David Remnick: New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook's new book is about a family business. Not a mom-and-pop store, but a huge operation run by a ruthless patriarch. The patriarch is getting older. He's beginning to fail, but he can't stand the idea of losing his hold on power, especially to the children who stand to take control and inherit the business. This might put you in mind of Succession, HBO's drama that some critics have called one of the best TV programs of all time.

It's even drawn comparisons to King Lear, but the story that John Seabrook tells is about another family, a real one. The Seabrooks of Seabrook, New Jersey. Their frozen food empire was a huge presence in the flat, fertile farmland of South Jersey.

Female Voice: Well, at Seabrook Farms, we too grow vegetables right outside the door, cook and freeze them on the spot. You just boil them, bag and all, and enjoy that homegrown taste again.

David Remnick: John has written about the Seabrook business, his family, and its intersection with American history in his terrific new book, The Spinach King. Now, John, to start at the end of the story, you were a kid when a huge break happened between your father and your grandfather. Your dad was summarily ousted from the family business. How much did you know about what was going on when you were growing up?

John Seabrook: It actually occurred the year I was born, and so I grew up in this rubble of this destroyed relationship, but I never really understood what caused the explosion. My grandfather founded Seabrook Farms, which was the frozen vegetable business, and it became a big industry. At its height, it froze a third of all of the vegetables in the United States, including maybe some lima beans that were forced on you as a child.

David Remnick: Yes, we ate them for sure.

John Seabrook: Yes. Well, I was not responsible for the lima beans.

David Remnick: I kind of like lima beans.

John Seabrook: Oh, you do?

David Remnick: I'm the one. [chuckles]

John Seabrook: They're great for freezing, and they're hard to damage when you pick, at any rate. My grandfather was a great industrialist, but my father, who was 40 years younger, came into his own in the business after the Second World War, when the company was moving into a branded post-industrial phase. The family story became the brand story. I think that was really what drove them ultimately apart because no one could live up to the brand story.

David Remnick: The brand story that was being held out--

John Seabrook: The brand story were these clever farmers that started with my grandfather being-- this wasn't true, but the way he represented himself, a self-made man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. The capitalist hero, who then became a kind of almost cartoonish millionaire, because he was a man that started with nothing and really didn't know how to act with money. My father, however, had been born with money. Then my father was able to go to Princeton when my grandfather had never been to high school, so there were all these class conflicts that occurred.

David Remnick: We should tell listeners, we've known each other since we were in college.

John Seabrook: Literally, 19 years old.

David Remnick: I knew there was something called Seabrook Farms. I knew it was at the other end of New Jersey from where I grew up, but how much of this family story, which just has this something Greek or Shakespearean about it, did you tell to your friends? Were you thrilled by it, embarrassed by it? Did you want to not know about it and run away from it? How did you treat it as a younger person?

John Seabrook: Well, I think I probably had all those reactions. I never really wanted to be that guy, the Seabrook that everybody looked at, the son of the prince, the next in line. I hated all of that. I just didn't want people to think of me as any other than I was, and I wasn't that--

David Remnick: Because you didn't carry yourself like that when you were 19. By the way, some young aristocrats do that. We both knew a few.

John Seabrook: Yes, we went to college with them, too. No, I wasn't that person. It's not like the Seabrooks have been here since the Mayflower. My great-grandfather was an immigrant. I think one of the reasons that my grandfather and father were so determined to act like they were upper class is because they were really recently arrived at that status.

David Remnick: It was your great-grandfather, Arthur Seabrook, who was the real farmer, and he cultivated the land and started the farm.

John Seabrook: Right.

David Remnick: It's your grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, who was the so-called Henry Ford of agriculture, who saw himself as a higher thing, as an engineer.

John Seabrook: Yes, a builder.

David Remnick: He was a modernizer, and he built this vegetable factory.

John Seabrook: Right.

David Remnick: Was that something unique in American agricultural history?

John Seabrook: It was quite unique at the time. The interesting thing about my family is they line up quite neatly with these major changes in the American economy. You had my great-grandfather, who was an agricultural farmer at a time when agriculture was a big part of our economy. He had my grandfather, who mechanized and industrialized in the early 20th century, when the country as a whole was doing just that. He was trying to make an industry out of farming, but the agricultural part of it never really changed.

It still needed thousands and thousands of workers to do the work that the machines couldn't do. Then when frozen food became a thing in the '30s, he worked with Clarence Birdseye. There really was a person. It wasn't just the brand. He had invented this process for freezing fish and poultry, but he couldn't figure vegetables out because you have to cook them first, it turns out, because if you just try to freeze them, the cells burst. My grandfather said, "Oh, I can figure that out," and so he basically became the vegetable freezer for Clarence Birdseye, licensed the patents. This was in the '30s.

David Remnick: How was your grandfather talked about in your family with your father?

John Seabrook: The thing about my father is that he never ever challenged my grandfather. I didn't know the kind of abuse that my father had suffered, psychological, emotional abuse, until he died and left me these papers that detailed that abuse. Most people who had to endure that kind of thing from their father, their soul would be destroyed. He was this all-powerful man who just tried to humiliate his son in every possible way.

David Remnick: Why?

John Seabrook: As one reader said, it's the blood sport called filial love.

David Remnick: [laughs]

John Seabrook: There was something in my family. "We're going to throw you in the deep end of the water, and we're going to see if you learn how to swim. If you do, great. You're a Seabrook."

David Remnick: Well, God, your father was one of three sons.

John Seabrook: One of three sons. They were all trained as engineers.

David Remnick: I'm thinking Succession here.

John Seabrook: It's Succession with spinach. My very first attempt at this was a New Yorker piece I wrote 30 years ago.

David Remnick: 30 years ago, right.

John Seabrook: At that point, I thought I was still writing the heroic story of the Seabrooks with a couple of bad episodes.

David Remnick: There was certain glamour, too. There was a glamour to your parents. Your father was incredibly beautifully-dressed.

John Seabrook: He was a wonderful dresser. He was a very handsome man. He was 8 inches taller than his father. I think possessions like wine and clothes were very important to both my grandfather and my father to define them as members of a certain class. They didn't feel that secure in belonging to it. I also think that with wine, wine and alcohol was another one of these tests that you don't know you're taking. Really, it was a test of, "Can you hold your liquor?" My father started proffering alcohol when I was 13 years old. When I think about that and my children, I'm astounded by the fact that he wanted me to start drinking at the age of 13. I think it was this kind of "we'll see what he's made out of" test, and I failed. I flunked. [laughs]

David Remnick: You've written about this really movingly in The New Yorker that you got over drinking. You had to really confront it.

John Seabrook: Confronting the fact that this heritage of mine was toxic, and yet it was deeply embedded in my daily life. It was almost like I had to give up on my heritage, on my family. Alcohol was part of being a Seabrook. I think if I hadn't confronted the drinking and the role that my family played in it, I don't think I would have been able to write this book.

David Remnick: Now, John, Seabrook Farms had this aura of being a family business, but this wasn't just your dad and his brothers sorting vegetables. Thousands of people work there on this huge piece of land in South Jersey. Describe the workforce at Seabrook Farms.

John Seabrook: Another interesting thing about this story is that Seabrook, New Jersey, became a nexus for the immigrant experience in the 20th century. Early 20th century, you had Southern Italians, a lot of Southern Italians coming. The '30s, you had migrants coming up from the Jim Crow South. In the '40s, the Japanese Americans, who were interned in the concentration camps, were released to work at Seabrook Farms.

Then, after the war, Estonians, who had been placed in displaced persons camps, were sponsored by my grandfather to come. They all lived in housing that he owned and rented to them. It was this town called Seabrook Farms, and there were 5,000, 6000 people, so it was a substantial town that my grandfather had a caste system. People who were whiter got nicer houses. Violence was used to suppress any kind of dissent.

David Remnick: What kind of violence?

John Seabrook: Well, in 1934, the incredibly brave African American workers decided they'd had enough, because every time the slack season came, even though they had seniority, the Black workers would be released first. They said, "We're not going to stand for this anymore." Labor unions never really had much luck with farm workers because they didn't stay in one place for long enough, and they didn't really pay dues.

Where these workers had an advantage was the produce is seasonal. It's depending on getting to the market in a timely fashion. They staged a strike at the beginning of the beet harvest, when they really needed to get these beets out of the ground. They needed these workers to do it. My grandfather brought in vigilantes. The New Jersey KKK was involved. It was days of violence covered on the front page of The New York Times. Amazingly, I had never heard about this story until I was 34 years old.

David Remnick: I remember you're telling me about it some years ago, and the shock of learning about it either through combing through archives or--

John Seabrook: The Nation had covered it. My friend, Katrina vanden Heuvel, sent me a clipping from 1934 that detailed the violence--

David Remnick: How did you react to that?

John Seabrook: I'm still trying to process the fact that my family were involved in this horrendous labor violence against people who were really just trying to get a fair shake. Part of the reason I wrote the book was to represent those people, because not only were they mistreated and abused in the strike, he basically wrote the Black workers out of the history of the company. I've written them in with this book where they belong. That was one of my prime motivations.

David Remnick: It was never spoken of at home with your dad?

John Seabrook: Never. Never a word was spoken of it.

David Remnick: John, at what point of Seabrook Farms go out of your hands and fail? Because your father, he was a businessman till the very end, but not with Seabrook Farms.

John Seabrook: Right, so my grandfather sold the business in 1959 in order to avoid my father basically taking it over and running it. My father had had enough. He didn't want to work for somebody else. He wanted to own the company with his brothers. Not only did my grandfather sold the company, but he disowned them. After he died in 1964, my father and his brothers pursued a lawsuit to try to get the will thrown out. It was the documents that came from that lawsuit, which documented just how crazy my grandfather was, that he then passed along to me when he died in 2009, which became an important source for this book.

David Remnick: You were born in '59. Your grandfather died in '64. Do you have any memories of him, or was it just kind of--

John Seabrook: I was taken to meet him once. It was a very scary encounter. He was sunk into dementia, I believe, at that point. There was always a question of whether his behavior was partly physically caused and what was psychologically caused. I remember the really mean mouth he had. He had these lips pressed together, corners turned down. He was dressed in a suit, sitting on the floor. At first, I didn't know what to do, but he had these Tinkertoys in front of him. He was building something with Tinkertoys. The nurse said, "Why don't you sit down there and play with your grandfather?" I did, but it was--

David Remnick: You remember that.

John Seabrook: I remember handing him a little dowel, and he put it in. That was the only time I ever saw him.

David Remnick: How did your parents feel about you beginning research on this book and writing about the family, which you did some?

John Seabrook: Right.

David Remnick: Now, it's in its full flower.

John Seabrook: Well, I did it when they were alive. My mother hated it, absolutely, even though my mother was a journalist. She absolutely hated it whenever I wrote about my family. She hated when I wrote that original piece here. I think she knew what I was going to find out if I kept at it. She knew because she came into this family in 1956, when everything was falling-- She thought she was marrying into this wonderful American aristocratic family. She ended up in a nut house and spent three years in this incredibly vicious succession battle. Then we were exiled about 18 miles away to Salem, New Jersey. I think she just wanted to put it behind her and never think about it again.

David Remnick: You were exiled to school?

John Seabrook: We were exiled to a town about 18 miles away. The house that we lived in was my grandfather's house. When everything fell apart, we were evicted from that house.

David Remnick: You've got two kids at home. What do they know of this story, and how do they take it in?

John Seabrook: Well, I think my son has always been alarmed by the fact that he comes from this line of crazy father-son behavior. I do feel that these traumas are embedded in--

David Remnick: You do?

John Seabrook: I do. They're passed down. I was very influenced by the book Terry Real wrote about how male depression is passed down. I think fathers often have terrible struggles that they had with their father that they don't know how to talk to their sons about. Certainly, in my case, I think it interfered with my relationship with my father. I was determined not to have that happen with my son, and I don't think it--

David Remnick: Do you really see much of yourself in your grandfather and your father?

John Seabrook: No, but I think that there's certain aspects of my father's personality that were formed by his grandfather's treatment of him. A certain lack of trust, maybe. You're not really sure whether you can really count on these family bonds. I think that primal wound, if you will, was always in my father. I think I, if not inherited it, then was certainly influenced by it.

David Remnick: You must feel some sense in some corner of your being, John. As a guy in good health in your 60s with a family, you've been married for a very long time. You're a sane, decent, loving person.

John Seabrook: Thank you.

David Remnick: There must be some sense of profound, I don't know, satisfaction that transcends just the mere publication of a book, which you've done before.

John Seabrook: I feel like I lived the first half of my life with this story, and then I spent the second half of my life writing this story. Now, they're finally complete. There were times when I didn't know I was going to be able to finish this story because it really was very difficult and painful. It takes place over 80 years and three generations. Then I also did it for my daughter, who I've also written about in The New Yorker, who is Black and is adopted from Haiti. When I adopted her, I had a new view on my family. What is my daughter going to think of these people? How am I going to communicate with her about this, the fact that she's got these privileges that are partly based on exploiting Black people?

David Remnick: Have you had that conversation?

John Seabrook: I haven't really had that conversation with her yet, but I'm hoping that the book will help us to have that conversation. She hasn't read it, but I think she's going to listen to it. Dion Graham reads it in the narrated version, so I hope she'll listen to it.

David Remnick: It's an absolutely wonderful book, and thank you for being here, John.

John Seabrook: Thank you, David.

[music]

David Remnick: The Spinach King is the title of John Seabrook's new book. You can find John's writing on a great range of subjects, especially music and the music business, at newyorker.com.

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