chapter 28
The city shrinks from view. Cars pass along the highway. Dasani looks out the window, seeing trees and snowy banks, and then a sign:
Pennsylvania
Welcomes You
STATE OF INDEPENDENCE
All her life, she has been hearing about Pennsylvania. This is the place where people go to be free. Her mother did it as a child, leaving Brooklyn on a bus for Pittsburgh. Sherry made the pilgrimage in 2013 to live with a sister. Chanel still talks of moving to the Poconos, though no one believes her.
Dasani, now thirteen, watches the highway.
She had tried to leave quietly. "You know Sani leavin', right?" Chanel told Lee-Lee. The toddler pushed her tiny nose into Dasani's face, mumbling "No, no, no, no." Then she poked Dasani in the eye with a piece of Bazooka bubblegum.
"She don't understand," Dasani whispers. "Yet."
Neither did Papa. He had zipped around the apartment, waving a certificate in Dasani's name with the words "Congratulations on your acceptance to the Milton Hershey School." It had come in the mail with a school T-shirt, which Dasani is now wearing.
To avoid saying goodbye, Dasani had distracted Lee-Lee with the cartoon show Peg + Cat, slipping away before the toddler noticed. On the stoop, Supreme was standing in the snow, his eyes wet. He hugged Dasani hard, saying "I love you," which he never says. Then he watched her step away.
"I'm mad jealous," he said softly. "Wish I could do it all over again."
She carries no suitcase, only a stack of family photographs, a bottle of perfume, and a small black purse filled with dozens of coins. Chanel, Avianna, and Nana have come along for the ride. They watch as Route 78 gives way to a country road, cutting through vast fields of corn. Dasani sees farmhouses and silos pointing to the sky. She can look all the way to the horizon, finding nothing but hills, even when she squints. The cows make her shriek, the way that city rats might alarm a country child. Everything looks different.
Soon there are houses, and then a town so quirky, so appealing, that Dasani starts to giggle.
Even to a world traveler, Hershey might seem strange. Situated in south central Pennsylvania, with a population of 14,500, it is less a town than a chocolate fairyland. The first thing Dasani notices are the streetlamps, in the shape of Hershey's Kisses. They adorn the intersection of Chocolate and Cocoa avenues, where the air itself smells sweet. The scent of roasted cocoa beans drifts from the local factory, in keeping with the town's motto: "The Sweetest Place on Earth."
Dasani's eyes light up. She has been raised on candy, at the expense of several teeth. Nothing else brings the same instant joy.
And here it is, all around. Shoppers can buy cocoa-infused shampoo, s'mores-scented candles, Reese's Peanut Butter hot chocolate, and cocoa-filled jewelry. They are told, without irony, to "have a sweet day." They can sip chocolate martinis or chocolate Manhattans before dining at the Chocolate Avenue Grill, not to be confused with Chocolate World or the Chocolate Spa, where treatments include a "whipped cocoa bath" and a "chocolate fondue wrap."
The town's marquee attraction is a chocolate-themed amusement park that draws more than 3 million visitors yearly. The tallest roller coasters crank to their peak just over the shops. A Ferris wheel turns like a giant lollipop opposite two looming smokestacks bearing the name "Hershey." It is impossible to pass through this town without noticing its dependence on chocolate, or its reverence for the man who made this empire.
Everywhere you look, Milton Hershey is staring back—from a bronze statue, from a water fountain, from the facade of the Rite Aid pharmacy. His ultimate shrine is Founders Hall, the soaring epicenter of his school.
Dasani will soon stand there, waiting to be matriculated. She will see a portrait of the man, dressed in a tailored suit and high hat. She will assume him to be rich, almost kingly. No one would think that Milton was ever poor. Or that he, like Dasani, grew up craving candy.
***
Milton Hershey had a troubled childhood.
It began in the stone farmhouse built by his Swiss Mennonite great-grandparents, in the velvety fields of central Pennsylvania, where he was born a few years before the Civil War. His parents, Fanny and Henry, made an odd couple. She was the daughter of a Reformed Mennonite bishop, steeped in the values of frugality and self-denial. He was a bon vivant with a weakness for silk clothing. Fancying himself a writer, Henry lacked the discipline to make a living. They got so poor that Fanny took to "stripping" the neighbors' cows for any remaining drops of milk.
As a boy, Milton loved the taste of anything sweet. Caramels, peppermints, sourballs. Candy—known as "tzooker" in Milton's Pennsylvania Dutch dialect—was a rarity for children of little means. He attended seven different schools as his family moved from town to town, pulled by his father's desire to strike it rich. Henry tried selling farm equipment, planting fruit trees, harvesting trout. As each scheme failed, Milton went hungry at times, or lacked proper shoes.
The event that broke the Hersheys came in 1867, when Milton's only sister, four-year-old Sarena, contracted scarlet fever and died. His parents eventually separated, and by age thirteen, Milton had quit school to work. He soon took an apprenticeship at Royer's Ice Cream Garden in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he learned to make taffy. Four years later, Milton moved to Philadelphia to try his luck as a confectioner. In 1883, he landed in New York City.
There was no more thrilling place for a twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur than Manhattan at the height of the Gilded Age. It was a city of stunning contrasts, of squalid tenements and lavish mansions. A handful of tycoons had amassed great wealth—the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the steel mogul Andrew Carnegie, the banking giant J. Pierpont Morgan, the shipping and railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt. Few might have guessed that Milton Hershey—a rural candy maker with a fourth-grade education—would join their ranks, becoming the nation's premier chocolate magnate.
Nearly broke, Milton opened a candy shop near Hell's Kitchen, coming into frequent contact with the poor. Little was known about this other New York, where ragged children worked long hours in sweatshops or roamed the streets in vagrant packs, beset by disease. Their small corpses filled the city's morgues.
There were no federal laws protecting the rights of children. This was still the era of "Spare the rod, spoil the child." A turning point had come in 1874, with the Manhattan case of nine-year-old Mary Ellen. For years, she had been sadistically beaten by a guardian. A local missionary wanted to help, but there was no government office tasked with preventing child abuse. So the missionary turned to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose founder helped bring Mary Ellen's case before the state supreme court. A blitz of news coverage followed, resulting in the child's rescue and leading to the creation of the first nongovernmental organization devoted to protecting children from "cruelty."
By then, New York's child savers had planted the seeds of American foster care (with the orphan trains) and its child protection system (with the case of Mary Ellen). She had lived in Hell's Kitchen—just a few blocks from where Milton was now selling candy, and where the muckraking Danish-born journalist Jacob A. Riis was working on his first book. They witnessed the same abject poverty in the same pivotal decade, shaping each man for years to come.
Riis's book How the Other Half Lives would spark a public outcry, fueling the Progressive Era—a period of social activism and political reform that counted Milton among its recruits. Progressives wanted to better the world, fixing the problems brought by modernity, of rapid industrialization, mass immigration, political corruption, and urban life.
The city, Milton thought, was a poor fit for humanity, "especially for children." After three years, he packed up and returned to his roots, opening the Lancaster Caramel Company.
"If you want to make money," his father, Henry, had told him, "you have got to do things in a big way."
***
Chocolate was still a luxury product, imported from Europe and sold in fancy packages. The most coveted chocolates had a smooth, creamy finish, suggesting the presence of milk. No one knew how to make this delicacy affordable. The shelf life of milk chocolate was too short to survive freight train rides.
The problem came down to chemistry. To make milk chocolate required binding two incompatible ingredients: the water in milk and the oil in cacao butter. Only one company in Switzerland had mastered the secret, while confectioners in the United States fumbled.
Relishing the chance to experiment, Milton purchased German chocolate-making machines at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. He began toying with formulas at his Lancaster factory but wanted a more private location. He found it twenty-nine miles away, in the stone farmhouse built by his great-grandparents, which was up for auction. In 1897, Milton bought the property for $10,311, adding a dairy farm, a milk-condensing plant, and a chocolate production facility.
Milton's birthplace became his laboratory. Night after night, he tinkered for the right formula, boiling milk in kettles and grinding cocoa into powder. His breakthrough came in 1900—the same year Milton sold his caramel company for $1 million to make way for the Hershey Chocolate Company. From a new factory near the farmhouse, individually wrapped bars came off assembly lines, selling for five cents apiece. With that, America had its first mass-produced milk chocolate. Milton had popularized a luxury commodity, making him "the Henry Ford of chocolate."
By age forty, Milton had settled down, marrying Catherine "Kitty" Sweeney, a twenty-five-year-old Irish Catholic known to be theatrical, chatty, and fond of furs. As Milton's chocolate empire grew, he designed a new town in his name, modeled after the village built by the Cadbury chocolate family near Birmingham, England. Hershey's town would feature a library, a theater, a pool, a trolley, even a zoo. Milton wanted his workers and executives to live in harmony, upholding the same progressive values while abstaining from any "offensive purpose or occupation."
It soon became clear that Milton and Kitty could not have children. To fill their void, Milton's birthplace—the stone farmhouse where he had invented his milk chocolate—would become a new kind of laboratory: the site of an innovative school for orphans. This would be Milton's ultimate experiment and proudest legacy—a place where poor boys could transcend their origins.
Milton had done it himself, and wanted the same for his recruits, whom he identified in his own image as "poor, healthy, white, male orphans." He began this project much like his chocolate venture, with no expert knowledge. But he had an innate sense of what his orphans needed. "Those boys must grow up with the feeling that they have a real home," he told The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1929. They would, according to the school's deed, be "fed with plain, wholesome food" and "neatly, and comfortably clothed, without distinctive dress." The school's ultimate purpose was to train young men to "earn their own livelihood."
When the school opened in 1910, the first crop of orphans, ages four to eight, spent their weekdays learning arithmetic, reading, and other subjects. Their home life resembled Milton's early years on the farm, with exposure to Christian scripture and the Golden Rule. They did chores, milked cows, said grace before dinner. Milton and Kitty built a mansion nearby, leaving another couple to serve as the boys' "houseparents."
This couple-for-hire, in Milton's untested vision, would re-create the family that these boys had lost. After Kitty passed away in 1915 of a mysterious disease, Milton never remarried.