Spring? Never heard of her. In my part of Pennsylvania, we seem to have leaped from winter's last grasp straight to the front door of summer, but in the next couple days we're dropping from temperatures in the 90s down to the 50s. But on the bright side, it's not snowing.
I recently saw a trailer for a new movie from Angel Studios, coming out later this year, simply titled Hershey. I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to make a movie about the guy, since Milton Hershey is arguably one of the best-known figures in Pennsylvania history. In fact, out of all the native Pennsylvanians I can recall, it might be a toss-up between him and Mister Rogers for the top spot, though I'm inclined to give the prize to my childhood hero. (I'm only counting natives in that. The commonwealth has many famous figures who came from elsewhere, like William Penn himself and Ben Franklin.)
However, while Hershey the man is remembered with great affection, Hershey the company has a few dark spots in its story. This week's quest is about one of them.
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| The marker stands at the intersection of Cocoa and Caracas Avenues, near the headquarters of Chocolate Workers Local 464 |
Then the Great Depression hit. To save money, the work week was reduced to forty hours, and annual bonuses were no longer given. It made sense on paper - people were spending less on non-essentials like chocolate, so theoretically the company was making less money. In practice, the Hershey Chocolate Corporation was still making millions. Meanwhile, the workers were struggling to get by on their reduced paychecks.
They were annoyed with their boss for another reason, too. Yes, he had given them a wonderful place to work and live, but this also meant that he was directly involved in their private lives, to what might be considered an unhealthy degree. Milton's wife Catherine had died in 1915, after less than twenty years of marriage. The Hersheys had never been able to have children, possibly due to Catherine's health struggles, so her death left Milton rattling around their home at High Point Mansion all by himself. As his parents' only surviving child, he didn't even have any nieces or nephews of his own, though Catherine had a few through her brother and sisters. The bulk of the Hershey estate was, and still is, used to maintain a tuition-free boarding school known today as the Milton Hershey School. Milton absolutely refused to even consider remarriage, as he had completely adored his wife, and so he really didn't have much of anywhere to focus his attention except on his company and his workers. Not all of them were entirely comfortable with how much control he had over their day to day existence.
Because of the deep involvement he had in his company and town, Milton and his executives were often accused of playing favorites, granting jobs and promotions to those workers with whom they had closer relationships. Some of the workers created, in late 1936, a circulating newsletter called The Chocolate Bar-B, which listed many of the complaints the workers had. High temperatures and physically demanding work were among the biggest, but the wage disparity between the regular workers and the executives was also heavily criticized. The work schedule was sometimes unpredictable, and they were being pushed to improve production speeds despite the less than ideal work environment. The newsletter was allegedly written by the Communist Party of Hershey, and when I say 'allegedly' I mean that was how the writing was signed. Whether that's true or not, the author (or authors) of the paper urged the workers to form a union.
Into all of this came the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). This was a united group of unions in the United States and Canada, which had just formed in 1935. You probably know them today as one half of the AFL-CIO; the CIO was originally formed as a committee of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) with a focus on so-called unskilled laborers. They met secretly in a firehouse in Palmyra, several miles from Hershey. As a result of that meeting, Hershey employees soon created for themselves a local chapter of the United Chocolate Workers Union. Their first negotiation seemed to go well, with the company being receptive to their complaints and promising to raise wages. They also promised that the union organizers would have job security. However, not long afterward, some of the union organizers were laid off. It was claimed that it was a regular seasonal cutback, but the CIO took it as the company going back on their promise, and the union decided to strike. At eleven in the morning on April 2, 1937, the strike went into effect. Some of the workers were outside picketing, or on the roofs of the various buildings along Chocolate Avenue, but others sat down on the factory floor and refused to move. This particular antic was inspired by the actions of General Motors employees, who had held their own sit-down strike the previous December and had succeeded in their goals.
There were two particular issues which made the strike go awry. One was the fact that the employees who didn't participate in the strike still showed up to work. Since the strikers hadn't closed the entire factory, this meant that work was still being done - just not nearly as much as usual. The bigger problem, though, was the milk. The whole reason Milton Hershey put his company where he did was because of the abundance of fresh milk from the nearby farms, since you can't very well make milk chocolate without it. As a result of the strike, thousands and thousands of quarts of milk was going unused and spoiling right there in the factory. Meanwhile, outside of the community of Hershey, the dairy farmers who depended on Hershey to buy their milk were panicking. The strikers promised to reopen the creamery, so that the milk could still be processed and not go to waste, but then the milkmen never went to collect the milk from the farms.
On April 7th, the peaceful part of the strike came crashing to a halt as farmers and non-striking employees stormed the factory. Violence broke out, with some using improvised weapons to attack the strikers. The New York Times coverage described it as "an old-fashioned walloping". Several people were injured, and all three of the main union organizers were beaten badly, one with a baseball bat. Some of the strikers suspected that company higher-ups had planned the whole thing by hiring strikebreakers and egging on the farmers. This has never been proven nor disproven, but it was clear to everyone what had to be done. The strike ended so that nobody would get killed.
History - even the history of chocolate - isn't always sweet.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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