As the year drew to a close, Paul Austin outlined his concern over “anti-establish-mentarianism” in a detailed memo to Robert Woodruff. The under-thirty generation had literally forced LBJ out of office and was now focusing on other concerns. Because of its dominant position, Austin noted, The Coca-Cola Company “epitomizes the Establishment” and needed to implement programs to deflect criticism. “Following withdrawal from Vietnam,” he predicted, “the Group’s target will become pollution.” Austin observed that “we participate in the litter to a significant degree” with throw-away bottles and cans, not to mention billboards. The nutritionally empty drink also lay open for criticism. Its highly visible truck fleet made Coke an “ideal target.” Coca-Cola, the star of the show, desperately needed supporting products and programs to appeal to idealistic youth. Austin urged prompt action on several fronts. Perhaps more important than any profit, however, he sought what he called “the halo effect.” Coke must appear to be doing good in the world.
Austin’s words proved prophetic, if too late to avert trouble. Coca-Cola, the “ideal target,” had already caught the eye of politicians and government bureaucrats. Worse, the Company had attracted the ferocious attention of Cesar Chavez, a hero of the baby boomers. For Coca-Cola, the seventies would commence on a sour note.
The 1915 prototype of the classic hobbleskirt bottle was a buxom affair, which may have inspired the nickname “Mae West bottle.” It proved too bulky for bottling machines, however.
Here are a chronological procession of six-and-a-half-ounce Coca-Cola bottles, beginning with the unsatisfactory Hutchinson stopper, then the straight-sided bottle with diamond-shaped labels, and finally the classic hobbleskirt bottle, adopted in 1916.
Benjamin Thomas (left) and Joseph Whitehead (right), the two portly lawyers who finally convinced Asa Candler to let them bottle Coca-Cola, made a fortune while democratizing the soft drink, though both died relatively young.
Even at the age of two and a half, Robert Woodruff observed the world from a calm, adult face—contemplative, serious, calculating, and melancholy. (Woodruff Papers, Special Collections, Emory University)
Robert Woodruff jauntily steps onto a running board in 1923, the year he assumed the helm at Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola advertising always matched the times. In the 1920s, this flirtatious flapper espoused the drink. Note the line on the special Coca-Cola glass, indicating the proper syrup level before mixing with carbonated water.
In 1929, Archie Lee introduced “the pause that refreshes” as the appropriate social role for Coca-Cola. He also coined a phrase to take advantage of its huge sales volume: “It had to be good to get where it is.”
During the thirties and forties, Coca-Cola commissioned artists like Norman Rockwell and N. C. Wyeth to paint bucolic ads, such as this country boy with his dog, fishing pole, and Coke.
For years, Haddon Sundbloom’s Christmas ads depicted a jolly, red-clad Santa Claus who paused for a Coca-Cola while making his rounds. As a result, Sundbloom shaped the American version of St. Nick.
Actress Joan Crawford smiled for Coca-Cola in 1933, but when she married Pepsi president Al Steele in the fifties, she became a roving ambassador for the rival soft drink.
During World War II, Coca-Cola “Technical Observers” flew overseas to bottle the drink behind the lines for homesick GIs such as these, for whom the drink assumed an almost mystical significance.
[CREDIT: COPYRIGHT BILL MAULDIN, 1944, REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION]
Cartoonist Bill Mauldin took a somewhat jaundiced (but probably realistic) view of Coca-Cola’s superhuman efforts to reach soldiers during World War II.
Max Keith, who developed a thriving German business during the Nazi era against great odds, bore a physical resemblance to Adolf Hitler and led chants of “Sieg Heil!” during Coca-Cola conventions.
In 1939, Coca-Cola trucks massed in Essen’s Adolf-Hitler-Platz in a show of strength.
Max Schmeling, former heavyweight champion and the symbol of Aryan supremacy during Hitler’s reign, became a born-again Coke bottler in Hamburg, Germany.
When Robert Woodruff refused to allow his portrait on this May 15, 1950, Time cover, the magazine commissioned a classic painting depicting the worldwide flood of the soft drink. (Copyright 1950 Time Warner Inc. Reprinted by permission.)
In 1950, the French Communists led the fight against Coca-Cola, depicted here as a seductress luring France away from his legitimate Beaujolais wife. (Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate)
Coca-Cola welcomed the post-war world with the 1946 “Yes” girl. Before the Freudian “depth boys” discovered phallic symbols in advertising, the Coke men were using them.
In the mid-fifties, Coca-Cola targeted the burgeoning black middle class for the first time in publications like Ebony. It would be years, however, before minorities appeared in mainstream ads designed for general audiences.
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* Minute Maid, established in 1946, owned twenty thousand acres of Florida citrus groves, making Coca-Cola one of the world’s largest orange growers.
* Coke’s notion of “way out” flabbergasted cinematographer Ed Vorkapich. “There’s a girl in there that doesn’t have Coca-Cola–length hair,” a Company man complained at a screening. Such hair should just brush the shoulder, and the pert blonde in question had a shorter bob. Such strictures soon drove Vorkapich to desert Coke for Pepsi, where he had a freer hand.
* In a 2011 book, Feasibility of Using Mycoherbicides for Controlling Drug Crops, the National Research Council advised against using the fungus to eradicate illegal coca in Latin America, concluding that “the available data are insufficient to determine the effectiveness of the specific fungi [Fusarium oxysporum] proposed as mycoherbicides to combat illicit drug crops or to determine their potential effects on non-target plants, microorganisms, animals, humans, or the environment.”
* Nixon circled the globe six times for Pepsi between 1962 and 1968, plus numerous shorter trips.
* The Thomas Company insisted that because the new drink was a dietetic form of Coca-Cola, the old contract should apply. Without granting the validity of the claim, Paul Austin agreed to pay a “tribute” to the Thomas Company to assure its advertising cooperation.
* This was by no means the first racial incident at Ichauway. In 1932, Woodruff had hired a Pinkerton agent to investigate a series of lynchings on the plantation. The detective discovered that a white employee was the ringleader, but Woodruff didn’t fire him for fear of his possible return to do damage. The blacks didn’t blame Woodruff for the lynchings, but they, along with local whites, did resent the rich Atlantan for buying the property and preventing the free range of their hogs and cattle. At least the Boss provided work, however—for fifty cents a day.
* The Ku Klux Klan circulated a picture of Harvey Russell and his wife, a light-skinned African American, urging a white boycott of Pepsi because its “nigger vice-president” was married to a white woman. Local Coke bottlers were rumored to have funded the brochures, but there was never any proof.
* It is difficult to know what Robert Woodruff’s real feelings about civil rights were by 1964. He remained good friends with J. Edgar Hoover, who had placed Martin Luther King Jr. at the head of his “enemies list” and delighted in replaying tapes of the black leader’s illicit sexual encounters. In August of 1963, the same month in which King made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Hoover wrote to Woodruff, assuring him that “all of us at the FBI will strive to continue to merit the support you have given us.”
* It is ironic that on the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a local boycott of Coca-Cola in Memphis because “they haven’t been fair in their hiring practices” and to demonstrate “the power of economic withdrawal” while calling attention to the plight of the striking garbage collectors.
* Advertising for Saci emphasized that it made consumers “powerful” and healthy. Brazilian men interpreted this to mean that the drink would
render them more virile. Consequently, Saci never reached many malnourished children.
~ 17 ~
Big Red’s Uneasy Slumber
We used to say, “Be careful not to wake up Big Red. Be aggressive, but don’t wake up Big Red.”
—Deke DeLoach, retired Pepsi lobbyist
IN 1979, a Coca-Cola executive reviewed a dismal decade. “Had we stood in Atlanta in 1969 on the threshold of the seventies,” he told assembled bottlers, “and were endowed with some Gypsy ability to see into the future, I think that we would have quailed at the prospect that lay before us.” Paul Austin had no such “Gypsy ability” in 1969, but he sensed trouble when Cesar Chavez, fresh from his victory over the California grape growers, toured Florida. “His next target,” Austin lamented in a memo to Woodruff, “will be Citrus. He mentioned our Company by name.” Austin knew that Chavez couldn’t be lightly dismissed. “He has adopted the role and general mien of a Messiah,” he wrote gloomily. The situation in Florida’s Minute Maid groves was vulnerable, since the Company hired some six thousand migrant workers during the picking season. Most were black. Pay was minimal. Men, women, and children lived in “barrack-like structures” without bathrooms or recreation facilities. “If we were the subject of a pictorial news report,” Austin concluded, “we would come off badly.”
In 1960, the same year in which Coke acquired Minute Maid, Edward R. Murrow had first spotlighted the horrendous conditions in Florida’s orange groves in the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. No one at the soft drink company had shown much concern. Ten years later, just months after the alarmed Austin memo, Chet Huntley narrated an NBC update called Migrant, showing that nothing had changed in a decade. Coca-Cola’s groves were highlighted, with an irate Minute Maid overseer caught on camera, belligerently ordering the TV crew to leave. Although Paul Austin and Luke Smith, the president of Coca-Cola Foods, had explained Coke’s strategies to improve conditions to Martin Carr, the show’s producer, the documentary did not mention them.
Only days before Migrant was aired, Smith and Austin sat in on a closed-circuit pre-screening for Houston NBC affiliates. They were not happy with what they saw. Enraged, Austin called NBC president Julian Goodman, screaming that the station was doing “a bitch job on Coke.” The television executive listened politely, since Coca-Cola had already purchased over $2 million worth of TV spots on NBC for the 1970 season. In the end, NBC agreed to add one sentence about Coke’s “major plan which it claims will correct . . . failings,” and to delete a statement that Coke set the standards for the entire industry.
The cosmetic changes failed to deflect bad publicity. When Martin Carr told the press of the “enormous pressure” applied by the Coke men to modify his documentary, the Company came across as a corporate censor. Less than a week after the documentary aired on July 15, Senator Walter Mondale chaired a subcommittee to explore the migrants’ plight. “Nothing will change,” Mondale said in his opening statement, “until this rotten system is exposed and held accountable.” Philip Moore, the head of the Project on Corporate Responsibility, told the senators that while the migrants worked for slave wages, Paul Austin earned $150,000 a year and owned fifty-five thousand shares of Coke stock paying annual dividends of $79,200. “I would like to ask Mr. Austin,” Moore said, “why is it that when it comes to profit, corporations work fast, but when it comes to human conditions, corporations at best plod along?” Moore concluded with a scathing forecast. “I just know that Austin and other Coke officials are going to come breezing into these hearings and they are going to say, ‘Boys, we’re sorry. We’re sorry for raping these people. We’re sorry that we don’t pay them enough to live a month, much less a year. We’re sorry that migrant workers die at the age of forty-nine. . . . But now we’re going to be better.’”
Several days later, when Austin, accompanied by lawyer Joseph Califano, appeared before Mondale’s committee, he fulfilled Moore’s expectations.* He admitted that conditions for the Minute Maid workers were “deplorable,” but the Company now planned to hire many migrants as regular employees with full benefits. Coca-Cola would properly house and feed them, provide adequate child and health care, and offer recreational opportunities. Finally, Austin called for a National Alliance of Agri-Businessmen, modeled on the National Alliance of Businessmen.
Austin’s performance was nearly flawless under the senators’ hard questioning. He observed that, in addition to problems of malnutrition and poor housing, the migrants suffered from “a profound sense of futility.” He proposed giving them “human dignity” and a chance “to rise not only in our citrus operations but throughout the whole structure of our organization.” The Coca-Cola executive slipped only once, betraying a condescending racism. “These people,” he explained, “do not have a philosophy of work discipline.”
Combined with tangible results of the subsequent Agriculture Labor Project (ALP), Austin turned the initially adverse media reaction into a public relations bonanza. Time headlined Austin’s Senate speech as “The Candor That Refreshes.” African American orange picker Willy Reynolds became a star interviewee after moving into his own home in Frostproof, Florida. “It’s like bein’ born again,” he said. “I’d been in houses like this but I was always a visitor. I never thought I’d own one.” Business Week gave Coke its 1970 Award for Business Citizenship. Even Ralph Nader was impressed by Austin’s sincerity when Joe Califano arranged a dinner for the two men. After listening politely to the Coca-Cola executive’s description of his horror at conditions in the orange groves, Nader asked, “What’s a sensitive man like you, with a degree from Harvard Law School, doing pumping syrupy brown drinks into people’s stomachs?” Looking the consumer crusader straight in the eye, Austin answered, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with selling a refreshing drink.”
LITTER, POLLUTION, AND OTHER IRRITANTS
Even as the Company narrowly escaped accusations of cold-hearted neglect of migrant workers, however, it faced angry environmentalists. By the beginning of the seventies, 40 percent of all soft drinks were packaged in “one-way” containers, and the figure was steadily rising. Just after the first Earth Day in April 1970, protesters dumped mounds of nonreturnable Coke bottles in front of the North Avenue headquarters. At the same time, bottle deposit bills cropped up in state legislatures. One 1971 survey claimed that 5 percent of the country’s solid waste litter consisted of containers manufactured by The Coca-Cola Company. Company men explained, with some justification, that if Coke went back to returnable bottles and Pepsi didn’t, they would invite disaster in the marketplace. Consumers demanded an end to litter in the abstract, but at home they wanted the convenience of a throw-away container.
Hoping to defuse criticism, Coca-Cola urged recycling, stressing that most of the Company-owned bottling plants were returning glass and paper to vendors for reuse. Company advertising teams introduced billboards with a clever wordplay on the hawkish chant of Vietnam hard-liners to either love America or leave it. “If you love me,” exhorted the sign displaying Coke cans and bottles, “don’t leave me.” To catch the public’s attention, the Company willingly broke its rule about overt sexuality in the interest of litter prevention. “Bend a little,” one ad teased, showing a pretty girl’s behind as she leaned over to pick up a bottle.
While Austin had clearly approached the migrant uproar as a pragmatic business problem, he appeared to be genuinely concerned about environmental issues. In the tropical serenity of the Bahamas, Coca-Cola managers engaged in a series of Harvard-run seminars with high-power academics from across the United States. Unlike the standard management meetings, these humanistic sessions emphasized broad, sweeping visions, self-actualization, and environmental awareness. They had an enormous impact on Austin and his associates. In the world of the future, they learned, clean water would prove more valuable than gold. Austin asked Bob Broadwater, already in charge of subsidiary acquisitions, to hire a cadre of eager young Harvard Business School graduates and devise practical ways to a
pply the seminar’s lesson. Reporting directly to Austin outside of the run-of-the mill Coke bureaucracy, the group soon earned its nickname as “Austin’s Orphans.”
Broadwater and his Orphans delighted in their freedom to explore new areas. Their first find was Aqua-Chem, a leading company in the field of desalinization and water purification that might also provide leverage for ending the Arab boycott, since the arid countries of the Middle East badly needed desalinization plants. The Orphans purchased a natural-water bottler in Massachusetts, raised hydroponic fruits and vegetables under plastic on Kharg Island in Iran, bought a Wisconsin plastics company to experiment with biodegradable garbage bags and bottles, and shrimp farmed in Mexico. After an all-day session with Sterling Livingston, a former Harvard professor who had founded his own management-teaching complex in Boston and Washington, D.C., the educator suggested the enterprising Coke men buy his Sterling Institute outright. “Hell, it was only a million dollars,” Broadwater recalled. “We spilled that much before breakfast in those days.”
With the exception of the natural-water company, none of Broadwater’s acquisitions paid handsome returns. Clearly, Paul Austin was willing to forgo immediate profits to pursue his “halo effect.” After all, in 1970 the Company sat on $150 million in cash, and the money kept pouring in from soft drink sales, mounting to $300 million by 1974. Why not let the idealistic young managers have a go? Austin took a fatherly interest in them. “It’s fascinating,” he said. “In three years you watch a boy grow into a businessman.”
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 46
