For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Read online

  Soda fountains grew increasingly ornate throughout the 1870s and 1880s. They were “temples resplendent in crystal marble and silver,” according to Mary Gay Humphreys, an 1891 commentator, and bore names such as Frost King, the Snow-drop, the Icicle, the Avalanche, or the Aurora Borealis to indicate the frosty nature of their beverages; the decor of others tried for a foreign flavor and were called the Persia, Ionic, Doric, Chalet, Arabia, Rialto, or France, although others, such as the Washington and Saratoga, were more patriotic. These monstrous affairs sometimes cost as much as $40,000 and offered over three hundred beverage combinations. “To supply these,” wrote Humphreys, “the entire side of the wall is dedicated and made glorious with California onyx, rare marbles, and plate-glass.” Sophisticated, jaded consumers demanded an ever-greater variety of beverages. Most of these new flavors were recognizable combinations of old fruit drinks. Coca-Cola, however, was one of several unique blends offering something entirely new. All survived their early years as health boosters and nerve tonics to become recognizable national soft drinks. Unlike the regular run of fountain offerings or soda pop, these concoctions appeared modern and mysterious. Their ingredients were usually secret or came from some exotic country.

  Coca-Cola was by no means the first of these drinks. Charles Hires, a Philadelphia Quaker, marketed Hires Root Beer in 1876 as a solid concentrate of sixteen wild roots and berries.* It claimed to “purify the blood and make rosy cheeks.” Consumers mixed the twenty-five-cent packets into five-gallon batches, making it the first drink to tap the home market. It was finally bottled in 1895.

  Moxie Nerve Food was invented and bottled by Dr. Augustin Thompson of Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1885. Thompson, who had a flair for promotion and strategic untruths, claimed that the drink was made from a rare, unnamed South American plant (said to resemble asparagus, sugarcane, or milkweed and to taste like a turnip) whose therapeutic powers had been discovered by a Lieutenant Moxie, Thompson’s mythical friend. Moxie allegedly cured paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia.

  Charles Alderton created Dr Pepper as a Texas cherry soda fountain drink in 1885, but he soon bottled it as well. Early ads featured a naked, robust young woman cavorting in the ocean, her crotch teasingly covered by a wave, and asserted that Dr Pepper “aids digestion and restores vim, vigor, and vitality.”

  With so many new drinks available, the soda jerks had to become virtuosos at mixing drinks with grace and speed. One of Coca-Cola’s early selling points was that it could be so quickly prepared. As a contemporary article pointed out, “time is everything to the soda water man on a hot day. With new customers crowding and jostling each other to reach the counter, it is money in his pocket to get rid of consumers as quickly as possible.” The busy late nineteenth-century soda fountain first satisfied the American demand for fast food and drink.

  Nowhere were soda fountains more popular than in the South, particularly in the booming, busy, hot town of Atlanta. Though still opened only seasonally, generally from March to November, they garnered a huge business. The adventurous could order a drink called “don’t care,” a mixture of virtually every flavor, usually with a healthy splash of hard liquor to bind it together.* In the following 1886 Atlanta ad (one of the first to mention Coca-Cola), the proprietor specified that his “don’t care” was non-alcoholic. The incredible range of choices ran from innocent fruit drinks to more stimulating “nerve tonics”:

  At the sodawater palace can be found the most cooling, delicious beverages—the ladies’ favorite—ice-cream sodawater, any flavor that is desired.

  Syrups: Wine flavor—Claret, Catawba, grape, sherry, nectar, blackberry, ginger wine, oget, don’t care, prohibition drink—great, everybody must try it to find out what it is—no whiskey . . . French wine of coca from Sinytis, coco-cola, French calisaya wine or nerve food, quiet the nervous system, ginger ale . . . lemons, chocolate, vanilla, cream, pine apple, raspberry, sarsaparilla, wild cherry, ginger, orange, blood orange, banana, coffee, ice tea, black gum, Beermann’s egg phosphate, the most nutritious drink known, Maxey [i.e., Moxie] nerve food, milk shakes. . . .

  The soda fountain was a uniquely American phenomenon. In years to come, Coca-Cola would be advertised as the great national drink, a wholesome, enjoyable product that all classes of Americans could share. The seeds for that image were already germinating, as Mary Gay Humphreys (with no thought for Coca-Cola) pointed out in 1891: “Soda-water is an American drink. It is as essentially American as porter, Rhine wine, and claret are distinctively English, German, and French. . . . The crowning merit of soda-water, and that which fits it to be the national drink, is its democracy. The millionaire may drink champagne while the poor man drinks beer, but they both drink soda-water.”

  The fountain owner, Humphreys explained, made a tidy democratic profit from rich man and pauper alike, selling a drink for a nickel that cost a cent and a half to produce. (Actually, she was overly generous to the fountain owner, because ingredients usually cost less than half a cent per glass.) Everyone was happy, because “for him who drinks it is small cost to see the ‘bubbles winking on the brim,’ to feel the aromatic flavors among the roots of his hair and exploring the crannies of his brain, and to realize each fragrant drop as it goes dancing down his throat.”

  The competition among new soda fountain drinks equaled the cutthroat patent medicine field. One writer of the era estimated that less than one percent of all new drinks ever won a following. “The summer trade in soft drinks is . . . already so loaded down with different sirups* and drinks that dealers will not take hold of a new thing unless it can be demonstrated to possess unusual virtues, or the inventor of it is willing to put a lot of money into advertising it.”

  John Pemberton’s Coca-Cola had little chance. In 1886, the inventor did not have much money to put into advertising, but he struggled to demonstrate his drink’s “unusual virtues.” Pemberton, a perennial optimist despite the many disappointments in his life, clearly believed in his own product. Certainly, much of the credit for Coca-Cola’s survival has to go to Asa Candler, who eventually acquired the product (in an exceedingly questionable manner) and pushed it aggressively. But an equal measure of credit must go to Pemberton and the time and place in which he found himself.

  __________________

  * Curiously, to be diagnosed as a neurasthenic was a sign of good breeding and high status. Only those with refined, delicate temperaments or highly charged brains were subject to the high-status disease.

  * The term “patent medicine” was a misnomer. The more accurate term was “proprietary medicine,” because a hopeful inventor would patent the label or trademark of his nostrum, but never its “secret formula.” To reveal the ingredients would have ruined the mystique, opened the field for imitators, allowed the public to discover how cheaply the product was produced, and, perhaps most important, it would have revealed the amount of alcohol, narcotic, and/or poisons present.

  * At first, Hires called his drink Hires Herb Tea, in keeping with his pacifistic religion. Russell Conwell, the capitalistic evangelist who gave the “Acres of Diamonds” speech, advised him to change the name to “root beer” in order to appeal to hard-drinking Philadelphia miners.

  * The “don’t care” is the ancestor of the “suicide,” popular at 1950s soda fountains. Using Coca-Cola as a base, a suicide called for the addition of every other flavor available.

  * All ungrammatical errors inside quotation marks are the mistakes of the original person being quoted. I make this note here rather than putting [sic] into so many quotations.

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  What Sigmund Freud, Pope Leo, and John Pemberton Had in Common

  The use of the coca plant not only preserves the health of all who use it, but prolongs life to a very great old age and enables the coca eaters to perform prodigies of mental and physical labor.

  —Dr. John Pemberton, 1885

  John Pemberton was obsessed: he wanted to invent the ultimate medicine and the perfect
drink all rolled into one. With it, he would make enough money to fund his dream laboratory, with plenty to spare for his family. He could even donate to worthy charitable organizations. After all, other inventors with far less education or dedication had made fortunes from their patent medicines, most of which cured nothing except imaginary illnesses. But the Georgia pharmacist knew that he was running out of time. By 1879, he was forty-eight years old. The average life expectancy for men was only forty-two, and Pemberton had suffered from bouts of debilitating rheumatism and a mysterious stomach ailment even before he was wounded in the War Between the States. At least he was sure now that he was on the right track, having just read about a wonderful new medicine—a plant with magical properties that grew high in the Peruvian mountains.

  AN ECLECTIC EDUCATION

  Pemberton’s entire life had led to his pursuit of the perfect medicine. Born in 1831 in the tiny town of Knoxville, Georgia, he attended the nearby Southern Botanico Medical College of Georgia when he was just seventeen, where he discovered the wisdom of Samuel Thomson, an unlettered New Hampshire herbal practitioner whose teachings formed the basis for the college curriculum. In 1822, Thomson had published his New Guide to Health; or Botanic Family Physician, Containing a Complete System of Practice, On a Plan Entirely New.

  Thomson’s “complete system” consisted primarily of repeated steam baths and massive doses of lobelia (aptly nicknamed “screw auger” and “hell-scraper”), an herb that caused violent vomiting. Although this sounds horrific, it was actually an improvement over the “heroic” measures (as they were then known) of the period. Doctors generally prescribed a combination of three therapies: bleeding to the point of unconsciousness with a lancet, intentionally raising and then popping huge blisters, or dosing with calomel, whose principal ingredient was mercury. Thomson called these doctors murderers who attacked patients with “their instruments of death—mercury, opium, ratsbane, nitre, and the lancet.” Almost single-handedly, Thomson fomented a revolt of the masses against traditional medicine that one medical expert called “a second American revolution.”

  Even before Thomson died in 1843, however, splinter groups had formed. The egotistical rebel abhorred all formal education, preferring to keep himself as the sole font of wisdom. Nonetheless, various botanico colleges sprang up despite his resistance. Thomsonianism was particularly popular in the South. When the Georgia school was opened in Forsyth in December of 1839, the college president declared that “the eyes of the world are upon us” because they were ushering in “an era in the progress of civilization and a triumph for suffering humanity.”

  By the time Pemberton attended college, most Thomsonian schools had modified their reliance on lobelia and become more “eclectic,” emphasizing other herbal remedies and some traditional medical study. At the age of nineteen, Pemberton graduated in 1850, and, after a brief stint as a traditional Thomsonian “steam doctor,” he went to Philadelphia for another year of schooling as a pharmacist before beginning his real career as a druggist in Oglethorp, Georgia. There, he met Anna Eliza Clifford Lewis, called “Cliff,” whose father was a prominent local plantation owner and dry-goods merchant. They were married in 1853, and the following year Cliff gave birth to their first and only child, Charles Ney Pemberton. Charley was a beautiful, precocious child, but neither of his parents could bring themselves to discipline him, and he was spoiled. For a minimal sum, Cliff’s father sold two slaves to the young couple to help care for the infant.

  In 1855, Pemberton moved to the larger town of Columbus, where he built a thriving practice for the next fourteen years with a number of different partners. Although primarily a druggist, he also practiced some medicine, including eye surgery. His main income, however, came from the sale of various proprietary products with names like Dr. Sanford’s Great Invigorator or Eureka Oil and the occasional medicinal wine, such as Southern Cordial.

  By the spring of 1861, Pemberton wrote Cliff’s mother that business was booming and six-year-old Charley was “learning fast, you would be surprised to hear him spelling and I teach him his Sabbath School book every week.” In urging his mother-in-law to visit, Pemberton described their “delightful home” and the twenty acres of corn, potato, sugarcane, and watermelons they had just planted. He also revealed his love of nature, referring to “the sweetest of all times below, a Sabbath Eve in the Springtime,” adding that “the trees and flowers are blooming in our yard and the air is fragrant with the sweet perfume from them.”

  Less than a month after he described that peaceful scene, Fort Sumter was attacked, and the Civil War began. Pemberton enlisted as a first lieutenant in May of 1862 and eventually organized a home guard of the overaged and exempt into Pemberton’s Cavalry. When the Yankees attacked on April 16, 1865, a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Pemberton was shot and cut with a saber while defending the bridge into town in one of the final skirmishes of the war. This brush with death left him with an impressive scar across his abdomen and chest; his life was apparently saved by the money belt he wore.

  SWEET SOUTHERN BOUQUET AND CARBUNCLE CURES

  Pemberton must have recovered quickly. By November of 1865 he was industriously promoting his drug business again, having just returned from a buying spree in New York City, where he purchased “the largest and most complete stock of European and American drugs, medicines, and chemicals.” Like many hustling Georgia businessmen, he resolved to put the war behind him and didn’t mind seeking the help of Yankees. Later, when his nephew pestered him to tell him how he got his scar, Pemberton refused, telling him he wanted to forget all about the war.

  For the next five years, Pemberton’s partnership with Dr. Austin Walker, a wealthy local physician, allowed him to thrive. He could never save money, however. What he didn’t spend on his laboratory and research, he gave freely to family and friends. During the late 1860s, Pemberton began to experiment, creating his own proprietary items, including Globe Flower Cough Syrup, Extract of Stillingia, a “blood purifier,” and Sweet Southern Bouquet, a perfume—all made from locally gathered herbs.* An 1867 visitor was so charmed by Pemberton’s business, and by the inventor himself, that she wrote a long letter of praise to the local paper. “I confess I was astonished at the extent of the laboratory,” she noted, “for I did not know there was such an establishment in the South.” Pemberton, “every inch a gentleman,” had presented her with an elegant wicker-covered bottle containing what she described as “the most delightful and delicate perfume that ever regaled my olfactories.”

  LIFE IN THE PHOENIX CITY

  In 1869, Pemberton abandoned his well-established Columbus business and moved to Atlanta to make his fortune. Atlanta had begun as a collection of shanties, whore-houses, and saloons simply called Terminus, because it happened to be the site where the railroad stopped. Although there was a prewar “Moral Party,” the opposing “Free and Rowdy Party” had more attraction for the denizens of Snake Nation and Murrell’s Row. Even so, there were enough banks and railroads in Atlanta before the war to give the city a “progressive” reputation.

  In the wake of the Civil War, Atlanta, calling itself the Phoenix City, rose with a dynamic vengeance from the ashes to which William Tecumseh Sherman had reduced it. “The one sole idea in every man’s mind is to make money,” wrote one observer of the Atlanta scene just after the war. A visitor from the country wrote in 1866 that “Atlanta is a devil of a place,” adding that “the men rush about like mad, and keep up such a bustle, worry, and chatter, that it runs me crazy. Everybody looks as if nearly worked to death.” Atlanta was a whirling, self-important, frenzied vortex for Southern business after the Civil War. To this wild, wide-open city, John Pemberton brought his wife and child for a new life.

  At first, he was a great success. With his partners, he established the largest drug trade in the city at the elegant Kimball House, a luxury hotel with six floors and over three hundred rooms featuring elaborate furnishings and gold ornaments, complete with steam-powered elevators
, fountains surrounded by tropical plants, and its own French chef. But by 1872, Pemberton had slipped into bankruptcy. He and his partners, an R. G. Dun credit man noted, were “honorable & industrious but lack good management.” Pemberton never quite recovered from this bankruptcy, though he continued to experiment with new medicines and to attract moneyed partners through the years. He suffered through two major fires, in 1874 and 1878. After the second fire, in which $20,000 worth of stock was destroyed (covered for half that amount by insurance), the Dun man described Pemberton as “a broken down merchant”—surely an unfair description, but understandable under the circumstances. In 1879, he finally paid off the bankruptcy debts and was free to devote more time to creating and manufacturing new products.

  In subsequent years, he invented Indian Queen Hair Dye, a rheumatic remedy called “Prescription 47–11,” Triplex Liver Pills, Gingerine, Lemon & Orange Elixir, and probably a few other now-forgotten patent medicines and drinks. In his endeavors through the last years of his life, he met with “varying success,” as the newspaper politely put it in 1886.