newspaperman’s measured, understated tone (D’Antonio shared a Pulitzer Prize working for Newsday),

Hershey also provides lengthy historical background on such diverse topics as Cuban economics, airshow stunts, orphanages, unions and strikes, and marketing practices, as they arise in the narrative. These passages and the sections on the dark side of Hershey’s personality enlarge, rather than diminish, our picture of him. In his lifetime, he encouraged fawning publicity, because he assumed customers wanted to buy candy from a kind-hearted man. By reviving his human complexity, D’Antonio gives us something a little more robust to chew on.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.