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: #241920 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743264105
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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

A Well-Written Critical Examination of a Great Man
Everyone knows Mr. Hershey for chocolate. Fewer people know that he secretly gave almost his entire fortune away 35 years before his death to provide perpetual support for an orphanage. He then carefully oversaw that orphanage, which grew to 1,500 students and became the Milton Hershey School. He also established an orphanage of similar size in Cuba, where he had large investments in sugar operations.

I found this book to be extremely well-researched and well-written. I have read 3 previous books and many articles on Mr. Hershey and this book covered many facets that were not previously reported. The author does an exemplary job of putting incidents in Mr. Hershey's life within a larger historical context.

The author's main goal was to delve into Mr. Hershey's character and actions in a way that goes beyond the myths. In the process, he finds some faults (such as gambling and a temper), but this critical examination provides a much more refined picture of the man's greatness. As a result, we see that Mr. Hershey's accomplishments stand up to intensive scrutiny.

The book describes a long rivalry between Mr. Hershey and William Wrigley. It started when Mr. Hershey thought that Wrigley had cheated him while they were gambling on an ocean liner. That spurred Mr. Hershey to enter the chewing gum business (which lost millions) and to almost buy the Philadelphia Phillies to compete with Wrigley's team.

One item in the book that has gotten some unpleasant attention is a possibility that his wife had late stage syphilis. This discussion is only on one page out of a 300 page book. The author theorizes that the illness was without symptoms for many years after they met and was not contagious at that stage.

The book reports that after a 1933 study predicted that the Trust would generate more income that MHS could spend, Mr. Hershey specifically changed the Deed of Trust to order the Managers to serve as many kids as the funds allow.

The book tells a story about an incoming student to the orphanage in the 1930s, who enrolled at age 7 after his mother died. He said Mr. Hershey "was right there when I first arrived at the school and they were giving me my clothes. He put his arm around me and said, `From now on, we'll take care of you. You're one of my boys." He said Mr. Hershey visited them every 2 weeks, and he remembers playing with Mr. Hershey in his car behind the steering wheel pretending to drive.

The book also describes the controversy surrounding the then-proposed sale of the Hershey Company in late 2001 by the Trust that Mr. Hershey had established.

Sweet Success
Teddy Roosevelt called them the "malefactors of great wealth", the Gilded Age magnates who controlled an overwhelming portion of commerce and didn't care much about who got hurt as they got rich. Milton S. Hershey had plenty of their characteristics. He was pushy, censorious, and irascible. He certainly did make his millions, and he certainly enjoyed them, but he did not neglect his workers. In _Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams_ (Simon and Schuster), Michael D'Antonio writes, "If it's a rule that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, M. S. Hershey was the exception." Hershey was not without his flaws, and didn't treat everyone affably, and certainly might be accused of paternalism, but he was the "Good Millionaire", a unique entrepreneur who harnessed his own ambition and put it to higher purposes than greed or self-aggrandizement. Everyone knows Hershey Kisses and Hershey Bars; the wrapper of the bar is so familiar that it is parodied for the cover of this delightful book, forcing a legal decision that required a sticker be placed on it: "Neither authorized nor sponsored by the Hershey Company." The company need not have worried. Both Hershey and HersheyCo come off well.

Hershey was born in 1857 on a Pennsylvania farm, but his family shifted around due to his improvident father's ways His mother had ambitions for her son who started working in confections after leaving school at age twelve. His initial businesses failed, but he succeeded in caramels, which he worried were a fad. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he saw the German chocolate machines and realized that chocolate would be a staple of the candy business. When the exposition closed, he bought every one of the chocolate machines and had them shipped to what would become the town of Hershey, a planned town for workers that was far more successful than any similar schemes. Some citizens objected to having intrusive care taken of them, but as the town grew, the old man was regarded as a friendly father figure, one of them. He did lead a low-key life when he was in Hershey, but the townspeople didn't know much about how he spent when he went on vacation in Europe, or how much he enjoyed betting for high stakes at the casinos. Hershey wanted the town to support the company, and vice versa, but he had bigger ideas of service. He aimed for the profits from his corporation to go to his heirs in the school he had founded, whom he saw as the "little fellows" like he himself had been, with impoverished families, poor school habits, and poor prospects. "Obviously they were his sons," D'Antonio writes, "and he was giving them the stability, safety, and community he had missed as he followed his father and mother from place to place."

The town of Hershey sold chocolates, but from the start also sold itself as a tourist destination, which it still is, since people are interested in walking on Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, sniffing the chocolate-scented air, and seeing the lampposts that are shaped like Hershey's Kisses. The Milton Hershey School is the best endowed K-12 school in the nation (vastly exceeding the second-place, academically elite Phillips Exeter, and also exceeding most universities). It is now coed and is expanding to take in 2,000 boarding pupils. Hershey managed to change our candy habits forever, and to make his millions, but also to make his beneficial mark. As D'Antonio writes, after Andrew Carnegie died, no one ever asked, "What would Andrew Carnegie do?", and no one asked that about Vanderbilt or Henry Ford. But the question in Hershey's version is still pertinent in the mind of many who live in the town or work in the company, or who have graduated from the school. They admire Milton Hershey, and feel that carrying out his wishes is still important for community good. Decades after Hershey's death, he is still exercising his power of benevolent control.

At Last, an unbiased and lively Hershey Biography!
After reading most of what had been written about Milton Hershey, and after being a Hershey tour guide for nearly 20 years, I was thrilled to get my hands on the first scholarly biography of the America's most generous industrial barron.

Even though young Milton could not be considered a "poor boy" in economic terms, he felt abandoned by his dreaming and adventurous father. Milton failed at school, farming, job training and self-employment...a typical looser. Yet he had an inate sense of optimism that kept him going: "If at first you don't succeed..." should be his epitaph.

But orphan boys and girls are his real opus. After amassing over $60 million he and his wife Catherine donated it all to the Hershey School for children from broken homes which still thrives today. M.S. Hershey's legacy is also found in the quaint and charming factory town with lights shaped like Hershey Kisses and people who admire their founder as if he were still alive. The combined Hershey Schools, Trust, and Companies are now worth over $10 billion.

However the real breakthrough in this new book is the amazing discovery and revelation about Catherine's illness and Milton's decade-long, worldwide search for a cure. A quest that sadly failed to save his beloved Kitty, but it cemented a beautiful and romantic relationship into a remarkable love story.

I have always felt that this secret love story was at the hidden heart of the Hershey tale. In so many ways it was his failures that lead to his later successes. We all have our failings and sometimes crushing losses to add to our burdens. The Hershey story is an inspiration to all of us "loosers". A big Thank You to Michael D'Antonio for doing all the work to bring this untold love story to light.

Bill Reitter