Teddy Roosevelt called them the "malefactors of great wealth", the Gilded Age magnates who controlled an overwhelming portion of commerce and didn't care much about who got hurt as they got rich. Milton S. Hershey had plenty of their characteristics. He was pushy, censorious, and irascible. He certainly did make his millions, and he certainly enjoyed them, but he did not neglect his workers. In _Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams_ (Simon and Schuster), Michael D'Antonio writes, "If it's a rule that behind every great fortune lies a great crime, M. S. Hershey was the exception." Hershey was not without his flaws, and didn't treat everyone affably, and certainly might be accused of paternalism, but he was the "Good Millionaire", a unique entrepreneur who harnessed his own ambition and put it to higher purposes than greed or self-aggrandizement. Everyone knows Hershey Kisses and Hershey Bars; the wrapper of the bar is so familiar that it is parodied for the cover of this delightful book, forcing a legal decision that required a sticker be placed on it: "Neither authorized nor sponsored by the Hershey Company." The company need not have worried. Both Hershey and HersheyCo come off well.
Hershey was born in 1857 on a Pennsylvania farm, but his family shifted around due to his improvident father's ways His mother had ambitions for her son who started working in confections after leaving school at age twelve. His initial businesses failed, but he succeeded in caramels, which he worried were a fad. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he saw the German chocolate machines and realized that chocolate would be a staple of the candy business. When the exposition closed, he bought every one of the chocolate machines and had them shipped to what would become the town of Hershey, a planned town for workers that was far more successful than any similar schemes. Some citizens objected to having intrusive care taken of them, but as the town grew, the old man was regarded as a friendly father figure, one of them. He did lead a low-key life when he was in Hershey, but the townspeople didn't know much about how he spent when he went on vacation in Europe, or how much he enjoyed betting for high stakes at the casinos. Hershey wanted the town to support the company, and vice versa, but he had bigger ideas of service. He aimed for the profits from his corporation to go to his heirs in the school he had founded, whom he saw as the "little fellows" like he himself had been, with impoverished families, poor school habits, and poor prospects. "Obviously they were his sons," D'Antonio writes, "and he was giving them the stability, safety, and community he had missed as he followed his father and mother from place to place."
The town of Hershey sold chocolates, but from the start also sold itself as a tourist destination, which it still is, since people are interested in walking on Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, sniffing the chocolate-scented air, and seeing the lampposts that are shaped like Hershey's Kisses. The Milton Hershey School is the best endowed K-12 school in the nation (vastly exceeding the second-place, academically elite Phillips Exeter, and also exceeding most universities). It is now coed and is expanding to take in 2,000 boarding pupils. Hershey managed to change our candy habits forever, and to make his millions, but also to make his beneficial mark. As D'Antonio writes, after Andrew Carnegie died, no one ever asked, "What would Andrew Carnegie do?", and no one asked that about Vanderbilt or Henry Ford. But the question in Hershey's version is still pertinent in the mind of many who live in the town or work in the company, or who have graduated from the school. They admire Milton Hershey, and feel that carrying out his wishes is still important for community good. Decades after Hershey's death, he is still exercising his power of benevolent control.
