* The Coca-Cola Joneses—whether Turner, Harrison, Bobby, or others yet to come—were not related to one another.
* Morton Hodgson related the story of the nauseating European Coca-Cola, having heard it from several industry veterans when he arrived in France in 1935. In the properly acidic environment of standard Coca-Cola, bacteria could not thrive, but fermentation due to alkaline water was common in the early foreign markets.
* Coke never actually went public with its tadpole-biting title. Many years later, however, Pepsi’s “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” was literally translated in Taiwan, where it meant “Pepsi Will Bring Your Ancestors Back from the Dead.” The nearest Coke ever came to such a public faux pas was with its French version of “Have a Coke and a Smile,” which, when heard as lyrics in a song, could easily be misunderstood as “Have a Coke and a Mouse.”
* Woodruff dreaded the negative publicity that would ensue if it became public knowledge that he had shorted his own company’s stock. To hide the affair, he maneuvered funds between the Blue Ridge Investment Company (a front for his investments) and The Coca-Cola Company. The net result: the IRS refused to allow Woodruff to take the loss on his taxes.
~ 11 ~
A Euphoric Depression and Pepsi’s Push
That merry symphony of nickels and dimes rolling into the myriad cash registers across the nation and eventually into the Coca-Cola Company’s treasury has meant a remarkably steady income . . . both in good times and bad. You could have bought Coca-Cola stock at the top price of 154½ in 1929, carried it through a major depression and the latest business recession, sold it at the low this year and you would have had, including dividends, a profit of approximately 225%.
—Barron’s, November 7, 1938
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot.
Twice as much for a nickel, too,
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
Nickel nickel nickel nickel,
Trickle trickle trickle trickle.
—Radio jingle, 1939
“By what magic does Coca-Cola make its universal appeal? There surely must be something, for the demand grows and grows,” wrote an awestruck journalist in 1932. By the beginning of the 1930s, the Coca-Cola business had become an astonishing avatar that left observers admiringly bewildered. “Regardless of depression, weather, and intense competition Coca-Cola continues in ever-increasing demand,” another investment analyst wrote, adding the caveat that “Coca-Cola is after all [only] a specialty product.” The “specialty,” however, seemed to be everywhere. In the spring of 1931, when the Empire State Building broke through the New York skyline, it nearly did so in the form of a gigantic Coca-Cola bottle. Douglas Leigh, who had created the Spectacular billboard in Times Square, suggested the bottle’s familiar contours as a fitting cap to the new skyscraper.
The same year, Coca-Cola’s popularity was proved in an entirely different way in the streets below, as police finally caught up with a huge Coca-Cola counterfeiting operation in a Bronx loft, complete with a two-hundred-gallon vat, chemical laboratory, printing press, and fake labels. The elusive “bottling ring,” as the New York Times called the five men who perpetrated the fraud, had managed to stay one jump ahead of the law in twenty-five cities over the past year. Their Bronx operation had 6,800 gallons of syrup ready to go when the police closed in.
When alcoholic beverages were finally legalized again in December of 1933, many stock analysts predicted doom for Coca-Cola. “The repeal of prohibition,” a journalist wrote a year after the event, “would deal The Coca-Cola Co. a staggering blow, for who would drink ‘soft stuff’ when real beer and ‘he-man’s whiskey’ could be obtained legally? Why, the case was an open and shut one: The Coca-Cola Co. was on the skids.”* But nothing of the sort occurred. “While the advent of legal beer gave Coca-Cola a little jolt for a time, the novelty soon wore off and Coca-Cola addicts turned en masse to their old habits.” In 1932, the soft drink company’s stock had been added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.* By 1935, selling at over $200, Coca-Cola had become the highest-priced industrial stock in the U.S. before splitting that November, four-to-one. Writing to a Company official that year, one observer commented that the stock had shot up so quickly that “you must have placed a sack of Vigero under it.” As the Company approached its fiftieth anniversary in 1936, it appeared unstoppable.
THE GREAT FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
When over two thousand Coca-Cola men assembled in Atlanta for a three-day bash to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Pemberton’s drink, they looked back from a very satisfactory promontory. The strife between the bottlers and the Company now seemed minor in light of the enormous success under Robert Woodruff’s guidance. Veazey Rainwater referred to it only briefly as a “family quarrel,” adding that since they were “dependent upon each other,” they could “under no circumstances . . . afford to fight among ourselves.”
Wealthy bottlers of the 1930s had little to worry about. They owned a simple, profitable business. As one Company veteran recalls, “The plant foreman would flip a switch and those hobbleskirt bottles would fill up, then he’d turn the switch off.” Many of the Coca-Cola plants constructed during that time were monuments to their owners’ wealth, stability, and vanity, complete with murals, gold inlay, sculptures, and domes. One bottler built his plant as a miniature Taj Mahal in honor of his wife.
Many of the pioneer bottlers were still active, including Joe Biedenharn, the much-celebrated Mississippian who had first bottled Coca-Cola in 1894. As a tribute to these men, a play titled Pioneer Days depicted the “Podunk Coca-Cola Bottling Company,” with scenes of reluctant retailers finally appreciating the new drink. As good clean fun, Coca-Cola men and their wives were treated to boxing and wrestling matches in the evening. Elsewhere in the convention hall, antique machinery reminded bottlers of how far they had come, and a “Visomatic” display room illustrated the technological training of future employees. While watching filmstrips, a new soft drink man could be indoctrinated with the winning Coca-Cola attitude. By the time he had seen each of the Visomatics, he had received his first transfusion in a career-long process. In their veins, Company men laughingly acknowledged, ran not blood, but syrup.
Robert Woodruff didn’t address the bottlers at the convention, but he did deliver a short speech at a special dinner for fountain men, the elite cadre he often called his Marine Corps. “We are still pioneers,” he said, noting that Coca-Cola’s success tended to promote “ease and financial independence” that would “soften too many of us too soon.” He warned that “there are hazards in this talk of success. . . . In the long life of Coca-Cola, this half century is hardly more than a flicker; but we can use it, if we will, to light a beacon that will be a guide to us and those who follow.”*
Woodruff’s quiet cautions were drowned out in a wave of optimism. As the convention finale, Harrison Jones delivered a speech entitled simply “Tomorrow”: “There will be trials and tribulations. Men will be sorely vexed and their souls will be tried. . . . There may be war. We can stand that. There may be revolutions. We will survive. Taxes may bear down to the breaking point. We can take it. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may charge over the earth and back again—and Coca-Cola will remain!” The motto to live by, Jones concluded, was that “Coca-Cola is not yesterday; Coca-Cola is tomorrow.” With a smug look backward, then, Coca-Cola men left the 1936 convention secure in their hopes for the future.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE DEPRESSION
The men leaving the convention had ample reason to gloat. By 1936, it was clear that Robert Woodruff and his men had managed to turn the Depression on its head by deliberate, determined, multiple attacks on consumers. As a Fortune reporter observed two years later, the Statistical Department’s punch cards recorded “the precise state of Coca-Cola affairs on its far-flung capillaries” and could forecast sales and profits for the following year within a 2 percent margin of error.
I
ncreasingly, for a public prodded by the Company’s calculated advertising, Coca-Cola not only quenched thirst but performed a social function, as a contemporary observer noted, “Everywhere, but in the South particularly, it seems to be taking the place of coffee—or other liquids—as the something over which men must sit to talk.” Imbibing also began earlier in the day. Sam Dobbs had remarked in 1910 that Coca-Cola had found a place everywhere except the breakfast table. By 1932, there was even fizz in the a.m.: “Pay a visit to one of Schrafft’s stores in New York in the early morning and note the number of people breakfasting on Coca-Cola and rolls or even Coca-Cola alone.”
The soda fountain proved a magnet for all ages. Coca-Cola was the approved beverage over which teenagers mooned and spooned. In common jive parlance, the soft drink was also known as “heavenly dew,” while water was called “sky juice.” In the evening, working men and neighborhood women congregated under the ceiling fans to sip communally, while privileged children perched on the high stools with their own glasses, listening to the adults’ idle gossip. No one was more aware of the importance of placing the soft drink at the heart of America’s social activity than the Company itself. “Play up the soda fountain as an institution, a gathering place,” advertising department head Turner Jones advised Archie Lee in 1934. The D’Arcy man did highlight the soda fountain, but he didn’t stop there in his Depression-era efforts.
Lee was one of the first advertising men to realize that a product’s image was actually more important than the product itself. During a beach vacation, Lee noticed that his four-year-old daughter lavished such attention on her Pooh bear that other children fought over it, though other toys appeared more attractive. Lee took the incident as a parable. “It isn’t what a product is,” he wrote to Robert Woodruff, “but what it does that interests us”—and set out to plant the proper thoughts about Coca-Cola, which he wanted to make as popular and well-loved as the Pooh bear. Extensive Depression-era advertising presented the drink as a pleasant, inexpensive time-out from an increasingly difficult reality. Everyone could find a nickel to “bounce back to normal,” as Archie Lee’s slogan promised. A historian looking at Coca-Cola ads of the thirties would be hard-pressed to find any evidence that the United States was suffering through hard times. Promotions for the soft drink portrayed people enjoying Coca-Cola at work and play with no hint of the Depression—exactly what people wished to see. They needed no reminders of their daily reality. Coca-Cola ads, as well as the drink, provided a temporary escape, showing happy-go-lucky tourists at the Kentucky Derby, Mardi Gras, Carlsbad Caverns, or Old Faithful enjoying themselves with the pause that refreshed.
COCA-COLA GOES TO THE MOVIES
Movies provided a similar escape, thriving along with the soft drink. Archie Lee dispatched photographers to Hollywood with expense accounts to buy Coca-Cola for movie sets. Throughout the thirties, movie stars appearing in Coca-Cola ads included Wallace Beery, Joan Blondell, Claudette Colbert, Jackie Cooper, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Maureen O’Sullivan, Randolph Scott, Johnny Weissmuller, and Loretta Young. “Movies have a wider appeal than any other thing in this country,” Lee wrote to Turner Jones in 1935. In the same letter, he crowed over the “free advertising that we are getting . . . in recent movies.” Imitation of Life was “very popular,” Lee said, and was “really based on Coca-Cola.” Broadway Bill mentioned the soft drink several times, and Dizzy Dean gulped it in a film while announcing baseball games. Lee liked these movie advertisements immensely, noting that they made “many people so actively conscious of it that they subconsciously buy it.”
By the end of the decade, businesses were hiring specialized agents to arrange film placements for their products. Coca-Cola’s infamous Barbee brothers,* who had built their Los Angeles bottling plant in the shape of an ocean liner complete with port-holes, hired J. Parker Read to hand out Coca-Cola on Hollywood back lots—two cases every month to major stars, five cases a day to all current productions. For Read, a movie mogul in the era of silent films, it was a humiliating job, but he performed it with style. In 1939, when Spencer Tracy called for “two Coca-Colas, please,” in Test Pilot, sixty million adoring fans watched him enjoy his soft drink. “The movies,” noted a Business Week reporter, “combining sight and sound, can boast a marked advantage over either magazines or radio when it comes to showing a product in use.” This “low-pressure selling” was effective, the writer asserted, because of its “subtle suggestion.”
Most of the female movie stars in Coca-Cola ads were clad in bathing suits more revealing than the modest swimming dress worn twenty years before. In fact, one series of Depression-era spreads contrasted two Coca-Cola beauties, one in the demure costume of the past, one in a skimpy modern suit. Treading the fine line between overt sexuality and wholesome allure now posed a real challenge, and, without saying so in public, some Coca-Cola men clearly came down on the side of sex. Writing to Archie Lee in 1934, Turner Jones suggested his Hollywood photographer be on the lookout: “Why shouldn’t he take pictures of any stars he can get in bathing suits, in some good sexy poses?” A Portland, Oregon, bottler took the theme further. He built a huge billboard at a busy intersection, leaving a cutout section in the middle for a simulated beach scene in which Miss Oregon and another beauty queen lolled on the sand for three hours nightly, making oral love to Coca-Cola bottles. “On some nights it has been necessary to have a traffic officer present to keep the traffic moving,” the local bottler gleefully reported.
AT HOME WITH IDA BAILEY ALLEN
Aside from going to the movies for escape and sexual fantasy, though, most Americans found few social outlets. With less money to spend, more families entertained and ate at home. At the same time, it was much simpler to keep soft drinks ice-cold with the new technological wonder of the refrigerator. Consequently, the Company planned major campaigns to persuade women and children to drink more Coca-Cola at home.
The Company recognized “the tremendous importance of that veritable army of women shoppers,” said one journalist, noting that they bought “daily supplies for some 25,000,000 American homes.” With the new carton, Coca-Cola was available for the first time in thousands of Piggly Wiggly and A&P stores. Housewives were urged to grab a six-box for the fridge, and the home market blossomed almost overnight. To ensure its growth, Woodruff sent bands of women from house to house to install the familiar Coca-Cola bottle opener and to offer coupons for free cartons.
At the same time, in 1932, the Company gave away millions of copies of a booklet, When You Entertain: What to Do, and How, by Ida Bailey Allen, whose cookbooks and syndicated show, The Radio Home-Makers Club, made her the last word on the etiquette of entertaining at home. Desperate to avoid embarrassing faux pas in front of neighbors or the husband’s boss, housewives sought the advice of the redoubtable Mrs. Allen, whose matronly profile graced the frontispiece. She promised to help them craft the correct meals, right down to the doilies. Nor did she press the Coca-Cola bottle too firmly to her readers’ lips, holding herself back until page 26, when she first mentioned that “Coca-Cola or tomato juice cocktails are delightful with canapés.” Once having suggested the soft drink, however, she soon lost all restraint, mentioning it as an accompaniment for every meal, including “Dramatizing the Breakfast Occasion.” The recipe called for Eggs Benedict, Crisp Rolls, Crullers, and Grape Fruit Sections in Coca-Cola.*
To promote the idea of buying cartons for the home, Coca-Cola ads featured food for the first time along with the soft drink, a “natural partner of good things to eat.” The hot dog or hamburger with chips, washed down by a Coca-Cola, was presented as the typical American meal.
SANTA WEARS COCA-COLA RED
Coca-Cola bottlers had always known that they had to snare the next generation of drinkers early, regardless of the taboo on direct advertising to those below twelve. Now that children could find Coca-Cola in their refrigerators, the Company went after the school-age market
as well, though it took care never to show anyone of elementary age actually drinking the beverage. One approach directed at children wound up reshaping American folk culture through the art of Haddon Sundblom.
A hard-drinking Swede whose work was brilliant but usually late, “Sunny” made himself indispensable, regardless of his habits, by creating the classic Coca-Cola Santa Claus in 1931. Sundblom’s Santa was the perfect Coca-Cola man—bigger than life, bright red, eternally jolly, and caught in whimsical situations involving a well-known soft drink as his reward for a hard night’s work of toy delivery. Every Christmas, Sundblom delivered another eagerly awaited Coca-Cola Santa ad. When his first model, a retired Coca-Cola salesman, died, Sundblom used himself. While Coca-Cola has had a subtle, pervasive influence on our culture, it has directly shaped the way we think of Santa. Prior to the Sundblom illustrations, the Christmas saint had been variously illustrated wearing blue, yellow, green, or red. In European art, he was usually tall and gaunt, whereas Clement Moore had depicted him as an elf in “A Visit from St Nicholas.” After the soft drink ads, Santa would forever more be a huge, fat, relentlessly happy man with broad belt and black hip boots—and he would wear Coca-Cola red.
The Company produced a series of miniature scenes for window displays also primarily aimed at children. The charming cardboard cutouts could be assembled to create, in successive years, a miniature circus, a tiny town, an airport, the Olympics, a corner drugstore, and the cast of Uncle Remus animals.† Millions of children took free smaller versions of each scene home, where parents helped put them together—all part of the Company’s devious calculations. Similarly, a house-to-house sampling campaign made “a tremendous impression upon the younger generation,” a bottler noted with pride. The kids “gathered around the truck in swarms.”
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 27
