Still, the money poured in. He created the Candler Investment Company and began to buy Atlanta real estate. In August of 1904, he watched the foundation being laid for the Candler Building, a seventeen-story skyscraper that rose above Atlanta, a monument to the New South. On January 4, 1906, elegantly gowned women and men in three-piece suits entered to admire the nearly completed showpiece, with its six elevators, artistic gargoyles, polished marble, mahogany, and brass, and glittering crystal chandeliers. On the first floor was Candler’s newly formed bank, the Central Bank and Trust Corporation. Here was permanence. Here was immortality. In the building’s cornerstone Candler placed a copper box containing his picture and a bottle of Coca-Cola.
The next month, as if God were mocking Asa Candler, a heavy windstorm tore a huge plate-glass window from the building and smashed it in the middle of Peachtree Street. Candler fretted. “My friends too often are my enemies,” he wrote. If that were so, even God might turn on him. “He has given me so many unmistakable evidences of His ability to carry me safely over dangerous places—yet I do not trust Him and may be lost.” Still seeking immortality, he spread his name and presence across the United States, paying for skyscrapers in Kansas City, Baltimore, and New York City, all named the Candler Building. The New York effort, fronting on West Forty-Second Street near Times Square, cost $2 million and soared to twenty-five stories, with the Candler coat of arms cast into the doorknobs, elevator doors, and mailboxes. With an obsessive attention to detail and petty economy, he specified the wattage of light bulbs.
In the first twenty years of the century, Asa Candler invested in virtually every aspect of Atlanta’s life. “It would literally be impossible,” wrote Howard Candler, “to describe all my father’s business interests.” Through his railroad holdings, he traveled gratis on any line and insisted that Coca-Cola be sold in dining cars. When the bottom dropped out of the cotton market, he built a huge warehouse and bought the surplus cotton at low prices, making a tidy profit when the market improved. During the “panic of 1907,” Candler bolstered real estate prices, snapping up hard-hit properties. For most of these profitable activities, he was hailed as a hero even as he raked in more money. To radicals and labor leaders, however, Candler was a villain. A 1908 political cartoon criticized the wealthy banker, showing his support of vested interests while saying “Nothin Doin” to the poor.
Indeed, Candler’s money did not make him generous. When a personal friend owing him money reminded him of their longtime relationship, Candler cut him off, saying that while he appreciated all that, “we are not talking friendship now; we are talking business.” An indigent missionary once begged Candler for money to support his wife and five children, explaining that it was “humiliating in the extreme” but that he would starve otherwise. Candler sent him ten dollars, along with a note: “You realize I am sure that such calls as yours are frequent on me.” He wasn’t even generous to Cliff Pemberton, the impoverished widow of Coca-Cola’s inventor. When a group of women approached Candler to ask that he give her fifty dollars a month, he refused. In July of 1909, as Mrs. Pemberton lay dying of cancer, a relative wrote that “if someone would present her case properly to the rich man who purchased the Coca-Cola formula, his heart, if he had one, would be moved.” Two months later, she was dead.
The year before Mrs. Pemberton’s death, another unpleasant side of Candler was revealed. In 1908, the fourth annual convention of the National Child Labor Committee met in Atlanta, principally to protest the horrific conditions in cotton mills, where women and children worked over sixty-hour weeks, breathing cotton motes for fifty cents a day or less. Georgia would be the last Southern state to pass child labor legislation. As president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Candler gave an almost unbelievable opening speech, considering his audience. “Child labor properly conducted, properly surrounded, properly conditioned, is calculated to bring the highest measure of success to any country on the face of the earth,” he began. “The most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labor.” In fact, the younger the boy began work, “the more beautiful, the more useful does his life get to be.” Candler ended by asserting that the proper function of the Committee was to assure that the child’s work turned him into “a noble, useful, competent laboring grown person.”
In commenting on this performance, a Committee official chose to interpret Candler’s speech as “subtle humor,” a character trait no one else ever accused Candler of possessing. He was clearly serious, perhaps recalling his own youthful entrepreneurial days but more likely defending the widespread use of child labor in Southern cotton mills—including his own in Hartwell, Georgia, which he sold two years later—and, of course, at The Coca-Cola Company and bottling franchises.
During the summer of 1913, Candler, sixty-one, took his wife on the Grand Tour of Europe, as befitted the wealthy of that era. He granted an interview just before leaving in which he was “altogether optimistic and cheerful as to the business outlook,” surveying a horizon “abundantly rainbowed and promising nothing but good things.” The interview was a fraud. The real motivation for Candler’s trip was flight from a breakdown, as he admitted to his brother Warren: “I left home to try to recover my nerve steadiness.” As usual, he hated the enforced idleness, writing that while his wife enjoyed Paris, “I do not but will tough it through.”
He only parted with substantial sums of money when he felt it would add to his greater glory. While Candler was in Europe, Andrew Carnegie offered a million dollars to Vanderbilt University, which had always been a Methodist institution, on the condition that it become nondenominational. Faced with losing Methodist influence in higher education because of the godless Yankee capitalist, the religious leadership naturally turned to Asa Candler, Carnegie’s Southern equivalent. Candler was embarrassed and angered by a rumor that he would give $2 million to Emory College to transform it into a fine university. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to give any money to Emory, which he called “a crumbling castle.” Goaded by Warren, rumor, and his belief in religious education, he eventually awarded one million to Emory in July of 1914, noting testily in announcing the gift that “I do not possess by a vast deal what some extravagantly imagine and confidently affirm.” Emory subsequently moved from Oxford, Georgia, to Atlanta. Before his death, Candler would lavish over $8 million on the college.
COCA-COLA IN COLLIER’S
While Candler spent more time caring for his other business interests and agonizing over philanthropy, Coca-Cola advertising guaranteed that he would never have to worry about poverty. Though a few years older, Frank Robinson had none of Candler’s misgivings about spending money to attract new consumers. He had always bought ad space in major U.S. newspapers, but in the first years of the 1900s, the new popularity (and circulation figures) of magazines attracted him. He placed the first Coca-Cola ad in a national periodical in 1904, spending just over $4,000 for the year. The next year, however, he boosted the budget for magazines to over $56,000, hiring Atlanta’s Massengale Advertising Agency to create the national spreads. Almost all Massengale ads featured long, curved arrows pointing toward a glass of Coca-Cola—clearly an early, awkward effort to induce an automatic psychological response. “Whenever, you see an Arrow,” read typical copy, “think of Coca-Cola.”
At the beginning of 1906, Robinson added another $25,000 to the budget, earmarked for religious and literary publications in an attempt to sway Coca-Cola’s critics. Such magazines had “a powerful influence,” he argued, certain that ads there would convince “the very best people in this country that Coca-Cola is not only perfectly harmless, but . . . helpful and health-giving.” Robinson promised that when publications such as Collier’s Weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, or the Christian Herald were “flooded with letters” objecting to the Coca-Cola ads, the magazines would leap to the drink’s defense.
Unfortunately, the flood of such protest letters had the opposite effect on the Wesleyan Christian Advocate, a Methodist magazine, which in 1906
refused to accept any more Coca-Cola ads. Reluctantly, Bishop Candler sold his Coca-Cola stock to avoid controversy. Asa Candler was infuriated, particularly since the Advocate continued to accept advertising from obviously fraudulent patent medicines, electric belts, and weight reducers. “Cut to the quick,” as son Howard put it, Candler forthwith canceled his subscription.
The defensive Coca-Cola ads of this period continued to mix messages. True, the drink was delicious and refreshing, but its medicinal, bracing qualities were also stressed. A 1905 Massengale ad in McClure’s, for instance, portrayed a young man in a darkened room, reading a book in an armchair. The lamp threw light onto the book and the glass of Coca-Cola he was about to drink. The text, a handwritten mock prescription, read: “Rx for Students and all Brain Workers. Take one glass Coca-Cola at eight to keep the brain clear and mind active until eleven.” By 1907, however, Coca-Cola spreads no longer stressed only brain workers. Uncle Sam himself served as a soda jerk in one ad, which depicted him drawing a glass of Coca-Cola from a spigot attached to the front of the White House. The “Great American Beverage” was for “All Classes, Ages and Sexes.” While an ad in the Saturday Evening Post featured a businessman in the foreground, women and children drank Coca-Cola at the soda fountain behind him.
Other ads targeted specific groups, the first efforts at “market segmentation.” By 1907, the advertising finally recognized that women were major consumers, calling Coca-Cola “the shoppers’ panacea.” Here the medicinal claims were particularly strong. In one ad, Mrs. Blue exclaims, “Oh My, how tired I am! Nothing wears me out so completely as an afternoon’s shopping.” Mrs. Cheerful tells her the “wonderful secret” of how she remains so bouncy: “When I start out I get a glass of Coca-Cola; that keeps my nerves quiet. On the way home I get another. This relieves that headachy feeling and I return home as fresh as when I started out.” Ads in theater magazines explained that “Coca-Cola is just as enjoyable as the play itself,” while the Scientific American ad showed a man slumped over a drafting board before he had a drink and explained that Coca-Cola soothed “Rattled Nerves” and restored “Wasted Energy to both Mind and Body.” Other efforts simply attempted to make readers hot and bothered. “When the Sun is Red Hot, and you and your collar are limp as rags; when your mouth and throat are the only dry spots on you and you are very, very thirsty, there’s just one thing to do—Drink Coca-Cola.”
Many of the 1905–1907 ads contained celebrity endorsements by movie stars or athletes. Coca-Cola gave Eddie Foy “vim, vigor, and go” on stage, while Ty Cobb and many other baseball players found it put the zip back into their games. “On days when we are playing a double-header,” Cobb testified in a 1906 ad, “I always find that a drink of Coca-Cola between the games refreshes me to such an extent that I can start the second game feeling as if I had not been exercising at all.”
All of the advertising of the period addressed the urban consumer, calling Coca-Cola a “metropolitan beverage.” Even those with a country setting stressed the sophistication of the consumers, such as two well-dressed couples served drinks in their automobile at a roadside stand. While most soda fountains were in the city, Coca-Cola had many rural customers. The Massengale men must have thought that snob appeal worked for the farmers and country folk who wished they were more cosmopolitan. Another explanation for the upscale image, of course, was the Company’s effort to disassociate the drink from cheap soda pop.
It is surprising that there was no mention of bottled Coca-Cola in this ad, or those featuring baseball. After all, a bottle would be more logical for these mobile consumers in the country or for sports fans. Even though bottle sales grew enormously in the first decade of the 1900s, the Company resolutely ignored them, presumably because the bottler would advertise his own product. There was more to it than that, however. Since there was virtually no mention of the bottle in annual reports of the period, Candler must have believed that real Coca-Cola was served at the fountain to upper-class people, and he resisted giving credit or exposure to the bottled drink.
BOTTLING BOOM COMES OF AGE
Nonetheless, the bottling industry had come of age by 1913, when the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association was formed. By that time, technology had revolutionized the young industry. While some plants still used the horse and wagon, many had bought trucks, allowing for more efficient and widespread delivery to a growing variety of outlets, including bowling alleys, barbershops, billiard rooms, fruit stands, and cigar stores. The New Orleans bottler A. B. Freeman used the most innovative modern delivery system, servicing the bayous with his motor launch, Josephine. Automated bottling, soaking, and washing machines made it possible to produce a more uniform drink at higher speeds.
The Coca-Cola bottler was now one of the wealthiest men in town. He sponsored elaborate floats covered with American flags and Coca-Cola signs for the local Fourth of July parade, gave to charity, and owned a prestigious automobile—though a true Coca-Cola man wasn’t too high and mighty to ride his delivery trucks to “jolly the trade” or to promote Coca-Cola through “under-the-crown” contests. The typical bottler was a true believer even more than the fountain man, since Coca-Cola had made him rich. In addition, the widespread plants meant that wherever he traveled, a Coca-Cola man could count on an instant enthusiastic friend who spoke the language of refreshment.
The quirky bottling industry soon had its share of dynamic Coca-Cola women, however, who proved their mettle over the years. The first was Joseph Whitehead’s widow, Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans (she remarried a Colonel Evans in 1913). In 1906, when Whitehead died, she pondered selling her share of the parent bottler, which John Candler advised her to do since the business was “like a big balloon—punch a hole in it, and it is gone.” Wisely, she decided to retain control, which she quietly exercised until her death in 1953. Other women took direct charge of bottling plants, usually as widows. Arthur Pratt’s sister-in-law Julia didn’t wait for her husband, Russell, to die, however. She despised Los Angeles (and must not have been particularly fond of her husband, who remained there), returning to Florence, Alabama, where, from 1911 on she ran an extremely profitable bottling operation.
BUGS IN THE BOTTLES
But the five hundred bottlers who formed an association in 1913 weren’t banding together out of sheer love of Coca-Cola; they also needed protection from lawsuits. From the very first, the bottled soft drink had caused problems. Since a wide array of bottles and carbonation was used, the finished product sometimes exploded in the consumer’s hand. Returnable bottles arrived at plants with slugs, roaches, mice, cigarette butts, slime, and other unmentionable items; frequently the rinsing machinery of the day didn’t entirely remove these “foreign ingredients,” and they became a part of the delicious and refreshing drink sold to the public.
One of the early “exploding bottle” cases, involving a grocer named Hudgins, made it to the Georgia Supreme Court in 1905. Hudgins lost, as did most of the plaintiffs in cases against Coca-Cola. The law put the burden on the consumer to prove negligence—virtually an impossibility. It couldn’t have hurt, however, that Judge John Candler sat on the Georgia Supreme Court bench at the time. The “foreign ingredient” cases made for good newspaper copy, however. In one early suit, Mrs. Mattie Allen, having discovered “a large number of bugs and worms” in her bottle of Coca-Cola, couldn’t return to work for a week due to “untold mental agony from fear that an untimely death might result from said poisoning drink.”
Wealthy bottlers attracted fraudulent charges. Often, they preferred to settle out of court for sizable sums rather than risk the adverse publicity of a court trial. In 1913, two bottlers in adjacent states discovered that they had paid the same woman hush money. Upon further investigation, they discovered that she routinely located dead bugs in her Coca-Cola as she moved around the country. And she was not the only one. When the associated bottlers finally located an insurer, they had to write their own policy, the first liability insurance in the United States. In the ensuing years, Coc
a-Cola bottlers generally refused to settle out of court. In 1913, they even won a case in which a deaf-mute individual had lost one of his remaining senses when blinded by shards from an exploding bottle.
The court cases, in conjunction with the concern about newly discovered “germs,” led the bottlers to emphasize Coca-Cola as a clean, pure product. “Just now a wave of sanitary ideas [is] blowing over the country,” a bottler wrote in 1909. “If the boards of health and the various pure-food committees of your vicinity get on the rampage, it is a very good advertisement for you if they find your place in a first-class, spotless condition.” When salmonella-tainted milk made headlines, one bottler advised, “Tell your customers to cut out the milk diet and drink Coca-Cola. They are reasonably certain to get a pure drink prepared in a sanitary way.”
THE LOATHSOME FOLLOWING
While imitators had plagued the Company when it offered only a fountain drink, there were now literally hundreds of bottled drinks cashing in on Coca-Cola’s fame. Candler’s nephew, J. J. Willard, contemptuously described them as “little mushroom beverages that rise up at every morning’s milestone,” lamenting that it was impossible to escape such a “loathsome following.”
The Company’s efforts in the first few years of the century to squelch imitators yielded frightening results. In 1901, the Company had sued John B. Daniel, one of Pemberton’s former partners, over his Passiflora Koko-Kolo, a drink that added maypop, or passionflower (yet another supposed aphrodisiac), to the standard coca and kola. In the suit, John Candler alleged that Daniel was “deceiving and misleading the public” by selling it in red five-gallon kegs for twenty-five cents a gallon less than Coca-Cola. Daniel’s lawyers argued that he was not infringing on the name because the words “coca” and “cola” were descriptive and not subject to copyright. Coca-Cola lost the case. The next year, John Candler instituted a similar suit in New Jersey against Oscar Grenelle and Charles Schanck, who brazenly sold drinks they called Coco-Cola and Kola-Coca. Without denying their actions, Grenelle and Schanck mounted the same defense as Daniel: Coca-Cola was a purely descriptive term. Afraid to press the explosive issue, Candler dropped the prosecution.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 15
