The Emperor of American Chocolate

The Hershey Story Museum tells a delicious tale but also, as economic and social history, a fascinating one.

E arlier this week, I wrote about pretty, bustling Lancaster, Pa., best known for its Amish heritage, but it’s a powerhouse in history, too. Lancaster was one of America’s first inland cities. A paved toll road made it a hub for travel east and west. Conestoga wagons were built there by the thousands. Thaddeus Stevens, the brains and push behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, was Lancaster’s congressman during the Civil War and a Lincoln confidant. Stevens took care of all things constitutional, but Lydia Hamilton Smith, his mixed-race housekeeper, ran his life as well as the local Underground Railroad.

The two embody the trauma and triumphs of the era. There’s a promising new history museum in the works in Lancaster honoring both and examining their times.

But man, woman, and child can’t live on history alone. While in Lancaster, we had a day reserved for “the Sweetest Place on Earth,” with a main drag called Chocolate Avenue and streetlights the shape of chocolate Kisses. “Here there will be no unhappiness,” said a journalist about this place. Yes, Hershey, America’s chocolate capital.

Yum, yum, yum. Hershey’s a Gilded Age dream come true. The founder, Milton Hershey (1857–1945), the company, and the town evoke Horatio Alger, the template for America’s self-made men and the robber barons against whom Milton and his company were the antidote. Hershey — company and town — are the utopian vision of what many think is a rare bird: a good rich man.

A few months ago, I wrote about the Meissen corporate museum near Dresden. I’d never written about a museum focused on a for-profit’s products, but why not? Meissen’s been making porcelain since the 1720s. Its archives and corporate collection are exhaustive. So are Hershey’s.

The Hershey Story — its full name is The Hershey Story, the Museum on Chocolate Avenue — occupies its own building in the heart of Hershey, technically part of Derry Township, near Harrisburg. It’s frankly hagiographic, with Milton the star attraction, though it covers the history of the company until about ten years ago, when the M. S. Hershey Foundation spent about $23 million for a fresh, interactive look. The space is vast, with tall ceilings giving it the spaciousness of an old World’s Fair exhibition hall. Here and there it’s too diffuse. Especially in the sections covering the company after Milton’s death, it’s easy to lose track of the story. The Hershey Story is marketed as an experience for families rather than scholars, and big parts are pitched to children.

I enjoyed it. I’ve eaten a ton of Hershey’s chocolate in my lifetime. My last visit was in the early ’60s with my parents, at a time when visitors toured the factory on a catwalk running over assembly lines. I was long overdue for a new look.

The museum begins at the beginning, with Milton’s birth in 1857 in Derry Township, a few miles north of Lancaster, and his baby cradle. His father, Henry, and mother, Fanny, were from old Mennonite stock. In many ways, the Hershey story begins in Lancaster. Hershey’s mother’s family, the Snavelys, started there as Swiss immigrant farmers in the early 1700s, growing rich as Lancaster did, through farming, mills, and construction.

The museum covers Milton’s family with good graphics, honesty, and family objects. The Hersheys and Snavelys, it seems, never tossed anything. Henry’s a leading player, and the museum doesn’t mince words. He tried the oil business about the same time as John D. Rockefeller, but Rockefeller had the grit, focus, and financial skills Henry lacked. He failed. Henry tried farming and failed. He tried mining in Leadville, Colo., and failed. He tried the cough-drop business and failed. He excelled in charm and indebtedness, and for only so long could one camouflage the other. Milton, corralled by his father in his schemes and debts, nearly drowned in paternal impecunity.

Milton’s salvation? Milton’s mother’s confidence in her son knew no limits. Her sister, a generous old-maid aunt, righted his financial ship. Together they helped Milton harness the dreamy ambition he inherited from his father with his own blend of pluck, vision, and Snavely horse sense.

A succinct, illustrated timeline itemizes Milton’s many brushes with debt and disaster from the mid 1870s to his big breaks 20 years later. He left school at 13, with the equivalent of a fourth-grade education. When he was a teenager, his mother and aunt found him an apprenticeship with a confectioner in Lancaster.

After going bust over and over, Milton hit it big with caramels. By 1890, Milton’s Lancaster Caramel Company owned a massive, 450,000-square-foot factory. Very soon, though, he decided caramels were what he called “a fad,” one that dainty Americans would eat only a few times a year. Chocolate? That, he sensed, would be the future, not as a fad but as a staple. He was right, and right beyond his imagination. Hershey’s chocolate is an American icon.

The museum explores Milton’s innovations. He beat the caramel rap that the candy was too sticky and hard to chew by using fresh milk, making the taste sweeter and more buttery on the way. He experimented — in the early years, constantly — with mixing, heat, and ingredients to get the perfect flavor and texture for his chocolate. Milton didn’t invent the high-volume, low-prices business model but used it when it was still revolutionary.

Milton’s chocolate empire turned from vision to fledgling at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. More than the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the 1893 World’s Fair celebrated both American ingenuity and its presence as an international economic force. In the fair’s Palace of the Mechanic Arts, a booth devoted to J. M. Lehmann’s chocolate business in Dresden, Germany, was actually a miniature factory producing the stuff.

Beans, sugar, cocoa butter, and vanilla did their magic in roasters, grinders, pressers, and mixers. And it smelled like nectar from the gods. And voilà, or sehen Sie, or wow, the chocolate bar came to America. Milton didn’t reinvent the conch, the name of the shell-shaped rollers. He bought Lehmann’s equipment. On view is updated Lehmann equipment Milton bought a few years later.

I learned that the company didn’t have a marketing campaign until the 1970s. Hershey was ubiquitous, its products accounting at one point for 90 percent of America’s chocolate consumption. Starting very early, though, Hershey focused narrowly. For years, it made very few products. By word of mouth and modest advertising, it evoked milk’s wholesomeness in chocolate’s flavor. Hershey’s milk went straight from the udders of local cows to the factory for boiling and condensing.

Chocolate Kisses weren’t exactly Milton’s invention. He grabbed the basic concept from a chocolatier who made chocolate droplets, developed the concept into a chocolate cone called a Sweetheart and, finally, the Kiss. Kisses were initially wrapped in foil piece by piece by women who worked at the factory. By the mid ’20s, company engineers developed a machine to wrap them.

I also learned that Kisses weren’t produced during World War II because of aluminum rationing. Another reason to whip the Nazis.

The museum depicts Milton as an incessant tinkerer. He and, eventually, a staff of chemists, continued to hone the taste and texture of Hershey’s chocolate. Milton knew intuitively that Americans preferred a mild flavor but also a texture that was ever-so-slightly resistant. Even Kisses have a bit of a bite.

Next to The Hershey Story’s visitor-services area is a chocolate-tasting bar. Visitors can first taste liquid chocolate made from Tanzanian beans — intense — moving to bitterer, long-lasting chocolate from cocoa from the Dominican Republic, fruitier chocolate from Mexico, sweeter chocolate from Ghana and Java beans, and finally Milton’s mellow brew.

I like writing about architecture, and Milton was an awesome dreamer and builder. His New York years exposed him to, for him, the phenomenon of the slum. He knew enough about big New York factories using child labor, which horrified him. Squalor appalled him, too. “Cities never seemed natural to me.” The museum treats this in a section on developing what we know as Hershey — the community — from scratch.

The museum has some very good material on Milton’s exit from Lancaster, which probably involved high taxes and local land-use corruption, to rural Derry Township. He started thinking about the move in the late 1890s. In 1900, he sold the caramel company for $1 million in cash and stock. By 1905, a new factory, 30 miles north, was humming.

When Augustus the Strong, Saxony’s grand duke in the early 1700s, learned the formula for porcelain, hidden for centuries in Chinese and Japanese factories, he moved his own, new porcelain factory to a family castle in Meissen, fearing intellectual-property theft if it stayed in Dresden. Like Augustus a despot but a benevolent one, Milton liked Derry Township’s isolation, possibly as a way to protect company secrets. Soon acquiring thousands of empty acres, he could also build the modern factory and town he wanted.

Influencing Hershey also was the nascent City Beautiful movement. Born at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the movement envisioned new cities in which Neo-Classical buildings, parks, paved streets, sewers, churches, good housing stock, and cultural and civic amenities would produce happy, productive workers, families, and citizens. Milton, using the profits from the company and his own money, built the town of his dreams from scratch.

Central to it were worker-owned, single-family homes on roads named Chocolate, Caracas, Trinidad, Granada, and Java, all related to Hershey’s core product. The company held the initial mortgages and regulated design, mandating front porches, yards big enough for children to enjoy, and — a novelty in the early years of the last century — electrical wiring and indoor plumbing. Homeowners couldn’t rear pigs or operate a back-door saloon, and no fences were allowed unless approved.

I looked at real-estate listings in Hershey. Homes in Milton’s housing developments are still selling, and briskly. They’re solid vernacular architecture, mostly Colonial Revival and Arts & Crafts, starting at $500,000 and rising, depending on improvements and additions. Milton wasn’t religious, but his sense of morality, and fairness, led him to create what he felt was a perfect society. And his model town didn’t stop with worker homes, parks, good infrastructure, and a library. Milton financed a zoo, a concert hall, and Hersheypark, an amusement park, resort, and swimming pool the size of a lake, all open to residents and tourists alike.

The museum takes visitors through Hershey’s experience during the Great Depression — negligible pain since chocolate was an inexpensive luxury and commodity prices dropped — and the development of new products like Mr. Goodbar. The company purchased the H. B. Reese Candy Company in 1963.

Milton and his wife, Catherine, known as “Kitty,” loved European travel. Kitty, by the way, was his constant companion and confidante but was ill during most of their marriage. In a near miss, Milton booked a stateroom on the Titanic but nixed his trip at the last minute. Kitty died in 1915. After the ’20s, Milton disengaged himself from the day-to-day business.

Milton’s 88th birthday party was held at the old farmhouse in Derry Township where he was born in 1857, with a small dinner in the room where his mother delivered him, his baby cradle in the corner. He never forgot his roots.

A temporary exhibition is called “Mr. Hershey’s Cuba: A Sweet Venture in Sugar, 1916–1946.” Starting in 1916, Milton developed a Cuban version of Hershey. At his initiative and close direction, Hershey built a community of farms and factories, possibly in the Yumuri Valley, to ensure its supply of sugar.

There, Hershey built a transportation network, housed workers — though not as commodiously as it did back home — and diversified the economy so workers were employed between sugar-growing seasons. The exhibition is beautifully done, with high production values and more-scholarly messaging. A child is less likely to enjoy it than a chemist or an economist. There’s not a single weepy rant about colonialism, either. Hershey unloaded its Cuban holdings in 1946. Like most everything else, Castro wrecked the factories, transit, and farms.

The museum explores Hershey’s most unusual ownership. The majority of the voting stock for The Hershey Company is held by the Milton Hershey School Trust, for which the Hershey Trust Company acts as trustee. Milton Hershey School operates on the income generated by the investments of the Milton Hershey School Trust. The school was established by Milton and Kitty in 1909 for “poor, healthy, white, male orphans.” Initially called the Hershey Industrial School, it educated boys as young as four and up to 18 for productive trade or agricultural careers. It was part orphanage, part school, part secular church teaching morality and ethics with generic Christian religious instruction.

The Hershey Story presents Milton’s school as part of his visionary philanthropy. Andrew Carnegie, another Gilded Age philanthropist, believed that no man should die rich. The museum wisely skirts the school’s pedagogical issues and transformations over the years. Now called the Milton Hershey School, it long ago ditched racial and other exclusions and a sense that it was a reform school.

Milton initially endowed the school with his $60 million in Hershey stock, at the time a humongous amount of money. By 2002, the value of the trust, then called the Milton Hershey School Trust, was thought to exceed $5 billion. For many reasons, the trustees then tried to sell a controlling interest in the chocolate business. The ensuing furor, mostly from the locals, tanked the scheme. The museum barely touches the episode since it’s more about the post-dotcom-bubble economy than about Milton and chocolate.

My one suggestion, should the museum do a reinstallation and reinterpretation, is to tighten the narrative so it’s more linear and to raise its intellectual octane. Hershey has a serious archive and lots of talent. It’s got a delicious story but also, as economic and social history, a fascinating one. The museum situates Hershey in the context of Gilded Age gazillionaires here and there, but so much more could be done. He’s in the ranks of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pullman, Henry Clay Frick, and J. P. Morgan but never accumulated the baggage.

The 2002 sale kerfuffle put Milton — the god, man, and business genius — on the front page nearly 50 years after his death. “All you need is love,” wrote Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, “but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.” The very good Hershey Story museum is about tons and tons of chocolate but also about Milton Hershey’s eccentric, rare love of humanity.