† The Jewish market was so important to Coca-Cola that it apparently revealed its ingredients (though not the precise formula) to Atlanta rabbi Tobias Geffen in 1935. The minute amounts of glycerin (from animal fat) and alcohol (from grains) were problematical, so, for its kosher Coca-Cola, the Company used glycerin made from vegetable oil and its alcohol from molasses.
* Even after the war’s 1939 commencement, Atlanta continued to ship Coca-Cola syrup to Keith. With the U.S. entry into the war, however, the syrup spigot was shut off.
* It is only fair to note that Schmeling was always uncomfortable as a symbol of Nazism, insisting that he was only a professional boxer—with a Jewish manager for a while. After World War II, Schmeling made a point of befriending Joe Louis and escorting him on a tour of his Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Part IV
Trouble in the Promised Land
(1950–1979)
“Into the Eighties with Coke!” The flashing red signs in the great empty hall, once so comfortably familiar, appeared bizarre and disorienting to Paul Austin. Why were they so bright, so much like an incandescent bloodletting? His heart pounded irregularly; he felt dizzy.
Stumbling toward the bar at the side of the amphitheater, Austin confronted a huge photograph of a beautiful woman’s head, her gigantic teeth bared in a ferocious grin. “Have a Coke and a Smile!” she ordered. He leaned against the counter, steadying himself. “I’ll have a Scotch on the rocks,” he heard himself say, his voice sounding unreal and distant to his ears, as if it echoed from a corner of the hall. The technicians scurried purposefully around the room while a few bottlers and their wives strolled among the displays. Mumbling his thanks, Austin gulped his drink.
A man hurried toward him, deferentially nodding his head and holding out a hand. “Oh, there you are, Mr. Austin,” he said. “Would you mind coming up on the podium for a sound check, sir?” Refilling his glass quickly, the tall Coca-Cola executive moved toward the stage. Perhaps another drink would calm him, ease the confusion. Deliberately, heavily, he ascended the steps and stood behind the microphone. His hand quivering slightly, he carefully placed his glass on the table beside him, as he had done countless times in the past. He leaned over the podium, grasping both sides.
Paul Austin stared into the pulsing red space before him. Sucking in a deep breath, he leaned further forward, and, his speech slightly slurred, asked a question which reverberated throughout the hall. “Excuse me, but could anyone tell me why I’m here?”
~ 14 ~
Coca-Colonization and the Communists
Apparently some of our friends overseas have difficulty distinguishing between the United States and Coca-Cola. Perhaps we should not complain too much about this.
—One Coca-Cola executive to another, 1950
In April of 1945, representatives of fifty countries converged on San Francisco for a conference with the idealistic mission of creating the United Nations, a postwar organization to maintain the peace. Sensing a pivotal moment in history, Robert Woodruff dispatched James Farley to San Francisco with an unlimited entertainment budget to wine, Coca-Cola, and dine the powerful delegates so conveniently assembled in one town. “The relationships I established,” Farley later wrote with characteristic understatement, “might be helpful in our efforts to establish Coca-Cola bottling companies” around the world.
Farley was the consummate politician, famous for his prodigious memory for names and his paper flood of polite correspondence signed in green ink. He once explained that “it’s the little things that cause trouble, it’s the little sores that cause bitter feelings.” Consequently, he vowed early in his life to be a consistent friend to everyone; no detail was too minor, no gift too small to be acknowledged. During the 1932 Democratic Convention, a journalist wrote that wherever Farley appeared, “rainbows flashed and quivered,” perhaps reflected from his enormous bald pate, a beacon at the top of his burly 6'2" frame. “Give him time,” noted the reporter, “and he will call everybody in the United States by his Christian name.”
As a Democrat, Farley stressed loyalty above policy. Naturally gregarious, he neither drank nor smoked and needed only six hours’ sleep a night. He loved to travel, meet new people, and exert subtle influence—in short, he was the perfect Coca-Cola man. In 1941, Ralph McGill, the famed Atlanta journalist and friend of Robert Woodruff, wrote solemnly that Farley’s new job with Coca-Cola “entirely divorced him from politics.” Far from being divorced from the process, Farley’s diplomatic missions for his soft drink in the postwar world required every ounce of his skill. Increasingly, Coca-Cola was politics, particularly to the Communists.
For a brief moment near the war’s end, it appeared that the traditionally antagonistic relationship between the USSR and the United States would give way to the friendship of victorious allies. But Stalin’s purges, power hunger, and rebuffs to tentative American feelers soon led to the Cold War’s first chill.
That spring of 1945, while Farley hobnobbed with Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Lord Halifax of Great Britain, and representatives from Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries, he pointedly avoided Andrei Gromyko, the Russian delegate. Within a few years, American hostility to the Soviets would turn to paranoia, as Richard Nixon prosecuted Alger Hiss, the State Department member accused of being a Communist. Ironically, Hiss arranged Farley’s San Francisco meetings with foreign delegates.*
Farley proved as loyal to Coca-Cola as he had been to the Democratic Party. Indeed, he delighted in the product that made him a nonpartisan goodwill ambassador and gave him entree to the rich and powerful. After a three-month trip around the world in 1946, Farley confidently told the press that the countries of the world “look to the American nation to lead them out of their difficulties,” adding that “there isn’t any doubt of the affection” these foreigners felt for Americans. The Coca-Cola ambassador was equally certain that the Chinese, torn by a civil war between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung, could “work out a solution to their problems.”
Building on the goodwill fostered by the American soldier and his soft drink, The Coca-Cola Company swiftly licensed bottling plants in new countries and held its first international convention in Atlantic City in 1948, clearly intending to impress its newfound overseas bottlers. “When we think of Communists, we think of the Iron Curtain,” a placard at the convention read. “BUT when THEY think of democracy, they think of Coca-Cola.” At the convention, an executive prayed fervently: “May Providence give us the faith . . . to serve those two billion customers who are only waiting for us to bring our product to them.” By the end of 1950, the business had started in Egypt, Morocco, Barbados, Liberia, Rhodesia, Guadeloupe, Algeria, Gibraltar, Kenya, Thailand, Tunisia, India, Congo, Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, additional plants and aggressive marketing in countries where the industry was already established—primarily Europe and South America—substantially increased per capita consumption around the world.
The first step when entering a country was to locate a wealthy, socially prominent, politically influential bottler. Key employees were then brought to the United States for an extensive eight-month indoctrination—working in plants, riding the trucks, putting up advertising, properly icing coolers, enduring endless Visomatics in the appropriate language. By the time they went home, the new Coca-Cola men had received multiple syrup transfusions. “They are linked,” wrote one Company man, “by a common faith in Coca-Cola, their belief in the honesty of the product and its value to mankind.”
Giovanni Pretti, a thirty-year-old Italian salesman, was typical of the new international Coke man in 1950. Bounding from bed, he confronted a bathroom mirror whose signs inquired: “Hair Combed? Shaved? Uniform Clean and Neat? Shoes Shined? Friendly Smile?” Properly clothed and brimming with enthusiasm, he lovingly polished his shiny red and yellow truck and drove through Milan, explaining to a journalist that because of his “responsible position,” he was now known as Signor Pretti.
As part of m
orale-building continuing education, Coca-Cola Export field men staged skits for bottling plant workers. In Cairo, for instance, the assembled employees watched a morality play about Barsoum, a mustachioed Egyptian bottler who, failing to apply proper ice to his Coke, lost sales. Taking advantage of this lapse, a nefarious salesman for a competing drink convinced Barsoum to push the inferior product. Fortunately, the wise Coca-Cola salesmen arrived just at the crucial moment, booted the imitator, and restored refrigeration and the proper soft drink.
As an epilogue, one of the Coke field men, extolling the virtues of the Coca-Cola cooler, was interrupted by a loud voice. “Stop talking! I can speak for myself,” the machine shouted. “I’m a twenty-four-hour salesman,” it explained to the rapt Cairo audience. “I advertise the product, I cool the product, I present your product attractively.” In another overseas presentation, a giant Coke bottle proclaimed: “I am Coca-Cola, vigorous with life and more than a mere shape,” immodestly calling itself “a royal bottle . . . the object of your strivings.” This sort of hokey presentation, standard since the 1930s in America, created a sensation abroad. By 1950, sales in the six Egyptian bottling plants, owned by the four Pathy brothers, mushroomed, reaching 350 million drinks annually only five years after the first Coke rolled off the line there.
The growth of the business overseas fascinated American media. Henry Luce, the anti-Communist publisher of Time and a Woodruff hunting companion, featured the Company in his May 15, 1950, issue. When Robert Woodruff refused to allow his portrait on the cover, Luce commissioned a classic painting in which a smiling red Coca-Cola disk with a skinny arm held a Coke bottle to the mouth of a thirsty globe. The legend underneath read, “WORLD & FRIEND—Love that piaster, that lira, that tickey, and that American way of life.” The article pointed out that the “gentle burps” evoked by the drink could be heard amid “the bustle of Parisian sidewalk cafes” and “the tinkling of Siamese temple bells.” By that time, a third of the Company’s profits came from abroad. The Time reporter noted that “to find something as thoroughly native American hawked in half a hundred languages on all the world’s crossroads from Arequipa to Zwolle” was strange—“like reading Dick Tracy in French.” Nonetheless, he concluded, it was rather reassuring.
James Farley agreed. In a speech to the American Trademark Association, Farley pointed out that the American flag itself was “the most glorious of all trademarks,” representing the “greatest tide of products and services in the history of mankind.” As an example of America’s contribution to global progress, Farley cited the Philippines, where at first he had been disturbed by the primitive conditions—homes of bamboo and grass raised on stilts, with shabbily dressed natives and naked children wandering along mud streets. “But you turn a corner in all this poverty,” Farley said, smiling at the memory, “and suddenly you catch sight of a beautiful Coca-Cola bottling plant.” In the midst of the squalor, here was a well-constructed, sparkling white factory equipped with “the latest and most modern bottle fillers, bottle cleaners and water treating equipment.” The floors, Farley noted, were meticulously clean. The local employees, despite their unsanitary regular lives, showered at the plant daily and wore freshly laundered uniforms. If they were sick, there was a plant doctor. In conclusion, Farley bragged that Coca-Cola plants had “raised the standard of living in each of these islands.”
Naive and thoroughly ethnocentric, Farley accepted the poverty he saw around him, easily condemning native culture and assuming that the American way of life, represented by Coca-Cola, was the only way of life. He added that the soft drink was effective in “influencing” favorable attitudes toward America and would eventually embrace all nations in “a brotherhood of peace and progress.” It was true, however, that Coke often brought much-needed technology for cleaning water, that Coca-Cola employees were paid decent wages by local standards, and that the bottling plant was usually owned and run by natives. In 1950, only 1 percent of Coca-Cola Export employees were Americans. As one Coke executive pointed out, “in Germany it is a German business; in France, it is a French business; in Italy, it is an Italian business.” Local industries to produce glass, carton, crown, and bottling equipment started in each new country. The Coca-Cola Company even supplied specifications, blueprints, and economic advisers.
NOT EVERYBODY LOVES US
Nevertheless, the result of Coca-Cola’s postwar onslaught was not a “brotherhood of peace and progress.” The fate of China proved symbolic of Coca-Cola’s new woes. Farley’s optimistic prediction that the opposing factions would “work out a solution” amicably was dead wrong, and in 1949 Mao Tse-tung founded Communist China, while Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. All of Coca-Cola’s Chinese bottling plants were nationalized except for the British outpost in Hong Kong.*
Traveling a barren road next to the barbed wire fence separating Hong Kong from Communist China in 1950, a Company man braked impulsively before a huge, bright red billboard with the single word “Coca-Cola” in English and Chinese characters. Only feet from the Bamboo Curtain, it faced Mao’s regimented realm. Inspired, the Coke executive reflected that the sign painter had been “a man with a soul” who created the sign “to breathe its defiance of communistic doctrine.” The Communists, too, viewed Coca-Cola as the fitting symbol of “degenerate capitalism.” In countries around the world, they defamed the American soft drink in the press, lobbied against it in legislatures, and whispered of its vile effects in back alleys.
The Communists were not the only ones concerned about Coca-Cola’s postwar expansion, however. While the native Coke bottlers may have been happy, many of their countrymen were not, particularly if they sold competing beverages such as wine, beer, mineral water, or soft drinks. Many citizens across the Atlantic also resented the brash, aggressive Americans and their powerful new position in the world. This was particularly true of Europeans, whose love/hate attitude toward Americans was easily transferred to Coca-Cola.
Under the Marshall Plan, named for Coke’s old friend George C. Marshall, Europe was rebuilt with massive infusions of American capital. The aid was not altogether altruistic, however, but intentionally gave American multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola a mighty boost. A bitter Englishman observed in the 1950s that “victory brought an intensification of the state of siege” for his country, while it triggered “a paradise of consumption” in the United States. The lavish spending and infantile behavior of American soldiers who remained on huge bases (sneeringly called “Coca-Cola towns” by locals) didn’t alleviate this resentment. Thrifty Germans were appalled by GIs who left lights on all night, opened windows in winter, and never turned off the radio.
In 1949 and 1950, the French and several other nationalities, afraid of the imminent “Americanization” of their cultures, blindly fought back at the most convenient, blatant symbol of American hustle, a product that threatened to alter consumption patterns and attitudes of the next generation—Coca-Cola, the drink with the singsong name, the alluring poster girls, and the low cost. “There are many Europeans,” commented one journalist, “who genuinely believe that the object held aloft by the Statue of Liberty is a Coke bottle.”
THE UNHOLY FRENCH ALLIANCE
In planning for Coca-Cola’s return to the French civilian market, Company executives made a valiant effort at cultural harmony, worrying over issues such as the gender of their drink. The French-Canadian ads were masculine, but in all other Latin languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, it was a less aggressive female. After considerable discussion, they decided to skirt the issue with simple “Buvez Coca-Cola” signs, dropping “le” or “la.” The ploy backfired when grammatically punctilious Frenchmen complained about the lack of the proper definite article. The American company, they said, tortured their language.
Such niceties were lost on the French Communists, who howled in 1948 when Coca-Cola applied to the authorities for permission to bottle in France. Forced out of the governing coalition in 1947, the Communists still rema
ined the largest party in the French National Assembly, where they raged against “American imperialism” and the Marshall Plan. Throughout 1949, using smear tactics and whipping up the wine and mineral water interests, the Communists warned against the “Coca-Colonization” of Europe. When the first bottles were sold in Paris in December of 1949, their propaganda intensified, insisting that the Coca-Cola distribution organization doubled as a spy network. Skull and crossbones appeared overnight on Parisian Coke signs. In the Assembly, the Communists pressed unsuccessfully for a bill to ban Coca-Cola as a poison.
Coke’s man on the scene was Prince Alexander Makinsky, a suave, multilingual White Russian émigré. The French-educated anti-Communist had worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Paris before joining Coke in 1945. He now quietly conferred with the U.S. ambassador and French officials to calm the waters and prevent revelation of Coke’s ingredients. He diplomatically pointed out the “innocent error” of a French analytical laboratory that had found cocaine in the drink, but he couldn’t prevent a furor over the phosphoric acid and caffeine. The matter reached a head at the end of February in 1950, when the Communists formed what Farley called “a strange alliance” with the wine and mineral water interests, supporting a bill introduced by Paul Boulet, the deputy mayor of Montpellier and spokesman for many winegrowers. Boulet proposed a general measure against all non-alcoholic beverages with vegetable extracts—a thinly veiled assault on Coca-Cola. On February 28, it passed one house of the French legislature. Soon afterward, a suit was filed charging Coca-Cola with violation of a 1905 law prohibiting the sale of pharmaceuticals without ingredients on the label.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 36
