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Milton Hershey was not your ordinary Gilded Age robber baron. As the founder of the world’s most successful candy company, he brought the same disciplines of mass production and marketing to his niche in the economy as the steel and auto kings did to theirs. It is certainly easier to love a producer of that staple American food, Hershey left a legacy unique in U.S. history. In 1905 he built a fairy-tale town in Pennsylvania to house his workers, a school to house and educate orphans and poor children and, of course, the Hershey Chocolate Company. He then set up a trust for the school and donated the company stock to the trust. This ultimately resulted in a school with an endowment in the billions of dollars, which controlled the company and the town the workers grew to love. Like many of the business titans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Hershey was a visionary, with the ability to scale up his business to serve a national market. But he differed radically from the likes of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller in that he really did care deeply about the everyday lives of his employees. It was this interest in the lives of his workers that led Hershey to build the town of Hershey in Pennsylvania. Influenced by Theodore Roosevelt and the Utopians as well as his own Mennonite upbringing, Hershey created a storybook place to live. Who wouldn’t love a town with streets named after candies, with the smell of chocolate always in the air? As a chocolate manufacturer, Hershey was an experimenter who searched for innovative techniques by trial and error, rather than by employing a particularly scientific approach. Hershey went broke many times as he slowly found his way to a recipe that enabled him to manufacture and distribute chocolate on an industrial scale. Interestingly, the slightly bitter taste in Hershey’s chocolate is the result of the fermentation of milk in his original recipe. It is unique to Hershey’s, and struck a happy chord with his customers. "M.S." and his beloved wife Kitty had no children, which made it all the more natural that he would focus his paternal urges on those he called "the little fellows" who attended and lived at his school. Over the years, the school put thousands on a path to a happier life. Hershey loved to travel and gamble, but he was not a particularly extravagant person. Although he built a beautiful house for himself in Hershey, he lived without ostentation. His happiest days were spent experimenting with new ideas for making candy. In later years, he donated his house to the school and occupied only a couple of rooms upstairs. M.S. Hershey, like the iconic chocolate bar in the brown wrapper, was an American original. (Simon & Schuster., 2006, 267pp, $26) |
milk chocolate, than someone who specialized in building belching smokestacks. But there are other reasons to admire Hershey.
