Executive Times
		2006 Book Reviews
		Sweet and Low by Rich Cohen
Rating:			***
		(Recommended)
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	Family So much could have gone wrong in Rich Cohen’s family story, Sweet and Low. The fact that Cohen’s mother was disinherited from a fortune created by her father could have injected bitterness in this book. Instead, Cohen uses humor and the description of relatives to allow the characters to tell the story, and for readers to figure out why his mother was cut out of a will. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 11, pp. 75-79: Marvin began working full time at Cumberland Packing in 1956. He had graduated from the University of Vermont, where he studied chemistry. There was some thought of his attending medical school, carrying on the legacy of Uncle Abraham. The dilemma is presented thus: Marvelous comes out of college full of piss and vinegar, rice and beans, salt and pepper, and can do whatever he wants, so stands there like Lady Justice, weighing the two ways of doing good—go to medical school and save sick kids and stuff, or go to the factory. In the end, he decided to ride to the rescue of Ben. “Grandpa didn’t want Marvin to go into the business,” Gladys told me. “When Marvin got out of the army, Grandpa said, ‘Look, I don’t know what this business is going to turn out to be and I might run into a lot of trauma.’ But for whatever reason, Marvin said, ‘I want to be there for you, Pop. I want to be with you.” A great family is built by the will of a patriarch. The rest of the story is just the dissolution of this will, a dwindling of the energy that built the castle, founded the bank, invented the sugar packet. It’s why family firms tend to last no more than three generations. First comes the pioneer, the old man with knowledge of the world. Then comes the son who frets and fears and lays in stores of antibiotics but always for the wrong disease. Then comes the grandson, who either wants to have fun or—and this is more dangerous—wants to outperform Pop. For the third generation, it seems the money will always be there because it always has been. The challenge for a family firm is to devise a way to beat human nature. How does a rich man raise a son who is not a rich man’s son? You might study the old private firms of Europe, because some went public, some went defunct, but some stayed in the family for generations. Take the Warburgs, for example, a Jewish banking family that prospered from the 1700s to the mid-1900s—a reign that ended only with the rise of Hitler.* The patriarch of the Warburgs, Simon von Cassel, emigrated from Hesse to Warburg, a Prussian town near the Rhine, in 1559.** This man appears out of nowhere, like a stranger at the edge of a wood. His progeny would be scattered among the banking capitals of the Continent. By looking at the workings of this firm, which seemed to exist in a perpetual first generation, one can devise a few general rules for the preservation of a family firm. 1. Do Not Observe Primogeniture: Birth order has no significance, as it has no bearing on savvy, intelligence, or leadership. In fact, the first born is like the first batch of pancakes, which often needs to be chucked, not because there was anything wrong with the batter but because the grill was not hot enough. In the end, the best leader might turn out to be the youngest. In other words, don’t bestow leadership; have it be fought for and won. 2. There Is Nothing Immediate About Immediate Family: Do not restrict your search for a successor to the nuclear family. Sometimes the far-flung branches create the dynamos (a cousin raised on a farm in Bavaria, a middle child raised in an English Tudor in Illinois), because the power belongs to the man from the provinces, an outsider who understands the world because he sees it from beyond the glass. The Warburgs searched wide for talent, in one case recruiting the middle son of a disgraced sister who had vanished years before. The children of such outcasts most resemble the patriarch, exhibiting the desperation and drive of the first generation. In spite of any former grievances, the Warburgs promoted such recruits to positions even above their own sons. Because in the end, the firm is the family. 3. Make the Kid Work for It: Even when a future leader is spotted, he should not be given a position of power immediately. After a Warburg finished school, he was sent to a distant city, where his name carried little meaning, and put to work. In this way, the family short-circuited the system and cheated time, creating a pool of first generationers. Unlike my uncle Marvin or cousin Jeff, who have had little experience in the world outside of Cumberland Packing, and so have no real confidence (Marvin is a man telling a joke he himself does not get), the Warburgs would be brought back to Hamburg only after decades with another firm in another town, bringing the knowledge of another office, and, more important, the confidence of one who has made his own way. Shortly after Marvin started at the factory, Ben gave his son half ownership of the company. Ben did this in recognition of the problems just mentioned. By turning Marvin into a partner, he hoped to instill in him the responsibility and terror of ownership. This is the story as the family tells it, anyway: because if you dig through the documents, it gets more complicated. The assets of the business, which is entirely family owned, are in fact divided into two kinds of stock: fifteen shares of class-A voting stock which actually controls the company; several hundred shares of class-B nonvoting stock, or common stock, ownership of which entitles you to dividends but to no real role in the decision making.*** The holder of such stock has about as much say in Cumberland as the holder of Israel bonds has in the foreign policy of Jerusalem. Thus dividing the stock allowed Ben maximum control. He could give without giving, like the dollar on the string, or the trap door in the contract. He handed out nonvoting shares to Marvin, and later to Ira and Jeff, but kept control of the class-A stock: five shares were given to his oldest son, hut the rest he divided between himself and Betty, a distribution that mimics the dynamic of the family. Map the stock and you map the love. Marvin learned the business from the ground up. In the early days, he hung out with the assembly-line workers and mechanics, mostly immigrants from South America and the Caribbean. Many of these men are still at the factory. Whenever a reporter visits, Marvin walks through the plant grabbing workers seemingly at random and asking, “How long have you worked at Cumberland?” Ten years, eighteen years, forty years. He spent his youth with these men, in the break rooms and mixing chambers, laughing and telling stories. He speaks of these as his years at sea, as if he had been Henry V wandering in disguise among his soldiers, or Peter the Great hiking through Europe dressed as a pauper. He says, “Everything I learned, I learned in the school of hard knocks.” But everyone knew who Marvin was: not just the son of the owner but an owner himself. Such a regular guy turns up in the lunchroom the way a screw turns up in the joint. Everything gets quiet and the phony grins appear. Or maybe these men saw Marvin as a great development, a weak son who could be colonized and exploited like a third world country. For Marvin, the years drifted by as a succession of faces, the immigrant factory hands, like the sombrero wearers in a Diego Rivera mural, crashed on the loading bay between shifts, Sweet’N Low packets stacked behind them, the pink packets under the hard blue sky, tenements and smoke stacks, the dirty river, the men laughing and singing their sad songs and passing the reefer and the jug as the gringo son of the boss sits among them, laughing, too, because he is dumb and doesn’t know he is the butt of the joke. Mañana man, mañana. Tomorrow we work, but today, mañana, man! These men, who have worked at the factory for decades, are silent witnesses to the rise and fall of Cumberland Packing. Witnesses? Yes, literally. Marvin arrived at the factory each morning before sunup. He walked the floors and examined the presses and belts. Goddamn, he was a handsome man! Thin hipped, blue eyed. Into gadgets. A genius with his hands. An aristocrat of machines. He took them apart and put them together. He crawled under the belts and climbed into the rafters. He was covered in grease, his face turning above the factory. You can amass a pile of patents awarded to Marvin, each elegant drawing accompanied by a byzantine description of a new formula, a new sugar substitute, a new device. When I think of my uncle in those years, I think of a creative world-tamer, so, sadly, I have come to see his story as one of wasted potential. He was out front for years, soaking up the sun in the family portrait, a golden boy of the postwar boom. Yet this figure of energy and promise spent himself and withered. The flaw in his character ripened. It was part of his talent, the glitch that made the early success possible. It was the focus that gave him the insight into equipment but crippled him when it came to people. *See Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York: Random House, 1993). **The family took its famous name in 1668, when Simon’s great-grandson Juspa-Joseph left Warburg for Altona, a town on the Elbe River, where lie came to be known as Joseph von Warburg, later shortened to Joseph Warburg. ***A 1995 audit estimated the class-A voting stock at $27,620 a share. The total value of the class-B nonvoting stock was estimated at $40 million. The pleasure in reading Sweet and Low comes from Cohen’s character descriptions, his perspective on the joys and perils of a family business, and the revelation of the complexity of close family relationships. Steve Hopkins, June 26, 2006
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