Destiny of the Dispossessed Spinach Prince
John Seabrook’s history of Seabrook Farms, where many incarcerated Japanese Americans worked during WWII, is ultimately about fathers and sons.
The Spinach King
The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
by John Seabrook
Norton, 368 pp., $31.99
IN A PHOTO FROM THE JANUARY 1955 ISSUE of Life magazine, a line of men in rural New Jersey toss Boston Marrow squash from field to truck bed. The harvesting relay unfolds at Seabrook Farms, which the magazine describes as the “biggest, best-organized vegetable factory in the world,” producing and quick-freezing 100 million pounds of vegetables and fruits in the prior year. Seabrook’s picked lima beans, stretched out, would span 2,250 miles—roughly the distance between New York City and Las Vegas, plus a marathon. The operation’s asparagus was enough to provide “one serving for every resident of New York, Florida, Washington, and Texas.”
On the following pages, an overhead shot taken from atop a company crane captures the assembled workforce making farming at this scale possible: field and plant workers, engineers, office staff, and—raised on the bed of a lift truck—chairman C.F. Seabrook, surrounded by his three sons. Seabrook Farms was a family affair, and the workers saw the boss as an almost mythical figure of good.
This was not always the case. Twenty years earlier, during the Depression, striking members of the Agricultural and Cannery Workers’ Industrial Union battled a villainous crew made up of local police, “vigilantes” hired by farm bosses, and members of the local Ku Klux Klan. Klan members had burned crosses at the home of the union’s former president, a black worker named Jerry Brown. A contemporaneous account noted that Cumberland County, New Jersey was “controlled industrially, politically and socially by a small group of cannery, glass factory, and farm owners—of which last class Charles F. Seabrook is one.”
Seabrook’s workers were striking against poor pay and even worse living conditions: “Half-clothed, half-starved, completely dirty children, poor white and Negro, run about in hopelessly squalid surroundings. Frowsy heads look out from half-open doors, through which may be seen badly ventilated rooms crowded with broken furniture and with broken humanity.” If they saw C.F. Seabrook as a mythical figure back then, they probably didn’t take him to be aligned with the good.
The Spinach King by John Seabrook—C.F. Seabrook’s grandson—carefully holds up these dichotomies for our examination. In its telling of the morally complex story of the Seabrook produce empire—a story that, in one of its more important episodes, links the family to the Roosevelt administration’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—the book offers a self-critical, exactingly honest story of family, ambition, and class. No one remains untouched here, including the author himself.
JOHN SEABROOK’S FATHER AND NAMESAKE, John Sr., who goes by Jack—one of the men standing high up alongside C.F. in the overhead Life photo—was cut out of the sudden sale of the business in 1959, but even so, he parlayed his background, family connections, and business acumen into a life of wealth and privilege over the following decades. As his blond hair turned “a distinguished aluminum silver,” Jack “dressed in the finest British tailoring, served only the best French wines, and drove a coach and four vanilla-colored horses along the country roads that ran through his Jersey estate, like an English duke,” his son writes. The Seabrooks’ new money had endeared them to the old aristocrats. Jack still called himself a farmer—but “apart from hay . . . the only crop was him.”
The farmer without a farm had two things left to give his son: money, and the Seabrook family lore. The latter proved somewhat more difficult for him to offer. In 1994, John had just been named a staff writer at the New Yorker, a position he still holds. He and his father met for lunch, “both aware that my writing career was subsidized in part by family money.” The younger Seabrook wanted to write the family story and prodded his father for details, but Jack was hesitant to criticize his own father, the mythical C.F.; “he was still fiercely protective of him. As I was of my dad, despite our differences,” John admits.
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His grandfather’s death merited an obituary in the New York Times. The headline began, “Charles F. Seabrook Dies at 83,” and we learn that “Jack noted with pleasure the use of the present tense in the obit’s headline, an honorific reserved for very important people.” John observes that “the Seabrooks sweated those details,” as clear a sign of their pedigree as his father’s beautiful clothes and cars. As Paul Fussell put it, class is inextricable from perception, and for those at the top of the societal pyramid, “taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.”
A graduate of Princeton and Oxford, Seabrook is skilled at writing about class. He’s also aware of his limitations. In an introductory note about his sources, Seabrook reveals that his father “kept meticulously detailed office diaries” totaling nearly a thousand pages. They provide glimpses of Jack’s life in exterior view only—what his father “was doing, but rarely what he was thinking.” Inference is the lifeblood of biography, and Seabrook relies on it to fill in his account of the interior. But there is a further barrier: his father’s inveterate mythmaking. “A great deal of work, care, attention, study, and money went into being Jack Seabrook,” John writes. What the father passed along to his son, he sometimes made available at an odd remove. When he died, Jack left his son a box of interviews with his grandfather that were conducted during a lawsuit. The box, labeled “Save for JMS Jr,” reveals details that Jack hesitated to elaborate on during their lunch conversation. His son John, the writer, needed to work for them.
These motifs—rooted in the interactions of myth, perception, and class—find an appropriate setting in New Jersey, which John McPhee, a lifelong Princeton resident, described as “vast, vulnerable, and a cache of lore and legend, not to mention sui generis characters.” Shouldered by New York City and Philadelphia, densely populated and distinctly wealthy, New Jersey is a forest of paradoxes. It makes sense that one man could grow to outsized stature amid these trees and tall buildings.
Seabrook places us firmly in South Jersey, and you can virtually taste the air when he does:
In between the farms are swamps, piney woods, and lonesome crossroads where the stop signs are cored by bullet holes, circles of sunlight glowing in the metal. The earth is flapjack flat. The power lines have orange ribbons dangling from them so that the crop dusters won’t get tangled. The big gun irrigation systems blast 300-foot-long arcs of water across crops. Tractors leave muddy, crosshatched tire marks on the roads. Every now and then there’s a colonial-era brick farmhouse in which rich Quaker farmers once siloed their wealth. The marshy border of Delaware Bay feels like the edge of the known world.
When Seabrook departs from these environs, though, The Spinach King moves more slowly. He has a lot of historical and genealogical ground to cover, and the latter material in particular is not especially compelling.
But Seabrook is at his sharpest—and the book becomes important—in his dramatization of the actions of Seabrook Farms during World War II.
“FOOD WILL WIN THE WAR,” a 1917 poster proclaimed. Painted by Charles E. Chambers and distributed by the United States Food Administration, it bore a further message that was directed at immigrants: “You came here seeking Freedom. You must how help to preserve it. Wheat is needed for the allies. Waste nothing.”
Following Pearl Harbor, the United States government pulled the poster’s slogan out of the propaganda archive and redeployed it, but its new messaging gave it a new emphasis: abundance. Food production, Seabrook notes, was “an act of patriotism.”
C.F. Seabrook embraced the opportunity to join his business to the national duty: “Beginning in 1942, the quartermaster general—the military’s grocer—asked the nation’s food producers for a 525 percent increase in production during the war years. For three or four years running, Seabrook Farms sold the government its entire year’s production in advance, plus that of some five hundred local farmers the company contracted with.” Americans at home were advised to purchase frozen, not canned, vegetables—more metal could then be saved for the war effort—and Seabrook Farms were experts at quick-freezing, then a new technology. They quickly scaled up their operations.
Such an undertaking required lots of workers. At first, Jack Seabrook looked to black day laborers in Philadelphia to meet the family company’s staffing needs, but he worried that the violent events of the preceding decade “might have left some lingering ill will in the community.”
He turned to the Quaker community in Philadelphia. Although he’d come intending to find local sources of labor, the Quakers—who had railed against Executive Order 9066, the vehicle of FDR’s internment policy—told Jack there were “large numbers of Japanese American workers from the camps out West, who would soon be available.” Two members of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, were working full time to help the government relocate and resettle Japanese Americans who were being released on a provisional basis after attesting to, documenting, and otherwise proving their patriotic loyalty. Seabrook Farms sent recruiters to the camps with a message for the imprisoned families who would soon be released from their formal incarceration: “the Seabrooks personally promised every man and woman a job at the going wage, a house with heat and utilities, and decent schools for their children.”
The gambit worked. Thousands of Japanese Americans who were approved to leave the internment camps out west and accept Seabrook’s offer were relocated to South Jersey. The migration presents another paradox of The Spinach King. One worker described the conditions at Seabrook Farms as fundamentally similar to those of their earlier incarceration: “the transfer to this place from our former life behind barbed-wire fences was no more than a shift from complete confinement to partial confinement.” Some of his compatriots, though, considered C.F. Seabrook to be their “savior.” In adjudicating these differences, John Seabrook lets the first group speak clearly, but he also allows the second to have its say. And sometimes, that latter group even speaks over him.
For years, he has not only been writing about his family business but attempting to correct the common, frequently rosy accounts of its history. He even became president of the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, but his “efforts to reform the narrative mostly failed.” The source of opposition is somewhat surprising: A member of the center’s Japanese-American community told a reporter that in criticizing his grandfather, Seabrook was “biting the hand that feeds [him].” In honest, self-effacing lines, Seabrook reflects on this resistance to his self-chosen project. These supporters of his grandfather, he writes,
weren’t interested in changing their views because the great man’s privileged grandson, a New York liberal who drove down now and then, told them that the old man was a corrupt demagogue and an abuser who only ever cared about power, control, and himself. Social justice is a fine thing, but the truth wasn’t going to set anyone free. C.F. had given his workers something more compelling than truth. Their lives had meaning. C.F. made them feel like they mattered. And people want to matter.
The tension described in this passage is central to the book’s challenging and moving final quarter. Although the book is many things—a regional history, a document about a family business, an insightful view of American race and ethnic relations—it is ultimately a book about a son and his father. The original stuff of myth.
Seabrook appreciates the privilege of his pedigree. His family name opened academic and literary doors. But his father Jack’s house had many rooms, and not all were inviting. He laments that they “played father and son as though we were acting our parts in a Restoration comedy.” Their form of love was gradual and guarded. “Genuine affection,” Seabrook notes, was a dangerous play—between them, vulnerability was weakness. Best to remain on guard and detached.
The Spinach King is a complex elegy for John Seabrook’s father, and it speaks to the more distant realities of his grandfather’s fraught life and politically and morally complicated business, as well. But ultimately, its last meaning is the most personal: It can be read as an elegy for the writer himself.
The current government of the United States is investing tens of billions of dollars in a new network of detention camps, reprising dark days that are within living memory for those affected by the Japanese internment policy of the 1940s. In government as in personality and family history, there is a compulsion to repeat.
But Seabrook’s way of showing us this feature of human life requires him to keep his scale at the personal level—the domain of mystery and manners. Can a person avoid a destiny? He knows that his father eventually became his grandfather. He’s a shrewd and honest enough writer to recognize that the same could happen to him.
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