Coca-Cola was the subject of an increasing amount of gossip in those years. Growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe heard most of the rumors, but they only increased his taste for Coca-Cola. He immortalized the Great American Soft Drink in this passage from the Great American Novel, Look Homeward, Angel. “Drink Coca Cola. They say [Candler] stole the formula from old mountain woman. $50,000,000 now. Rats in the vats. Dope at Wood’s [Drug Store] better. Too weak here. [Gene] had recently acquired a taste for the beverage and drank four or five glasses a day.”
DEPUTY KEBLER TOURS THE SOUTH
Adams was not the only one who went south during the fall of 1907 to investigate Coca-Cola. Going considerably beyond the simple sample analysis requested by the Army, Wiley sent his drug deputy, Lyman F. Kebler, for an extended jaunt through Coca-Cola heartland, where he visited Army bases as well as major cities and Coca-Cola bottling facilities. Kebler’s report reads, one commentator aptly observed, as if he were a “stranger in an alien and hostile land, appalled by the odd and dangerous customs of the natives.”
The drug deputy characterized Atlanta as “the home of coca cola and . . . the city of fountains,” observing that there was a soda fountain on almost every street corner and in all major office buildings. He noted that Coca-Cola was drunk by people “in all walks of life, but most abundantly by office workers and . . . brain workers,” who, he noted with horror, took a glass before work, another at lunch, and several more in the evening. Soda jerks informed him that “Coca-Cola fiends” drank ten to twelve glasses a day. “We personally saw the beverage consumed by children of four, five and six years of age,” he wrote, adding that Coca-Cola was often brought home in pitchers to be guzzled by the entire family.
Kebler inspected the Coca-Cola plant itself and was disgusted by what he observed: “The kettle in which the sirup was made appeared to boil over occasionally, and it was surrounded with filth of every description, including sticks, dirt, straw, and all sorts of debris.” He noted that, although the filling area in the cellar was cleaner, the containers were not. “Dead mice and similar things have been found in the sirup barrels and kegs after they have been emptied.”
Visiting bottling plants in Chattanooga, Kebler was equally offended by the “slovenly and unhygienic manner” in which Coca-Cola was bottled. “If, for example, some foreign material is present in a dark bottle,” he wrote, “it is likely to be overlooked and left inside, and the bottle filled with the beverage. The cleaning, as a rule, is very superficial, and only a small portion of filth is removed.” At nearby Fort Oglethorpe, Kebler learned that Coca-Cola had served primarily as a hangover cure before the ban, but a local saloon proprietor said that soldiers drank “Coca-Cola high-balls”—the soft drink mixed with whisky—which made them “wild and crazy.”
Kebler finally returned to Washington late in the fall of 1907, convinced that Coca-Cola was a habit-forming menace, confirming Wiley’s worst fears. At the end of October, Wiley announced that he was forming a new Poison Squad specifically for soft drinks. Newspapers reported that his twelve brave volunteers, young men in their twenties, would test one hundred different drinks “widely advertised as invigorators, nerve-restorers, and brain stimulants” and known to contain “cocaine, caffeine, chloral hydrates, or opium.”
WILEY’S FRUSTRATED OFFENSIVE
When 1907 finally ended, Sam Dobbs noted in the annual report that “during the past year, we have not only had to work to get new business, but we have had to fight to keep the business we already had. Throughout the year we were constantly engaged in combating prejudice, ignorance and graft.” Having weathered the multiple onslaughts of 1907, Asa Candler must have been relieved when the following year passed relatively uneventfully, with sales nearing three million gallons annually and a cash surplus of $1.2 million.
But Wiley had not retreated: he was only preparing for a massive frontal assault which he would have launched in November of 1908 except for bureaucratic interference. George McCabe, the department’s solicitor and a member of the Board of Food and Drug Inspection, repeatedly refused to approve Wiley’s recommended seizures, since caffeine had not been proven harmful. On February 8, a frustrated but resigned Wiley wrote to Adams to assure him that “I am going to stay by the ship until I am court-martialed and put under arrest.” The next month, Wiley located an interstate shipment of Coca-Cola in New Orleans and recommended its seizure. Worn down, McCabe finally referred it to Dr. Dunlap of the board for a decision. Dunlap pointed out that “if the data are so strongly against caffeine,” he would logically have to ban the importation of tea and coffee—an impossibility—and he too countermanded the chief chemist.
Infuriated, Wiley dismissed the comparison to tea and coffee, claiming that the matter did not “merit discussion.” His anguished memos make it clear that his main concern was that children drank Coca-Cola. In May, he tried again, writing that a woman on a local board had objected to Coca-Cola signs erected near schools, luring students to imbibe. “If their parents knew they were drinking caffeine,” Wiley asserted, “they would be horrified. I again renew my request, which has been denied on several occasions, to institute proceedings.” Again, he was denied. This time, James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, personally told Wiley to lay off Coca-Cola. Wiley was “surprised and grieved,” he wrote later, but “as usual I could see behind it the manipulation of powerful hands.” He must have reflected bitterly that while he was lionized by the public, nominated that year for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, his opinions held no weight with his superiors.
Even though Secretary Wilson had ordered him to leave the Atlanta beverage king alone, Wiley sent Inspector J. L. Lynch to look over the main factory in July, where Lynch observed a black man “cooking” the huge kettle of Coca-Cola, reporting that the cook’s dirty undershirt was soaked with sweat, his feet poked through his broken shoes, and he shot wads of chewing tobacco indiscriminately onto the platform next to the mixing kettle. When sugar spilled onto the platform, the employee shoved it into the vat with his feet.
As if to taunt Wiley, Asa Candler hired a dirigible with a gigantic Coca-Cola logo to float above Washington in 1909. At the same time, Sam Dobbs and William D’Arcy were writing The Truth About Coca-Cola, a defensive tract that opened with the words: “This is a book of information—not of defense.” During the strife of the next few years, the Company distributed millions of these pamphlets, despite Ben Thomas’s objections to defensive strategies.
FINALLY GETTING THE GO-AHEAD
In August of 1909, John Candler could still boast that “not once . . . has there been a single State or Federal prosecution against . . . Coca-Cola.” But two months later, that all changed. While in Washington, Fred L. Seely, editor of the Atlanta Georgian, asked Harvey Wiley why Coca-Cola had not been prosecuted under the pure food law. Unlike the Constitution and Journal, the Georgian wasn’t part of the Atlanta business establishment. Seely, a New Jersey native, had founded the paper in 1906 and was considered radical for his opposition to child labor and chain gangs. The crusading editor and Asa Candler were already antagonists. In May of 1909, Seely had threatened to publish photos of the appalling conditions at the Decatur Orphans’ Home, where Candler was a trustee.
Stung by Seely’s question, Wiley poured out his frustrations to the editor, brandishing his file of Coca-Cola memos. Seely immediately went to Secretary Wilson and told him that unless he allowed Wiley to go ahead, he, Seely, would make trouble for him in his paper. As Wiley put it, “It is remarkable what the fear of publicity will do.” The next day, Wiley was given the go-ahead.
On October 19, 1909, Drug Deputy Kebler and Inspector Lynch traced a shipment of syrup bound for Chattanooga. The next day, they made yet another unannounced inspection of the Coca-Cola factory. Howard Candler was startled to find them sneaking around in the cellar, but he remained polite and provided them with a sample of Merchandise No. 5, the coca and kola mixture. When Howard’s father found out the government agents w
ere once again snooping about, he flew at them like an enraged hornet, “very excited and very much worked up and very nervous,” as Lynch recalled. “By God,” Candler said, “if I had been here you would not have got [that sample].” Lynch was baffled when Candler called Kebler “a God-damned carpenter.” In fact, the Yankee inspector obviously misunderstood the epithet. In his outrage, Candler had labeled the government agent a God-damned carpetbagger.
Two days later, Inspector Lynch seized thirty-seven barrels and twenty kegs of Coca-Cola syrup in Chattanooga, though somehow three more barrels must have been added later. The case was officially called The United States vs. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola. Although ludicrously named, the case promised to be a fierce legal battle between formidable opponents. It was only the second case under the new pure food law to go to court. Now that Wiley finally had the Agriculture Department’s support, no effort or expense was spared.
SPY/COUNTERSPY
It took almost a year and a half for Coca-Cola and the government to prepare the case for trial. After Wiley’s investigators found that Coca-Cola intended to call famous scientists to testify that caffeine was not harmful, Wiley lined up his own expert witnesses. He also ordered his spies to dig up dirt on the opposition scientists, although nothing came of it. Over his strong objections, the trial was held in Chattanooga, site of the seizure, rather than Washington. As Wiley was aware, Chattanooga was a Coca-Cola town; the jury was likely to favor the defense. “It was equivalent . . . to trying the case in Atlanta,” Wiley complained.
As the trial geared up in March of 1911, seven government spies infiltrated Chattanooga to keep an eye on jurors, trying to prove they were incompetent, immoral, or associated with Coca-Cola. Meanwhile, Candler hired his own counterspies to keep an eye on the government agents. The entire affair started to resemble a Keystone Kops film. One juror, it transpired, had once been arrested for horse stealing, while another frequented saloons. The agent dismissed the rest as “very low class men” who seemed “entirely incompetent to try a case of this nature.” In unearthing such information, one government spy complained that they were “watched, followed and pointed out by agents of the defense. . . . This makes us almost useless now.” He also noted that rooming at the downtown Hotel Patten, owned by Coca-Cola’s J. T. Lupton, was a mistake.
Just before the trial commenced, Wiley, sixty-six, a lifelong bachelor, married Anna Kelton, a librarian less than half his age. Giving her a taste of what her marriage would be like, he took her on their “honeymoon” to the Coca-Cola trial, where everyone expected him to be the star witness. The Chattanooga papers and high society were thrilled to have the famous Dr. Wiley in their midst, even though he was on the wrong side, and the Wileys were treated like visiting royalty.
THE TRIAL
From opening day on March 13, 1911, the Barrels and Kegs trial attracted national attention, making daily headlines in Chattanooga and Atlanta for its nearly month-long duration. The two main charges were that Coca-Cola was adulterated and misbranded. According to the pure food law, a product was adulterated if it had a deleterious added ingredient. Consequently, the government had to prove that caffeine was both harmful and an “added” ingredient under the law. Coca-Cola was misbranded, the charge stated, because it did not in fact have the whole coca leaf in it (i.e., cocaine was removed), and it had only an infinitesimal amount of kola nut. The misbranding charge was ironic, because if the drink had contained cocaine, it would have been illegal as well.*
For Chattanoogans, the trial provided ample entertainment. Lynch and Kebler repeated their observations on the filthy Coca-Cola plant, appealing to racist sentiment by dwelling on the black cook’s sweat and expectorations. Kebler testified that Coca-Cola was not only poisonous but had made one deceased victim’s heart so hard that it was impossible to cut with a knife. At that point, Judge Edward Terry Sanford had to reprimand Coca-Cola’s expert witnesses, who couldn’t contain their audible amusement. Another government witness reported that he had found straw, part of a bumblebee, and other insect fragments in the seized syrup.
Well-known Methodist evangelist George Stuart took the stand briefly. Unfortunately for those eager for real sensation, he didn’t get far before the prosecution had to bow to defense objections and withdraw him. Stuart had thundered against Coca-Cola from an Atlanta pulpit, then written Bishop Candler a long public letter in which he said that excessive use of Coca-Cola at a girls’ school led to “wild nocturnal freaks, . . . violations of college rules and female proprieties, and even immoralities.” Coca-Cola also kept boys awake, Stuart said, inevitably tempting them with the evils of masturbation.
Most of the trial, though, was taken up with expert witnesses. Whether the jurors were “low class” or not, it is doubtful they understood a fraction of the scientific jargon that the doctors and pharmacologists unleashed in the courtroom. The caliber of the witnesses was beyond reproach. All three coeditors of the 1905 edition of the National Standard Dispensary testified at the trial—Henry H. Rusby for the government, Charles Caspari and Hobart A. Hare for Coca-Cola. Near the end of the event, when the jurors were already dazed, Coca-Cola lawyers triumphantly unveiled a massive deposition from world-renowned German pharmacologist Oswald Schmiedeberg, delaying the trial because of the need for translation.
Despite their impressive credentials, most expert witnesses relied on flawed experiments highly colored by their own opinions. Harry and Leta Hollingworth’s ground-breaking double-blind experiments on caffeine’s effects on humans, still-cited classics of the literature, were the exception. Harry Hollingworth, a young psychology professor at Columbia, took the job—considered “a somewhat shady business”—only after his seniors rejected the research. Leta directed the actual experiments, which indicated that caffeine, in moderate amounts, improved motor skills while leaving sleep patterns relatively unaffected. Awaiting his turn to testify, Harry Hollingworth found the proceedings “a most interesting and often amusing conflict.” Appalled by the “anecdotal and misguided testimony that appeared on both sides,” Hollingworth was particularly dismayed by one scientist’s conclusion that caffeine caused congestion of the cerebral blood vessels in rabbits that he had dispatched by a club to the head.
Neither of the principal antagonists testified, which in Asa Candler’s case was easy to understand. His lawyers didn’t want the volatile owner anywhere near the courtroom. Candler stayed in Atlanta for most of the trial, firing off dyspeptic letters to Chattanooga calling Lynch a perjuring liar and expressing outrage over the Atlanta Georgian’s sensationalistic coverage. He can scarcely be blamed. At one point, Seely’s newspaper ran the headline “EIGHT COCA-COLAS CONTAIN ENOUGH CAFFEINE TO KILL.” Candler concluded, “It is outrageous that our government is disposed to harass us, but I feel that right will eventually prevail.” The government’s scientists spent days describing the effects of Coca-Cola on various animals.* When defense attorney J. B. Sizer complained that injecting frogs with Coca-Cola hardly constituted viable evidence, Harvard professor Dr. William Boos countered, “It is a difficult thing to feed a frog. Have you ever tried it?” With relief and some contempt, Asa Candler wrote on March 21, that “U.S. has almost exhausted its rat rabbit & frog evidence.”
The papers repeatedly anticipated that Wiley would take the stand, but he never did. While masterminding the prosecution, Wiley apparently preferred to let the specialists testify, telling the lawyers that he did not qualify as an expert in any specific area. Surely, however, Wiley would have testified if he had had strong evidence of Coca-Cola’s negative effects on his poison squad, but apparently the young men must have thrived on the beverage.
Coca-Cola eventually won the case, though not on any scientific grounds. All of the testimony and spying on jurors proved irrelevant. Judge Sanford (who was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1923) issued his opinion from the bench, ordering the jury to return a verdict in favor of Coca-Cola. He ruled that the product was not misbranded, since i
t did contain coca and kola, even though in tiny amounts. Without deciding whether caffeine was a poison or not, Sanford said that it was not an added ingredient under the law, but had been an integral part of the formula since the drink was invented.
WILEY’S CRUSADE
Jubilant, Company officials publicized this victory widely. The trial did, nonetheless, cause an immediate change in Coca-Cola advertising. The most compelling case against the drink in the trial had been its consumption by children. Defense lawyers hadn’t contested caffeine’s bad effects on youngsters; instead, they had denied that children drank Coca-Cola at all. This assertion was somewhat awkward, since many contemporary ads showed children drinking right along with their parents. “Father likes it. Son likes it,” crowed one 1907 ad that depicted a five-year-old happily imbibing. After 1911, an unwritten law stated that no one under twelve years old would be shown drinking in a Coca-Cola ad—a dictum enforced, with few exceptions, forevermore.†
Because of adverse publicity from the trial, two bills were introduced in the U.S. House in 1912 to amend the Pure Food and Drug Act, adding caffeine to the list of “habit-forming” and “deleterious” substances that must be listed on the label. Coca-Cola successfully fought to kill the bills, the first of many such efforts to keep its caffeine content out of the public eye.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 18
