The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by John Seabrook; W. W. Norton, 368 pp., $31.99
A father’s legacy can take many forms: an honorable example, a talent for affection, a thousand neckties. Jack Seabrook, once the nation’s lord of frozen food, guarded his heart with razor wire but doted on a sublime, cross-indexed wardrobe of silk and superfine—130 bespoke suits, 500 handmade shirts, and precisely the right grey top hats for driving Eva Gabor, plus picnic basket, in a glossy coach-and-four.
After Jack died in 2009, no one wanted the clothes—not costume institutes, not consignment shops. His third child, New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook, didn’t want them either. What he did want, though, Jack took to his grave: the truth about the family’s produce business, built and erased in just three generations. Jack did bequeath him a cache of journals and documents, plus a family safe that refused to open. (“It was not until after he was gone—and my therapist pointed out that the very last thing this careful, meticulous man would ever do is lose a combination to a safe—that I understood why it was hidden behind a sliding bookcase and a false wall, and what was inside.”)
Seabrook, at 34, wrote a New Yorker feature on his formidable grandfather, Charles Franklin (C. F.”) Seabrook, a short, mean genius known as the Henry Ford of agriculture. Thanks to 50,000 fertile acres of carbonate marl near Delaware Bay, New Jersey, C. F. was “the principal dreamer, main promoter, political fixer, master builder and autocratic ruler of this industrial farming empire,” and innovations such as overhead irrigation, boil-in-bag technology, and proto-TV dinners changed the way Americans ate. Seabrook asparagus could go from field to quick-freeze in under two hours. “The greatest vegetable factory on earth,” crowed Life, in 1955.
C. F. was fortunate in his trio of sons: the engineer, the marketer, and Jack the financial whiz. He sent two of them to Princeton, studied the tribal customs of British aristocrats, and “set about creating a South Jersey peerage of his own … a sort of feudal kingdom ruled by Seabrooks, to be passed down by the law of primogeniture” for half a millennium. His grandson thought its saga could make a book, given a year or two. It took him nearly 30. In between, he pursued the higher journalism, married a loving woman of sense, became a parent, adopted a daughter from Haiti—and kept probing ancestral wars of inheritance, despite a bumper crop of Keep Out signs. “Don’t write about your family,” warned his mother, a former star reporter, as his father stayed gracefully elusive—a danger signal, since he was no overbearing Tom Buchanan, but “sleeker and stealthier, and much cleverer. He entered through a side door, and you wouldn’t hear him coming.”
Then Seabrook (“young and righteous”) discovered reportage in The Nation on a violent 1934 farmworkers’ strike over wage cuts and bad housing—probably the most significant event in company history. He’d never heard of it. Eyewitnesses, including ACLU observers, agreed that “the Seabrooks and their henchmen crushed the strike using fire hoses, tear gas, mass arrests, an imported gangster named Red Sanders, armed vigilantes, and the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which spread terror by burning crosses in front of Black workers’ homes.” One beloved uncle torched a striker’s house with a woman and small children inside; another drove over protesters (including his loyal landscaper) with a truck. “Were you there then?” Seabrook asked his father, who replied, ”Of course I was there”—17 years old, armed with a pistol, clubbing strikers in the groin.
Who were these people he’d loved and trusted and thought he knew? A labyrinth of alternate histories, unreliable narrators, and generational cover-ups makes The Spinach King a first-rate misery memoir and a harrowing study in history told from above and below. Japanese-American internees who worked at Seabrook in the ’40s remembered C. F. with respect, even fondness: he’d defended them to locals, and even provided a Buddhist temple. Yet archival research strongly suggested that the jolly modern farm was a Potemkin village, with semi-captive labor from around the globe, and the piratical C. F. (perhaps due to the effects of stroke) “an addict, a predator, and a paterfamilias who seemed to hate his own flesh and blood.”
Jack took over for his unstable parent as Seabrook’s CEO in 1954, a succession beset by secrets and demons, private and commercial. But after baroque betrayals on all sides, C. F. abruptly sold the company to outsiders in 1959 “and left a smoking crater just over the horizon of my paternal heritage,” an Edenic loss that left the adult Seabrook flailing and mourning until a brother’s crisp advice—“Lay off the vitriol, and the bourbon”—saved both his marriage and his book.
The Spinach King is a rueful, sure-footed portrait of three generations in pawn to a farm boy’s dream. Seabrook’s confiding prose and thorough sourcing deliver a genuine capitalist tragedy: Lear among the pea pods. “Over time, the real family and the branded one blurred,” he realizes. “Intimate personal relations got mixed up with public-facing togetherness. Instead of family values shaping the brand, marketing values came to shape the family.” You can’t beat the material, from his parents’ shipboard meet-cute on the way to Grace Kelly’s royal wedding to death curses and fistfights, nouveau-riche spending jags, coaching with Prince Philip, and enough family pathology to justify a new DSM listing: Seabrook Syndrome.
Compassion, if not complete understanding, duly arrives, though the testosterone tempests of the C-suite often drown out input from Prufrocks and consorts and heirs, notably the brother and sister whom “I didn’t ask … to participate in the book, in order to allow them plausible deniability. They have processed some of these events differently, as siblings do,” which may be something of an understatement.
Divide and conquer was the Spinach King’s maxim, and his short-lived subjugations prove, yet again, how hard it is to be rich and stay human. His grandson’s reconstructions form a riveting tour of a forgotten battlefield led by an exiled prince still neck-deep in ghosts. And brooding over truant Swiss bank accounts, of course. As one does.
