Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

In Italy and to a lesser degree in France the new espresso (“made on the spur of the moment”) method increased in popularity during the thirties. Made by forcing hot water under high pressure through very fine grounds, espresso coffee, which takes less than thirty seconds to brew properly, is dark, rich, complex, concentrated, and satiny, with a rich hazel-colored crema on top and an overwhelming aroma.

  In 1901 an Italian named Luigi Bezzera invented the first commercial espresso machine, an imposing, gorgeous, complicated affair with assorted spigots, handles, and gauges, all topped with a resplendent eagle.68 Desiderio Pavoni bought the Bezzera patent, and along with other Italian inventors such as Teresio Arduino, soon produced steam pressure machines capable of spurting out 1,000 cups of espresso in an hour. By the 1930s these had spread to cafés all over Europe and to Italian restaurants in the United States. One of the advantages of this quick, concentrated brew was that it hid all manner of inferior beans; in fact, cheap robusta blends made a richer crema.

  In sidewalk cafés, fine restaurants, smoky subterranean coffeehouses, dining rooms, and kitchens, Continentals enjoyed their coffee—either black or with varying amounts of milk, whipped cream, spices, sugar, or alcohol. From Vienna to Amsterdam, they frequented their favorite coffeehouse to read the paper, play chess, or simply observe life over the rim of a coffee cup.

  Thousands of regional family roasters, many going back generations, supplied the European coffee thirst, but none were owned by conglomerates as in the United States. A few were carving out large market shares, however. The Norwegian roaster B. Friele & Sons, founded in 1800, opened a seven-story plant in 1938 in Bergen, featuring electric roasters and other modern refinements. The Dutch coffee firm Douwe Egberts had been in the same family since 1753. In 1853 young Victor Theodor Engwall began selling green coffee beans door to door in Gävle, Sweden, eventually founding the roasting firm Gevalia, purveyors of coffee to the royal family. In Finland, Gustav Paulig established Finland’s first roasting plant at the turn of the twentieth century.

  In Germany, Johann Jacobs had opened a small coffee shop in 1895, then began roasting his own coffee. In 1930 his nephew, Walther Jacobs, joined the firm, fresh from the United States, where he had learned the value of advertising. With aggressive salesmanship, slick packaging, and slogans such as “Jacobs Coffee—Satisfaction Down to the Last Bean,” the company expanded during Hitler’s Third Reich. Many Italian firms also boasted a long history, such as Caffé Vergnano, founded in 1882, or Lavazza, begun in Turin in 1895. Founder Luigi Lavazza retired in 1936, but his sons carried on the family business.

  Other firms had begun more recently. In 1933 Francesco Illy started illycaffé in Trieste (the lowercase “i” is correct). He invented an improved espresso machine two years later that did not use steam to push water through the grounds, thus preventing overextraction. He also created an arabica-only espresso blend packaged under pressure with inert gases.69

  In 1924 in Bremen, Germany—already the home of Jacobs Kaffee—Eduard Schopf created Eduscho (a combination of his first and last names) as a mail-order house—the only way at the time to achieve national distribution. By the end of the 1930s, Eduscho was the largest roaster in Germany.

  European coffee firms feared for their businesses as war appeared more and more likely. In 1938, as part of a program to limit imports in preparation for war, Hitler ordered the cessation of all coffee advertising. In January 1939 German coffee imports were reduced by 40 percent, and just before the war began, the Nazi party confiscated the country’s entire coffee stocks for use by the military.

  At the end of the 1930s, a long-established European firm entered the world of coffee. In 1867 Henri Nestlé, a German chemist who had settled in Vevey, Switzerland, had invented an infant feeding formula for women who couldn’t nurse. By 1900 he had set up production facilities in several countries, including the United States, where he also made condensed milk. During the next thirty years the international beverage company added chocolate and confectionary products, while establishing factories and purchasing subsidiaries around the globe.

  In 1938, after eight years of experimentation, Nestlé launched Nescafé, an improved powdered instant coffee destined to revolutionize the way many consumers around the world drank their coffee. Rather than using the drum method, in which brewed coffee was boiled down to crystals, Nestlé sprayed the liquid into heated towers, where the droplets turned to powder almost instantly. The manufacturers also added an equal amount of carbohydrates (dextrin, dextrose, and maltose), which they believed helped maintain flavor. The next year the company began marketing Nescafé in the United States.

  The World of the Future

  As the 1930s and the Depression came to an end, the United States looked toward the future with much greater optimism than either Latin America or Europe. Now in his third term, Franklin Roosevelt represented stability and confidence as he opened the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

  At the fair, Standard Brands had built the world’s longest coffee bar to serve Chase & Sanborn, made from beans roasted and ground in a miniature demonstration plant nearby. In an open-air theater, visitors could laugh while Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy put on a live show, taking care to plug Chase & Sanborn appropriately. “New swing bands at World’s Fair are phenomenally popular; can’t swing it too fast for the jitterbugs,” an ad declared, illustrated by a girl flung high in the air by her partner. “Chase & Sanborn are popular, too, for thrilling, fast delivery.” August 31 was set aside as Coffee Day at the fair.

  At the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, Hills Brothers opened the Coffee Exposition Theater, where they showed their promotional film, Behind the Cup, and where tourists could sip coffee while viewing colorful murals depicting scenes from Hills Brothers’ history. The company’s ads tied in with the event. “To a Woman, Every Day is EXPOSITION Day,” the headlines read. “Where is the woman who doesn’t take a quick glance at every mirror she passes—to ‘check-up’ and make sure she is looking her best?” asked the copy, while the illustration showed a woman checking herself out. “Is your coffee always at its best?”70

  In 1939 a major national advertising campaign—funded by six Latin American countries that had formed the Pan American Coffee Bureau—spent $35,000 to encourage summer iced-coffee consumption.71 They even crowned a buxom swimsuited Miss Iced Coffee. They sponsored a fall-winter marketing campaign, reaching 25 million families through newspapers and magazines, offering true-false quizzes such as “Coffee Makes Physical Work Easier” (True) and “Coffee Makes Your Brain Work Better” (True). The bureau also published Coffee Facts and Fantasies, a booklet to combat the “health fetish” that branded coffee a drug. It reported on an experiment conducted at the University of Chicago in which two groups of college students were given coffee and milk, respectively. The coffee group complained of disturbed sleep, while the milk group did not. The students did not know, however, that the coffee was decaffeinated, while caffeine had been added to the milk. Thus, concluded the booklet, their reaction was psychological rather than physiological.

  G. Washington advertised its availability on Eastern Air Transport flights: “Every Cup a Masterpiece Aboard These Giant 18-Passenger Planes”—and all in only three seconds to stir the instant brown crystals. Not to be outdone, Pan American Airways conducted a much-publicized “scientific experiment” to demonstrate that its drip coffee was satisfactory.

  The American Can Company, which produced most of the vacuum cans for the nation’s coffee, created its own Bureau of Home Economics, designed to indoctrinate schoolchildren into the wonders of coffee. The company paid the famed photographer Margaret Bourke-White to spend a month in Brazil taking photographs of coffee cultivation and harvesting, then sent out educational coffee packets to over 700,000 students.72 The schools were delighted to get the free material as long as it didn’t come directly from a coffee company. As a result, thousands of elementary schoolchildren penned coffee anthems and poems, such as the f
ollowing effort from a young student who must have observed her parents: It’s a pick-me-up at breakfast,

  It’s a stimulant at night.

  If you ever miss your coffee,

  You’ll sure be apt to fight.

  National surveys revealed that 98 percent of the families in the United States drank coffee, with 15 percent of children between six and sixteen years old partaking, and 4 percent of those under age six. The A & P brands held the lead with 15 percent of the market, while Maxwell House and Chase & Sanborn had snared 13 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The rest of the market was split among some 5,000 other brands, all of which had managed to survive the Depression. Annual U.S. coffee consumption finally had topped fourteen pounds per capita. Seeking an explanation, a Time reporter felt that “high-pressure advertising plus cheap retail prices” had helped, along with “the nervous national tempo.” He also surmised that “when depression nips an average man’s buying power, he finds a 5¢ cup of coffee a sort of emotional ersatz for more expensive things.”

  To cap off the self-congratulatory year of 1939, grocers displayed a “Parade of Progress” of national brands, with coffee leading the list. In all this jitterbugging, promotional, bigger-and-better hubbub, the caffeinated nation paid scant attention to the gathering war clouds. The American coffee men were more concerned that Mussolini had declared war against coffee as an unhealthy drink. “Granting that the Nazis and the Fascisti are developing a race of supermen,” an editorial in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal stated, “the sure way to make them invincible, in the last analysis, is to feed them coffee in constantly increasing quantities and not to deny them the one drink that has ever been the indispensable beverage of strong nations.”

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  Cuppa Joe

  The United States, the leading coffee-drinking nation of the world, conform[s] in general to the coffee-pattern—non-conservative, self-assertive, dynamic. . . . Coffee has . . . expand[ed] humanity’s working-day from twelve to a potential twenty-four hours. The tempo, the complexity, the tension of modern life, call for something that can perform the miracle of stimulating brain activity, without evil, habit-forming after-effects.

  —Margaret Meagher, To Think of Coffee (1942)

  On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s blitzkrieg stormed across the Polish border. Europe was at war, and a market for some 10 million bags of coffee—a little less than half the world’s consumption at the time—snapped shut. As in the previous world war, Scandinavian countries initially bought heavily for resale to warring nations, but Germany’s quick march through Europe early in 1940 soon closed off those ports. Besides, German U-boats made crossing the Atlantic—or even steaming from Santos to New York—extremely hazardous.

  Suddenly the old Brazilian idea of a coffee agreement didn’t seem so repugnant to other Latin American producers or to the United States government—at least not its foreign policy wing. Colombia, threatened by Brazil’s open-the-floodgates policy and the wartime closing of the European markets, asked the U.S. State Department to help implement an accord. Meanwhile, green coffee prices plummeted.

  Goose-stepping in Guatemala

  With startling German military successes early in the war, the prospect of nazified neighbors to the south seemed all too real. Many of the 5,000 Germans in Guatemala were open Nazi sympathizers. In the northern province of Cobán, Germans owned 80 percent of all arable land. In addition, Germans controlled the prominent banking-export house of Nottebohm Brothers and many of the country’s coffee export firms.

  Still, there were a number of German Guatemalans who had no use for Hitler. Walter Hannstein, for instance, born in Guatemala in 1902, had grown coffee all of his adult life. He cared only for his family plantation, not fascist megalomaniacs halfway around the globe.73 Similarly, Erwin Paul Dieseldorff and his son, Willi, who inherited the huge Guatemalan coffee holdings in 1937, were opposed to the Nazi government.

  Local Gestapo members brought increasing pressure to bear on non-Nazi Guatemalan Germans, sometimes threatening them with violence. The Nazis compiled a secret list of forty “unpatriotic” Germans who were to be executed once Germany won the war and took over Guatemala.

  Gerhard Hentschke, the commercial attaché to the German embassy in Guatemala City, deluged Guatemalans with Nazi propaganda (in Spanish) through newspapers, radio, and libraries. Distributors of German goods enclosed Nazi literature in cases of merchandise. Otto Reinebeck, the Nazi minister for all Central America, was headquartered in Guatemala. Reinebeck invited groups of German coffee growers to parties, and soon the German Club flew the swastika alongside the flag of the old monarchy. Nazi sympathizers marked the underside of strategic bridges with swastikas to let invading German forces know that these bridges were to be blown up.

  Hammering Out a Coffee Agreement

  Given this context, it is easy to understand the alacrity with which the U.S. State Department hastened to assure coffee growers that they would support an agreement that would save the coffee industries and economies of Latin America. The United States was now the only market for their coffee. If the United States took advantage of the situation to extort ever-lower prices, it would virtually throw an embittered, impoverished Latin America to the Nazis or Communists.

  On June 10, 1940, five days after Hitler invaded France, the Third Pan American Coffee Conference convened in New York City, with delegates from fourteen producing countries. The conference assigned the task of quota divisions to a three-man subcommittee, which thrashed out a compromise. The Inter-American Coffee Agreement, which was to be renegotiated on October 1, 1943, allowed for 15.9 million bags to enter the United States—nearly a million over the estimated actual U.S. consumption at the time, which would ensure U.S. citizens of enough coffee while at least providing a quota ceiling so that prices would not decline to absurd levels. Brazil would get the lion’s share of the quota—not quite 60 percent—with Colombia snaring just over 20 percent. The rest was divided between other Latin American producers, with a token 353,000 bags left for “other countries” that included Asian and African producers.

  Although the conference closed on July 6, 1940, it took nearly five months to achieve an agreement that all of the participants would sign. Mexico and Guatemala were major holdouts, demanding a larger share of the pie. On July 9, Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico told John Cabot, the American chargé, that his country’s proposed 500,000-bag quota was completely unacceptable. “The mere publication of the plan locally,” the pro-German Ubico informed Cabot, “would result in driving this country commercially into the hands of Germany as soon as commercial relations with Germany can be resumed.”

  As the pending quota agreement appeared in jeopardy, coffee prices continued their free fall, eventually reaching 5.75 cents a pound in September 1940, the lowest price in history.74 Eurico Penteado of Brazil and Sumner Welles of the United States, working through the already-established Inter-American Financial and Economic Committee, agreed to tweak the quotas in a compromise that finally brought all of the signatories to the table.

  Welles met on November 20, 1940, with representatives of fourteen Latin American coffee-producing countries to sign the agreement in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. The New York Times reported that it was “an unprecedented agreement” that would erect “economic bulwarks against totalitarian trade penetration.”

  1941: Surviving the First Quota Year

  The first year of the agreement, which ran retrospectively from October 1, 1940 (when the new Brazilian harvest began to arrive in the United States), through September 30, 1941, was marked by controversy and uneasy compromise. In the first few months of 1941, coffee prices rose swiftly in response to the newly signed agreement. At first American coffee companies weren’t alarmed. W. F. Williamson, secretary of the National Coffee Association, put it succinctly: “The American consumer does not require, and will not insist on having coffee at prices which mean bankruptcy to Latin American producing countries.” Business Week note
d that higher coffee prices would “cushion the impact of the war on the economy of Latin American countries,” while allowing them to purchase more goods from U.S. manufacturers.

  By June prices had nearly doubled from their lows of the previous year. At the Coffee Board meetings of the Inter-American Coffee Agreement, the producing countries resisted the suggestion put forward by American representative Paul Daniels to increase the quotas. Both Brazil and Colombia flouted Daniels’s request by increasing the official minimum price at which they would sell their coffees.

  Leon Henderson, head of the newly created U.S. Office of Price Administration (OPA), took notice. The New Deal advocate had never approved of the coffee quota agreement. In July, when Brazil announced another minimum-price increase, Henderson blew up. “The unmistakable attitude of the producing countries to date,” Henderson wrote, was: “‘Here is a chance to make a killing.’” He threatened to suspend the quota agreement. Daniels subsequently invoked the right of the United States under the coffee agreement unilaterally to increase the various quotas without the consent of the producers. On August 11 quotas were officially increased by 20 percent. The ploy worked, as prices began to subside.

  In spite of numerous problems, the coffee agreement saved the Latin American coffee industry, and relations between the United States and Latin America seldom had been more amicable. During 1941, per-capita coffee consumption in the United States had risen to sixteen and a half pounds—a new record.

  In December six Latin American “coffee queens,” funded by their governments, arrived in New York for a triumphant U.S. tour. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted them on her show, Over Our Coffee Cups, which stressed the theme, “Get More Out of Life With Coffee.” The coffee queens were scheduled to appear at the Waldorf Astoria a week later for a grand Coffee Ball—but the Japanese upstaged them.