Free Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off

engendered also bred overwhelming social problems. But the Rowntrees believed that the state had a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of those who would not—or could not—help themselves.
    Seebohm Rowntree was among a group of moral businessmen who tried to lay the foundations for Britain’s first welfare state. He lobbied government to establish a minimum wage and a system of family allowance payments for all British workers. He was active in the Liberal Party and argued that the appropriate seat of democratic power was the elected House of Commons and not the unelected House of Lords. And he went even further, creating a model community for his own workers at his chocolate factory in York, insisting on a clean, safe working environment. Seebohm believed the shop floor had greater impact on a person’s life than the church. In the Chocolate Works, he established a democratic system for employees to choose their own managers and he insisted on rigorous timekeeping for shift workers and scheduled payment of salaries and benefits. The rights andresponsibilities of workers and their managers were declared by the company in writing.
    Seebohm Rowntree was not the only paternalistic capitalist in the chocolate industry who dabbled in social engineering. Appalled by the general state of working conditions in nineteenth-century British factories, the Cadburys decided to move their operations from Birmingham to a greenfield “Factory in a Garden.” In 1878 the Cadburys bought four and a half acres of land in the countryside and began to build their community on the banks of the river Bourn, establishing a pretty little town they called Bournville.
    The Cadburys’ factory offered landscaped grounds with flowers and green spaces for relaxation, and a dining room with wholesome meals. The idyll on the banks of the Bourn was supposed to inspire employees and create a healthy atmosphere—notions that the Cadburys took from the “garden city” movement. According to the pioneering ideas of the nineteenth-century town planner Ebenezer Howard, the garden city was designed to bring together the best of urban and country life while offering employment to its citizens. While most so-called garden cities eventually became bedroom suburbs of larger urban centres, Bournville was considered a model of the concept, and is a tourist attraction to this day.
    There was, of course, at the heart of all the idealism of Quaker cocoa barons, a heavy-handed moralism. Cadbury Brothers expected its workers to live by a strict moral code, to attend church and to conduct their lives properly. Couples received Bibles when they wed, and newly married women had to leave the factory so that they could raise their families. Pubs and drinking establishments were banned in Bournville.
    The experiment seemed to work, at least from a commercial point of view. The Quakers came to dominate the chocolate industry, despite stiff competition from the rest of Europe. National policies helped. Great Britain encouraged trade bylowering taxes on imported cocoa beans, and soon England was on the cutting edge of international chocolate manufacturing. They were producing the first affordable chocolate—no longer something for the elite.
    But for all the social justice in their words and factories, there was a disturbing blind spot in how these idealistic capitalists saw their businesses. They managed what was near at hand with impeccable regard for human dignity. But it was a different story beyond the horizon of their social conscience, in those dark and distant places where the raw material for their business came from. The humane working conditions enjoyed by their employees, the “Absolutely pure and therefore Best” products purchased by their customers, the consistent strength of their profit figures—all depended on the efforts of people who worked for next to nothing, had hardly any control over their destinies and