The Company helped bottlers invade public schools by offering a series of Nature Study Cards along with a booklet, placing the Coca-Cola logo in classrooms across the country. Some local businessman went much further, though. In 1931, a Texas bottler wrote that “the kids play basketball at recess on Coca-Cola goals, use Coca-Cola blotters to blot out their troubles, consult a Coca-Cola thermometer, and write their notes on Coca-Cola tablets. Can you beat that?” Some school administrators were not so amenable to free advertising, however. One Georgia bottler found that an open house at his plant provided the “opening wedge,” as he put it. “We make an appeal to the children in the form of a useful toy, forcing the parents to attend by not allowing children admission” without an adult. “Heretofore,” he wrote, “it has been strictly against the rules of the school authorities” to allow the Company to pass out materials. Once he gave away the pencils, sharpeners, and tablets at his plant, however, they found their way into the schools anyway, and the financially strapped district caved in. “Due to the general economic conditions, we have received requests from practically every school in the community,” the bottler concluded.
Other bottlers didn’t wait until children had reached school age. N. A. Lapsley, a hustling Kansas owner, scoured local papers for birth notices, mailing a little poem in honor of the birth along with a coupon for two free bottles of Coca-Cola. “Toast your own health from the cheering bottle,” Lapsley rhapsodized. “Tilt back your heads, then open the throttle.” Presumably, most parents appropriated the coupons for their own use, but some undoubtedly put a feeding nipple right onto the bottle, as did James Durkin, a Rhode Island serviceman. “I have a baby boy 15 months old,” he wrote, “who will drink nothing but Coca-Cola. . . . I feel so proud of my son saying Coca-Cola almost as soon as he learned to say ‘Da-Da.’”
RADIO COMES OF AGE
By the end of the 1930s, families were listening on the average to over four and a half hours of radio programming daily. “No medium has ever captured the imagination—not to mention the leisure time—of the public with the speed of radio,” commented one historian. Identifying the wave of the future, The Coca-Cola Company firmly committed itself to radio in 1930 with a budget of almost $400,000. Grantland Rice, one of Woodruff’s buddies and a well-known sportswriter, went on the air with a sports program, beginning with interviews of Ty Cobb and Bobby Jones Jr. Leonard Joy conducted an all-string orchestra, introducing each show with a special Coca-Cola anthem he initially wrote as a tango, but Woodruff hated it. Slowed to a stately waltz time, however, the theme, played by a sweeping string section, charmed the radio generation, providing the signature for every company-sponsored show.
Coca-Cola’s radio programs gave Archie Lee headaches, caught as he was between the artists, Woodruff, and the audience. Woodruff insisted that shows associated with Coca-Cola be as wholesome and upbeat as the product, employing a gracious soft sell rather than the sirens, gongs, and pistol shots that often announced commercials for other products. He vetoed any news coverage as too negative to warrant sponsorship. There would be no controversy. Lee carefully instructed a comedian to avoid not only off-color jokes but “any remarks about politics, religion, prohibition, and so forth”—anything that might even remotely “arouse antagonism.”
Woodruff’s favorite radio personality was “Singin’ Sam,” born Harry Frankel, a country smoothie from Indiana (Archie Lee called him the “homey hoosier”) who crooned for the soft drink from 1937 until 1942. Lee, though, preferred the silken sounds of André Kostelanetz. Unfortunately, the conductor was a prima donna of sorts, insisting on a full orchestra of forty-five men. Kostelanetz even refused to play in a new million-dollar studio because the sound didn’t suit him. By 1940, Lee looked back on the decade as his “years of struggle and grief with radio,” but he felt that Coca-Cola programming had achieved a decent balance. Singin’ Sam appealed to rural, blue-collar types, while the temperamental orchestra leader attracted most other adults. For the bobby-soxers, there was a new program featuring the swing and jazz bands of men such as Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Lunceford, whom Lee referred to as a “darkey” who “shrieks and howls through his trumpet.”
The great irony of the thirties was that technological innovations such as radio and refrigeration were revolutionizing American domestic life at the precise time the country suffered through its first protracted economic disaster. As technology advanced, the iced Coca-Cola cooler of the twenties evolved into an electrically chilled unit with a sliding lid. Westinghouse introduced the Standard Electric Cooler for only $76.50 in 1934. The next year, seventy-five thousand coolers, quickly dubbed “Red Devils” by competitors, were sold to dealers. Three years later, the Mills 47, a coin-operated cooler with a capacity of over a hundred bottles, hit the market.
“The Coca-Cola cooler,” wrote one bottler, “is advertising manager, salesman, clerk, delivery boy, warehouseman, and sometimes even the cash register all at the same time.” A Jumbo unit, introduced at the 1936 convention by a talking cooler, solemnly proclaimed, “I am the bottler’s friend.” Factory workers, too, soon regarded the Red Devils with affection, using their share of the soft drink profits to buy team uniforms or to fund social clubs. In 1937, eight thousand coin-operated coolers were installed in public areas.
Coca-Cola took advantage of yet another technological innovation in the 1930s, as air travel matured from the biplane into a reliable mode of transportation. Robert Woodruff’s friend Eddie Rickenbacker started Eastern Airlines, whose stewardesses served the ice-cold soft drink aboard all flights on the eighteen-passenger Condors. The Biedenharn and Freeman families, both bottling dynasties, helped C. E. Wool-man expand Delta Airlines from a Mississippi crop-dusting outfit to a passenger service offering free Coca-Cola. The soft drink also took to Georgia airways via a Fokker airplane named “The Voice of the Sky” whose oversized wings bore the famous logo on their underside. Citizens of Atlanta were subjected to “strange music and voices in the air” as three amplifiers blared the Coca-Cola theme song from on high. To attract airborne consumers, the Birmingham Coca-Cola Bottling Company created a hundred-foot logo in the back court of the plant, easily visible to American Airways passengers en route to and from the Alabama city.
PRESSURE ON THE D’ARCY MEN
As Coca-Cola’s advertising diversified through young technologies, the D’Arcy Advertising Company involved itself in virtually every aspect of the Coca-Cola business. The agency men performed an astonishing number of tasks for The Coca-Cola Company during these years, going well beyond the creation of advertising. In 1934, for instance, the Company was frustrated by its inability to place coolers in a Chicago office building owned by a printer named Donnelly. “Why can’t you get some of the magazines in which we advertise . . . to hit Donnelly?” Turner Jones inquired of Archie Lee. The agency also conducted consumer and dealer surveys for the Company. The harried advertising men even had to organize crown cap counts, a particularly unpleasant survey in which used bottle caps were collected from coolers to see what percentage belonged to Coca-Cola.*
Almost everyone, one Coca-Cola ad man once concluded in frustration, was an expert on his subject. “Even morons have ideas and opinions about advertising,” he noted sourly. Archie Lee must have entertained similar thoughts when Turner Jones complained, “This is not simple and clear writing—it is most hopelessly confusing.” If so, Lee kept them to himself. The Coca-Cola Company was too important a client to offend in any way. Of course, that didn’t mean that ad men couldn’t complain to one another. Jack Drescher, a fellow D’Arcy employee, wrote to tell Lee of an illustration that had to be changed: “[Ralph] Hayes and [Robert] Woodruff say that if the attached man had about ten years taken off of him and he was made a little more cheerful, that he would be right for the poster. I say that if you do this, you would have what we have now.”
In December of 1934, Robert Woodruff wrote a letter to William D’Arcy that must have ruined Christmas for the advertising mogul. In no
uncertain terms, Woodruff suggested that D’Arcy augment his staff to handle increasingly diverse Coca-Cola advertising more effectively. At the same time, Woodruff advised D’Arcy to “freshen the viewpoint of your agency . . . by throwing it more closely in contact with advertising and business thought . . . in the East.” Clearly, Woodruff thought St. Louis was too isolated; he wanted a branch on Madison Avenue, emphasizing that the need was “urgent.” The following year, D’Arcy opened a New York office.
By the end of the thirties, the beleaguered D’Arcy agency was almost an extension of The Coca-Cola Company, resulting in cumbersome, pedantic rules to prevent ruffled executive feathers. At the beginning of 1938, Jack Drescher wrote a memo to other D’Arcy men specifying thirty-five different commandments for Coca-Cola advertising. Among the charges were:
•Never split the trade mark “Coca-Cola” in two lines.
•The phrase “trade mark registered” must always appear in the tail of the first “C” even though it is illegible.
•When the cooler is shown open, the righthand side which shows the bottle opener should be opened if possible.
•The trade mark must never be obliterated so that it is not perfectly legible.
•The circular sign should carry the phrase “Delicious and Refreshing.”
•On oil paintings or color photographs be inclined to show a brunette rather than a blond girl if one girl is in the picture.
•Adolescent girls or young women should be the wholesome type; not sophisticated looking.
•Never refer to Coca-Cola as “it.”
•Never use Coca-Cola in a personal sense—such as, “Coca-Cola invites you to lunch.”
•Never show or imply that Coca-Cola should be drunk by very young children.
PROTECTING THE SACRED TRADEMARK
Most of those rules actually originated in the Coca-Cola Trademark Protection Department. By the late thirties, Company efforts to prevent substitution and infringement were standardized and sophisticated. The soft drink lawyers were keenly aware that they could quickly lose their trademark by letting it slip into common usage. That fate had already befallen aspirin, cellophane, and the escalator. References to “cola” drinks were anathema, as were calls for dope.
In 1938, fresh out of law school at the University of Georgia, Jasper Yeomans nervously sat through his interview for a job as a Coca-Cola investigator. “When you were a law student, how did you order a Coca-Cola at the local soda fountain?” Yeomans had not prepared for this particular question. “Dope with cherry, sir.” His interviewer grimaced. “Jasper, that’s the last time that you will call Coca-Cola ‘dope.’ Also, Coca-Cola is a product that cannot be improved upon; therefore, it needs no additives.” That night, when Yeomans’ girlfriend asked how the interview had gone, he answered, “You can’t have any more dope with lime.”
Yeomans was one of a cadre of “investigators” kept busy checking out substitution rumors. The Coca-Cola spies, mostly young lawyers trying to save money to begin a practice, were given strict orders to remain anonymous. Entering a suspect soda fountain, a hot water bottle hidden in his trench coat, the agent would order a Coca-Cola, then surreptitiously pour a sample for later analysis. Immediately after a foray, he would write detailed notes with time, place, and description of the soda jerk. The samples, sealed in small vials with hot wax, were shipped for lab analysis. “We used to call it the Gumshoe Department,” one veteran Company man recalled. “Those guys were the closest thing to the FBI you ever saw.”
If the fountain was indeed serving fake Coca-Cola, it received a warning letter. If two subsequent samples revealed continued substitution, two agents were sent at the same time—one as a witness for the impending lawsuit. Few such suits ever reached the bench, since most offenders chose to settle out of court. In the case of the minority that did go to trial, Coca-Cola never lost, but the Company sought no monetary damages, only the judge’s orders that such derelict behavior cease forthwith.
WOODRUFF’S QUIET MANEUVERS
Robert Woodruff himself remained in the background, constantly maneuvering to outwit the bottlers, the government, and the competition. Woodruff bought back the parent bottling organizations one by one.* He had purchased the weak New England organization when he first took the helm in 1923. Ten years later, he absorbed the Southeastern region, followed by Western in 1935. In 1940, he purchased the Texas territory known as the 1903 Company. And, in 1942, Woodruff nearly achieved his goal of acquiring the last two parent bottlers. By that time, Arthur Pratt owned the Pacific Coast, which he had purchased from George Hunter, who still ran the original Thomas Company. Pratt sold, but Hunter backed out of the deal at the last minute, remaining loyal to his Uncle Ben’s memory. As the last parent bottler, the Thomas Company continued to irritate Woodruff for another thirty years.
With Coca-Cola’s continued growth came predictable attention from the tax man. In 1933, Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge announced his intention of enforcing an old tax law on intangibles. This “ad valorum” tax on stocks and bonds appeared an easy way to raise desperately needed money at the Depression’s nadir. Because of the county unit voting system, poor rural areas dominated Georgia politics, and the soak-the-rich tax was passed with an even higher rate for all “foreign” corporations—firms like Coca-Cola that were technically incorporated out of state—taxing them on all their profits, even if they were made outside of Georgia.
Woodruff warned the governor that he would move the firm rather than submit to the tax. Each believed the other was bluffing, until Coca-Cola made good on its threat by reincorporating on January 1, 1934, as a holding company. The timing was so tight that the Coca-Cola staff finished packing and fled the tax assessor just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, setting up administrative headquarters in Wilmington. While the syrup was still manufactured in Atlanta, Woodruff and his administrative staff stayed in Delaware for a decade, until the Georgia laws were amended. Harold Hirsch, however, refused to budge from Atlanta. As a result, in 1935 John Sibley replaced him as the Company’s general counsel. Though Hirsch remained an important legal adviser, his domination of Coca-Cola policy was effectively ended. He died five years later.
How Woodruff maneuvered the reversal of the ad valorum tax is a telling example of his patient, unrelenting strategy. While the Boss took care to avoid any illegal activity, he used every other means of influence and persuasion at his disposal. In this case, he assigned Atlanta lawyer Hughes Spalding the task of securing a constitutional amendment to remove the ad valorum tax.* In 1937, Spalding hired journalist Frank Lawson to crank out two weekly columns arguing against a pending Georgia soft drink tax. One of these, aimed at the rural farmer, copied Tom Watson’s hysterical, inflammatory style, utilizing boldface, italics, multiple exclamation points, and every conceivable propaganda tactic. The other, far less strident in tone, offered a more balanced, editorial tone. Both were printed in almost a hundred rural Georgia papers eager for filler. Copies were also sent to influential businessmen and members of the General Assembly.
As a result, the soft drink tax was voted down in December of 1937. In the early 1940s, Georgia governor Ellis Arnall asked the legislature to grant soft drink companies special tax treatment, pending the passage of a constitutional amendment permitting foreign corporations exemption from the intangibles tax. By unanimous vote, it was passed. “What’s good for Coke,” the governor asserted, “is good for Georgia.”
Another result of Woodruff’s repeated tax tangles was his 1939 decision to give the Coca-Cola presidency to Arthur Acklin, the former IRS man. Acklin wasn’t eager to take the job, particularly since Woodruff clearly had no intention of relinquishing any of his control, which he would exercise as chairman of the executive committee. That way, Woodruff could remain out of the public eye, which was how he liked it, letting the bureaucrat handle routine administration. Besides, Woodruff, peering over the horizon as usual, probably suspected that the United States would eventually enter World War II, a
nd Acklin’s governmental contacts would be essential.
As president himself, Woodruff had moved swiftly and secretly to assure a steady flow of Coca-Cola’s most controversial ingredient. The U.S. legislature had passed a bill in 1927 to prohibit the importation of coca leaves for all but medicinal purposes. That did not necessarily incommode Coca-Cola, since the Company could take the decocainized leaf after the cocaine had been extracted. The trouble was that Coca-Cola consumption mandated more leaf than the doctors needed for cocaine. “Mr. Woodruff has been phoning us two or three times a day about what progress is being made on No. 5 [the coca and kola extract],” Harrison Jones wrote late in 1929 to Harold Hirsch. By 1930, Coca-Cola was using two hundred thousand pounds of coca leaf annually. That year, Woodruff prevailed upon New Jersey Republican Senator Walter Edge, a fellow member of the Norias Club (a Florida plantation owned by Walter Teagle), to intervene with the Hoover administration, which agreed to allow unlimited coca leaf importation for Coca-Cola, as long as the resultant cocaine was destroyed. With help from Georgia’s U.S. Senator Walter George and others, both houses quickly passed the exemption legislation.
In the early 1930s, however, the United States was considering joining the Geneva Convention, which required the importation of coca leaves only for medicinal and scientific purposes. In addition, Harry J. Anslinger, the head of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was a militant antidrug chief who was suspicious of Merchandise No. 5. The situation was too uncertain to let it rest with politicians. Robert Woodruff secretly flew to Lima, Peru, where he made arrangements to restart the plant to decocainize the leaves. The facility was ready to go by the fall of 1937, although it never proved necessary.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 28
