There is no question that the valorization scheme benefited Hermann Sielcken and his associates more than the farmers or government of Brazil. It did prevent mass bankruptcies, foreclosures, and possible revolution, however. Unfortunately, its perceived success encouraged Brazil to pursue further valorization schemes of one sort or another for the next few decades. In the euphoria of 1912, with coffee prices going up, the Brazilian politicians abandoned the tax on new plantings, allowing overproduction a few years later. Over time it also became clear that Brazil was not immune to competition from other coffee-growing countries. The result: Brazil’s domination of the world coffee industry (nearly 80 percent in the early twentieth century) would slowly erode.
Hermann Sielcken’s Final Years
For septuagenarian Hermann Sielcken everything seemed to be going well. As the valorization suit finally was dismissed early in 1913, his partner George Crossman died, leaving him a million-dollar bequest. It turned out that Crossman and Sielcken, about the same age, had made a kind of bet on who would live longer: each had included the other for $1 million in his will. (Crossman’s son received only $300,000.)
Soon afterward the seventy-three-year-old Sielcken, widowed seven years previously, married Clara Wendroth, forty years his junior. They sailed for Germany in October 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Sielcken, the astute internationalist who could predict Brazilian harvests so well, apparently refused to believe that war actually would transpire.
In 1915 the New York Times reported a rumor that Sielcken was being detained in Germany, where the government was extorting large amounts of money from him. However, as the article reported, Sielcken had in fact always been “very pro-German in his opinions.” The money he donated to German war relief was purely voluntary. In 1915 he secretly furnished $750,000 to purchase the New York Evening Sun, which promptly supported the German cause.
As Sielcken’s health failed in 1917, so did his fortunes. Only days before his death in October, his U.S. property, worth over $3 million, was seized under the Alien Property Act. It took four years for Sielcken’s widow to prove that he had been a naturalized American citizen. The government then returned the money.
Litigation over Sielcken’s estate, valued at over $4 million, continued to keep his name alive for years. After his death two women with whom he apparently had been romantically involved came forward. The Woolson Spice Company, controlled by Sielcken at his death, passed into other hands. After examining the books the new managers sued the estate for $800,000. It seems that in 1913, when the government suit had pressured Sielcken into selling the valorized coffee, he had dumped some 23 million pounds of Brazilian coffee into the warehouses of the Woolson Spice Company, for which he had charged the company the prevailing high prices. Shortly thereafter, when the valorized coffee was sold, the price dropped substantially. Sielcken’s executor settled the case out of court for around $250,000.
The Caffeine Kicker
By the turn of the twentieth century many reformers were convinced that coffee was an evil drug whose immoderate use could lead to insanity or even death. As a result, pure food faddists such as John Harvey Kellogg and C. W. Post produced “healthy” coffee substitutes, and another aspect of the coffee wars commenced.
6
The Drug Drink
The drug, caffeine, in coffee keeps many persons awake nights when they ought to be asleep. If you’ve found only that one annoying fault with coffee (there are others) isn’t it time to quit it and use POSTUM? . . . “There’s a Reason”
—1912 advertisement for Postum
The high prices that accompanied valorization delighted Charles William Post. As the inventor of Postum, America’s favorite coffee substitute, Charley Post, or C.W. (as he preferred to be addressed formally), profited handsomely whenever green bean prices soared and people sought cheaper alternatives. Taking advantage of a new national health consciousness and adopting a scientific patter, Post promised that by drinking Postum, his coffee substitute, consumers would be on the “road to Wellville.” His folksy but negative approach to advertising revolutionized modern marketing while appalling the coffee industry by calling their beverage a “drug drink.”
With his ubiquitous advertising, self-righteousness, posturing grandiosity, and propaganda against “coffee nerves,” Post was the opponent coffee men loved to hate. And they did, vilifying him in the pages of the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal as “the cereal slush king” and worse. By 1900 there were half a dozen other Battle Creek, Michigan, firms producing “healthy” coffee substitutes. During the valorization period, several other cereal firms marketed coffee substitutes or extenders. Postum, however, was by far the most successful. With Grape-Nuts cereal, it had made Post a multimillionaire even before the valorization scheme.
Born in 1854 in Springfield, Illinois, Charley Post quit school at fifteen. He made up for his short attention span with inventive fervor and entrepreneurial energy. While still in his teens he started a hardware store in Independence, Kansas, selling it a year later for a profit. He worked as a traveling salesman of farm implements, then invented and manufactured farm equipment on his own, obtaining patents for a seed planter, sulky plow, harrow, hay stacker, and various cultivators. He also invented a smokeless cooker and a water-powered electric generator.
Post’s extraordinary inventiveness did not come without cost, however. By 1885 he had developed neurasthenia, a fashionable “disease” of the era. Named and popularized by Dr. George Beard, neurasthenia supposedly involved an exhaustion of the body’s limited supply of “nervous energy.” Many overworked businessmen and oversensitive upper-class women believed they suffered from this ailment. “The combined effects of work with stimulants and narcotics,” Post said later, “produced a nervous breakdown.”
After a brief recovery, Post took his wife, Ella, and young daughter, Marjorie, to California in 1888, then to Texas, where he took to a wheelchair owing to his supposedly weak nerves, while simultaneously managing a woolen mill, selling land and homes, and representing several electrical motor manufacturers. He also invented a player piano, an improved bicycle, and “Scientific Suspenders,” which could not be seen when worn under a coat.
Despite his entrepreneurial fervor, Post hadn’t yet made a decent living, and the financial strain caused digestive disorders and another breakdown in 1890. He moved his family to Battle Creek, Michigan, to seek care at the famed Sanitarium, or “San,” of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.
Kellogg had turned the San into a national phenomenon. A diminutive, bearded dynamo, he made himself the impresario of health faddism, and one of his particular dislikes was coffee. “The tea and coffee habit is a grave menace to the health of the American people,” he intoned, causing arteriosclerosis, Bright’s disease, heart failure, apoplexy, and premature old age. “Tea and coffee are baneful drugs and their sale and use ought to be prohibited by law.” He even alleged that “insanity has been traced to the coffee habit.”
Mind Cure and Postum
Post’s nine months at the San failed to cure his indigestion or nervous disorder. “I think you should know,” Dr. Kellogg gravely informed Ella Post, “that C. W. has very little time left. He is not going to get well.” In desperation Ella took up the study of Christian Science with her cousin, Elizabeth Gregory. Mrs. Gregory told the ailing Post that he should simply deny his illness, that it was all in his mind, and that he could eat whatever he pleased. Obeying her suggestion, he began to feel better, left the San, and moved in with his new healing guru.
By 1892 Post had recovered sufficiently to open his own Battle Creek alternative to Kellogg’s Sanitarium, which he christened La Vita Inn. Gregory provided mental treatments for a slight extra charge. A couple of years later Post published a book, The Modern Practice: Natural Suggestion, or, Scientia Vitae, which he reissued the next year with the catchier and more egotistical title I Am Well! In it Post claimed miraculous cures for himself and those who stayed at his inn, espousing “New Tho
ught” or “mind cure.” All disease was simply the result of “wrong thinking.”
In 1895 Post first manufactured Postum, a grain-based coffee substitute that bore a suspicious resemblance to Kellogg’s Caramel Coffee (served at the San).23 In October 1896 he transferred $37,000 of the inn’s assets to provide start-up capital for Postum Ltd. When his new drink proved profitable, Post abandoned his therapeutic practice at the La Vita Inn and modified his views to fit his new product. In I Am Well! he had written that all disease stemmed from “mental inharmony” and could be cured through right thinking. Soon, however, he was advertising an easier method: “Remember, you can recover from any ordinary disease by discontinuing coffee and poor food, and using Postum Food Coffee.”24
Post was a natural salesman. A tall, slim, square-shouldered man with chiseled good looks, he impressed both men and women with his charismatic, persuasive presentations. In 1895 he took a portable stove along with Postum samples to Michigan grocers. At each store he would prepare a pot, boiling the prescribed twenty minutes, all the while praising the drink’s medicinal and mouthwatering properties. “When well brewed,” he proclaimed, “Postum has the deep seal brown of coffee and a flavor very like the milder brands of Java.”
The first Grand Rapids grocer Post visited wasn’t moved, since he had a large supply of Kellogg’s Caramel Coffee on hand, gradually turning stale. Post convinced the grocer to take Postum on consignment, promising that advertising would create a demand. Then the industrious entrepreneur visited the editor of the Grand Rapids Evening Press, brewed more Postum, and served it. The editor remained dubious until he noticed Post’s stationery, with a red dot in one corner and the legend below, “It makes red blood.” Impressed by Postum’s health claims, he gave Post $10,000 worth of advertising credit.
By mid-1895 Post was spending $1,250 a month on advertising. In 1897 the figure had risen to $20,000 a month. Over his career he spent well over $12 million to promote his products, 70 percent in local newspapers, the balance in national magazines. Post remained convinced that such gigantic advertising outlays were justified, creating demand for a mass-produced and widely distributed product. Through economies of scale he could lower the cost of goods to the consumer despite his ad expenditures.
Within a few years, the nondescript barn in which Post first brewed Postum was surrounded by pristine white factory buildings, known as the White City. The most impressive building served as his “temple of propaganda,” as one journalist put it, where Post’s advertising men dreamed up new slogans for him to approve or amend. It was, according to the writer, “the most unique and sumptuously furnished office building in the world.”
Post’s Fierce Attacks
Post believed in appealing directly to the consumer rather than relying on salesmen to convince grocers and wholesalers to stock his product. With such “pull” advertising, consumers would demand his products.
The Postum ads “must use plain words, homely illustrations, and . . . the vocabulary of the customer,” Post emphasized. One of his best-known advertising lines, “If Coffee Don’t Agree, Use Postum Food Coffee,” drove the coffee men and grammarians wild, but it sold Postum. At the end of every ad Post added a tag line: “There’s a Reason.” It was never clear what this sentence meant. Regardless, the phrase found its way into the popular culture of the time.
By May 1897 sales were booming, largely due to scare ads that depicted harried, desperate, and dissipated people hooked on caffeine. They warned of the hazards of “coffee heart,” “coffee neuralgia,” and “brain fag.” Abstaining from coffee and drinking Postum would effect the promised cure.
An interviewer told Post, “Your advertising . . . has this element of combat in it. It always . . . goes straight for the other fellow’s eyes.” Indeed, one Post headline blared, “Lost Eyesight through Coffee Drinking.” Another announced, “It is safe to say that one person in every three among coffee users has some incipient or advanced form of disease.” Coffee contained “a poisonous drug—caffeine, which belongs in the same class of alkaloids with cocaine, morphine, nicotine, and strychnine.” One ad featured coffee spilling slowly from a cup, accompanied by an alarming text: “Constant dripping wears away the stone. Perhaps a hole has been started in you. . . . Try leaving off coffee for ten days and use Postum Food Coffee.”
Other ads resorted to personal intimidation. “Is your yellow streak the coffee habit?” Post’s copy asked. “Does it reduce your work time, kill your energy, push you into the big crowd of mongrels, deaden what thorough-bred blood you may have and neutralize all your efforts to make money and fame?”
When he wasn’t frightening his readers, Post buttered them up, appealing to their egos. He addressed an ad to “highly organized people,” telling them that they could perform much better on Postum than on nerve-racking coffee. Post also addressed the modern man, asserting that Postum was “the Scientific Way To Repair Brains and Rebuild Waste Tissues.” Coffee was not a food but a powerful drug. “Sooner or later the steady drugging will tear down the strong man or woman, and the stomach, bowels, heart, kidneys, nerves, brain, or some other organ connected with the nervous system, will be attacked.”
Post has been given credit for first adapting patent medicine come-ons—with their exaggerated health claims, appeals to snobbery and fear, bogus scientific jargon, and repetitive incantations—for a beverage, thus paving the way for modern consumer advertising. In fact, he may have learned from Coca-Cola, first offered in 1886 as a “brain tonic,” and also destined to play an important role in coffee history.
Tapping the Paranoia
Post, a man of his times, tapped into a fin-de-siècle American fear. The pace of change—with telegraphs, electricity, railroads, ticker tapes, and economic booms and busts—seemed overwhelming. In addition, the typical American diet, heavy with grease and meat, was guaranteed to cause indigestion—dyspepsia was the most frequent medical complaint of the age. This heavy food was usually washed down with an ocean of poorly prepared coffee. By the turn of the twentieth century, the typical U.S. citizen used an average of twelve pounds of coffee annually—nothing compared to the Dutch, the world leaders at sixteen pounds per capita, but a great deal of coffee nonetheless. People frequently sought drug-laced patent medicine remedies for their stomach problems.
Post’s new national product advertising, cleverly adopting much of the scientific patter and overblown claims of the patent medicines, was extraordinarily effective. Regional coffee advertisers, with the exception of the Ariosa and Lion brands, could not compete. Their local messages, stressing familiar themes such as aroma and good taste, were no match for Post’s sophisticated pitches. Worse, in the face of the Postum onslaught, many coffee ads became defensive, saying that their coffee (as opposed to others) lacked poisonous substances and tannins.
Post further infuriated coffee men by writing inflammatory, pseudo-scientific letters directly to consumers. “Coffee frequently produces indigestion and causes functional disturbances of the nervous system,” he wrote in one such letter. He asserted that caffeine attacked “the pneumogastric nerve (the tenth cranial or wandering nerve, the longest and most widely distributed nerve of the brain),” often leading to paralysis. “Coffee is an alkaloid poison and a certain disintegrator of brain tissues.”
The fact that Post himself continued to drink the evil brew did not soften his attacks on coffee. According to his daughter, Marjorie, Post would drink coffee “for a few days and be sick, and he’d drink Postum for a few days and be well, and then he’d go back to coffee.” He even did so in public. One newspaper reporter noted that at a dinner, Post imbibed “oh, horrors, some of that terrible, nerve-destroying beverage, the deadly coffee,” despite being “the champion of the coffeeless nerve.”
Finding that Postum sales were seasonal—peaking in the winter—Post invented Grape-Nuts cereal in 1898 to round out the year, calling it “the Most Scientific Food in the World.” Postum sales swelled, by 1900 reaching $425,196, nearly
half of which was pure profit. In 1908 Postum accounted for over $1.5 million in sales, though it was topped by Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties by that time.
Monk’s Brew and Other Ploys
Post sold Postum boxes for 25 cents retail and a case of a dozen boxes to grocery wholesalers for $2, leaving a slim profit margin for retailers. The product was in such demand, however, that merchants had little choice but to carry it. Inevitably, competitors sprang up, offering a similar coffee substitute at a substantially reduced price. Post responded to these challenges by creating a new drink, Monk’s Brew, pricing it at only a nickel a package, and marketing it aggressively in towns where underpriced competitors were making inroads. Once Monk’s Brew wiped out the competing brands, Post withdrew it from the market. “The imitators were ruined,” Post chortled. “It was one of the most complete massacres I have ever seen.” The wily Post took the returned Monk’s Brew and repackaged it as Postum—quite legitimately, since it was precisely the same product.
Although Post rolled in money, he was stingy with his own employees. The packing room women received 0.3 cents for each box of Postum they filled but were fined a full 25 cents for each box they accidentally tore. Even though they were paid on a piecework basis, workers’ pay was still docked when they showed up late for work. In addition, Post was rabidly antiunion, spending much time and money in his latter years writing and distributing right-wing diatribes against the evils of organized labor.
Over time Post left the day-to-day manufacturing process to his managers, while he pursued a restless, nomadic life among homes in Washington, D.C., Texas, California, New York City, London, and at his married daughter’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He conducted much of his business by mail. While delegating most aspects of his fabulously successful enterprise, however, Post continued to pay personal attention to advertising copy. He often kept a piece of copy in his pocket for weeks, adding a new touch daily, aware that each word would reach some 30 million readers. “I have never been able to get anybody to write our advertising better than I do myself,” Post observed, “and have never been able to teach anyone to write it my way.”25
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 13
