Scoop Sweeney 00:03 - 00:24 Author and journalist John Seabrook joins the Plutopia podcast as we discuss his new book, Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Following the death of his father, John inherited a huge collection of family documents. These documents started Seabrook's research into his family history. John Seabrook 00:25 - 01:23 I felt that I was fulfilling some kind of from the grave wish of my father. To achieve rev not just revenge but also justice in some way for what he endured and what he tried to do and and why the company failed. And so that's kind of what I did really, you know. And it kind of motivated me actually while I was writing to feel like I was doing this for my father. And it and it also kind of brought me into a better understanding with my father, who was kind of a chilly and remote person. But now I kind of understood why, because he had had to survive this sociopath, you know. That it was pretty clear that this man who created this company was a sociopath and that probably helped him in many ways in creating and controlling the company, but it brought the family down. Jon Lebkowsky 01:23 - 02:41 Hey everybody, welcome to the Plutopia News Network podcast. Today, Wendy Grossman, Scoop Sweeney, and I, your podcast co-hosts, We'll be interviewing acclaimed journalist and author John Seabrook. John is a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, like for over 30 years. And he's known for his sharp insight into culture, technology, and the arts. He's the author of several influential books, including The Song Machine, No Brow. and Flash of Genius, the latter of which was adapted into a major motion picture. And his latest work, which is called The Spinach King, The rise and fall of an American dynasty takes a deeply personal turn, chronicling the story of his own family and their iconic agricultural enterprise, Seabrook Farms. So we're excited to dive into this kind of book. It's a memoir, it's a history, it's social commentary, and it's a very interesting book. John, could you? Summarize the book as we get started here. John Seabrook 02:42 - 05:01 Yeah, thanks, John. Thanks for your interest in the book. And nice to see my old friend Wendy here, too. Yeah, so my grand the book is about my grandfather and my father and their relationship, but it's the backdrop is The historical change in America from sort of pre-industrial age agriculture Through the mechanization of farming in the early 20th century, through the New Deal, labor unions, my grandfather's struggle against those. And then finally, getting into his the succession between him and his three sons. He had three sons, Belford, Courtney and Jack, who was my youngest. I mean, my father, the youngest. And then you get into the 50s at the kind of brand of consumer society. And against that backdrop, it's a story of a man and his three sons. Who created this great frozen food empire in southern New Jersey called Seabrook Farms? They froze vegetables. They started out freezing vegetables for Clarence Birdseye and then they started doing it for themselves. And by in their peak in the mid-1950s, they had 25,000 acres of their own. They had another 25,000 acres. Under contract, they froze a third of the nation's lima beans and a sixth of the nation's frozen vegetables altogether Seabrook, New Jersey was their home base. A town was created where Seabrookers. Thousands of workers lived. Japanese Americans came from internment camps during World War II. Estodians came from displaced persons' camps after the war. So their personal stories intersected with my grandfather's story. And, you know, at its peak, it was really a whole world unto itself that basically my grandfather owned. He owned the housing and the company, so everybody paid rent to him. And he was a very authoritarian figure. But eventually, he couldn't let go of power and there was succession battle that brought everything down. That's the story, really. Jon Lebkowsky 05:02 - 05:21 And it's a deeply personal story that addresses a lot of familial dysfunction and also. Political, like capitalist dysfunction, I guess, economic dysfunction. What inspired you to get into this? It must have been very difficult to write. John Seabrook 05:21 - 05:43 When my father died, so my grandfather and my father had this falling out in 1959, the year I was born. But my father and my father was kicked out. The company was sold. He was basically disowned along with his three brothers. But he never really talked about why. And he basically continued to represent my grandfather as this great man who had. John Seabrook 05:44 - 05:46 Started this company and it was visionary. John Seabrook 05:46 - 08:36 And there was kind of an official narrative of my grandfather that was built up by the workers. There's a museum. Still exists in Stebrook, New Jersey, that tells this heroic story of my grandfather. As a kind of bootstrapping capitalist entrepreneur who did it all with hard work, most of it false. But he held to that story and never really criticized his father or said much about Why this had happened. But when he died in 2009, he left me these boxes of material, which were mainly materials that after his father died in 1964. The brothers had tried to have the will thrown out, and they had done all these interviews with people all around the company and the family. And the portrait of my grandfather that emerged from these boxes was It was really a monster, you know, incredibly emotionally abusive to my father. Tried to steal his girlfriend, who happened to be Ava Gabor. He abused workers in the plant. Women, he preyed on female workers. He was a racist, an anti-Semite, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it just goes on and on. And so I was left with this stuff. You know, at this point, I'm a professional writer, quite well known. I mean, my dad knows what I'm going to do with it. And so I'm left wondering why he didn't if he why did he leave it for me? And I can only imagine he wanted revenge or he wanted it was an act of jo I felt that I was fulfilling some kind of from the grave wish of my father to achieve not just revenge, but also justice in some way for You know what he endured and what he tried to do, and why the company failed. And so that's kind of what I did, really. And it kind of motivated me actually while I was writing to feel like I was doing this for my father. And it also kind of brought me. Into a better understanding with my father, who was kind of a chilly and remote person. But now I kind of understood why, because he had had to survive this. Sociopath. You know, that it was pretty clear that this man who created this company was a sociopath, and that probably helped him in many ways in creating and controlling the company. But it brought the family down. You know, it's a family business and love and money. And, you know, what's more valuable got all confused, I think. Wendy Grossman 08:37 - 08:46 I'd kind of like to give a copy of the book to all of the current billionaires, you know, who behave in very similar ways. It's like this is what can happen to you. John Seabrook 08:47 - 11:55 Lawless Beyond the there's a lot of similarities between the way my grandfather behaved, and which was himself influenced by the 1890s, that he Grew up in the Gilded Age, the robber barons, how they behaved. And there's a lot of links between the robber barons and our oligarchs of today and the way they behave. And so, yeah, my grandfather was very much in that. You know, what's good for business is good for everyone because it creates growth. And even if you break some rules and break some laws. It's like the railroads were built that way, basically. The infrastructure of America, that's how he operated. Fraud. I mean, you know. Part of researching this story was uncovering all the things that he, these illegal or immoral things that he did, including this strike That had occurred in 1934, led by the black workers, which was a very courageous thing for them to do in that place with that man. and was crushed with violent reprisals from vigilantes, even the local KKK got involved And they were erased from company history. The whole incident was erased. And then, basically, what those workers tried to achieve, which was a union. Which eventually was achieved 12 years later, was erased from company history to the extent that I had never even heard of it, even though I sort of tried to. You know, kind of research it until I was about 34. And then I asked my father, you know, what about this? There was an article in The Nation that had been published in 1934. That described my uncle throwing a tear gas bomb into a worker's house, setting it on fire. Children ran out, and another one of my uncles running over one of the strikers with a truck. And these were uncles who I remembered, you know, fondly sweet, you know, lovable men. So there was a lot of like pretty heavy stuff that Came out of the research, and it did take a long time for me to kind of process it. And of course, I'm kind of betraying my family in a way. I mean, there's that Element of it too, that this man, whatever he did, kind of helped put us on the map and get us educated and started in life well. So, shouldn't I just kind of be grateful for that? So, yeah, there was a lot of. I guess the way I answer that question is the books are not written for dead people. You know, books are written for living people, and then the people who are not even born yet. And I felt like the truth was more important for the living, and the dead didn't really care. That's how I basically resolved that problem. Jon Lebkowsky 11:56 - 12:03 So do you see this family history that you recount in the book as being uniquely American? John Seabrook 12:05 - 12:27 Certainly it's the American capitalism, the unique Winner-take-all society that we live in, where immense riches are valued highly and workers who get screwed. you know, it's just the way things go. John Seabrook 12:27 - 12:30 I mean, it definitely tells that story. John Seabrook 12:31 - 14:38 And it all, you know, and it tells the story of how The American farm, the farm workers, like the relationship between white farmers and people of color who were their workers. Which sort of began, you know, in the early 20th century and continues to this day. That is an American story. You know, my grandfather built this. Industrial farm up, which at its peak had like 8,000 workers at a time when Americans were basically not doing farm work, or they were moving to cities and getting factory jobs. And so it was just at that beginning of trying to sort of find workers to do this essential work of providing food for people. And, you know, so we went through, you know, we. Early 20th century Italian immigrants, and then that, you know, the nativist panic in the 20s kind of closed that down. And then black migrants. coming up from the South and then the strike in Thirty Four. Then the Jap incarcerated Japanese Americans coming, 2,000 of them and their whole life story getting entwined with Seabrook. So if you go to those incarceration camps, Seabrook sent recruiters to all those camps and in the history of those camps Seabrook features fairly prominently. And then you've got Estonian workers who literally might have been killed if my grandfather hadn't sponsored them. to come to America and work at Seabrook Farms. And all of that sort of is an American story. And now you have this current immigration thing we have going on now. A lot of it is farm workers, you know, undocumented farm workers. And Trump wants to maybe make exemptions, but Stephen Miller seems to think we should just get rid of those folks, too. So, yeah. Scoop Sweeney 14:38 - 15:37 I was fascinated by the way you described the activities against the farm workers. And when I was starting in journalism in the 70s, Cesar Chavez was starting to really get active. in California and in Texas, which has a big agricultural base. And I encountered people that were Created basically. They were Hispanic, but they were going out and talking about how evil the CISR was and how evil the Farm Workers Union was. And I interviewed one of them and I asked him, who is paying for your tour? And he's like, you came up with several different answers, but that seemed to be. Quite common among farm workers. They always had somebody trying to destroy their organization. Your description was quite familiar to what I've seen. John Seabrook 15:38 - 15:53 Because they didn't want to pay them living wages, right? Because then their economy, their food wouldn't be cheap. We have sort of subsidized a lot of our food by. Not paying farm workers living wages, that still goes on. Jon Lebkowsky 15:54 - 16:06 Could your I was just going to say, could your grandfather have Have done what he did? Could he have accomplished what he did? And at the same time, paid a living wage? John Seabrook 16:06 - 17:59 That's a great question. And certainly he would have claimed no. In fact, the arguments that he made during the strike were that he couldn't pay the interest on this government loan that was allowing them to kind of in the early stages get their frozen food business going if he had paid the workers thirty cents an hour. So he had to cut it to 17. 5 cents an hour. Whether that was true, I have an academic friend from Rutgers, Andy Urban, who's also writing a book about Seabrook Farms. And he told me that in his research, he didn't believe that the government made any kind of threat to close up the Seawork loan if they couldn't pay it. I mean, this is a relationship they were looking to cultivate. So I don't really believe it. But, you know, yeah, they started out certainly. The whole beginning of the frozen food business was very touch and go In the thirties. It was also the Depression. So, you know, things were cut to the bone, and cash was hard to find. They did pay workers better once they got going more, although they never really paid workers. It was always like what they could get away with paying workers. It wasn't like Henry Ford's $5 a day. See, my grandfather sort of modeled his whole industrial approach to farming. On Henry Ford, but it stopped short of actually paying the workers the way Henry Ford paid his workers. That's where my grandfather was called the Henry Ford of agriculture. But he departed from Henry Ford in that way, maybe because he didn't want to or maybe because he had to. I can't really say for Wendy Grossman 18:00 - 18:09 Well, maybe partly also because cars are really expensive, so Ford really had to give them more money if they were going to be able to afford the cars, whereas a pack of frozen peas is not the same. John Seabrook 18:09 - 18:12 You can right. That's a great point. Jon Lebkowsky 18:13 - 18:48 When I was reading about the strike, I kept thinking that people today, younger people today, If you talk to them about a strike, they say, Well, that's what television writers do that delay my television shows. You know, I mean, you don't really hear about strikes in the same way now. We really don't have effective unions very much. But is that because people don't feel they need to organize? Because they're now all very well paid? I mean, I kind of don't think that's the reason. John Seabrook 18:49 - 19:15 Well, or the unions are better established than they were. I mean, the autoworkers' union certainly. gets but then you have like the Amazon you know workers and and I mean strikes are still Effective, I think. Maybe it's a different kind of strike. Like, yeah, the television strikes, maybe. Maybe it's more like intellectual property, because kind of that's more what America makes, I guess. You know? Wendy Grossman 19:16 - 19:58 If you asked me, I would say that people are more frightened to strike in the US because they don't have access to health care except through jobs most of the time And in this country, in the UK where I live, you certainly do see other groups of people striking, and unions are sort of much stronger here, I think. But one of the three reasons that the book interested me so much was that the history of these very violent strikes, there were you know, people forget that the reason that the reason we had forty day forty hour weeks and so forth is because people actually bled to get it. John Seabrook 20:00 - 20:01 So true. Yeah. Wendy Grossman 20:02 - 20:09 I mean, I was also fascinated by a lot of the personal details. I mean, the description of your father's suits was just astonishing. John Seabrook 20:09 - 22:20 Yeah. Yeah, they really went to town on clothes, wine, and then in my father's case, horses and carriages, which was This crazy pursuit he got into. And it was all, and the interesting thing about it was it was a passion, but it was all for social advancement or professional advancement. It was always. Calculated in terms of the image of the Seabrook family, and because the brand was based on the Seabrook family. And unlike Birdseye or Green Giant, you didn't have this family that you could take pictures of at beautifully dressed at social events. That was kind of how my family felt they could compete with these other brands that it was It was because they really did live on this farm, and the vegetables really did grow right there. They were the ultimate brand ambassador. And I think that's kind of what got them into trouble as a family, really, because they couldn't really live up to their brand, basically. And maybe that's true. I was just reading this book about the Bush family of brewers that started Bud. And how, like, the as the generations went on, the younger generations could never really live up to like this sort of mythologized version of how the company started and the virtues of the founders that allowed for the success that they had. Because they were always kind of judged against this idealized image, which never really was true, and they could not really ever hope to compete with. I think that kind of. Was a major factor in my family. That didn't really answer your question, but yeah. Jon Lebkowsky 22:20 - 22:40 I mean, I guess there's a lot of myth building that happens. And, you know, I'm realizing that If your family or if your dad hadn't figured that the optics of going to the Grace Kelly Prince Rainier wedding would be a good thing. You probably wouldn't be here today, right? John Seabrook 22:40 - 22:45 That's definitely true. My mother was, that's how my mother met him. Jon Lebkowsky 22:45 - 23:00 Yeah. Yeah, and that's kind of a fascinating Fascinating story. I had not realized that they put a bunch of people on a cruise ship and sent them over there. I can't imagine what that cruise was like. Did you ever hear any stories about the cruise? John Seabrook 23:00 - 25:47 Yes, it would just yeah, so they spent nine days going from New York to Monte Carlo on an ocean liner that the Kelly family had chartered. Specifically for the wedding, which in and of itself is kind of amazing. And it was like the Kelly wedding party and guests, and then the press, because The Kelly family, who were also kind of associated with the Seabrook family, Jack Kelly, who was Grace Kelly's father. Like my grandfather, sort of started out as an uneducated kind of tradesman and worked his way up to becoming like a major contractor in Philadelphia Also, sort of a sports legend. He was an Olympic oarsman. And anyway, and they built the factory at Seabrook Farms. So my father was invited as a guest. And my mother was a reporter from South Dakota who had come to New York in the early 50s. To write a column for United Press International, kind of a gossip, kind of women's column. It wasn't really a gossip column. It was sort of like profiles of actors, actresses, and Marilyn Monroe was one of them, but also men like Christiane Dior. Anyway, she wrote the story of Grace Kelly's wedding, and she was invited to come on the ship. And so they met on the ship. And I think that really the book, like my perspective in the book is really like her perspective as a journalist coming into this family. I mean, I was part of the family, so that's. Not entirely true, but I don't think I would have written this book if she hadn't been such a big influence on my life and her kind of outsider view. Of the Seabrooks, because she came into it right when they were falling apart, and she brought these kind of high expect, you know, mythological sort of ideas about The elite and how wonderful they were, and then saw up close how horrible, how awful they were. And I don't know. I think that kind of carried through. She stopped working. When she married my dad, I always sort of felt like she might have regretted that. Maybe I was sort of unconsciously kind of motivated to become a journalist, partly for that reason. Although she never wanted me to write about my family, that was the interesting thing about my mother. It's like she encouraged my journalism and inspired me. But when I wrote about the family, she was not for it. And I talk about that in the book and speculate about why. I think she knew what I was going to find out, basically, you know. Jon Lebkowsky 25:48 - 26:08 You know, I can see how it would be very difficult for you to write the book, not just because, you know, you're kind of like. Exposing a lot about yourself, but you're exposing this stuff about your family, and you've got people within the family who are, I'm sure, very unhappy with you for doing that. John Seabrook 26:08 - 28:33 Well, I waited a long time. So the players all died. So nobody who the action and concerns in the book is really living might I have an older sibling and a younger brother, an older half sister and a younger brother. And they, although they, I don't think they're not speaking to me, they're not really speaking to me about the book. We're just kind of like, at this point at least, not talking about it. Maybe we'll talk about it at some point. And then I have these cousins that still do what my ancestors did, which is freeze vegetables. In that area, so southern New Jersey, and they probably are not happy at all The difficult thing in the book, you know, me writing the book or taking the alternative narrative to the official narrative was that for a lot of the workers. It was important that my grandfather be a good man because they didn't want to feel exploited. After they had already been exploited, or they, you know, for the Japanese Americans and the Estonian workers who created the museum. My grandfather is this kind of savior figure. In the Estonian case, literally, in the Japanese-American case. It's more like he was a capitalist who sort of gave them faith in America again after like FDR had rounded them up and put them in these camp And so, and the museum, I just spoke at the 80th reunion of the Japanese American Oban Festival that takes place in Seabrook. And you know, that was like. You know, and a woman stood up in the audience and said, Your grandfather saved my life. So, yeah, I mean, There is this sort of other story of my family, and I think there's a lot of people in my family still that want to just keep that as the main story. And then my story is. It's wrong, or it's biased by my liberal values, or whatever. I think that's the way it's probably going to go down Scoop Sweeney 28:33 - 29:20 I'm looking at your website at a photograph, an aerial photograph of the layout of the company, the factory and what appears to be the company housing. And I was stricken by your description of the company housing. First eight years of my life, I lived in company housing. My dad built liquid petroleum gas refineries. And we ended up in Texas building one. And we lived in the company housing. And it was very segregated. There were only white folks in the company hous Although there were many Mexican American and African American employees, they were kind of on their own. Was that pretty much? What they experienced. John Seabrook 29:20 - 31:45 It was segregated housing. My grandfather, basically, the lighter your skin, the better your housing. You know, that was kind of the way it went. And The black folks often didn't even live in Seabrook, but were out like a mile away in these kind of older shanty towns. And when the new housing was built for them during the Second World War, he gave it instead to the Japanese American workers when they came, just because he favored them. More. So, but here's the interesting thing about that whole world is that for the adults, it was like a Jim Crow South kind of situation. With certain sort of minor exceptions. For the children, though, a lot of the children who came to Seabrook during the war with their parents Or just after, thought of it very fondly. It was a fun place for them. There were a lot of other kids Their parents were careful about not exposing them to the darker truths of their lives, like in some ways my parents. And so a lot of those people who are now the people who are alive and coming to these reunions. Are on their own kind of like journey of reevaluating the stories that they heard about their family from their parents. Realizing that they weren't really true, you know, in some important respects. Maybe my grandfather wasn't just like a benevolent Humanitarian who was trying to give them a second chance, but also taking advantage of a very good situation when he needed workers very badly. You know, so I feel like You know, but the village itself was very much, yeah, it was like a caste system, really, almost. You know, it was almost like an Indian caste System more than just segregated, you know, it's because they had they had the black West Indian workers and then the black American workers, and he Like the black West Indian workers better than the Black American workers because they thought they were more industrious or something. So they got somewhat better housing and kind of went like that. Wendy Grossman 31:46 - 31:58 You end the book with the adoption of your daughter, Rose, and speculating about how she will think about it. She's a l she's a good bit older now. Has she read the book, and what did she think? John Seabrook 31:59 - 34:30 We've listened to the part about her and you know, I think she was touched by that. She didn't really say that much. It was a little embarrassing, actually. I mean. You know, it's kind of personal. And then it's me and her. And so, yeah, I don't know. Lisa's going to listen to more of the book with her. I think she'd feel more comfortable listening to it with Lisa probably. than with me. Getting her to read the whole thing might also happen. But I think the idea at this point is we have a number of car trips. She's going to be looking at a lot of colleges. You know, she's going into her senior year, even though she's 16. She's kind of young for her class. And so there's going to be a lot of car trips. So I think there's going to be some listening to it in car trips. But yeah, I. She was a major motivating factor in writing it too. It seemed like she ought to know. Maybe she's not quite ready for everything to know all of it But I think she ought to know that the Seabrooks kind of built their fortune partly on the backs of black workers who weren't really paid fairly or treated equally. I don't know. I just think it's better to know. And hopefully, she'll appreciate that sacrifice. I have said it's Be able to tell the black worker story for the first time is what I am proudest of about this book, the thing that I value most about it. And now that I've been down to that area and met some of the older black people who work for my family and hearing their Expressions of gratitude about it. You know, it's very touching to me. I met this 97-year-old black woman who I think looked after me for the first nine months of my life, like was like the person picking me up out of my bassinet. So That's it, it was kind of intense. And, you know, but I feel like it's there's a healing process, like the arc of the universe is actually kind of bending toward justice in this particular case And if I can help bend it, I'm really happy about that. But yeah, she'll know it all. Jon Lebkowsky 34:30 - 35:01 It was kind of interesting that at the end of the when the strike ended and there was this settlement and it was announced, and then the guy Henderson, understanding that the settlement May still be less than it should be, gets up and he's, you know, he's saying you should not accept this settlement. And all the workers say Yeah, we're going to accept it. And unfortunately, the black workers mostly got fired after that, right? John Seabrook 35:01 - 37:16 Right, and they didn't honor the settlement. So Henderson was right. Yeah, Henderson was a communist who came down and tried to organize. The workers in a in a communist, you know, sort of affiliated union, and that whole I mean, so this book is, you know, it's partly memoir, but a lot of it was is reported. And it's sort of like Historical, journalistic, reported narrative, and the Hendersons and their role in agitating and Seabrook Farms and How they got their start in New York and the 20s, and the affiliation between the NAACP and the Communist Party, or maybe it was the United Urban League at that point. All those things were super fascinating for me to be able to put into a narrative that I sort of had like this unique kind of Hold over because it was really my family story. But I felt like I had the space to kind of get all well, not all of it, but like The best of it into the in-between the family scenes, sort of as context. And the challenging part was knowing, like, you know, how to balance The fact that it really is kind of a memoir, it's coming from me. It starts out like a memoir and it ends like a memoir. But, like, Once I started doing kind of historical narrative, I didn't really want to like step in myself. But occasionally I do sort of step in. So all that was very interesting from a kind of a formal Person narrative like when you work at the New Yorker, you end up thinking about narrative constantly. It's like what and it's like this kind of weird Formula that if you get it right, it like it adds up to more than the sum of its parts and it like clicks together and hums, you know? And I was looking, I was kept looking for that. And in this book, you know, with that balance between the personal and the historical, that was a challenge Jon Lebkowsky 37:16 - 37:28 Yeah, narrative is how most of us think, right? Right. So it's kind of important. How much did alcohol figure into the history of your family? John Seabrook 37:29 - 38:37 Well, I learned a lot more about that too when I was researching the book, which I only really was doing when I myself was Struggling with alcohol. So all of that was also very personal. But yeah, my grandfather started a wine seller. I think, you know, my grandfather really leaped the middle class altogether. He basically went from being The eighth-grade educated seat of the pants, kind of intuitively gifted engineer. A guy that could figure out sort of how to apply revolutionary changes in the power source on farms which are basically electricity and internal combustion and telephones, and apply them to agricultural issues, problems. and create efficiencies of scale and profit from that. You know, that was his. That was his great skill. Wait, what was the question? Sorry, I lost the thread. Jon Lebkowsky 38:39 - 38:44 Well, it was about the role of alcohol in advancing your family. John Seabrook 38:44 - 44:06 Yeah, sorry. So my brain. Maybe I drank too much for back. Anyway, so yes, alcohol. So my grandfather skipped the middle class altogether. He was really. A guy that just went from working class to upper class. And the way he did that was to kind of like go deep into what he judged to be the ways the elite Sort of express their status. And alcohol, I think he encountered the elite and alcohol first on transatlantic Ocean liners that you needed to take in the 19 teens and 20s to get to Europe. Because you had this whole contracting business in Europe. Building roads. Another thing about my grandfather, or farming, that I didn't really know when I started this, is road building, which we can discuss in a sec. But anyway, so I think he observed that the drinks people ordered on, you know, in the saloons of these ocean liners and the way alcohol figured in their whole class Presentation. And he, you know, like in a very American way, like the same impulse that guided Robert Barons to rebuild French chateaus on the Hudson You know, Valley went and just sort of collected alcohol and had a cellar. And then my father, like with most of the things my grandfather did, my father did it, but did it better Did it even more thoroughly and expertly. And so he created this whole wine cellar in the basement of our house that Was hidden behind a sliding door, and then another part was hidden behind a fake wall. That also figures in the narrative because he was hiding these documents inside there, too. But at any rate, the wine cellar made an enormous impression on me. It was he instructed me in the use of pouring wine, of how to, you know, everything about wine was part of that sort of patronage. The patrimony from him to me. But in my case, it really just made me want to drink it. It really didn't make me want to collect it that much. And That wasn't really warrant. Like, there was this thing in my family. I don't think it's just my family. Where, like, you're given enough rope to hang yourself, kind of. And if you're given alcohol and you don't control yourself around alcohol, then that's on you. And that's. A sign that maybe you're not going to be the CEO of the company or whatever. You know, there was some kind of implicit testing that went on in my family. And my father engaged in, and my father never really, I mean, he drank wine every day. And he was surrounded. Many of his friends were alcoholics, interestingly. Who, like most humans, find it hard to control themselves around alcohol. But he had this iron Will and never really seem to drink beyond a certain point, even while enabling You know, people around him and continuing to pour. And of course, it was always the best wine. So You know, it played a role in the branding of the family as this kind of elite family, but My grandfather eventually became an alcoholic. You know, this is another thing I didn't really know until I got into those boxes. There were a lot of doctors' records in those boxes because they wanted to prove. That they did prove very effectively that he, in the last 10, 15 years of his life, was basically both an alcoholic and he was addicted to phenobarbital. For maybe for this health event that he had tried to get through and then he just couldn't stop taking the phenobarbital. You know, a lot of what happened, the paranoia, the idea that his sons were going to, you know. Betray him the way he had betrayed his father. He had cheated his father out of his land. A lot of that could easily be fed by alcohol and drugs, which I didn't really know anything about. So Yeah, alcohol figured very largely both in, I guess, the presentation of my family and the demise of The relationship between my grandfather and my father. And then, yeah, my struggles with alcohol came both from having alcohol around a lot as a kid and then You know, using it as a form of medicine, really, to blunt pain, I think that became my main reason for using alcohol Scoop Sweeney 44:06 - 44:50 Well, my senior year in college, I studied business and went into journalism as a result. I think I was scared by the business professors The marketing professor that I was in class, and he gave a big lecture on alcohol as a sales tool. And I sat there going, What? You're going to say that? And he was very serious, giving examples of, well, you know. Hard alcohol is iffy. Maybe some beer and wine might help you close the sale. And I think that's kind of epidemic in the world, especially in sales. John Seabrook 44:51 - 50:00 That's so true. In my father's case, it was champagne. Like, you know, it was always champagne. It was always a particular kind of champagne, Bollinger. That closed the sale, both like representing him representing himself as a sophisticated man, and then whoever got to drink the champagne. Felt bonded with him in this kind of way. Absolutely. You know, that was a big reason for the Seabrooks' use of they were experts in the use of alcohol in sales. And they were, and that's one thing about them all: that they were all basically promoters, right? I mean, they were always like promoting this idea of themselves and then. The company was always a great idea that the food was all grown there. They had this system worked out called the growth units. They brought a climatologist to the farm. And his name was Thornthwaite. And he created this system, which is still used in many places. Of growth units, where he calculated the you know, at any particular period of the year, the amount of heat So sunlight, precipitation, evaporation, temperature, and he figured out exactly how long, how many growth units it would take. For a crop to go from the pea or the bean, the seed, to the finished product. And then would plan all the crops sequentially around that so they would all come ripe like the next day. That, you know, it was those kind of systems that they excelled in. It was like the control of nature. Like the, because the idea that you're going to create, I mean, Wendy said, yeah, one of the differences between Henry Ford's factories and CFC Brooks is the product wasn't sold for thousands of dollars. You know, it was sold for a couple of cents. But another difference was that Ford could control all his raw materials and the suppliers. Because they were none of them. Well, I mean, they were maybe dependent on certain sort of weather conditions to float them down the river, but But my grandfather was dependent on nature as like a major partner in the whole endeavor. And nature wasn't. Subject to his control, although that, you know, that's kind of what he attempted to do in an extraordinary way. But there would be the odd hurricane, you know, or whatever that would come through. Also, the use of pesticides, the use of Like you see, a lot of the pictures in the book have airplanes in them, and some of the pictures are taken from airplanes. That's because Like silent spraying, like Rachel Carson could have written the whole book basically at Seabrook Farms. The amount of DDT and other chemicals they sprayed on those crops Like before there were any kind of environmental controls. It's like I was talking to some of the workers and they were telling me like everybody knew to like close their windows on the Days that the crop dusters were dusting. Otherwise, you would get like, you know, chemical dust all over your. So that was another big part of the operation was pesticide use. And then Water, you know, the use of the amount of water it took to wash everything, and then where the water went. Again, like the Seabrooks kind of got away with what they could get away with. And eventually, the government kind of tried to regulate them. During the war, there's a lake there called Silver Lake. It's a lovely recreational lake. During the war, there was so much runoff from the beets that the Seabrooks Planted because the Army wanted beets. The Army wanted freeze-dried beets to put into the meals ready to eat because They're super full of nutrients and they lasted forever. So the Seabrooks just planted everything in beets all during the Second World War. And the runoff from the beets Turn the lake, you know, blood red. I thought about that a lot while I was writing this book, this image of this kind of blood red lake. From Seabrook's beat runoff for the at any rate, yeah, there was that was they operated a very well-organized system of control Jon Lebkowsky 50:00 - 50:06 There was something about cyanide in the greenhouse, too. That sounded like a pretty interesting system. John Seabrook 50:06 - 50:27 Yeah, they used cyanide where in the greenhouses where the rose is growing because it killed the aphids. So they would just basically, the worker would plop a cyanide tab or two in the pipe in the air gate in the irrigation and run out of the room. Jon Lebkowsky 50:29 - 50:48 So we've talked a lot about difficulties within your family and potential of your grandfather being sociopathic and so forth. Are there things that you consider particularly good or great about your family? John Seabrook 50:48 - 55:52 Yeah. Well, I always, as I say, my mother, I always admired her. Of the work she did and then how she coped in South Jersey for the most part. I do admire the engineering prowess that my Father, his uncles, and grandfather displayed. I've often written about engineers. Flash of genius is essentially I would say, kind of indirectly inspired by my family, the Mylar pouch that Seabrook developed in 1956, where Like you could then just plop the whole, you know, it's transparent mylar pouch in a pan of boiling water. That figured largely in my thoughts as a child as like this brilliant thing. My father didn't really invent it. It turned out my uncle had, but maybe my father suggested he had. But I just always kind of. Was drawn to inventors, particularly when there was like money at stake. And I would say, even in my book, The Song Machine. Which is not about like mechanical invention, but it is about like hook invention, you know, popular music invention. And often it occurs. Kind of in this similar sort of, you know, at least often, flash of genius kind of way where the sudden insight comes to you and you see the thing that you're trying to achieve. That was just part of my upbringing. And part of it is creation, and part of it is commerce. And I always have been drawn to subjects. As a writer, where both of those things were at stake. And I think, you know, so I credit my family. With that. I mean, they also were, they cared about facts and knowledge and science. You know, they. I mean, I often wonder what they would have made of Trump. My dad died in 2009 before Trump was running for office And I'd like to think that they would have been revolted, or at least my father might have been revolted by Trump's personal behavior. But there are a lot of kind of weird Sort of similarities like in the things that people value about the Trumps, like wealth and then enterprise and Entrepreneurship that I kind of at least grew up valuing about my family. I mean, learning what I learned about them when I was writing this book That threw a lot of my sort of naive notions, which I kind of knew weren't true. But it sort of exploded them for good. But yeah, I do try to sort of and also let's say the thing that they did, which was freeze vegetables. Wasn't a bad thing in any way, really. I mean, you know, a lot of people had no access to vegetables before frozen vegetables. Well, they could buy canned vegetables, but they probably weren't that Interested in canned vegetables, maybe, or at least not, you couldn't really get green vegetables what you could. But anyway, I think that they added to the diet of the nation in a positive way. Although frozen food, once the Milar pouch came in and they started doing prepared foods, sort of took the low road of a lot of Bad and salt, and I think kind of blew it in some ways. Like in the early 60s, they could have Sort of marketed it as not like as a low-cost alternative to other food, but really as like legitimate. Food, but they didn't do that. Nowadays, I think during the pandemic, you know, a lot of millennials bought frozen food. In France, if you go to Paris You see these incredible, like, you know, chef-prepared frozen entrees that people buy for dinner. But here, I don't know. I think I still feel like frozen food is Slightly stigmatized, maybe by the way that my family and others marketed it early on. But anyway. No, I I value many of the things that they the the val the entrepreneurial, engineering, you know, to a cert certain extent, capitalist, although in their case They went too far. And education was important to them, and I value that too. Yeah. Wendy Grossman 55:53 - 55:59 You know, if they lived in South Jersey, there's no way they didn't know a lot about Trump. John Seabrook 55:59 - 56:06 They knew a lot about Trump. I mean, my father knew, but at that point, I think he found Trump vulgar and nothing much more. Wendy Grossman 56:06 - 56:16 I was going to say. I was going to say the the way you've described your father and his preference for elegance and c you know, very sort of British style of class John Seabrook 56:16 - 56:30 Yeah, but I think if he's still alive today, he probably would have come around just for expedience's sake, if for nothing el Unfortunately. But I'm sort of glad in a way that I didn't have to witness that happen. Wendy Grossman 56:31 - 56:33 So he would have held his nose and voted. John Seabrook 56:34 - 57:49 Well, I hope he would have held his nose. I mean, and then Fred Trump, you know, another thing about the parallels is Fred Trump Treated Donald and Fred Jr. a lot like my grandfather treated his sons And, you know, the fact that Donald became who he is, this kind of incredible narcissist. If you understand it in that context, and you see what happened to his brother, who didn't have that protective layer of narcissism and ended up becoming an alcoholic. That I see the parallels in my family with the fact that my father, I think, was a narcissist. And in knowing how he responded to his father's Treatment of Hemet, it makes his narcissism kind of more sympathetic to me, I guess, because it's like The way he protected himself from being destroyed. And I guess I could say if I had an ounce of sympathy for Donald Trump, which I don't think I do. I would maybe say he had to be the way he is to survive his father. Wendy Grossman 57:50 - 58:08 It all reminds me when you said three sons, and that immediately sort of. Flashed for me on James Goldman's play Lion in Winter, which is again about a king who's trying to decide among his three sons which one's going to get the kingdom. And failed me utterly. Jon Lebkowsky 58:08 - 58:09 Succession. John Seabrook 58:10 - 58:11 Or succession, yeah. Jon Lebkowsky 58:12 - 58:15 I'm guessing that your father I'm sorry. Scoop Sweeney 58:15 - 58:36 I'm guessing your father would have not appreciated the fact that Donald Trump managed to bankrupt casinos. I mean. That's not really the sign of a good businessman. It's basically like having a money printing machine and he drove it into the ground. Jon Lebkowsky 58:39 - 58:44 They don't sound like your family would have, like Trump, got into politics. John Seabrook 58:44 - 01:01:23 I am my father. My mother supposedly told my father that she never wanted him to be in politics I don't know. My grandfather was kind of in I mean, he was he certainly had he was a New Jersey highway commissioner. Just as an aside, the road thing, You know, one thing I learned about early 20th century America from this research was that farmers were some of the first road builders outside of the cities, like cities paved roads, but paved roads outside of cities were usually paved by farmers first because farmers had the equipment and they had the materials and they had the labor, and they often needed to keep the labor around so they would develop these kind of Side businesses in road building in the winter months so that then their crew would stick around and then they could put them to work on the farm again in the spring. And that's what my grandfather did. And, you know, he did it first around the farm, but then he got made a New Jersey Highway Commissioner. And then he started using state funds to build roads from the farm to cities. Camden was the nearest big city. And then from Camden, you could float the vegetables across the river to Philadelphia And he built a four-lane road to Camden. And he became so well known as a road builder that Joseph Stalin and the The early Soviet Union, when they launched the five-year plan in 1929, they brought all these American engineers over to Russia to build electrical transmission plants. GE, Ford himself came over. And my grandfather was brought over to build roads In Moscow and outside of Moscow, and spent a year there building roads. But apparently he didn't know how to build roads in Moscow. They fell apart within a year and he was chased out of Moscow by Stalin and never went back into road building after that, went back into farming. But yeah, roads and farmers, you know, who knew? In fact, the Bureau of Highways is part of the Department of Agriculture for 25 years. Jon Lebkowsky 01:01:23 - 01:01:38 Well, that is interesting. We have reached the end of our hour, and it's been a fascinating hour. We really thank you for joining us, and maybe you can come back sometime and we can talk about. about road building. John Seabrook 01:01:40 - 01:01:51 I have a piece in New Yorker. Well, now it was last week. I guess things happen fast, but in the weekly magazine business, but I have a piece about flooding, which I'd be happy to come back and talk to you about. Jon Lebkowsky 01:01:53 - 01:02:07 We were just talking about, I mean, that was down the road from us, the Texas part of it. And we talked about in our last interview was with journalists who had covered it here. Would definitely like to talk about that. That. John Seabrook 01:02:07 - 01:02:23 Well, check it out because I I bring a Vermont perspective to it and Vermont has passed these laws that will allow the state to manage rivers in a way that can prevent some of this kind of flooding from happening. It's kind of a radical law that's Never been tried before. Jon Lebkowsky 01:02:24 - 01:02:28 We'll have to tell our Texas leaders about it. John Seabrook 01:02:29 - 01:02:30 Hopefully, they're a little crazy. Wendy Grossman 01:02:32 - 01:02:45 Actually, where I live in the UK, the Kew Gardens was at one time a Mark Mark. Market gardening area, and everything was sent up to central London by the river because we're right on the Thames. Jon Lebkowsky 01:02:45 - 01:02:48 Yeah, the river's just another kind of road. Wendy Grossman 01:02:48 - 01:02:49 Yep. Jon Lebkowsky 01:02:49 - 01:02:51 Okay, well, thanks so much, John. Thanks for joining us. John Seabrook 01:02:52 - 01:02:53 It's been fun. Jon Lebkowsky 01:02:54 - 01:02:55 Thanks, everyone. Yeah, thanks a lot. John Seabrook 01:02:56 - 01:03:01 Wendy, great to see you again. You too. Hopefully, it won't be 14 years. Bye, Scoop. Bye, John. Scoop Sweeney 01:03:02 - 01:03:05 You can stay in touch with Plutopia at plutopia. Speaker 6 01:03:05 - 01:03:16 io on Facebook. Look for at Plutopia News. On Twitter, it's at Plutopia. This is the Plutopia News Network, 20 minutes into the future.