John Seabrook’s “The Spinach King” is a great American tragedy – about his own family. In this thoughtful, cautionary tale, the longtime New Yorker magazine staff writer reports on how three generations of his forebears, beginning with his great-grandfather, revolutionized vegetable farming and the frozen food business in southwestern New Jersey. And how, in the process, they amassed a fortune but fractured their family.
As in most tragedies, the Seabrooks’ rise and fall are driven by hubris. This saga of greens to greenbacks and the wilting American dream involves a battle for control and succession, with shades of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”
“The Spinach King” encompasses ambition, ingenuity, hard work, and vision, but also exploitation, greed, corruption, racism, antisemitism, and a lust for power. The author, who first wrote about Seabrook Farms for The New Yorker in 1994, grappled with the fraught, complicated, and deeply personal story for 30 years before finishing the book.
Why We Wrote This
Bootstrap effort and ingenuity are highly prized in America. In the early and mid-20th century, founders of successful companies became unimaginably wealthy and powerful. The downside was often a glossing over of the tactics used to amass such fortunes.
Charles Franklin Seabrook, known as C.F., “the Henry Ford of agriculture,” is, in his grandson’s telling, the family’s villain in chief. With only an eighth-grade education, he was the principal force behind the creation of the multifaceted business empire. At its peak in 1955, Seabrook Farms sprawled over 50,000 acres, employed some 8,000 people, and “grew and packed about a third of the nation’s frozen vegetables,” the author writes.
In 1912, C.F. had hoodwinked his father, Arthur Seabrook, into selling for a fraction of its value his share of the lucrative farming business they had built together. (Their early adoption of overhead irrigation had been a game-changer.) Decades later, an increasingly erratic and incapacitated C.F. railed against his three sons’ attempts to take over Seabrook Farms. Rather than cede control, C.F. sold the business to outsiders in 1959, the year the author was born, for far less than it was worth. He also disinherited his sons.
The author’s father, John “Jack” Seabrook – dubbed the Spinach King for his role in developing the company’s flash-frozen vegetable business, including its wildly popular creamed spinach in boilable pouches – had to find another job and home at age 42.
While Seabrook praises his father’s financial and marketing acumen, his overall portrait is hardly a hagiography. He describes Jack’s lavish lifestyle, including his collection of horse-drawn antique carriages, extensive wine cellar, large house staff, and celebrity girlfriends between his two marriages, Eva Gabor among them. The author devotes an entire chapter to his father’s wardrobe, including a collection of Savile Row suits so vast it was stored on a motorized dry cleaner’s rack.
Jack met his second wife – the author’s mother, Elizabeth Toomey, a hardworking journalist from South Dakota – on board a ship headed to Monaco for Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier in 1956: Jack was a guest, and Liz was a reporter covering the star-studded event.
In addition to the book’s chronicles of excess and succession – informed in part by Jack’s meticulous diaries and the paper trails left in the wake of the family’s many lawsuits – “The Spinach King” offers a critical account of labor conditions faced by the company’s thousands of worker-tenants. Most were displaced persons who were overworked and underpaid. These included Italians, Eastern Europeans, Black people who migrated from the Deep South in the 1920s, and Japanese Americans confined during World War II in detention camps. (The latter were relocated from camps in the Western U.S. in 1944 to address labor shortages.) At Seabrook Farms, workers and their families lived in segregated villages of houses and barracks, for which they were charged rent even during the unpaid offseason months. Black laborers were allotted the worst housing, often in broken-down sheds that lacked basic utilities.
Seabrook confronts his family’s most shameful chapter, in which a labor strike in 1934 was broken up by vigilantes, mobsters, and uniformed “special officers” hired by Seabrook’s grandfather. A group of Black and white workers was protesting unfair wages and conditions. Mayhem erupted when the strikers were attacked with tear gas and billy clubs. Black families were also terrorized by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, called the White Legion.
The irony is that Seabrook Farms was heralded in the press as a model of racial harmony and modernity. C.F. was looked upon by the community, and many of his workers, as a benevolent employer. C.F.’s descendants knew nothing of his strike-breaking tactics.
Late in “The Spinach King,” Seabrook recalls meeting his grandfather in 1963, a year before C.F.’S death. Seabrook, at age 4, was frightened and intimidated. As an adult, recalling that moment, Seabrook writes: “He stared at me balefully, this boy who would grow up to investigate and expose him for who he really was, seeking transgenerational revenge for the harm he had inflicted on my father’s soul.”
It would be doing the book a disservice to refer to its impetus as a quest for revenge. Readers can be assured that Seabrook’s journalistic instincts take over in this riveting, well-researched reckoning with his family’s history. Although the author dishes plenty of dirt, he also proudly highlights the Seabrook family’s many agricultural innovations, which helped feed a growing nation. The result is a book that covers plenty of fertile ground.
