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- “The Spinach King” tells the story of the Seabrook Farms, a major American vegetable supplier, and its patriarch, Charles Franklin Seabrook.
- The book explores agricultural history, family drama, and social conflicts, including a 1934 strike involving the KKK.
- The author also examines his complex relationship with his father and grandfather, reflecting on themes of family legacy and social climbing.
- The book occasionally struggles with balancing multiple storylines, but offers a compelling look at a unique family and its impact on American agriculture.
“The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty” is densely layered, containing countless rewards for anyone as it describes the powerful story of Seabrook Farms, one of America’s biggest vegetable suppliers, and its patriarch, Charles Franklin Seabrook, once described as the “Henry Ford of agriculture.”
Agricultural history is paramount — material Mississippians intuitively grasp — alongside family drama, the essence of Southern theatre, film and fiction.
Southern New Jersey, where the internecine conflicts occur, is seemingly below Mason and Dixon’s Line; imagine Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” or Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” set in the Garden State. The greed animating Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!” and Edna Ferber’s “Giant” and the films “Citizen Kane” and “Chinatown” comes to mind.
The 1934 strike against the family’s agricultural empire conjures memories of Bull Connor’s Birmingham: “… a long, two-part article in The Nation… published in August 1934…cited eyewitnesses who claimed the Seabrooks and their henchmen crushed the strike using fire hoses, tear gas, mass arrests, an imported gangster named Red Sanders [sic: Saunders], armed vigilantes, and the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, who spread terror by burning crosses in front of Black workers’ homes.”
John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” is also implicated. The author’s grandfather, after wresting control of family farmlands from his father, built a vertically integrated operation, bringing to agriculture what Standard Oil organized with petroleum and Ford Motor Company created for cars:
“As a model of agricultural engineering, there were few farms in the world that compared. Asparagus could be cut, trucked to the plant, trimmed, washed, blanched, packaged, and quick-frozen to -40 degrees Fahrenheit in less than two hours; one was the goal. A 4-page photo essay that Life magazine published in January 1955 called Seabrook Farms, with only some hyperbole, ‘the biggest vegetable factory on earth.’”
Seabrook’s achievement amply illustrates how Mississippi might synergize agricultural assets and industrial output: Governor Hugh White’s Balance Agriculture with Industry Program should have integrated industry and agriculture, ensuring that value added after raw materials are readied for retail sale benefits Mississippians rather than factory owners elsewhere.
Beyond economics is our common human condition. The author’s grandfather, remembering how he treated his father, feared similar mistreatment by his three sons.
The author inadequately analyzes his father, apparently an A-1 piece of work. The book serves as psychoanalysis on paper rather than the couch. Considering family issues and agricultural innovation simultaneously is disorienting, each topic being sufficient independently.
The author’s father is tantamount to Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, in which Durbeyfield becomes an aristocratic d’Urberville, Eliza Doolittle absent Professor Henry Higgins. The father appears to have been an obsessive-compulsive social climber to a pathological degree, countenancing no inadequacy which might become basis for rejection to such extent that he seems a laughstock, unaware of the reverse snobbery of those “to the manor born.”
The grandfather and father’s misconception that condescending prejudice constitutes a badge of belonging — not the absence of aristocratic attitudes, noblesse oblige — is loathsome. The author settles the score by adopting a 15-month-old Haitian orphan after a 2010 earthquake. He ensures that the Seabrook lineage includes someone of color, appropriate after past antisemitism and racism.
The author’s brother is barely mentioned, the older half-sisters only slightly more so, perhaps implying that not everyone endorses his assessments or is supportive.
The book’s shortcoming is confronting too many aspects of one family’s history; occasionally readers cannot see the forest for the trees. Discussion digresses to another subject as one resists abandoning a storyline.
The saga suggests that every family story is a buffet from which one takes what one wants, in proportions desired, unlike any other. Of those harboring illusions that they have a monopoly on truth and accuracy, one can only observe, “Bless their hearts!”
A review of ‘The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty’
- By John Seabrook
- W.W. Norton & Company
- Hardcover: 368 pages
— Jay Wiener is an a attorney in Jackson.