When John Seabrook first mentioned writing a guide about his grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, and the household’s agricultural empire along with his mom, her response shocked him, as he reveals in “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty” (WW Norton). “Don’t write about your loved ones,” she mentioned. “Simply don’t.”
Seabrook was perplexed. “Perhaps she knew what I used to be going to seek out out,” he writes.
In “The Spinach King,” he reveals the story of how his grandfather created one of many world’s largest farming operations, in addition to the ugly signifies that received him there.
“Charles Franklin Seabrook, my grandfather, was the principal dreamer, important promoter, grasp builder, and autocratic ruler of this industrial farming empire – and finally its destroyer,” he writes.
At its peak within the mid-Fifties, Seabrook Farms owned or managed 50,000 acres in southwestern New Jersey, employed 8,000 individuals, and grew and packed a couple of third of the nation’s frozen greens.
Dubbed the “Henry Ford of Agriculture,” C.F. Seabrook had taken over his father’s farm in 1911, reworking its fortunes along with his modern strategy to agriculture. He launched new irrigation and mechanization and diversified into constructing roads and railroads.
However it was his pioneering use of quick-freezing greens within the Thirties, partnering with Birdseye, that despatched Seabrook stratospheric.
“In our household historical past, he was Thomas Edison and Henry Ford in the identical Dagwood sandwich; a fantastic American who had elevated us from grime farmers to industrialists in a single technology,” writes John Seabrook.
Seabrook Farms was so profitable {that a} 1959 Life journal story described it as “the largest vegetable manufacturing facility on earth.”
In 1969, in the meantime, director Stanley Kubrick featured an astronaut in “2001: A Area Odyssey” sucking a Seabrook Farms Liquipack on their solution to the moon.
1000’s of staff labored for Seabrook: Russians, Syrians, Germans, Hungarians, Jamaicans, and Japanese Individuals, many personally sponsored by Seabrook beneath the Displaced Individuals Act and all paying hire to him.
Staff have been divided into three sections; whites, “negroes” and Individuals, with every dwelling in separate “villages” and their hire relying on their ethnicity. African-Individuals got the worst lodging, with out water or sanitary services, with European immigrants receiving the subsequent degree of housing, and Individuals one of the best normal.
It additionally decided their job.
“Within the office, Blacks have been confined to the sphere and weren’t allowed to work within the plant in any respect, to say nothing of administration, which was fully white, Protestant, and male,” provides Seabrook.
Behind the general public picture of the profitable businessman was a person feared by everybody.
“Ambition, vitality, and ingenuity drove his rise,” writes Seabrook, “however violence and terror allowed him to keep up management.”
The best way he tackled a strike in the summertime of 1934 was typical.
Seabrook’s revenues from quick-freezing have been gradual to materialize, and by that summer season, it turned mandatory to chop wages and lay off staff.
“That was when the difficulty began,” says Seabrook.
With resentment stoked by the employees’ depressing dwelling requirements, C.F. Seabrook amassed a vigilante strike power to subdue protests and even enlisted the native chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to crush the “Communist agitators” holding up operations.
The outcomes have been violent and terrifying; the KKK burned crosses exterior black staff’ houses.
Belford Seabrook, one in every of C.F. Seabrook’s three sons, reportedly threw a small bomb right into a home with a mom and her kids inside. Staff had their houses surrounded with hen wire to forestall their escape, and tear gasoline was employed to quell protestors.
Appeals have been made to New Jersey Gov. Harry Moore to declare martial regulation and ship within the Nationwide Guard.
Whereas a deal was ultimately struck, most black strikers have been fired, and others have been evicted from Seabrook properties. C.F. Seabrook would, years later, recruit Japanese Individuals from World Battle II incarceration camps, a “mannequin minority who would by no means problem the outdated man’s authority,” writes Seabrook.
Remarkably, John Seabrook had by no means heard in regards to the strike earlier than he began researching for his guide.
Even his father, John M. Seabrook, who took over the enterprise from his father, had by no means talked about it.
“This was arguably the one most vital occasion in Seabrook Farms historical past,” he writes. “How may I’ve remained clueless of an occasion that convulsed the household, the corporate, the county, and the state?”
Simply as Seabrook Farms prospered throughout World Battle I, so it did once more in World Battle II, as quick-freezing got here into its personal.
However by April 1959, along with his well being failing, C.F. Seabrook had offered the enterprise.
By the tip of the Nineteen Seventies, Seabrook Farms was not. The plant was demolished, and the land was given to the township in lieu of taxes.
“All that’s left of the world that my bootstrapping grandfather constructed is a small museum at one finish of the basement of the Higher Deerfield Township Municipal Constructing,” provides Seabrook.
“Right here the reminiscence of C.F. Seabrook, his multicultural workforce, and his vegetable manufacturing facility is preserved, swaddled in gauzy nostalgia.”
