Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off Page A

withdrew, slavery continued onthe islands for many more years, and Angolans were still being forced into labour until the 1950s.
    São Tomé was not the most abusive of colonies, nor was Cadbury Brothers the most hypocritical of companies. But Cadbury had elevated chocolate, in the public mind, to a special status—a token of affection, a symbol of simple joy, a sensual yet innocent pleasure. It was Cadbury more than any other chocolate company that had rebranded chocolate and defined its public image. Cadbury’s role in slavery and human exploitation was indirect. Their behaviour, compared with that of the pillagers of gold and ivory and diamonds in the Congo and southern Africa, was commendable. But Cadbury’s history and its philosophy and its product imposed a higher corporate standard. The company’s corporate moral failure left them vulnerable to the jibes of journalists like Nevinson, the mockery of their cynical political opponents and the judgment of posterity: If high-minded Quakers could be tainted by the cocoa business, what realistic hope existed that there could ever be integrity in the world of unrestricted commerce?

Chapter Four
THE GEOPOLITICS OF A HERSHEY’S KISS
    â€œAll the other chocolate makers, you see, had begun to grow jealous of the wonderful candies that Mr. Wonka was making, and they started to send in spies to steal his secret recipes. The spies took jobs in the Wonka factory, pretending they were ordinary workers, and while they were there, each one of them found out exactly how a certain special thing was made.”
    â€”R OALD D AHL
, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    M ILTON S NAVELY H ERSHEY HARDLY SEEMED DESTINED for greatness when he was growing up as a poor farm boy on the eastern seaboard of the United States. But then again, this was nineteenth-century America where anything was possible. Milton’s great-grandfather had fled persecution in Switzerland in the seventeenth century, along with other people of the Mennonite faith, and he had sought refuge for his family in the New World. The British Quaker William Penn had promised religious freedom for all in his new colony, and the Mennonites, feeling quite at home with the pious Society of Friends, settled among them in Pennsylvania.
    Hard-working, dutiful and dour, Milton’s mother, Fanny, taught her son that the only pleasure he should seek was that of reading from the Bible and that he should struggle to avoid more frivolous pursuits. But Milton’s father had other ideas. Romantic, whimsical and utterly unreliable, Henry Hershey encouraged his son to read widely and question everything. Though born aMennonite, Henry was preoccupied with the secular world of the nineteenth century, preferring modern skepticism to the certainties of faith. He read the
New York Times
every day, along with any book that he could find among the cornfields and dairy farms of Derby Church, Pennsylvania.
    Henry might still have endeared himself to his purposeful and pragmatic wife if he hadn’t managed to squander her resources, and those of her family, on various inventions and get-rich schemes. On the somewhat sensible side, he once tried his hand at planting fruit trees. There were trout brooks and canned vegetables—all worthy ventures that went bust for reasons beyond Henry’s control. If his wife felt any goodwill towards his endeavours, she lost it when Henry attempted to invent a perpetual motion machine. Fanny Milton was chronically cross but unable to challenge her husband for his vagaries since he was never around. In addition to his other qualities, Henry had a tendency to wander off, usually returning more broke than when he left.
    The Hersheys had one other child—a daughter, Serena. When the little girl died of scarlet fever at the age of four, all of Fanny’s and Henry’s conflicting hopes and dreams for the future came to rest on young Milton. They bickered constantly about his