For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Read online

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  Time Capsule: The Golden Age of Quackery

  I’ve been experimenting on a little preparation—a kind of decoction nine-tenths water and the other tenth drugs that don’t cost more than a dollar a barrel. . . . The third year we could easily sell 1,000,000 bottles in the United States—profit at least $350,000—and then it would be time to turn our attention toward the real idea of the business. . . . Why, our headquarters would be in Constantinople and our hindquarters in Further India! . . . Annual income—well, God only knows how many millions and millions!

  —Colonel Beriah Sellers, in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, 1873

  There’s no question that The Coca-Cola Company loves its own history. As if to prove the point, in 2007 it spent $38 million on its new Atlanta museum, which indoctrinates over a million Coca-Cola-drenched tourists yearly into the company’s high-tech version of its past. The press release for its predecessor called the museum a “fantasyland,” and, in more ways than one, it is just that. The red-clad young guides (called “ambassadors”) assure visitors, for instance, that Coca-Cola never had any cocaine in it.

  The museum carries on a long-standing company tradition. The Coca-Cola saga has been reverentially preserved and nurtured over the years. John Pemberton, who invented Coca-Cola in 1886, has been depicted by the Company as a poor but lovable old Southern root doctor who stumbled upon the miraculous new drink. Although Coca-Cola was supposedly born in a humble three-legged kettle in Pemberton’s backyard rather than in a manger, the story is treated as a kind of Virgin Birth. Coca-Cola’s first archivist, Wilbur Kurtz, described the moment: “He leaned over the pot to smell the bouquet of his brew. Then he took a long wooden spoon and captured a little of the thick brown bubbling contents of the pot, allowing it to cool a moment. He lifted the spoon to his lips and tasted.” Pemberton’s hard work and perseverance in finding just the right taste finally paid off with a stroke of luck when the syrup was inadvertently mixed with carbonated rather than plain water. The customers loved the effervescent drink and smacked their lips in satisfaction.

  From that point on, according to Company legend, the drink’s future was assured. Of course, it needed a little help from Asa Candler, who purchased the formula as Pemberton was dying, advertised it widely, and quickly became the wealthiest man in Atlanta. By the early 1900s, the drink’s phenomenal rise to fame was repeatedly called the “romance of Coca-Cola.”

  This official version of events is a myth, however. John Pemberton was not an uneducated, simple root doctor. He did not brew the drink in his backyard. More importantly, far from being a unique beverage that sprang out of nowhere, Coca-Cola was a product of its time, place, and culture. It was, like many other such nostrums, a patent medicine with a distinct cocaine kick.

  One element of the myth rings true, however. The chances of Coca-Cola’s success were about as remote as Colonel Sellers’ “decoction.” Twain’s passage was an uncannily accurate prophecy of Coca-Cola’s future, however. Today, Coke is the world’s most widely distributed product, available in more than two hundred countries, more than the United Nations membership. “OK” excepted, “Coca-Cola” is the most universally recognized word on earth, and the drink it characterizes has become a symbol of the Western way of life. How, in a century-plus, has a fizzy soft drink, 99 percent sugar water, attained such an astonishing status? Conditions in late nineteenth-century America largely determined its future.

  A NATION OF NEUROTICS

  During the Gilded Age, America’s metamorphosis from a land of farmers into an urbanized society of mills and factories was arguably the most wrenching in its history. With the Civil War as a catalyst and turning point, industrialization and a virtual revolution in transportation marked the emergence of a distinctively American brand of capitalism—one that idealized individual hustle and relied heavily upon advertising and newspapers to spread its gospel. The railroad became the symbol and engine of powerful change, allowing the creation of national markets for goods.

  The pace was so overwhelming that it generated concern over a new disease characterized by neurotic, psychosomatic symptoms. One writer of the era diagnosed it as the fruits of “an industrial and competitive age.” George Beard labeled the disease “neurasthenia” in his 1881 book, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences.* Beard attributed the new malady to the dislocations wrought, both socially and economically, by “modern civilization.”

  The steam engine, he noted, which was supposed to make work easier, had instead resulted in more frantic lifestyles and in overspecialization, “depressing both to body and mind.” In general, Beard noted, overwork, the strain of economic booms and busts, repression of turbulent emotions, and too much freedom of thought contributed to a high state of nerves. Finally, “the rapidity with which new truths are discovered, accepted and popularized in modern times is a proof and result of the extravagance of our civilization.”

  Coca-Cola emerged from this turbulent, inventive, noisy, neurotic new America. It began as a “nerve tonic” like many others marketed to capitalize on the dislocations and worries of the day. After surviving an early history rife with conflict and controversy, this lowly nickel soft drink became so much a part of national life that by 1938 it was called “the sublimated essence of America.”

  The description is still apt. Coca-Cola remains emblematic of the best and worst of America and Western civilization. The history of Coca-Cola is the often funny story of a group of people obsessed with putting a trivial soft drink “within an arm’s reach of desire.” But at the same time, it is a microcosm of American history. Coca-Cola grew up with the country, shaping and shaped by the times. The drink helped to alter not only consumption patterns but attitudes toward leisure, work, advertising, sex, family life, and patriotism. As Coca-Cola continues to flood the world with its determinedly happy fizz, its history assumes yet more importance.

  During the late 1800s, however, no one, including the inventor of Coca-Cola, had such grand visions. Coca-Cola was just one in a flood of other patent medicines foisted upon the public by hopeful marketers during the golden age of quackery.

  THE PATENT MEDICINE SHOW

  Clever promoters made fortunes in patent medicines.* Popular since the Declaration of Independence, these nostrums were peddled by the pioneers in the field of advertising. Patent medicine ads paid for the rapid growth of the American newspaper, whose columns, even before the Civil War, were half filled by their claims. The period after the war saw an exponential growth in the industry, due partly to wounded veterans who had acquired a self-dosing habit.

  There were also other reasons for the spectacular postwar success of patent medicines. The railroad, steamship, telegraph, and other communication revolutions made a national and even international market increasingly viable. Waves of immigrants brought new consumers to the country. The American population grew from fifty million in 1880 to ninety-one million in 1910—and eighteen million of those were immigrants. The newcomers did not have much money, but they would often venture a dollar for a “cure.”

  Another reason for the boom in self-dosage was that the medical profession had not caught up with the industrial revolution. Many doctors killed as many patients as they cured, so cheap nostrums sometimes provided a safer alternative. Furthermore, there were few doctors in rural areas, forcing the country folk to use patent medicines. Finally, patent medicines were often taken to relieve the symptoms of overeating and poor diet, which went hand-in-hand. Remedies for upset stomachs were the most common class of medicament during the late nineteenth century, which is not surprising, given the starchy diets and heavy meat consumption. Part of Coca-Cola’s appeal to Asa Candler, for instance, was that it was supposed to relieve indigestion.

  A TORRENT OF ADS

  By the 1880s and 1890s, the amount spent on advertising such tonics and concoctions reached stunning proportions. St. Jacob’s Oil spent $500,000 in advertising in 1881. By 1885, some half-dozen nostrum makers were sp
ending over $100,000 annually on ads. Ten years later, Scientific American announced that some drug advertisers were spending a million dollars a year, adding that the creator of Carter’s Little Liver Pills “cannot spend the money he is making” and that “judicious advertising has made it possible for . . . W. T. Hanson Company [to spend] $500,000 on Pink Pills for Pale People.” One promoter noted that “without advertising, I might have made a living, but it was advertising that made me rich, and advertising a very simple commodity at that.”

  The first national trade magazine for advertisers, Printer’s Ink, was launched in 1888, just two years after the invention of Coca-Cola. In its fifty-year retrospective issue, the magazine credited the patent medicine industry with first recognizing the importance of trademarks and ubiquitous advertising, adding that “it was not until the twentieth century had fairly begun that manufacturers as a whole were inclined to listen to the broad proposition that advertising as such was a potentially profitable sales tool.” One of the reasons that patent medicines could afford such extravagant advertising, of course, was their remarkable profitability. For a dollar, a manufacturer often sold a bottle that cost less than a dime to produce. It was easy for him to see the wisdom of spending another ten cents a gallon on advertising. He had no major capital investment, little overhead, and few employees.

  Besides, he knew that, without extensive ads, few would buy his medicines, which were not essential products. He had to be a salesman. No wonder the nostrum peddler dominated advertising expenditures during the Gilded Age. Patent medicine makers were the first American businessmen to recognize the power of the catchphrase, the identifiable logo and trademark, the celebrity endorsement, the appeal to social status, the need to keep “everlastingly at it.” Out of necessity, they were the first to sell image rather than product. At the same time, the stodgy producers of dry goods or sewing machines, with substantial capital investment and less of a margin, didn’t see the need to advertise. It was beneath their dignity, a waste of good money. People needed what they had to sell, and, if they advertised at all, it was simply to list their prices. Besides, the outrageous nostrum ads were giving advertising a bad odor, as Printer’s Ink pointed out: “Most patent medicine advertising was shamefully and flagrantly disreputable in its fake selling claims. Absolute remedial powers for cancer, consumption, yellow fever, rheumatism and other afflictions were widely claimed for preparations that had no efficacy for even the mildest ailment.”

  The torrent of ads was not confined to newspapers, however. The cure-all makers flooded the marketplace with all kinds of novelties in order to keep their trademarks highly visible. They specialized in items that got repeated use, such as clocks, calendars, matchbooks, blotters, pocket knives, almanacs, cookbooks, mirrors, or cards. Every time a consumer wanted to know the time or date, light a cigar, or look up a recipe, he or she was confronted with a reminder that Pale Pink Pills were good for the blood or that Coca-Cola relieved fatigue and cured headaches.

  Meanwhile, outdoor advertisers strove to outdo one another. Men with sandwich signs walked stiffly by on busy sidewalks. Banners were strung across Main Street. At night, the bill poster plastered every available surface with advertisements, layering over a competitor’s work of the night before.

  Sign painters were dispatched to paint huge trademarks where travelers were most likely to let their eyes wander. We tend to think of the Victorian era as a gracious period in which nature was unspoiled, but it wasn’t unusual for a patent medicine advertiser of the era to clear-cut an entire mountainside so that he could erect a mammoth sign for Helmholdt’s Buchu, visible from a train window.

  In May of 1886, the very month that Coca-Cola was invented, one writer vividly described the desecration of the landscape, saying that a traveler might admire “the undulating country, breathing Spring from every meadow and grove and orchard”—that is, “if he could see a single furlong of it, without the suggestion of disease.” It was not enough, he continued, that fences and sheds were defaced. “Enormous signs are erected in the fields, not a rock is left without disfigurement, and gigantic words glare at as great [a] distance as the eye is able to read them.” Viewing “sign overlapping and towering above sign,” the revolted traveler “turns away, shuddering, from the sight.” Consequently, the critic concluded: “We cannot complain if the intelligent stranger from foreign lands should, instead of ‘the scenery,’ write ‘the obscenery of America.’” One enterprising nostrum maker even offered to help pay for the Statue of Liberty, which was completed in 1886, in return for using the base as a gigantic advertisement.

  William James, psychologist and philosopher, reacted violently to newspaper ads when he returned to the U.S. after several years abroad: “The first sight of the Boston Herald . . . made me jerk back my head and catch my breath, as if a bucket of slops had suddenly been thrown into my face.” In 1894, he wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the Nation in which he spluttered in outrage at “this truly hideous feature of our latter-day life,” complaining that “this evil is increasing with formidable rapidity. . . . Now [these advertisements] literally form the principal feature of our provincial newspapers, and in many of the ‘great dailies’ of our cities play a part second only to the collective display of suicides, murders, seductions, fights, and rapes.”

  James tellingly added that “if a justification of these advertisements be sought, absolutely nothing can be alleged save the claim that every individual has a right to get rich along the lines of his own inventiveness.” Most Americans were willing to put up with fraud and hype in the name of individual rights and democracy, particularly if there was money to be made. Even a scoundrel was admirable, if he was rich enough.

  THE RIGHTEOUS PURSUIT OF WEALTH

  The patent medicine tycoons, along with industrial titans like Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt, stood at the apex of a new social order. By 1890, there were over four thousand American millionaires, and the number was growing rapidly. Their greatest problem, with no income or corporate tax, became not how to make money but how to spend it. The millionaire was the envied hero of the age, and the great new American religion had a fat dollar sign in front of it. Carnegie himself was busy spreading what he called the “Gospel of Wealth.” Russell Conwell, a Philadelphia clergyman and the first president of Temple University, made a tidy living by delivering his “Acres of Diamonds” speech over three thousand times, explaining that God loves those who produce wealth. “I say that you ought to get rich,” Conwell told his audiences. “To make money honestly is to preach the gospel.”

  At the same time, the plight of the poor was becoming increasingly desperate. While the rich industrialists raked in the money, eight-year-olds labored in their factories for ten cents a day. When confronted with the appalling gap between the haves and have-nots, men like Carnegie answered with a modified social Darwinism, piously invoking the “survival of the fittest.” Such were the unfortunate but inevitable results of progress. “The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization,” wrote Carnegie. This situation, he asserted, was “not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is . . . essential for the progress of the race.” Fortunately, Carnegie said, he regarded it as his Christian duty to help lift up the lower classes through wise philanthropy.

  This attitude was not limited to Yankees. Mark Twain noted a new breed of Southerner—“brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion.” Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution and spokesman of this New South, informed the New England Club in 1886 that “we have wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon’s line used to be,” and that the “Georgia Yankee” was the equal of the Northerner. One Georgian of the period matched Conwell in exhorting his fellow Southerners to make money their priority: “Let the young south arise in their might and compete with [Yankees] in everything. . . . Get rich! if you have
to be mean! The world respects a rich scoundrel more than it does an honest poor man. Poverty may do to go to heaven with. But in these modern times. . . . Get rich!”

  Asa Candler, the man who would take Pemberton’s Coca-Cola and parlay it into a fortune, was not so blatant, but in his speeches he clearly equated religion, capitalism, and patriotism. Candler’s drink, Coca-Cola, came to symbolize that trio. In large measure, Coca-Cola’s success stemmed directly from advertising which made it an emblem of the good things in America, a kind of secular communion drink. Like his brother Warren, a Methodist bishop, Asa Candler would send out his own brand of capitalistic missionaries.

  By the 1880s, however, most who attempted to make a quick buck through patent medicines were disappointed. Fortunes had indeed been made, and “the spectacle of some of the medicine kings churning about the high seas in their palatial steam yachts” (as one contemporary writer put it) caused an inordinate number of would-be entrepreneurs to test the waters of the trade. In doing so, they usually lost whatever small savings they had.

  On April 25, 1886, a New York Tribune reporter published a long article describing the saturated market for patent medicines. The “prevailing opinion,” he said, was that the nostrum racket was “lucrative above all others” and that all who ventured into the field automatically became millionaires with yachts and racehorses. On the contrary, he pointed out that only 2 percent of the latest patent medicines were even remotely successful. Thus, when Coca-Cola was first marketed two weeks after this article appeared, it faced long odds.

  THE SODA FOUNTAIN DURING THE GILDED AGE

  Coca-Cola became the first widely available product that was at once both a patent medicine and a popular soda fountain beverage. In retrospect, it seems a natural combination. After all, once Joseph Priestly learned to make what he called “fixed air” in 1767, artificially carbonated water was sold as a tonic and medicine, a cheaper form of naturally carbonated mineral water, which had been regarded as healthful since Roman times. An enterprising French immigrant, Eugene Roussel, first added flavors to his soda water at his Philadelphia perfume shop in 1839, and soon other soda fountains were serving orange, cherry, lemon, ginger, peach, and assorted other flavors. Because of the early medicinal legacy, the fountains formed a traditional part of drugstores, which in turn became social centers.