#146 Milton Hershey (Chocolate)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Perhaps the only thing about Milton Hershey that is absolutely certain is that he believed in progress.
As an industrialist, a philanthropist, and a social engineer, he was always moving forward. For this reason, the advances made by his company were true to his spirit. In his rare moments of open reflection, Milton Hershey showed his greatest affection for the little fellows whom he hoped to save.
Those were the children that he intended to rescue that came from fractured families.
They were challenged by schoolwork. They knew loneliness, hunger, and want.
In short, they were quite similar to the boy Milton Hershey had once been.
His father had neglected him when he was young, never providing him any real security and comfort.
His mother had struggled to feed her children.
Milton had never been a good student.
As an adult, Milton fulfilled his father's dream of success and acclaim by building a great industry.
With the creation of his utopian town, he heeded his mother's admonitions about serving something higher than the accumulation of personal wealth.
Then, when it came to consider his legacy, he invested his fortune with a poignant flourish.
He would save himself symbolically by rescuing little boys in the straits he knew as a child over and over again in perpetuity.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Milton Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams.
Okay, so before I jump into the rest of the book, I got to tell you about this school that they're referencing, which is the Milton Hershey School. Milton Hershey had one of the most unique ideas that I've ever come across in all the books that I've read for this podcast. And he didn't have any biological children, so he decided to leave his assets.
He starts this orphanage, this school for orphans, as they were just referencing, to help save the poorest and most disadvantaged people in his community, right? But the unique part is he leaves, he sets up the Milton Hershey School Trust, which funds the school, right? And the Milton Hershey School Trust owns a controlling interest in the Hershey Company.
So at the time I'm recording this, they have like $12 billion in assets now, because this has been compounding for over half a century. The school was founded in 1909 So to this day, it's considered one of the wealthy schools in the world. So let me read this highlight from the book. And at the time, this book was published in 2005, so the numbers are a little different. I think at this time, they had an estimate like $5 billion in assets, something like that. But check this sentence out. This blew my mind. Remember, this is a school for poor young people. Only six universities held larger endowments, which meant that the Milton Hershey School was richer than Cornell, Columbia, or the University of Pennsylvania.
And it's not just a school. It's a unique idea. We'll see how we built this company today. But let me just read this paragraph, because again, this book is very unique. This person is very, very unique. It says, MS. Hershey inspired the kind of reverence because he had created not just a great business and an enormous charity, but a complete, prosperous, and self-sustaining community that reflected his idealistic attitudes about everything from commerce to education and architecture. So what they're talking about there is when he was building his chocolate factory, almost like Willy Wonka in the sense that he created his own world there.
This is Hershey, Pennsylvania, the small town that he builds. Remember at the beginning of that excerpt, it says he was an industrialist, a philanthropist, and a social engineer. The social engineering is the building of this town and this closed ecosystem or closed economy, rather, that he created around his business. Okay, so I want to jump to his early life. I want to tell you about his father. One of my greatest fears in life, I would say, would be unrealized ambition. And Henry Hershey, Milton's father, was unrealized ambition personified. So it says, ambitious to a fault, he saw himself as a dramatic figure destined to do great things. He was so independent that he could walk away from his faith and his community without showing a single sign of self-doubt. Lack of formal education prevented him from becoming a writer, which was his first and greatest ambition. A little bit about his personality, and Henry Hershey, Fanny, which is Milton's mother, found a dreamer of the First Order. His independence touched something rebellious in her. She was a free thinker, too. Most of their families and the area they're in in Pennsylvania, primarily the main occupation is farming. Henry hated that. At this time, this is right around the Civil War and after Civil War. There's this giant economic boom that is happening in America, and it's a sentence about Henry seeing other ambitious people succeed in having the ideas, like, why not me? He says in Lancaster, Henry Hershey could see the magic that happened when ambitious men were armed with capital. Henry Hershey chafed at farm life, inevitably looked into the distance for both an escape and a chance to make it big. He was a man of imagination. All he needed was a little inspiration. It appeared oozing out of the ground. So what they're talking about there is a giant oil boom that's happening in Pennsylvania. In 1860s, the one that John D. Rockefeller is going to come and to monopolize. It says while the earth was gushing money in the northern part of the state, Henry Hershey tried in vain to pull profits from a small farm that he had purchased. Given the result, it's hard to imagine he made much of an effort. And that's one of the biggest things, I think, that Milton learned from his father and something that he avoided is that Henry had a thousand schemes and never stuck to any of them. He doesn't even know what the word perseverance meant. He says, just two months and two days after he acquired the place, Henry gave the property back to the seller and agreed to sell everything he owned to pay his creditors. Public auction netted just over $1,100. Within weeks, the Hersheys were on their way to Oil City. At this point, Milton is just a baby. And this is a great description of the mining fever that was taking place this time. They were caught up in the peculiar dynamics of a mining fever. Whether it was gold in California, silver in Colorado, or oil in Pennsylvania, the scenario was the same. A big discovery drew hope-filled men to a desperate race for riches. While most were certain to fail, the real successes of the few kept hope alive for everyone else. It was hard to walk away when you believed that one more pan of gravel or hole in the ground could make you rich.