THE SPINACH KING: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, by John Seabrook
When he was 14, John Seabrook’s father — he shared the author’s name but went by “Jack” — was made the “grader” at the family’s enormous, industrialized farm in southern New Jersey. It was 1931 and Jack’s own indomitable father, C.F., having failed at a contracting business, had returned to farming, his original profession, and had enlisted his offspring in the work; Jack’s task was to determine the value of the company’s peas, string beans and spinach.
The job demanded discernment. While peas and string beans could be graded using calipers, the hearty green leaves of the spinach plant required an eye capable of judging “color and crispness” and sensitive hands to feel how “clean the crop was.”
This anecdote sticks in the mind, anchoring one of two central figures in Seabrook’s keen, sophisticated and appealing new book, “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.” A longtime New Yorker staff writer, Seabrook has been circling the book’s central concerns — social class, various kinds of capital and aesthetic value — his entire career. His previous works, “The Song Machine,” “Flash of Genius,” “Nobrow” and “Deeper,” delve into the worlds of technology, music and science, but a through line remains visible.
Here, Seabrook brings the ease and command of New Yorker-style reportage to bear on his own family. It’s a shocking but juicy story, one he tells by harnessing his gift for quietly observing details that lesser writers would miss and then deploying them with the energy of a man who has skin in the game.
The Seabrook family’s saga in America (they are not the South Carolina Seabrooks) began in 1867, when the author’s great-great-grandfather purchased 13 highly leveraged acres of “scrubby wilderness” in Vineland, N.J. This was the start of the Seabrook farming enterprise, and by the early 20th century, the family had become a noted local purveyor of dairy, meat, and a broad assortment of fruits and vegetables.
As Seabrook discovers, the operation’s iconic logo and name served as a wholesome public-facing front for the family’s lucrative but frequently shady business dealings, which required social and political savvy more than knowledge of the weather. It’s not that the Seabrooks weren’t farmers. From irrigation at scale to quick-freezing and boil-in-the-bag vegetables, they were growers and innovators, with vast tracts of cultivated land and a massive processing plant; at the farm’s peak, in the mid-1950s, it was the biggest in the state, employing as many as 8,000 workers. Yet that’s not all that made them rich.
C.F.’s triumphs and failures in society (he learned to fit in with the upper classes but was never entirely comfortable there) and business (among other extraordinary projects, he signed a contract with Stalin to pave 10,000 miles of roads in Russia that soon crumbled) might easily carry the book. But Seabrook’s discovery of his grandfather’s practice of segregating and mistreating Black workers, supporting Klan activities, exploiting the labor of Japanese Americans released from internment camps, and engaging in violent strikebreaking and wide-ranging corporate malfeasance blends with antisemitic conspiracy theories to form a depressingly familiar American success story.
There are many moving parts to this book, but they ultimately coalesce around the moment in 1912 when the formidable C.F. cheated his own father, Arthur, out of his share of the family company. Seabrook carefully dismantles the fallout from the greed and jealousy behind this “original sin,” tracing the various ways it poisoned subsequent generations. For the author, getting at the unsettling truth of a history that involves not only rampant corporate abuse but the intrigue of a locked safe and mysterious Swiss bank accounts is made all the more painful because of his citrus-scented father’s meticulously constructed, utterly impenetrable WASP armor.
As fascinating a figure as the terrifying, possibly sociopathic C.F. is, it’s Seabrook’s playboy father, Jack, who infuses the narrative with an irresistible frisson. Jack’s fetish for suits put me in mind of his early experience grading spinach. As Seabrook describes it, what at first glance “appeared to be the well-appointed closet of a successful businessman” turns out to be a tiny fraction of “a much larger collection of suits, hanging on a dry cleaner’s motorized apparatus” that extends “through the ceiling of the second floor” of his parents’ house in Salem, N.J., and “into the attic.” From “drape suits, lounge suits and sack suits, in worsted, serge and gabardine,” to the “glen plaids and knee-length loden coats,” these garments are the most visible evidence of one man’s drive to inhabit a world far removed from the grubby reality of farm work.
Jack’s suits were deadly serious; beyond seeing him safely through the social perils of his Princeton education, the clothes carried him into the most rarefied echelons of American and British society. The stories of blond, tall, handsome, impeccably dressed Jack cavorting with Zsa Zsa Gabor’s sister Eva; parked at his table at the “21” Club with his son; flirting at Grace Kelly’s wedding with the lovely reporter who became his second wife; selecting a bottle from his vast cellar of French wine; fussing over his preciously expensive hobby of four-in-hand coaching (along with a team of white Lipizzaners, he maintained a collection of “buggies, buckboards, gigs, surreys, male and lady’s phaetons, park drags, road coaches and … horse-drawn sleighs”) — all make for captivating reading.
The alluring froth generated by Jack’s society excesses is dampened by the pall of intergenerational strife as well as by what the author calls pure “graft” and “a legacy of cheating,” which taint both the family money and the considerable wealth Jack accrued independently after his father disinherited him. This contaminant spreads, marring all the pretty things Seabrook writes so beautifully about. Although nasty old C.F. treated his son with contempt, Jack viewed him until his own Fox News-watching end as an “all-powerful figure who could do no wrong.”
As for Seabrook and Jack, they continued to politely sip their martinis and decant their wine, the familiar WASP family ritual quietly doing its damage, quite nearly to the last.
THE SPINACH KING: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty | By John Seabrook | Norton | 346 pp. | $31.99
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