For God, Country, and Coca-Cola

by Mark Pendergrast

  ARCHIE LEE SEEKS FAME AND FORTUNE

  As Harrison Jones was rejuvenating the Company, Archie Lee, the man who would revolutionize Coca-Cola’s advertising, was planning his first campaigns at the D’Arcy agency. Unlike most Coca-Cola men, Lee was an introspective, quiet sort who had been seriously questioning the meaning of his life before he joined D’Arcy. Just after America had entered World War I in 1917, young Archie Lee penned a long, soul-searching letter to his parents. “The doctrines of our churches are meaningless words,” he wrote. “Whither we are bound no one seems to know.” Still, he said, “Ah what a loss it is when we contemplate the Garden of Eden. There is something deep in our hearts that tells us life was meant to be beautiful, peaceful and joyous. All our actions lead to turmoil and strife. Where is there a man today who is holding out a genuine and satisfying hope?” Perhaps, he wrote, “some great thinker may arise with a new religion.”

  Lee went on to say that he wanted to “do something really worth while. I would die happy if it should be just one recognized and lasting thing.” The “great ambition” of his life was to write wonderful books. Of course, it would be nice if he earned decent money while he was at it. “Fortune and fame! They make a lot of difference.” Two years later, at D’Arcy, he was indeed on the road to fame and fortune, though not as a novelist. He had, however, found something that held out a “genuine and satisfying hope.” Coca-Cola, his new religion, offered a brief illusion of Eden to a world full of “turmoil and strife.” Archie Lee would translate the fundamental human longings into some of Coca-Cola’s most powerful ads.

  “It is hard work,” Archie admitted to his parents in 1920, “giving a different dress to many stories about the same thing.” In Coca-Cola, however, he felt that he had found the key to his fortune as well. He borrowed $1,000 from his father to invest in Coca-Cola stock at its lowest ebb in 1920, accurately noting that “there is a big chance that it will net a good profit, perhaps leading the way to a real fortune.” The next year, he wrote that he was creating “the best work I have ever done.” He had designed the year’s entire Coca-Cola campaign and was growing closer to Bill D’Arcy. “I feel confident that my reward will not be inconsiderable.” He hadn’t given up his goal of writing fiction—“at least one novel and some stories”—but he couldn’t find the time. Later in 1921, he described an Atlanta presentation where they displayed over fifty pieces of ad copy, most in color. Lee basked in Howard Candler’s praise of “the best material that had ever been presented.” There was no more mention of writing fiction. Archie Lee had found his calling.

  Lee was probably responsible for several changes in Coca-Cola’s ads in his first few years. By the time he joined the agency in 1919, the D’Arcy approach had grown more sophisticated than the wordy “reason why” ads of 1907. A full-color 1916 design, for instance, featured two women, one with tennis racquet, the other with golf clubs, drinking Coca-Cola, with minimal copy and dramatic use of white space. These women were wholesome, active, full of life, as opposed to the harried, neurotic shoppers pictured a decade before. A 1917 ad stressed Coca-Cola as “a favorite friend . . . a bond of mutual enjoyment.” Medicinal claims and negative advertising were nearly abandoned.

  In 1920, the D’Arcy agency took the trend of minimal copy to its extreme, possibly at the suggestion of the creative Archie Lee. A Life ad simply depicted a busy street corner dominated by a huge wall painting that read “Drink Coca-Cola, Delicious and Refreshing.” Another copyless ad featured the New York City skyline and harbor, with a hand holding a glass of Coca-Cola in the foreground. In 1921, ads showed a clean-cut young soda jerk who dispensed “with a deft, sure hand,” emphasizing superb, uniform service and product.

  Lee also assisted with a project to help the bottlers find new markets, sending out a packet of advertising and direct mail letters that could be tailored for varying circumstances. Aimed at retail dealers and women, the letters focused on the take-home market for the first time, urging them to request delivered cases from their local grocer. While the twenty-four-bottle case was awkward, the inventive D’Arcy approach tapped a huge potential market.

  Archie Lee’s real talent, however, lay with the perfect, gracious slogan, and in 1922 he devised his first big winner, “Thirst Knows No Season,” which ran for several years. February and December ads using the slogan portrayed Coca-Cola in lively ski scenes. The phrase was repeated again and again at a 1922 Atlanta convention, where fountain salesmen were delighted with its message. While the Company had always pushed Coca-Cola as an all-season drink, this was the first really sustained winter campaign.

  ROBERT WOODRUFF TAKES OVER

  In July of 1923, Archie Lee wrote that he was busy with a major new client—the White Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio. D’Arcy had won the account because the new president of Coca-Cola, a former White executive, had made the connection. Lee and the new Coca-Cola head were destined to become the symbiotic team that guided the company into a golden age. Lee introduced the man whose name would become synonymous with Coca-Cola:

  A fellow about my age and the son of a prominent banker in Atlanta, a fellow I met when I first went to Atlanta years ago, started selling White trucks about the time I went to work on a newspaper in Atlanta. He did remarkably well, and after the war he was taken to Cleveland and soon became General Manager of The White Company. . . . Although he was making lots of money in Cleveland, he went back in Atlanta a few months ago as president of The Coca-Cola Company. This man is Robert Woodruff.

  Vin Mariani, the popular coca-laced Bordeaux wine (and forerunner of Coca-Cola), was unabashedly touted as a beneficial drink for everyone, from babies to the elderly.

  Long before Coca-Cola, Vin Mariani spanned the globe, providing a nerve tonic for people in every clime.

  John Pemberton, Coca-Cola’s inventor, has usually been portrayed as the scraggly-bearded inventor seen in this oil portrait (right). In his younger years (left), however, his beard was well kept, and his eyes appeared at once sorrowful and reflective.

  Asa Candler in 1888, the year of Pemberton’s death, when Candler solidified his claim to Coca-Cola. (Candler Papers, Special Collections, Emory University.)

  Indomitable Ma Candler and her boys in 1891. The diminutive Martha Candler, a “hardshell Baptist,” ruled her brood, passing on a grim, down-turning mouth. Asa is standing, third from left. John, the lawyer and judge, is the youngest, standing far left. Pugnacious Bishop Warren sits at the left on a stool. (Candler Papers, Special Collections, Emory University.)

  Asa Candler with his family in 1899, the year Howard (standing at left) took to the road selling Coca-Cola. Asa put enormous pressure on his children to excel, but none of them ever lived up to their father’s expectations.

  Frank Robinson, the unassuming “unsung hero” of Coca-Cola, who named the drink, wrote out the graceful script logo, and manufactured the soda fountain favorite.

  The Coca-Cola staff in 1899, on the cusp of a new century. Frank Robinson (first row, far left) was even shorter than Asa Candler, who stands next to him here. Candler nephew Sam Dobbs, sporting a mustache, stands in the middle of the second row. Babyfaced Howard Candler, Asa’s oldest son, stands to the right of Dobbs, next to Mrs. Dobbs. In front of her, Walter Candler poses with his hands on his younger brother William’s shoulders. Looking ill at ease and separate, the two black workers to the right are labeled: “Jim Reed, Porter (col.); Will Cartright, Drayman (col.).”

  Three little boys proudly announce their preference for Coca-Cola in 1894, when it still contained cocaine.

  As controversy swirled around the drink, the Company explicitly declared it “the Great National Drink,” here served by Uncle Sam himself from a Capitol tap.

  Here, a gruff old tycoon examines the ticker tape along with his rising colleague. The 1907 text clarifies the lingering medicinal claims that Coca-Cola eases “nerve racking and physically exhausting terrors.”

  The Chicago Coca-Cola bottler found that overt sexual appeals help
ed sell his drink. Here, a 1907 beauty (above) is obviously “satisfied” in several ways. The same bottler portrayed the bare-breasted young woman holding her Coca-Cola bottle (left). The straight-laced Asa Candler was infuriated, not only by the sexual content, but also by the reference to Coca-Cola “high balls” and “gin rickies.”

  Even though Asa Candler professed horror at Western Coca-Cola’s risqué advertising, this 1913 Company effort echoed the double-entendre prostitute portrayed five years earlier. Here, the “satisfied” female isn’t quite so overtly sexual, although “it goes, straight as an arrow, to the dry spot” could be read several ways.

  In a contemplative pool of light, this 1905 student enjoys a prescription to keep “the brain clear and mind active.”

  Three Coca-Cola salesmen proudly pose before one of the ubiquitous wall signs. By 1914, the Company had painted over five million square feet.

  In this 1912 Good Housekeeping cartoon, Harvey Wiley warns a gullible public against the gremlins of indigestion, nervousness, and addiction lurking in Coca-Cola.

  In D. W. Griffith’s short 1912 film, For His Son, desperate heroine Blanche Sweet shoves aside a newsboy to get at her Dopokoke. Griffith’s moralistic tale capitalized on anti-Coca-Cola feeling following the 1911 Barrels and Kegs trial, though the drink had contained no cocaine since 1903.

  __________________

  * By this time, the sealed envelope with the Coca-Cola formula, as modified by Asa Candler and adjusted for court settlements, rested in the Guaranty Trust’s New York City bank vault as agreed upon in the 1919 Syndicate purchase.

  * It was only by a quirk of fate that Holmes delivered this opinion rather than Charles Evans Hughes. If the puritanical Hughes had not run for president in 1916, the Koke Case might have had a different outcome.

  * Unlike most Coke bottlers, Pidgeon paid top wages and attracted loyal employees. Every morning as his loaded Coca-Cola trucks rolled out, he shouted after his drivers: “Give ’em hell, boys—give ’em hell!”

  Part III

  The Golden Age

  (1923–1949)

  Georgi Zhukov was exhausted. He still hadn’t finished briefing his officers for the next day, and the sun had set hours ago. With a sigh, he asked his aide to bring him something to eat. The Russian general hadn’t paused once since he had defended Moscow against Hitler’s crack troops, then broken the German resistance at Stalingrad, lifted the siege of Leningrad, and championed the triumphant Russian advance from Warsaw to Berlin. Pushing his troops unmercifully to get there before the Americans, he had yearned to settle a personal score. “Soon I’ll have that slimy beast Hitler locked up in a cage,” he had promised his friend Khrushchev. Though Zhukov accomplished everything else, he was thwarted when Hitler shot himself.

  Now, bogged down in the kind of administrative tasks he loathed, the general oversaw the Russian-occupied zone of defeated Germany. Even though he despised the enemy, he pitied the starving, pathetic Germans who begged for food. While Zhukov felt contempt for most American troops—those braggarts who had entered the war late and considered themselves the world’s saviors—he had found a fellow soldier in Dwight Eisenhower, and the two had become friends at the Potsdam Conference.

  Thinking about Ike reminded Zhukov of the American’s favorite drink. To the Russian, it had looked evil—a dark, fizzy potion—but he couldn’t off end his new acquaintance when Ike offered it to him. Smiling, he tossed off the drink as he would a shot of vodka, then felt it explode up his nose. Spluttering, he thought he’d been the victim of a practical joke until Eisenhower, laughing, told him to sip it more slowly. “It’ll still give you gas,” he said, “but back in Kansas they say a healthy belch is good for your digestion.” Zhukov liked it the second time, subsequently developing quite a taste for the beverage.

  That was what he needed to brace him for the rest of the evening. “Nikolai!” he shouted. “Bring me one of those special Red Star drinks with my food.” Eager to enjoy the new drink, Zhukov had asked General Mark Clark, commandant of the American-occupied zone, if he’d arrange for a supply of Ike’s drink. “But it must not look like the American product,” he cautioned. “Don’t put it in that funny-looking bottle. And make it a different color.” Zhukov knew that Stalin, that jealous madman, would be only too delighted to have an excuse to liquidate the people’s hero. The general couldn’t be caught with the capitalist soft drink.

  Ah, here it was. His aide brought borscht and what looked like a bottle of mineral water. Snapping the red-starred cap, the hero of all the Russias tilted his head back and drank deeply, then emitted a small burp. “Ahh,” he said under his breath. “Coca-Cola!”

  ~ 10 ~

  Robert W. Woodruff: The Boss Takes the Helm

  Great things are done by devotion to one idea; there is one class of geniuses, who would never be what they are, could they grasp a second.

  —John Henry Cardinal Newman

  In 1923, when Ernest Woodruff’s dynamic son Robert became president of The Coca-Cola Company at the tender age of thirty-three, most people assumed that the crusty old banker had willed the appointment. In fact, Robert Woodruff, the youngest executive of a major corporation at the time, was hired over the initial objections of his father, who worried that there would be criticism of installing his relatively untested son. Ernest Woodruff was consistent in his business and family activities—he was difficult in both. As Robert Woodruff’s official biographer noted, his relationship with his father was “a never-ending pattern of affection, rebellion, respect, defiance, devotion, tolerance, and admiration.” According to the younger Woodruff, his “dictatorial” father never approved of anything he did. “He was much harder on me than on his other sons.”

  If Robert Woodruff was born on December 6, 1889, with a golden spoon in his mouth, his father had promptly confiscated it and melted it down for the bullion. As the oldest of three sons, Robert received no allowance and was expected to live in the Spartan manner of his father. Though he grew up with numerous servants in a suitably ostentatious house in Atlanta’s Inman Park, he was in many ways a poor little rich boy. The household’s atmosphere was serious, constrained, and severe; the three boys were never allowed to roughhouse or chase one another through the echoing halls. Childhood pictures of Robert Woodruff, even at the age of two and a half, reveal a preternaturally calm, adult face—contemplative, serious, calculating, self-conscious, and deeply melancholy. His deep-set eyes seem to assess a grim world but show no sign of fear. The world had best watch out.

  As one of Asa Candler’s Sunday school pupils, Woodruff received a dose of Candler’s fervent Methodism along with his father’s Puritanical influence. While not overtly rebellious, the young Woodruff undoubtedly delighted in joining his fellow students in mocking the Coca-Cola magnate behind his back. It must have given him great pleasure to bilk both Candler and his father at the same time. Ernest Woodruff gave his son fifty cents a week to feed the pony the boy rode to school. The resourceful student befriended the groom behind the Coca-Cola factory near his school and left his pony there all day to munch on Candler’s oats, allowing young Woodruff to pocket the money.

  He was a uniformly poor student. At thirteen, he attended a summer school run by Mrs. W. F. Johnson, who liked the awkward, serious boy. With her encouragement, he blossomed. “I have been greatly pleased,” she wrote, “to note the effort you have made since coming to my little summer school, and if you will only continue in this line, some day you will be a man to whom your parents will point with pride.” Woodruff cherished this note, keeping it among his mementos. When he later became President of Coca-Cola, he sent Mrs. Johnson a small monthly stipend, explaining that “you had a great many pupils, lots of whom were much better than Robert W. Woodruff, but I had only one Mrs. Johnson.”

  Woodruff’s response to this kind woman was probably related to his devotion to his mother, Emily Winship Woodruff, by all accounts a saint. Gentle and understanding, she served as a foil for her domineering husband
and encouraged a love of music and poetry in her children. Throughout his life, along with the gruff manner inherited from his father, Robert Woodruff displayed a sentimental side, and he always sought out nurturing women in addition to his manly sporting and gambling companions.

  Despite his summer school efforts, Woodruff quickly flunked out of Boys’ High School and was shipped to Georgia Military Academy, where he remained a poor student but found his niche as a leader. Because of his gruesome dental braces, Woodruff couldn’t take part in sports. Instead, he managed virtually everything at GMA—the football team, the school publication, the dramatic club—while putting his natural charm to good use as a salesman. Of course, it didn’t hurt to be Ernest Woodruff’s son. Raising money for the school band, he went straight to his father’s banking cronies. Woodruff’s arts of persuasion, coupled with his last name, also saved the school from bankruptcy. The brash young man visited James S. Floyd, the vice president of the Atlanta National Bank, which was about to foreclose on GMA’s mortgage. The lanky sixteen-year-old fixed the bank executive with his rather intimidating stare and told Floyd to “go easy” on the school. When Floyd found the interloper was only a student at GMA, the executive started to throw him out—until Woodruff told him his name and implied that Tom Glenn, one of the Trust Company’s officers, would endorse the GMA note. Suddenly Floyd was more than cooperative, and the school was saved.