John Seabrook on the Destructive Family Battles of “The Spinach King”
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook's new book is about a family business. Not a mom-and-pop store, but a huge operation run by a ruthless patriarch. The patriarch is getting older. He's beginning to fail.

But he can't stand the idea of losing his hold on power, especially to the children who stand to take control and inherit the business. This might put you in mind of Succession, HBO's drama that some critics have called one of the best TV programs of all time. It's even drawn comparisons to King Lear. But the story that John Seabrook tells is about another family, a real one, the Seabrooks of Seabrook, New Jersey.

Their frozen food empire was a huge presence in the flat, fertile farmland of South Jersey. Well, at Seabrook Farms, we too grow vegetables right outside the door. Cook and freeze them on the spot. You just boil them, bag and all, and enjoy that homegrown taste again. And John has written about the Seabrook business, his family, and its intersection with American history in his terrific new book, The Spinach King.

So now, John, to start at the end of the story, you were a kid when a huge break happened between your father and your grandfather, and your dad was summarily ousted from the family business. How much did you know about what was going on when you were growing up? It actually occurred the year I was born. And so I kind of grew up in this kind of rubble of this destroyed relationship, but I never really understood what caused the explosion.

So my grandfather founded Seabrook Farms, which was a frozen vegetable business, and it became a big industry. At its height, it froze a third of all of the vegetables in the United States, including maybe some lima beans that were forced on you as a child. Yeah, we ate them, for sure. Yeah. Well, I was not responsible for the lima beans. I kind of like lima beans. Oh, you do? I'm the one. Yeah.

They're great for freezing and they're hard to damage when you pick at any rate. So my grandfather was a great sort of industrialist, but my father, who was 40 years younger, came into his own in the business after the Second World War when the company was moving into a kind of branded post-industrial phase. And the family story became kind of the brand story. And I think that was really what drove them ultimately apart because no one could live up

to the brand story. And the brand story that was being held out? The brand story were these clever farmers that started with my grandfather being, you know, this wasn't true, but the way he represented himself, a self-made man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, the capitalist hero, who then became a kind of almost cartoonish millionaire because he was a man that started with nothing and really didn't know how to act with money.

My father, however, had been born with money. And then my father was able to go to Princeton when my grandfather had never been to high school. So there were all these kind of class conflicts that occurred. So we should tell listeners we've known each other since we were in college. Literally 19 years old. And I knew there was something called Seabrook Farms, and I knew it was at the other end of New Jersey from where I grew up. But how much of this family story, which...

just has something Greek or Shakespearean about it. Did you tell to your friends, were you thrilled by it, embarrassed by it? Did you want to not know about it and run away from it? How did you treat it as a younger person? Well, I think I probably had all those reactions. I never really wanted to be that guy, the Seabrook that everybody looked at, the son of the prince, you know, the next in line. I hated all of that. I just didn't

want people to think of me as any other than I was. And I wasn't that person. Because you didn't carry yourself like that when you were 19. And some, by the way, some young aristocrats do that. I mean, we both knew a few. Yes. We went to college with them too. Yeah. No, I wasn't that person. And it's not like the Seabrooks have been here since the Mayflower. My great-grandfather was an immigrant.

And I think one of the reasons that my grandfather and father were so determined to act like they were sort of upper class is because they really recently arrived at that status. It was your great-grandfather, Arthur Seabrook, who was...

the real farmer, and he cultivated the land and started the farm. Right. And it's your grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, who was the so-called Henry Ford of agriculture, who saw himself as a kind of a higher thing, as an engineer. Yeah, a builder. And he was a modernizer. Yeah. And he built this

kind of vegetable factory. Was that something unique in American agricultural history? It was quite unique at the time. The interesting thing about my family is they line up quite neatly with these major changes in the American economy. So you had my great-grandfather, who was an agricultural farmer at a time when agriculture was a big part of our economy. You had my grandfather, who mechanized and industrialized in the early 20th century when agriculture

the country as a whole was doing just that. He was trying to make an industry out of farming. But the agricultural part of it never really changed. It still needed thousands and thousands of workers to do the work that the machines couldn't do. And then when frozen food became a thing in the 30s,

He worked with Clarence Birdseye. There really was a person. It wasn't just a brand. And he had invented this process for freezing fish and poultry, but he couldn't figure vegetables out because you have to cook them first, it turns out, because if you just try to freeze them, the cells burst. My grandfather said, oh, I can figure that out. And so he basically became the vegetable freezer for Clarence Birdseye, licensed the patents. This was in the 30s.

How is your grandfather talked about in your family with your father? The thing about my father is that he never, ever challenged my grandfather. And I didn't know the kind of abuse that my father had suffered, psychological, emotional abuse, until he died and left me these papers that detailed that abuse.

And most people who had to endure that kind of thing from their father, their soul would be destroyed. He was this all-powerful man who just tried to humiliate his son in every possible way. As one reader said, it's the blood sport called filial love. There was something in my family, we're going to throw you in the deep end of the water and we're going to see if you learn how to swim. And if you do...

Great. You're a Seabrook. Well, God, I mean, your father was one of three. Three sons. One of three sons. They were all trained as engineers. I'm thinking succession here. It's succession with spinach. You know, I wrote my very first attempt at this was a New Yorker piece I wrote 30 years ago. And at that point, I thought I was still kind of writing the heroic story of the Seabrooks with a couple of bad episodes. And there was a certain glamour, too. There was a glamour to your parents. Your father was in

incredibly beautifully dressed. He was a wonderful dresser. He was a very handsome man. He was eight inches taller than his father. I think possessions like wine and clothes are very important to both my grandfather and my father to define them as members of a certain class. They didn't feel that secure in belonging to it. But I also think that with wine, wine and alcohol was another one of these kind of tests

that you don't know you're taking, but really it was a test of can you hold your liquor? And, you know, my father started proffering alcohol when I was 13 years old. And when I think about that and my children, like...

Like, I'm sort of astounded by the fact that he wanted me to start drinking at the age of 13. And I think it was this kind of, you know, we'll see what he's made out of test. And I failed. I flunked. Well, you're referring to, I mean, you've written about this really movingly in The New Yorker that you got over drinking. You had to really confront it. Confronting...

the fact that this heritage of mine was sort of toxic, and yet it was deeply embedded in my daily life. It was almost like I had to give up on my heritage, on my family. Like, alcohol was part of being a Seabrook. I think if I hadn't confronted the drinking and the role that my family played in it, I don't think I would have been able to write this book.

I'm speaking with John Seabrook about his new book, The Spinach King. More in a moment. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex.

Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. Now, John, Seabrook Farms had this aura of being a family business, but this wasn't just your dad and his brothers sorting vegetables. Thousands of people work there.

on this huge piece of land in South Jersey. Describe the workforce at Seabrook Farms. So another interesting thing about this story is that Seabrook, New Jersey, became a nexus for the immigrant experience in the 20th century. Early 20th century, you had Southern Italians, a lot of Southern Italians coming. The 30s, you had migrants coming up from the Jim Crow South.

In the 40s, the Japanese Americans who were interned in the concentration camps were released to work at Seabrook Farms. And then after the war, Estonians who had been placed in displaced persons camps were sponsored by my grandfather to come. They all lived in housing that he owned and rented to them. And it was this town called Seabrook Farms. And there were 5,000, 6,000 people. So it was a substantial town.

that my grandfather kind of had a caste system and people who were whiter got nicer houses and violence was used to suppress any kind of dissent. What kind of violence? Well, during the, in 1934, the incredibly brave African-American workers decided they'd had enough because every time the slack season came, even though they had seniority,

the black workers would be released first. And so they said, we're not going to stand for this anymore. And labor unions never really had much

luck with farm workers because they didn't stay in one place for long enough to and they didn't really pay dues. But where these workers had an advantage was the produce is seasonal and it's depending on getting to the market, you know, in a timely fashion. And so they staged a strike at the beginning of the beet harvest when they really needed to get these beets out of the ground and they needed these workers to do it.

My grandfather brought in vigilantes. The New Jersey KKK was involved. There was days of violence covered on the front page of the New York Times. Amazingly, I had never heard about this story until I was 34 years old. And I remember you telling me about it some years ago and the shock of

of learning about it, either through combing through archives or... The nation had covered it, and my friend, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, sent me a clipping from 1934 that detailed the violence. How did you react to that? I mean, I'm still trying to process the fact that my family were involved in this horrendous labor violence against people who were really just trying to get a fair shake. It's...

Part of the reason I wrote the book was to represent those people, because not only were they mistreated and abused in the strike, he basically wrote the black workers out of the history of the company. And I've written them in with this book where they belong.

And that was one of my prime motivations. So it was never spoken of at home with your dad? Never. Never. Never a word was spoken of it. John, at what point does Seabrook Farms go out of your hands and fail? Because your father, he was a businessman until the very end, but not with Seabrook Farms. Right.

Right. So my grandfather sold the business in 1959 in order to avoid my father basically taking it over and running it. My father had had enough. He didn't want to work for somebody else. He wanted to, you know, own the company with his brothers. And not only did they sell, my grandfather sold the company, but he disowned them.

And so after he died in 1964, my father and his brothers pursued a lawsuit to try to get the will thrown out. And it was the documents that came from that lawsuit, which documented just how crazy my grandfather was, that he then passed along to me when he died in 2009, which was

became an important source for this book. You were born in '59, your grandfather died in '64. Do you have any memories of him or is it just kind of received? I was taken to meet him once and it was a very scary encounter. He was sunk into dementia, I believe, at that point.

There was always a question of whether his behavior was partly physically caused and what was psychologically caused. But he just had a very—I remember the really mean mouth he had. He had his lips pressed together, corners turned down. He was dressed in a suit, sitting on the floor, and—

And at first I didn't know what to do, but he had these Tinker toys in front of him. And he was building something with Tinker toys. And the nurse said, why don't you sit down there and play with your grandfather? And I did. And you remember that? I remember handing him a little dowel and he put it in. And that was the only time I ever saw him. How did your parents feel about you beginning research on this book and writing about the family? What you've been doing, you did research.

Right. And then, and now it's in its full flower. Well, I did it when they were alive and my mother hated it. Absolutely. Even though my mother was a journalist...

But she absolutely hated it whenever I wrote about my family. She hated when I wrote that original piece here. I think she knew what I was going to find out if I kept at it. Of course. Because she knew, because she came into this family in 1956 when everything was falling. She thought she was marrying into this wonderful, you know, American aristocratic family, and she ended up in a nut house, you know,

and spent three years in this incredibly vicious, you know, succession battle.

And then we were sort of exiled about 18 miles away to Salem, New Jersey. And I think she just wanted to put it behind her and never think about it again. So you were exiled to a school? We were exiled to a town about 18 miles away. The house that we lived in was my grandfather's house. So when everything fell apart, we were evicted from that house. You've got two kids at home. What do they know of this story, and how did they take it in?

Well, I think my son has always been sort of alarmed by the fact that he comes from this line of kind of like crazy father-son behavior. And I do feel that these traumas are sort of embedded in— You do. I do. They're passed down. I mean, I was very influenced by the book Terry Real wrote about how male depression is passed down.

I think fathers often have terrible struggles that they had with their father that they don't know how to talk to their sons about. And it certainly, in my case, I think it interfered with my relationship with my father. And I was determined not to have that happen with my son. And I don't think it... But do you really see much of your son...

in your grandfather and your father? No, but I think that there's certain sort of aspects of my father's personality that were formed by his grandfather's treatment of him. A certain sort of lack of trust, maybe like you're not really sure whether you can really count on these family bonds. I think that sort of primal...

if you will, was always in my father. And I think I sort of, if not inherited it, then was certainly influenced by it. But you must feel some sense in some corner of your being, John. And, you know, as a guy in good health, but in your 60s with a family, you've been married for a very long time. You're a sane, decent, loving person. Thank you. There must be some sense of profound love

I don't know, satisfaction that transcends just the mere publication of a book, which you've done before. I feel like I lived the first half of my life with this story, and then I spent the second half of my life writing this story. And now they're finally complete. There were times when I didn't know I was going to be able to finish this story because it really was very difficult and painful. And it takes place over 80 years and three generations. And

And then I also did it for my daughter, who I've also written about in The New Yorker, who is Black and is adopted from Haiti. And it's sort of when I adopted her, I had a new view on my family. What is my daughter going to think?

And how am I going to communicate with her about this? The fact that she's got these privileges that are partly based on, you know, exploiting black people. Have you had that conversation? I haven't really had that conversation with her yet, but I'm hoping that the book will help us to have that conversation. She hasn't read it, but I think she's going to listen to it.

Dion Graham reads it in the narrated version, so I hope she'll listen to it. It's an absolutely wonderful book, and thank you for being here, John. Thank you, David. The Spinach King is the title of John Seabrook's new book, and you can find John's writing on a great range of subjects, especially music and the music business at newyorker.com. You can also subscribe to The New Yorker at newyorker.com. Same place. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. See you next time.

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