Bitter Chocolate (11 page)

But the anti-slavery activists just wouldn't let up, and the Cadburys presented an easy target. The conservative newspapers had a field day watching them struggle on the horns of their moral dilemma. The Cadburys fell back on the justification that they were conducting their own investigation. In fact, Joseph Burtt, the keen and affable researcher who now spoke a smattering of Portuguese, had departed for Africa just as Nevinson was returning, in June 1905. The two investigators actually crossed paths in Africa, Nevinson departing while Burtt was arriving. Nevinson thought Burtt was a decent enough chap but entirely too impressionable and “about the youngest man of 43” he'd ever met. Nevinson concluded that Burtt was out to whitewash the slave system—even before he'd seen it—as the best possible arrangement for poor Africans:
“Thinks the plantations greatly increase human happiness and so on,” Nevinson wrote in his diary.

While the Cadburys urged patience and dismissed Nevinson as a blowhard, Burtt spent two years travelling and didn't return to England until 1907. His report took months to write. Once it was completed, the Cadburys kept it from public view until near the end of 1908. Seven years had passed since they'd acknowledged to their board that there was a problem in the cocoa groves of São Tomé and Príncipe, and it was twenty years since the stories of abuse started to fill the pages of the
Reporter
. Even people who supported William Cadbury wondered why it took so long. Clearly, some of the delay can be blamed on the machinations of the Foreign Office since diplomatic contact with Portugal was complicated by political instability, a plague of coups and assassinations in Lisbon. But Britain had problems of its own, and it's safe to assume that the Portuguese missed few opportunities to remind the British of their own moral lapses in southern Africa.

Even though Joseph Burtt had received most of his information in Africa from Portuguese slave traders and cocoa farm owners who had wined and dined the wide-eyed writer during his visit, Burtt still managed to write a damning report. Perhaps the abuse was so widespread and so flagrant that even someone eager to please the Cadburys couldn't avoid being moved to outrage. Burtt's tone was measured, and his voice lacked the passion of the fiery Nevinson, but his bottom line was the same. He told the Cadburys that Nevinson had been right about everything—except perhaps he had not gone far enough. No matter what the Portuguese wanted to call their system, it was simply slavery by another name.

The conservative British press had been hammering at the Cadburys all along. Now, with Burtt's report, the Tory papers could smell the blood of Liberals and reformers, expecially the moralistic Quakers. The Conservatives weren't so much offended by the evidence of slavery as by the hypocrisy of the other side.
The
Standard
led the charge against the chocolate kings with a damning editorial: “It's not called slavery; but ‘contract labour' they name it now … But in most of its essentials it is that monstrous trade in human flesh and blood against which the Quaker and radical ancestors of Mr. Cadbury thundered in the better days of England.”

The Cadbury family was outraged by the bluntness of the accusation, coming as it did on the heels of a dozen less pointed attacks. They had threatened and coerced newspapers to print apologies and retractions in the past, but this time they decided they would sue the
Standard
. But the Cadburys needed to have one crucial bit of business in place before they could subject their reputation to the scrutiny of the courts.

In 1909, just before the libel trial, William Cadbury declared that he was going off to see the operation in São Tomé for himself. His uncle George urged friends and other newspapers not to report on the Portuguese labour issue for the time being lest it endanger William during his travels. William Cadbury had all the access the Portuguese would allow, which wasn't much. But on this same voyage, he made a side trip, which was, quite possibly, the real reason for his journey. He went to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to investigate cocoa export possibilities there. The first cocoa plants had arrived in the Gold Coast about twenty years earlier and, by the time of Cadbury's visit, the country had the growing capacity to replace São Tomé. The Gold Coast was also a British colony, where the cocoa companies and the British government could conceivably have considerable influence over labour practices. What's more, the Africans themselves were the farmers. All in all, it was a perfect solution to his problem. The Gold Coast would become the source of Cadbury's—and Britain's beans.

When Cadbury returned to England, the Quaker cocoa companies finally agreed to launch a boycott against São Tomé cocoa. The timing was perfect. They had an alternative supply of cocoa. It was the eve of the libel trial they hoped would shut the
Tories up, once and for all. The boycott, they assumed, would strengthen their case against the newspaper.

The trial began on November 29, 1909, and it soon became as much a test of Cadbury's ethics as defamation by the
Standard
. In his book
Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business
, Lowell Satre documents an extraordinary display of legal theatrics. It was a dramatic contest between two of the most accomplished and brilliant lawyers of the time: Edward Carson representing the
Standard
, and Rufus Isaacs representing Cadbury Brothers Limited.

What emerged during six days of testimony and florid oratory from the two barristers was a portrait of a highly principled company brought to moral paralysis for a decade in a genuine confusion of ethics and self-interest. Yes, the company ultimately launched a boycott against São Tomé cocoa—but that couldn't excuse ten years of dithering. William Cadbury could offer few explanations for all the procrastination, except to blame the Foreign Office. He'd been following instructions from important men at Whitehall and he thought he'd been behaving in the national interest. But in the end, the Foreign Office hung him out to dry.

Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, when called to testify, could shed no light on any such arrangement. Much to the astonished chagrin of the Cadburys, Grey claimed he could hardly remember any meetings with the chocolate companies and could offer no explanation as to why Cadbury Brothers had failed to boycott São Tomé years earlier. The Foreign Secretary had been called as
their
star witness.

In the end, the Cadburys had to fall back on their longstanding reputation for fairness and high moral principles over many years of business dealings. In the closing moments of the trial, it seemed that this might be enough. The judge's instructions to the jury urged that, should they find in favour of the plaintiff—that the
Standard
had indeed libelled the chocolate-makers—they
should award “sufficiently substantial damages.” The jury did rule in Cadbury's favour. But the victory was bittersweet. The jurymen awarded damages of “one farthing.”

Henry Nevinson continued to investigate and to rail against the chocolate companies in a campaign that was more advocacy than journalism. In his diary for June 3, 1910, Nevinson recorded a conversation with two cocoa traders who seemed to confirm that Cadbury Brothers had cynically avoided any boycott of the Portuguese until they were satisfied that Gold Coast plantations were ready to meet their needs for raw product. He also wrote that the Fry company seemed to have finalized a huge contract for São Tomé cocoa “the very day before the boycott was announced & continued to draw on it for many months.” During the trial, Cadbury's principal buyer admitted under cross-examination that it would have been “difficult” and “awkward” to obtain beans from anywhere else before 1909, but it was still possible, if one wanted to pay a premium. And that was the fundamental problem: The bottom line in business was, as always, the bottom line.

A number of contemporary scholars, including Satre, have concluded that it was a lack of alternative bean sources and not skepticism over Nevinson's report that made the Cadburys delay action for so long. The appalling corollary is that the Quaker cocoa companies of Britain dragged their feet and dodged the issue for nine years before they finally stopped using slave cocoa.

Despite worldwide condemnation of slavery, and laws against it, as many as eight million Africans died from overwork or were slaughtered by their masters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Uncalculated numbers perished on the Portuguese islands while the Cadburys temporized and stalled. Even after the British companies withdrew, slavery continued on
the islands for many more years, and Angolans were still being forced into labour until the 1950s.

São Tomé was not the most abusive of colonies, nor was Cadbury Brothers the most hypocritical of companies. But Cadbury had elevated chocolate, in the public mind, to a special status—a token of affection, a symbol of simple joy, a sensual yet innocent pleasure. It was Cadbury more than any other chocolate company that had rebranded chocolate and defined its public image. Cadbury's role in slavery and human exploitation was indirect. Their behaviour, compared with that of the pillagers of gold and ivory and diamonds in the Congo and southern Africa, was commendable. But Cadbury's history and its philosophy and its product imposed a higher corporate standard. The company's corporate moral failure left them vulnerable to the jibes of journalists like Nevinson, the mockery of their cynical political opponents and the judgment of posterity: If high-minded Quakers could be tainted by the cocoa business, what realistic hope existed that there could ever be integrity in the world of unrestricted commerce?

M
ILTON
S
NAVELY
H
ERSHEY HARDLY SEEMED DESTINED
for greatness when he was growing up as a poor farm boy on the eastern seaboard of the United States. But then again, this was nineteenth-century America where anything was possible. Milton's great-grandfather had fled persecution in Switzerland in the seventeenth century, along with other people of the Mennonite faith, and he had sought refuge for his family in the New World. The British Quaker William Penn had promised religious freedom for all in his new colony, and the Mennonites, feeling quite at home with the pious Society of Friends, settled among them in Pennsylvania.

Hard-working, dutiful and dour, Milton's mother, Fanny, taught her son that the only pleasure he should seek was that of reading from the Bible and that he should struggle to avoid more frivolous pursuits. But Milton's father had other ideas. Romantic, whimsical and utterly unreliable, Henry Hershey encouraged his son to read widely and question everything. Though born a
Mennonite, Henry was preoccupied with the secular world of the nineteenth century, preferring modern skepticism to the certainties of faith. He read the
New York Times
every day, along with any book that he could find among the cornfields and dairy farms of Derby Church, Pennsylvania.

Henry might still have endeared himself to his purposeful and pragmatic wife if he hadn't managed to squander her resources, and those of her family, on various inventions and get-rich schemes. On the somewhat sensible side, he once tried his hand at planting fruit trees. There were trout brooks and canned vegetables—all worthy ventures that went bust for reasons beyond Henry's control. If his wife felt any goodwill towards his endeavours, she lost it when Henry attempted to invent a perpetual motion machine. Fanny Milton was chronically cross but unable to challenge her husband for his vagaries since he was never around. In addition to his other qualities, Henry had a tendency to wander off, usually returning more broke than when he left.

The Hersheys had one other child—a daughter, Serena. When the little girl died of scarlet fever at the age of four, all of Fanny's and Henry's conflicting hopes and dreams for the future came to rest on young Milton. They bickered constantly about his education, and Henry dragged his son from school to school while Fanny insisted that the boy needed to settle down and learn how to run a farm. She loathed her husband's library, and much later—when it seemed he was finally gone for good—she happily burned all his books. For his part, Henry had nothing but scorn for Fanny's faith, calling his fellow Mennonites “the gray-minded people who cannot rejoice.”

With so much disruption in his schooling, Milton acquired only the most rudimentary reading and writing skills and had no knowledge of the farm business at all. By the time he reached puberty, his parents concurred (one of the few occasions) that the only hope for the young lad was for him to learn a trade. Henry's love for the printed word persuaded him that his son
should apprentice in a newspaper office, but the plan was a disaster. Milton was as unfocused and whimsical as his father and couldn't set his mind to the precise work of typesetting. He managed to jam the machines (deliberately, according to some accounts) and he soon lost his first job. Whatever plan Henry had in mind for Milton after that fiasco, he never got the chance to exercise it. Soon after, Fanny showed him the door, and Henry wandered off to seek his fortune elsewhere.