Inside the ruthless world of New Jersey’s frozen veggie kings

When John Seabrook first discussed writing a book about his grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, and the family’s agricultural empire with his mother, her response shocked him, as he reveals in “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty” (WW Norton). “Don’t write about your family,” she said. “Just don’t.”

Seabrook was perplexed. “Maybe she knew what I was going to find out,” he writes.

In “The Spinach King,” he unearths the story of how his grandfather created one of the world’s largest farming operations, as well as the ugly means that got him there.

“Charles Franklin Seabrook, my grandfather, was the principal dreamer, main promoter, master builder, and autocratic ruler of this industrial farming empire – and ultimately its destroyer,” he writes.

At its peak in the mid-1950s, Seabrook Farms owned or controlled 50,000 acres in southwestern New Jersey, employed 8,000 people, and grew and packed about a third of the nation’s frozen vegetables.

Dubbed the “Henry Ford of Agriculture,” C.F. Seabrook had taken over his father’s farm in 1911, transforming its fortunes with his innovative approach to agriculture. He introduced new irrigation and mechanization and diversified into building roads and railroads.

But it was his pioneering use of quick-freezing vegetables in the 1930s, partnering with Birdseye, that sent Seabrook stratospheric. 

“In our family history, he was Thomas Edison and Henry Ford in the same Dagwood sandwich; a great American who had elevated us from dirt farmers to industrialists in a single generation,” writes John Seabrook.

Seabrook Farms was so successful that a 1959 Life magazine story described it as “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.” 

In 1969, meanwhile, director Stanley Kubrick featured an astronaut in “2001: A Space Odyssey” sucking a Seabrook Farms Liquipack on their way to the moon.

Thousands of workers worked for Seabrook: Russians, Syrians, Germans, Hungarians, Jamaicans, and Japanese Americans, many personally sponsored by Seabrook under the Displaced Persons Act and all paying rent to him.

Workers were divided into three sections; whites, “negroes” and Americans, with each living in separate “villages” and their rent depending on their ethnicity. African-Americans were given the worst accommodation, without water or sanitary facilities, with European immigrants receiving the next level of housing, and Americans the best standard.

It also determined their job.

“In the workplace, Blacks were confined to the field and weren’t allowed to work in the plant at all, to say nothing of management, which was entirely white, Protestant, and male,” adds Seabrook.

Behind the public image of the successful businessman was a man feared by everyone.

“Ambition, energy, and ingenuity drove his rise,” writes Seabrook, “but violence and terror allowed him to maintain control.”

The way he tackled a strike in the summer of 1934 was typical.

Seabrook’s revenues from quick-freezing were slow to materialize, and by that summer, it became necessary to cut wages and lay off workers. 

“That was when the trouble started,” says Seabrook.

With resentment stoked by the workers’ miserable living standards, C.F. Seabrook amassed a vigilante strike force to subdue protests and even enlisted the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to crush the “Communist agitators” holding up operations.

The results were violent and terrifying; the KKK burned crosses outside black workers’ homes.

Belford Seabrook, one of C.F. Seabrook’s three sons, reportedly threw a small bomb into a house with a mother and her children inside. Workers had their homes surrounded with chicken wire to prevent their escape, and tear gas was employed to quell protestors. 

Appeals were made to New Jersey Gov. Harry Moore to declare martial law and send in the National Guard.

While a deal was eventually struck, most black strikers were fired, and others were evicted from Seabrook properties. C.F. Seabrook would, years later, recruit Japanese Americans from World War II incarceration camps, a “model minority who would never challenge the old man’s authority,” writes Seabrook.

Remarkably, John Seabrook had never heard about the strike before he started researching for his book. 

Even his father, John M. Seabrook, who took over the business from his father, had never mentioned it.

“This was arguably the single most significant event in Seabrook Farms history,” he writes. “How could I have remained clueless of an event that convulsed the family, the company, the county, and the state?”

Just as Seabrook Farms prospered during World War I, so it did again in World War II, as quick-freezing came into its own.

But by April 1959, with his health failing, C.F. Seabrook had sold the business. 

By the end of the 1970s, Seabrook Farms was no longer. The plant was demolished, and the land was given to the township in lieu of taxes.

“All that’s left of the world that my bootstrapping grandfather built is a small museum at one end of the basement of the Upper Deerfield Township Municipal Building,” adds Seabrook.

“Here the memory of C.F. Seabrook, his multicultural workforce, and his vegetable factory is preserved, swaddled in gauzy nostalgia.”