THE BUTCHER, THE EMBEZZLER, AND THE FALL GUY

In this nonfiction book, the daughter of a renowned poet attempts to unravel the mystery of her grandfather’s potential involvement in a corporate scandal.

Cherington never met her grandfather Alpha LaRue “A.L.” Eberhart. But she grew up hearing her father, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, tearfully relate the great injustice A.L. once suffered while working for Geo. A. Hormel & Company, then a sizable meat-processing firm and now a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. In 1922, A.L. was asked to resign by the company’s CEO and founder, George Hormel, after it was discovered that the comptroller, Ransome Josiah “Cy” Thomson, had embezzled more than a million dollars. The resignation request was based on a “flimsy pretext”: that A.L. personally borrowed money from the company’s brokers. Meanwhile, there were suspicions “that A.L. had known Cy was stealing.” Eberhart often recounted the tale with furious indignation—in his eyes, the innocent A.L. was “six feet of manhood and not a mark of fear,” while Hormel was a “bastard, all greed for laying father so low.” But the author gradually became suspicious of her father’s penchant for poetic embellishment. She began to question the “family mythology” and to reflect with impressive sensitivity on the allure of such fabricated histories: “We cling to our myths, especially heady and intoxicating ones. We want to believe them as truth. We help in their construction by denying what’s in front of us and filling in holes to reinforce their validity. And in every great myth there are heroes, ones we don’t want to see fail.” She conducted an investigation and uncovered some discomfiting details—her grandfather was likely friends with Thomson, and at one time the comptroller inexplicably paid off one of A.L.’s loans, an incriminating piece of evidence. Moreover, there were rumors in the aftermath of the scandal that A.L. was an accomplice to Thomson’s crimes. Cherington rigorously combs all the available evidence and reconstructs not only the details of the scandal, but also the history of the company and the industry it came to dominate as well as her grandfather’s significant contributions to both. This is a mesmerizing story, one filled with drama and suspense and told with remarkable emotional insights.

A dazzling account that deftly combines crime, drama, history, and introspective remembrance.