Milton Snavely Hershey was an American candy manufacturer and philanthropist. Hershey constructed the factory, which became the world's largest chocolate manufacturing plant. He and his wife, Catherine Sweeney Hershey, founded the Milton Hershey School to provide a home and an education for orphan boys. The school was endowed with the major portion of his wealth.
Background
Hershey was born on September 13, 1857 in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the only child of Henry H. and Fannie B. (Snavely) Hershey. His Swiss Mennonite forebears had settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1719, and Hershey was born in his great-grandfather's farmhouse in adjacent Dauphin County, in Derry Township on the site of the later Hershey, Pennsylvania.
His father was a perennial optimist, moving from farm to farm and from city to city promoting petty enterprises, none of them successful; his mother, the daughter of a Mennonite bishop, was a stabilizing influence.
Education
Hershey attended seven schools in eight years, never going beyond the fourth grade level. At the age of fourteen he took his first job, as a printer's devil on a newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but, bored and inefficient, was fired within the year.
With his next position, however, as apprentice to a Lancaster confectioner, he found his life's work. After completing a four-year apprenticeship, Hershey in 1876 went into business for himself in Philadelphia.
Career
Making candy by night and selling it by day, inadequately capitalized and fighting strong competition, Hershey could not make his business pay; by 1882 he had worked himself into a state of exhaustion and had to give up. For a time he worked for a confectioner in Denver, where his roving father had located. Father and son next ran a candy business in Chicago, until the elder Hershey endorsed a friend's bad note. Young Hershey made another start in New York City, but after initial success the venture collapsed in 1886.
Back in Lancaster, Hershey scraped together enough money to begin afresh. In Denver he had discovered that fresh milk, properly used, could give candy a delicious flavor. The fresh-milk caramels he was making in Lancaster pleased an English importer, who gave him a large order, and a local banker, impressed by his determination, provided funds for the equipment and personnel needed to fill it. Success followed quickly; less than three years later Hershey was one of Lancaster's wealthiest citizens.
A highly innovative confectioner, Hershey personally concocted most of his candies. Throughout the 1890's his principal products were caramels, some of them flavored with chocolate which he bought from other manufacturers. In 1893, inspired by German chocolate-making machinery exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair, he decided to produce his own chocolate. Soon he was making not only caramels but a variety of chocolate cigars, miniature bicycles, and other novelties.
Deciding to concentrate on chocolate, in 1900 he sold his caramel business for $1, 000, 000 to his chief rival, the American Caramel Company, and in 1903 began construction of a new factory in his native Derry Township, in the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch dairy country. Through lengthy experimentation, he had perfected his formula for chocolate, and he now began mass-producing five-cent milk chocolate and almond milk chocolate bars--the foundation of his great success. Although he did no advertising ("quality, " he believed, "is the best kind of advertising"), his sales grew rapidly: $622, 000 in 1901; $5, 000, 000 in 1911; $20, 000, 000 in 1921; $30, 000, 000 in 1931; $55, 000, 000 in 1941.
The firm was incorporated in 1927 as the Hershey Chocolate Corporation, but Hershey remained the dominant figure as majority stockholder and chairman of the board. Around his factory Hershey constructed a town, a self-sufficient community that came to include schools, churches, stores, a bank, an inn, golf courses, an amusement park, zoo, football field, and dancing pavilion, all Hershey-owned. He operated his community enterprises with enlightened self-interest.
He insisted that the company store earn only a modest profit, and he rented houses to employees at low rates. In 1930, to provide employment during the depression, he launched a large building program that added to the town, over the next nine years, a community building, a 150-room hotel, a large new school, an office building, a sports arena, and a 17, 000-seat football stadium. Pleasingly laid out, the town of Hershey came to resemble a college community more than an industrial center. Yet, unincorporated and without a mayor or municipal government, it remained entirely under Hershey's paternalistic control.
Along with the amenities of his model town, Hershey's employees received only moderately good wages. Labor organization and labor strife first came to Hershey in 1937, when club-wielding dairy farmers routed a C. I. O. union's sit-down strike for a closed shop. Peace was soon restored, and three years later the Hershey plant was organized by an A. F. of L. union.
He placed the bulk of his fortune, valued at $60, 000, 000, in trust for the Hershey Industrial School (later renamed the Milton Hershey School). So strong was the school's financial position that in 1963, nearly two decades after Hershey's death, it set aside $50, 000, 000 to build the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center at Hershey as the medical school of Pennsylvania State University.
Hershey stepped down from his post as chairman of the board in 1944, shortly after his eighty-seventh birthday. He died a year later in the Hershey Hospital following a heart attack and was buried in Hershey Cemetery.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"One is only happy in proportion as he makes others feel happy and only useful as he contributes his influences for the finer callings in life. "
"The value of our good is not measured by what it does, but by the amount of good it does to the one concerned. "
"Caramels are only a fad. Chocolate is a permanent thing. "
"One is only happy in proportion as he makes others feel happy. "
"Give them quality. That's the best kind of advertising. "
"I didn't follow the policies of those already in the business. If I had, I would never have made a go of it. Instead, I started out with the determination to make a better nickel chocolate bar than any of my competitors made, and I did so. "
"Young man: Be honest; train yourself for useful work; love God. "
"It isn't what you leave your children but how you leave them. "
"I believed that, if I put a chocolate on the market that was better than anyone else was making, or was likely to make, and keep it absolutely uniform in quality, the time would come when the public would appreciate it and buy it. "
"If we had helped a hundred children it would have all been worthwhile. "
"Business is a matter of human service. "
Personality
In appearance, Hershey in his sixties was short, stout, and ruddy-faced, with a small gray mustache. In the judgment of Fortune magazine, he was "disinterested, sincere, and warm-hearted, with a genuine desire to do good to his neighbors. " At the same time he had "the strong will, the ego, and the intellectual limitations of many another self-made man, " and hence wanted to "do things for people rather than supply them with the money to do things for themselves. "
Connections
On May 25, 1898, at age forty, Hershey married Catherine Sweeney, a New York City shop-girl. In 1909 the childless couple decided to house and educate four orphaned boys, a venture which expanded to become a trade school for orphans. As the school grew, vocational training was gradually supplemented by business and college preparatory curricula. Hershey's wife died in 1915.