For God, Country, and Coca-Cola

by Mark Pendergrast

  Other Atlanta syrup manufacturers and bottlers declared open season on Coca-Cola imitation. One such firm, Afri-Kola, had the gall to open a factory just down the street on Edgewood Avenue. In 1903, John Candler arranged for a Washington law firm to send a threatening letter to the Atlanta imitators, hoping to frighten them off, and Sam Dobbs followed with a personal visit. The owner of Kola-Ade admitted to Dobbs that he had received the letter. “Why did you go so far from home to get a lawyer?” he sneered, insolently adding, “Suppose I am substituting, what are you going to do about it?”

  Pemberton sold his formula to a few different people, but his ghost must have kept busy selling the secret wholesale, given the host of colas claiming to be as good as the original. Among others, these included Afri-Kola, Cafe-Coca, Candy-Cola, Carbo-Cola, Celery-Cola, Celro-Kola, Charcola, Chero-Cola, Cherry-Kola, Citra-Cola, Co-Co-Colian, Coca and Cola, Coca Beta, Coke Extract, Coke-Ola, Cola-Coke, Cola-Nip, Cold-Cola, Cream-Cola, Curo-Cola, Dope, Eli-Cola, Espo-Cola, Farri-Cola, Fig-Cola, Four-Kola, French Wine Coca, Gay-Ola, Gerst’s Cola, Glee-Nol, Hayo-Kola, Heck’s Cola, Jacob’s Kola, Kaw-Kola (“Has the Kick”), Kaye-Ola, Kel-Kola, King-Cola, Koca-Nola, Ko-Co-Lem-A, Koke, Kola-Ade, Kola-Kola, Kola-Vena, Koloko, Kos-Kolo, Lemon-Ola, Lime-Cola, Loco-Kola, Luck-Ola, Mellow-Nip, Mexicola, Mint-Ola, Mitch-O-Cola, Nerv-Ola, Nifti-Cola, Noka-Cola, Pau-Pau Cola, Penn-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Pepsi-Nola, Pillsbury’s Coke, Prince-Cola, QuaKola, Revive-Ola, Rococola, Roxa-Kola, Sherry-Coke, Silver-Cola, Sola-Cola, Standard-Cola, Star-Cola, Taka-Kola, Tenn-Cola, Toka-Tona, True-Cola, Vani-Kola, Vine-Cola, Wine Cola, Wise-Ola. It is little wonder that one Coca-Cola man referred to the lot as “Fake-Colas.”

  HAROLD HIRSCH TO THE RESCUE

  The situation became intolerable, but a St. George was at hand to take on the imitation dragons. Harold Hirsch, a Columbia Law School graduate, was twenty-two when he joined the Candler law firm in 1904. The next year, the Trademark Law of 1905 was passed, and Coca-Cola registered under the Ten-Year Proviso, a grandfather clause giving legal status to any trademark, descriptive or otherwise, that had been in continuous use since 1895. Encouraged by the trademark’s secure status, Hirsch decided to do something about the imitators. In 1909, he assumed full charge of Coca-Cola legal affairs, beginning a dogged courtroom pursuit of the “loathsome following.” By the beginning of 1913, John Candler could write with satisfaction that “we have brought and tried within the last twelve months at least ten infringement cases where we brought one in 1906.”

  Not simply a lawyer representing a client, Hirsch was a true Coca-Cola man, inspiring bottlers, company officials, and other lawyers to defend the sacred trademark. “I have known every human emotion that the soul can know in connection with The Coca-Cola Company,” he once said. “I have spent my nights and my days in thinking Coca-Cola.” In 1914, sounding more like a hellfire evangelist than a lawyer, he dramatically urged a convention of bottlers to use the Coca-Cola name only on the genuine product. “If you fail us, if you do not stand back of us, the trademark ‘Coca-Cola’ is doomed,” he warned. “No one, the great God Almighty Himself could not save you from final destruction.” Hirsch paused to let his words sink in. “But if you aid us with your work, this Coca-Cola becomes sacred.”

  In court, many defense lawyers argued that substitution was legal when customers requested a “dope” or “coke.” Consequently, Coca-Cola advertisements begged consumers to “demand the genuine by full name—nicknames encourage substitution.” Asa Candler offered $100,000 to anyone who could curtail the widespread habit. When one of his bank employees asked the elderly entrepreneur to join him for a dope, Candler exploded: “It is not dope! There is no dope in it! It is Co-Ca-Co-La!” It was “blasphemy and treason,” one salesman recalled, to utter a nickname. “To me ‘Coke’ was a dirty word, just like the other four-letter words.”

  Hirsch hired Pinkerton detectives to go to soda fountains, ask for Coca-Cola, and take samples of bogus drinks served, which were then chemically analyzed to prove they were not the genuine product. In 1915, he persuaded the Company to form the Investigation Department and hire full-time spies. The parent bottlers agreed to pay for a portion of the detectives’ salary and to share legal expenses.

  By 1923, Hirsch had won enough cases setting different precedents to fill a 650-page bible of Coca-Cola law, followed in later years by two more volumes. The Company graciously distributed these volumes to lawyers and libraries, reasonably assuming that potential infringers would be intimidated. By 1926, one reporter estimated that there were more than seven thousand “burials” in the Coca-Cola “copy-cat” mausoleum.

  Hirsch won his cases on various grounds. He sued any cola drink that dared to use a script logo, a diamond label like Coca-Cola’s, or red barrels. If the name was too similar, such as Chero-Cola, he objected on those grounds. He even attempted to claim the dark caramel color for Coca-Cola alone. Fighting his battles in city, county, state, and district courts, Hirsch appealed adverse decisions all the way to the Supreme Court. He opposed the registration of many colas at the U.S. Patent Office, effectively nipping them in the bud. During the course of his career, spanning three decades, Harold Hirsch virtually created modern American trademark law, filing an average of one case per week.

  CREATION OF THE PERFECT PACKAGE

  The Coca-Cola bottle frustrated Hirsch. Ben Thomas had tried to standardize it by blowing the logo into the glass on the bottle’s shoulder. If an imitator ran its name in a similar location, Hirsch attacked it as an infringement. But he wasn’t satisfied. The straight-sided bottles looked just like any other soda pop. In addition, imitators almost universally adopted the same diamond-shaped labels. Coca-Cola needed a unique bottle that required no paper label at all.

  At a 1914 bottler convention, Hirsch cajoled the small bottler to look beyond the short-term expense of implementing a new bottle. “We are not building Coca-Cola alone for today. We are building Coca-Cola forever, and it is our hope that Coca-Cola will remain the National drink to the end of time.” He called for a “bottle that we can adopt and call our own child.” Before his death that same year, Ben Thomas had also begged for a package so distinctive that people could recognize it by feel and instantly identify even a broken bottle.

  In June of the following year, the company asked several glass works to create prototypes of a distinctive bottle. Root Glass Company employees sought inspiration from the drink’s ingredients. At the Terre Haute, Indiana, public library, the company auditor failed to find any pictures of the coca leaf or kola nut resembling a bottle. But the illustration of the cocoa bean pod, near the coca entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, caught his eye. He may, in fact, have mistaken cocoa for coca. If so, it was a fortuitous error. Using the cocoa bean’s fluted contour as his starting point, Earl Dean, the company machinist, produced a few sample bottles only minutes before the furnace cooled for the summer season.

  Dean had designed what subsequently became known as the hobbleskirt bottle, named after a dress in fashion around 1914. Understandably, the skirt didn’t stay in vogue long, since it was so narrow below the knee that it “hobbled” women before spreading wider at the ankles. These first few bottles had quite a bulge in the middle, later reduced to fit standard bottling equipment. Someone looking at this bosomy first effort called it a Mae West bottle, a nickname that stuck for many years. At the 1916 Coca-Cola Bottlers Convention, a seven-man committee overwhelmingly approved the design, though it took a few years before most bottlers accepted the more expensive container.

  The new bottle eventually came to symbolize Coca-Cola as much as the script logo. Solidly built, it had a nice heft in the hand, although part of its weight was added to make the consumer forget that it held only six-and-a-half ounces. Industrial designer Raymond Loewy waxed lyrical about the package, calling the “perfectly formed” bottle “aggressively female,” while another authority maintained that it had “twenty cleverly concealed devices . . . to lure and satisfy the hand.”

  Harold Hi
rsch had no such grandiose ideas when he suggested the bottle, however. As the first ads made clear, the bottle was intended to stop fraud. “We’ve Bottled Up the Pirates of Business,” one ad bragged. “They have imitated the [old] Coca-Cola bottle and label . . . but they cannot imitate the new [one]—it is patented.”

  DOBBS VERSUS ROBINSON

  Harold Hirsch was not the only rising star in these turbulent years. Sam Dobbs, whom one observer called the “brains and beauty of the family,” was eager to fill his uncle’s shoes. Ever since Candler elevated his nephew to sales manager at the end of 1899, a power struggle between Sam Dobbs and Frank Robinson had been brewing. The brash, good-looking, self-assured Dobbs boasted that his sales force was “working like one great machine, without friction anywhere.” As he gained power within the Company, Dobbs chafed at what he considered the old-fashioned approach to advertising that Robinson represented.

  By 1906, the simmering personality conflict came to a head. Dobbs attacked one of Robinson’s pet projects, a booklet showing the annual Coca-Cola gallonage of individual jobbers and bottlers. In a memo to Uncle Asa in February 1906, Dobbs, thirty-eight, wrote that “I have always opposed the publishing of inside facts of our business” and recommended that the booklet’s publication cease. He explained that the widely distributed booklet furnished “facts and figures for the horde of imitators who are springing up over the country,” handing them a gift-wrapped list of potential customers. In addition, he said, the impressive sales figures invited attack by hostile legislators who could manipulate the statistics to prove how widespread the “evil” of Coca-Cola really was. Dobbs certainly had a point; in 1905, sales had exceeded 1.5 million gallons, a 37 percent increase over the previous year.

  Robinson, then sixty years old, countered with a dignified rebuttal pointing out that the booklet’s “great mass of evidence” of the “never-ending increase” in Coca-Cola’s popularity encouraged dealers to compete with one another for yet greater sales. More important, he had a fundamental philosophical objection to Dobbs’ suggestion. He didn’t want to scheme or hide. “We have always conducted our business in the open,” he wrote. “Our flag floats from the mast head. We are far, far beyond all competitors and this fact has been established by our statements.” To kill the booklet would be “equivalent to pulling down the flag, wiping out the figures on our monument, covering up our tracks and crawling into a hole and refusing to show ourselves. Clouds of doubt and distrust would be hanging over us.”

  Robinson lost his fight, in more ways than one. The booklet was terminated, and Dobbs took over advertising as well as sales in 1906. He moved quickly to make changes. Jealous of St. Elmo Massengale, who had been managing the Coca-Cola account, Dobbs hired his personal friend William D’Arcy and his St. Louis agency. Dobbs threw huge amounts of money into full-page magazine spreads in the summer. Robinson watched in horror while Dobbs impetuously spent most of the ad budget by the fall. In November, the older man called for a “calm, deliberate, carefully considered, conservative, continuous campaign,” spreading the same amount of money over the entire year with a slight increase during the summer months, allocating $3,000 to January and $8,000 to July. He called Dobbs’ approach “flash advertising” that was planned at the last minute and resulted in a flurry of telegrams and confusion.

  Robinson continued to plug away in his methodical, dedicated fashion until his retirement in 1913, but he was increasingly taken for granted. Dobbs claimed full credit for Coca-Cola advertising, becoming the darling of the press. After his election as president of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America in 1909, he promoted the “Truth in Advertising” campaign, gaining public acceptance for his profession—and, of course, distinguishing Coca-Cola (truthful and good) from patent medicines (fraudulent and bad).

  When Dobbs talked about his profession and its importance, his self-confidence verged on arrogance. “The advertising man of today is a schoolmaster,” he asserted. “The world is his schoolroom and the people are his pupils.” Some, he noted, were “unwilling pupils,” but what of it? They would learn anyway. The advertiser spoke in a universal tongue that recognized “no politics, no creeds or hobbies.” Dobbs compared an advertising campaign to a military action, speaking of the big guns of outdoor display and the small arms of metal signs.

  For all of his braggadocio, Dobbs had a singularly limited vision. In 1908, for instance, he advised against the use of a large electric sign, which he considered too dangerous. Nor did he think it worthwhile to implement special Yiddish signs for Jewish districts. He saw no future in pushing Coca-Cola overseas, though by 1909 bottling plants were operating in Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Two years later, a British advertiser eloquently urged England as a market featuring “forty-five million people, with plenty of money to buy, compactly settled in a country little larger than Kansas.” Dobbs wasn’t interested, answering that “the old USA is keeping us fairly busy.” In 1915, Dobbs wrote that “the foreign field is not a very attractive one,” rejecting repeated entreaties from foreign firms.

  Along with his friend D’Arcy, Dobbs stressed the beneficial qualities of Coca-Cola over the objections of parent bottler Ben Thomas. Advertised as a simple beverage, Coca-Cola attracted “every man, woman and child” as potential consumers, Thomas asserted. Calling it a tonic would create “the impression that it is a strong stimulant” and would “create a prejudice in the minds of those people who think young children at least should not be given such a drink.” Dobbs reacted defensively to the criticism, noting that he and D’Arcy had met six times and had “hammered and pounded on this stuff until it looks to me like it is about just right.” True, he said, Coca-Cola was a beverage, but wasn’t it more than that? “If simply a beverage, we have no grounds for claiming any excellency or special merit for it.” Dobbs also disagreed with Thomas about the advisability of advertising to children, saying that he had to restrain his own children from drinking too much Coca-Cola. “Children are so apt to abuse a thing like Coca-Cola.”

  THE HARVEY WILEY THREAT

  When Dobbs wrote that sentence in April of 1907, he unwittingly echoed the thoughts of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, whose name would soon cause Coca-Cola men to shudder as if confronted with the Antichrist. Early that year, the pure food reformer turned his intense gaze toward the soft drink industry and its most famous beverage. Over the next decade, Wiley nearly destroyed Coca-Cola.

  __________________

  * The Maywood plant, renamed the Maywood Chemical Works, then purchased by Stepan Chemical Company in 1959, continues to decocainize coca leaf for Coca-Cola.

  * Over the years, the Company received innumerable letters and photographs testifying to the love of the animal kingdom for Coca-Cola—including horses, bees, goats, elephants, and monkeys, but mostly dogs, so that wearied Company men called them all “bow-wow letters.” Those sending the photos received a stock response: “While pets drinking Coca-Cola usually make for an appealing picture, we have always thought it a sound policy to depict our product being consumed by human beings.” The Company was not above taking advantage of one clever myna bird, however, who shouted at conventions: “Won’t you have a Coca-Cola, huh?”

  † Coca-Cola chewing gum had a long and checkered history. Like many of the early trademark spin-offs, it was never officially sponsored by the Company. In later years, when protection of the logo became a crusade, the Company was embarrassed by the gum, which had deteriorated in quality. Through an intermediary, the Company bought out the nearly bankrupt firm in 1924. According to a persistent piece of Company folklore, the Coca-Cola chewing gum trademark was then “protected” once a year when a salesman delivered a carton to a rural South Carolina store, walked around the block, bought a piece of gum, chewed it, purchased the entire carton, and left.

  * The Spanish-American War sparked military support of American businesses in Latin America—most affiliated with Coca-Cola. Major General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marines bragged, “I helped make Haiti
and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers from 1909 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903.” The Coca-Cola Company was to form lasting alliances with every business Butler listed.

  ~ 7 ~

  Dr. Wiley Weighs In

  Wiley is now made chief inspector, chief examiner, instigator of the charge, prosecutor, jury and judge; and if any manufacturer dares cry out against such an unjust condition he is met with the cry from Wiley and the Wiley press: “He is an adulterator and a dopester. . . .” And all this power in the hands of a man who says: “I am the spirit and essence of the pure food law, and without me there would be no law.”

  —American Food Journal, February 15, 1912

  Since his arrival in Washington in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, the first head of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, had steadfastly fought against food adulteration; but it was only in 1902 that Wiley became a household name when he inaugurated his “poison squad,” a group of twelve young men who were human guinea pigs for food additives that Wiley suspected were health hazards. The “experiments” proceeded without scientific controls and ignored the fact that volunteers’ expectations that their diet would make them ill could produce psychosomatic effects; but what the investigations lacked in rigor, they supplied in publicity, inspiring satirical journalistic doggerel: