The riveting saga of the Seabrooks of New Jersey, by one of The New Yorker’s most acclaimed storytellers.
The Spinach King
The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
“Having left this material for his writer son, my father must have wanted the story told, even if he couldn’t bear to tell it himself.”
So begins the story of a forgotten American dynasty, a farming family from the bean fields of southern New Jersey that became wealthy and powerful aristocrats—only to implode in a storm of lies. The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the “Henry Ford of Agriculture.” His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.” But the carefully cultivated facade—glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends—hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. A compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge—three decades in the making — The Spinach King explores the author’s complicated family legacy and dark corners of the American Dream.
Seabrook, NJ
This is a book about the Seabrooks and the frozen vegetable empire they created in Southern New Jersey, Seabrook Farms. It chronicles the ingenuity and ambition that built the industrial farm and its brand, as well as the brutality and graft required to keep it going, and the tragic way that the family business ended.
Though the processing plant is long gone, there’s a museum in the basement of the Upper Deerfield Township municipal building with photographs and exhibits that depict the Seabrook Farms at its greatest, in the nineteen-fifties. See the seabrookeducation.org for opening hours.
“As sweeping in its scope as a great novel.”
“This is the tale of a patriarch immolating on the flames of his own ambition and the rotten roots of a great American archetype: the self-made man.”
“Like The Sopranos, it all happened in New Jersey.”
Seabrook Farms’ frozen vegetables and entrees were once a supermarket staple. The creamed spinach, based on a recipe created by C. F. Seabrook's African-American cook, retains a devoted following in the Northeast.
FAMILY
Jack, the youngest of the three brothers, was the son his father chose to succeed him. But the old man couldn’t let go. Jack never told his son the whole story of what happened, but he left a box of papers after he died that allowed the author to piece together the truth his father couldn’t bear to tell himself.
“The story of the family Seabrook is extraordinary. Raw ambition gets it rolling in the unprepossessing farmlands of New Jersey. It becomes a tour of the American 20th Century via frozen vegetables.”
“This is a deeply personal book that is also a tale of 20th century American ingenuity and ambition.”
THE HENRY FORD OF AGRICULTURE
The Seabrooks’ fortunes were intertwined with major twentieth century advances in mechanization, big agriculture, and food technology, in particular the early years of quick-frozen food.
“In The Spinach King, John Seabrook sets out to recount the little-known and fascinating story of the Henry Ford of agriculture—and the revolution in vegetable growing, packaging, processing, and preservation that made boil-in-bag Lima beans the curse of many a 20th-century childhood. Beneath it, however, lies a much more tragic and gripping tale: 'Succession' but make it spinach.”
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LABOR, IMMIGRATION, AND BRUTAL METHODS OF CONTROL
Although the Seabrooks were ingenious engineers, they relied heavily on both field and factory hands to keep their vegetable factory humming. Workers from more than twenty different countries came to Seabrook, as well as more than 2000 Japanese Americans from World War II incarceration camps, and five hundred Estonians from postwar camps in Eastern Europe. Thousands of African-American workers came from the South to work at Seabrook, and many settled there with their families.
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In 1934, some five hundred Black and Italian American workers struck for better pay. The first strike occurred in April, and the second during the beet harvest in late June and early July. A historic heat wave enveloped the region during the latter, a tense eleven-day stand-off that involved Communist Party organizers and the KKK, and ended in the violent crushing of the strike by local police and armed vigilantes.
“As the saying goes, behind every great fortune there lies a great crime. John Seabrook confronts the crimes of his family—political, economic, personal— with unflinching honesty.”
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“The Spinach King is an astonishing tale of American ingenuity, exploitation, and betrayal, pried from the burnished bedrock of family myth by one of the best narrative nonfiction writers of our time.”
GLAMOR
The Seabrooks themselves were the brand’s best ambassadors. They lived like the titled aristocracy the patriarch imagined them to be. Jack Seabrook, who Esquire judged one of the best dressed men in America, picnicked with Grace Kelly at the height of her movie career, and dated Eva Gabor for two years before meeting Liz Toomey on the ship that brought wedding guests and the press to Grace’s marriage to Prince Rainier in Monaco.
“What happens when a fearless investigative reporter turns his sights on his own storied family? In John Seabrook’s case the answer is magic, as he unpacks, artfully and frankly, all that comes tumbling, along with the smoking jackets, from that capacious closet.”
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The riveting saga of the Seabrooks of New Jersey, by one of The New Yorker’s most acclaimed storytellers.
John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades. He is the author of The Song Machine, Flash of Genius, Nobrow and other books. The film ​“Flash of Genius” was based on one of his stories. He and his family live in Brooklyn.
Photo by Ilya Tolstoy, courtesy of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art