Product Description

The name Hershey evokes many things: chocolate bars, the company town in Pennsylvania, one of America's most recognizable brands. But who was the man behind the name? In this compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D'Antonio gives us the real-life rags-to-riches story of Milton S. Hershey, a largely uneducated businessman whose idealistic sense of purpose created an immense financial empire, a town, and a legacy that lasts to this day.

Hershey, the son of a minister's daughter and an irresponsible father who deserted the family, began his career inauspiciously when the two candy shops he opened both went bankrupt. Undeterred, he started the Lancaster Caramel Company, which brought him success at last. Eventually he sold his caramel operation and went on to perfect the production process of chocolate to create a stable, consistent bar with a long shelf life...and an American icon was born.

Hershey was more than a successful businessman -- he was a progressive thinker who believed in capitalism as a means to higher goals. He built the world's largest chocolate factory and a utopian village for his workers on a large tract of land in rural Pennsylvania, and used his own fortune to keep his workers employed during the Great Depression. In addition, he secretly willed his fortune to a boys' school and orphanage, both of which now control a vast endowment.

Extensively researched and vividly written, Hershey is the fascinating story of this uniquely American visionary.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77039 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Keeping his prose blessedly free of "sweet" wordplay, D'Antonio offers a balanced and genial look at the man who brought America the five-cent chocolate bar and founded a utopian village. Milton S. Hershey (1857–1945) was hardly the only Progressive-era tycoon to envision an idyllic company town, but he alone made it work. He set out to create "a self-perpetuating little utopia of capitalism and charity," and that's exactly what Hershey, Pa., was and is. D'Antonio (The State Boys Rebellion, etc.) describes his subject's childhood and early failures, the company's investments and dealings, and the intricacies of candy making. He includes bad stuff on Hershey: the egotism expected of a business mogul, some capricious firings, a tendency toward heavy-handed paternalism and a childless marriage to a woman who, the author concludes, suffered from and died of syphilis. He also explains why Hershey's astonishing generosity toward a school for underprivileged boys resulted in decades of corporate stagnation and, in the last few years, a bitter battle over the company's future. All in all, D'Antonio solidifies his subject's reputation as "a kindly type of industrialist" who brought the nation "happiness in a wrapper." Not a massive social history with grand pretensions—indeed, it's a relief to pick up a corporate titan's biography that weighs less than eight pounds—this volume will satisfy all but the most voracious readers. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School Snack-loving teens may be well disposed toward this entertaining book before opening it, since its subject is the inventor of the first popular and inexpensive milk chocolate bar in the United States. The story of the man's success is one of determination, innovation, and perseverance despite repeated failures, all encompassed in a personality unique among the tycoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A curious mix of capitalist ruthlessness and utopian idealism, Hershey pursued riches but believed deeply in social responsibility. His devotion to the latter created a legacy that exists to this day in his school for at-risk children and, in Hershey, PA, the charming company town that was one of the few American communities virtually unaffected by the Great Depression. Fascinating details about candy production and Hershey's personal life abound, and the balanced viewpoint, smooth writing, and succinct treatment make this biography a good choice for assignments related to leadership, business, or U.S. social history. Starr E. Smith, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
During the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- the age of rapacious corporate bullies characterized by Theodore Roosevelt as "malefactors of great wealth" -- Milton S. Hershey was a man apart. The candy that he manufactured in idyllic, small-town Pennsylvania made him a millionaire many times over, he could be exceedingly tough in his dealings with competitors and employees, and he liked to live the high life during his frequent overseas jaunts. Yet he was a member of the "progressive crusade" that formed in reaction against the robber barons, and, as Michael D'Antonio puts it, he "had a strong sense of morality and responsibility" as well as firm convictions "about the purpose of wealth and the promise of American life."

These convictions led him to do some remarkable things. When he moved his business from the lovely old city of Lancaster into the Pennsylvania countryside, he built an entire town -- Hershey, of course -- that was "neat and inviting," in which modern houses were made available to employees at reasonable prices and numerous civic amenities were provided. For many years he gave employees generous bonuses; if in part these were aimed at scaring off unions, they also reflected a belief that labor as well as management had a stake in private enterprise. Perhaps most remarkably, he established the Milton Hershey School for the housing and training of orphan boys and eventually turned over to it what amounted to his entire fortune.

D'Antonio, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, begins his biography with events that occurred in 2002, nearly 60 years after Hershey's death. Members of the Milton Hershey School Trust, which oversees the school -- which by then had grown to "an eleven-hundred-pupil residential school for needy children" -- and controls the Hershey Foods Corporation, "decided that the charity's dependence on the firm's stock was unwise." The trust's $5 billion portfolio was immense, but the trustees believed that diversification was in the school's best interests. Therefore they proposed to sell the Hershey Foods Corporation to the highest bidder and to spread the portfolio among numerous blue-chip investments.

The school scarcely needed more money, but from a purely fiduciary point of view, the decision made sense; the trustees merely proposed to act in the trust's best interests, which is what trustees are supposed to do. But the people of Hershey didn't see it that way. They feared that a new owner might move the candy-making operation elsewhere, putting 6,000 townspeople out of work, and that their picture-postcard town would no longer be a prime tourist attraction. So they appealed to the press (this newspaper included), which sent in reporters who heard their message: "a uniquely benevolent and impossibly cute village, which called itself 'the Sweetest Place on Earth,' was being bullied out of its dreamy existence by coldhearted money managers."

That was oversimplification, of course, but it did arouse a lot of sympathy elsewhere, including in the governor's office -- eventually the trustees caved in, though not happily -- and it served as a reminder that the company, the town and the school were the legacy of a remarkable and unusual man. Hershey is scarcely so well known as many of his approximate contemporaries -- Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan et al. -- but to just about every American, his name is synonymous to this day with chocolate, and at a moment when too many of the Gilded Age's corporate excesses are being repeated in 21st-century style, it is useful to contemplate his far more modest example.

Hershey was born in Lancaster in 1857, the son of Henry Hershey and the former Fanny Snavely, a name right out of W.C. Fields's "The Fatal Glass of Beer." His father was an amiable ne'er-do-well who was better at dreaming than working, while his mother came from a comparatively prosperous family and expected her son (there was also a daughter, who died young) to make a mark on the world. Milton's education ended when he was 12, and when he was 15 he got a job downtown at Joseph P. Royer's Ice Cream Parlor and Garden. It was there that he began to learn the fine art of candy-making, to which he brought his father's penchant "for playful schemes and big ideas."

He soon set out on his own. Bankrolled by the Snavely exchequer, he opened his own candy shops, first in Philadelphia, then in New York. Both failed, but he learned a lot -- not just about making candy but also about the lives of the "poor, neglected, and abused boys and girls" he observed in New York. He returned to Lancaster determined "to make a candy no one else produced in the East -- Denver-style caramels." This time the Snavelys said they'd lost enough on him: "Years later he would say, with a hint of pride, that he realized he had become, like his father, a 'black sheep' in the eyes of his Snavely uncles. This rejection was a great motivator." Indeed it was. He figured out a formula for making caramel candy that would "keep fresh for weeks and perhaps months" and got a big order from a British buyer. He was on the way:

"After so much struggle it was strange that one big break -- an order from an importer who happened to pass through town -- would make Milton Hershey a success. The classic script would call for, at the very least, some minor setbacks and skirmishes with tough competitors. But none of those things happened. Instead, Hershey's sales abroad increased steadily, giving him a secure base for his business. He also exploited his recipe, and the advantages of his location, to build his business at home."

He called the company Lancaster Caramel. By the early 1890s, it was in a 450,000-square foot building in Lancaster, then in satellite factories elsewhere in Pennsylvania and in Chicago. He had more than 1,400 employees and a burgeoning bank account. He also had, by the turn of the century, the sense that caramel's day was done, that milk chocolate -- successfully produced in Europe and England but not in the States -- was the next big thing. He sold Lancaster Caramel for $1 million, bought up about 4,000 acres between Lancaster and Harrisburg, and began to build his factory and town.

He did all this without having lit upon a formula for mass-producing milk chocolate, but with the help of an old hand from the Lancaster factory he came up with one. It had -- and has -- "a distinctive flavor," sweet, of course, but with "a single, faintly sour note" that soon came to "define the taste of chocolate for Americans, who would find harmony in the sweet but slightly sour flavor." The flavor is so familiar, so part of the American grain, that I can taste it as I type these words.

You know the rest of the story, at least the most famous part of it. The candy on which Hershey put his own name was a colossal success. M.S., as he was by then known, soon had the money to indulge his taste for luxury; a wife, Catherine, with whom to share it; and the home (established in 1910) for boys who were known locally as "replacements for the children the couple could not have on their own." It was a time when "wayward, needy and orphaned children, whose ranks increased with every epidemic, war, and natural or man-made disaster, were a great social concern." It "was fashionable to worry about these children," but Hershey actually did something about them.

The remaining three decades of his life were devoted to spending as much time as possible with Catherine, who died in 1915 after a long illness, and to following various other business ventures. He got into sugar production in Cuba for a while, weathered the Depression thanks to the low cost of candy bars, and during World War II made "millions of bars per week for the armed services." The "Hershey chocolate that traveled with the troops was a sweet reminder of home and it became an icon of Americanism for the people who were liberated by U.S. forces," all of which was very good for business.

Hershey was no saint. As a businessman he "was controlling . . . and would not share power with anyone. He squeezed wages and resisted workers' attempts to form unions," though finally, in 1937, they got the better of him. He had a temper, and his kindness, though very real, was unpredictable; he "could be both generous and short-fused." Within Hershey, though, both the company and the town, his legend was clear: "He was tough-minded but fair. He wanted his workers and their families to live in dignity." To an impressive degree, he accomplished precisely that.

D'Antonio's biography is thorough and fair. He's a better reporter than writer, but there's nothing unusual about that. Hershey is a valuable addition to the literature of American business and philanthropy.
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Great American Chocolate Book
The only thing I really knew before reading this book is that Hershey chocolate has been around a long time and there is a town themed after it somewhere in Pennsylvania near Amish country. Boy was I undereducated in this realm.

Milton S. Hershey or M.S. as he was later known was the epitomy and poster-boy for American capitalism at it's grandest hour. Starting off as an apprentice to a Confectioner he was able to start learning the tricks of the trade. He found his life's calling and tried his hand at a few candy businesses primarily focusing on caramel chews. At this time in America, chocolate was not like the chocolate we have today (which is due almost entirely to M.S.) it was a rough texture that wasn't that tasty. The only people in the world that understood how and mastered the making of milk chocolate at the time was the Swiss and they guarded their secret with a passion. Eventually, after a few failed attempts at businesses in both Philadelphia and New York, he returned to his home to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was then that he started experimenting with trying to master milk chocolate. In fact after he had begun construction on his new factory in what would be known as the Town of Hershey, he still had not gotten it right, he was experimenting with a chemist up until the time the factory was completed when he got it right.

The book is wonderfully written, It makes you really take a step back and think about not only the history of Hershey, but America itself. A time when companies and products were an explosion onto the American scene more than any other time in our Country's history. The book also takes a very intricate look at Hershey and his drive to support the Orphans that were taken in by Hershey's Industrial School, that, on paper own the Hershey company which has been a major issue over the years.

I was so enthralled by this book that I am going to be picking up another book on the same industry called "The Emperor's of Chocolate" about the wars between Hershey and the Mars Candy Company. If you are looking for a great read and knowledge of corporate American history this is a wonderful book to read.

Hershey:, the legend and the man
Michael D'Antonio has given us a serious biography of a complicated, but highly admirable, man. A "chocolate king" who founded a town and created and endowed schools and home for orphans is not a figure to be treated lightly, and D'Antonio does not fail. While there is no question that D'Antonio likes his subject, Hershey is not given a free pass. His enormous philanthropy is described right alongside irrational temper tantrums and firings. Spying on worker's drinking habits is described alongside his own gambling habits. The rise of the Hersey empire, and the town he founded, is described in great detail. The book opens with the drama of a challenge to the Trust of his school for orphans and the reality of business in this day and age. "What would Milton do?" is the question. What the book tells us is that it is by no means certain what Milton would do. He had contemplated selling his empire at more than one point, ensuring the resources for the continued care of the orphans in his charge. We see the rise and life of the Hershey empire, and Milton's relationships with others. The possibility of the true nature of his wife's illness is mentioned and described. Some have been offended by this, I'd suggest they get over it. It has no bearing on what type of person she was, or how much he loved her. We see the evolution of the business, the international interests, the town and school. It is a satisfying read. The only additional material I would have liked is some more description of Hershey's interactions with some of the other business and political leaders of the day. We are told of a feud with Wrigley, and the suspicion that Wrigley had cheated in gambling, but little else. We know of TR's trust busting, and that Hershey was considered to be quite apart from the Robber Barons of the day. Did TR and Hershey ever interact beyond the one or two mentioned invitations? If so, how? This historical information may not exist in the archives, but was the only gap I felt while reading.

As Good as Chocolate
"This book is almost as good as the chocolate bar. This biography of Milton S. Hershey and the chocolate company shows how hard work, ingenuity, and just plain luck produced the world's largest chocolate factory. The only thing that would have made this book better would have been a free sample of the product."