Boston has an early and distinguished place in the American annals of caffeine. Even before any American coffeehouse had opened its doors, Dorothy Jones was granted the first known license to sell coffee in America, in Boston in 1670, though no one knows if she was a purveyor of “coffee powder,” the name for the ground roasted beans, or of the drink itself. It was also in Boston that the London Coffee House, the first coffeehouse in America, opened for business. It constitutes the earliest example in America of the now popular bookshop café, for it is reliably reported that “Benj. Harris sold books there in 1689,” the first year of its operation. Of course, the tradition of selling books in coffeehouses dates back to at least 1657 in London, and after their invention in the eighteenth century, newspapers were printed and sold from the coffeehouses in both England and the New World.
In 1696 the King’s Arms, the first coffeehouse in New York, was opened near Trinity Church by John Hutchins. Its yellow brick and wood structure, with rooftop seating and a splendid view of the city and bay, is supposed to have been standing in Holland when it was purchased, dismantled, and its parts transported to America, where it was reassembled.
The first coffeehouse in Philadelphia was opened by Samuel Carpenter around 1700 on the east side of Front Street, above Walnut Street. Because it remained the only such establishment in the city for some years, it was referred to in the old days simply as “Ye Coffee House.” The Coffee House was apparently used as a post office, to judge from this 1734 excerpt from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette:
All persons who are indebted to Henry Flower, late postmaster of Pennsylvania, for Postage of Letters or otherwise, are desir’d to pay the same to him at the old Coffee House in Philadelphia.1
Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), always alert to new business opportunities, sold coffee, running an advertisement claiming, “Very good coffee sold by the Printer.” Around 1750 William Bradford, another Philadelphia printer, opened his own London Coffee House, at the southwest corner of Second and Market Streets. It became a thriving center for merchants, mariners, and travelers, and was used as a market for horses, food, and slaves, the last of which were displayed on a platform in the street in front of the coffeehouse.
American coffeehouses, which continued the British coffeehouse traditions as “penny universities” and enhanced their feared and celebrated status as “seminaries of sedition,” soon opened in every colony. At first they were simply taverns serving ale, port, and Jamaican rum, as well as coffee. But soon these coffeehouses featured in American official civic life in ways that had been unknown even in England: Their “assembly rooms” became the sites of court trials and council meetings. The Green Dragon, a coffeehouse tavern and inn, established in 1697, which Daniel Webster called the “headquarters of the Revolution,” was frequented in the next century by Paul Revere, John Adams, James Otis, and other illustrious rebels, and remained open in Boston’s business center for 135 years. Throughout this time, the Green Dragon remained a center of activity, hosting from the first, “Red-coated British soldiers, colonial governors, bewigged crown officers, earls and dukes, citizens of high estate, plotting revolutionists of lesser degree, conspirators in the Boston Tea Party, patriots and generals of the Revolution.”2 The Grand Lodge of Masons, under the leadership of the first grand master of Boston’s first Masonic group, convened there as well.
Colonial American tea tray with cartouch of ladies reading coffee grounds, illustrating the common practice of using grounds for divination, one similar to the practice of reading tea leaves that is more familiar today. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
It was in the Green Dragon that Revere and his co-conspirators are supposed to have met to plan the Boston Tea Party. The story of the Stamp Act of 1765, a British tea tax that turned Americans into some of the world’s most avid coffee drinkers, is well known. Tariffs and taxes frequently determined which of the caffeinated beverages, if any, were within reach of the average person, and had often been designed to do so. The opposition to the British tax prompted the Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which the British East India Company’s cargoes of tea were jettisoned into the harbor. From this moment in history, coffee became the favored caffeinated drink of Americans, indispensable at the breakfast table and the workplace ever after. The Bunch of Grapes, another of the earliest Boston coffeehouses, was the site of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
New York’s Merchants Coffee House, at the intersection of Wall and Water streets, hosted the Sons of Liberty on April 18, 1774, who, following the example of their Boston compatriots, met there to plan their own blockage of British tea imports. The next month, leaders of the revolution gathered there to draft their call for the First Continental Congress. Neither was this coffeehouse forgotten in the aftermath of war and victory. For in 1789, New York City’s mayor and the state’s governor threw a lavish party there in honor of the election of George Washington.
With the opening of the Exchange coffeehouse on Exchange Street in Boston in 1808, the institution reached a kind of acme. The Exchange was modeled after Lloyd’s of London and, like Lloyd’s, served as a center for ship brokers and mariners. Designed by Charles Bulfinch, the most celebrated American architect of the day, it stood seven stories high and was constructed of stone, marble, and brick, at a cost of half a million dollars. In 1817 the Exchange hosted a banquet for James Monroe, attended by John Adams and many other dignitaries. Probably the largest and most expensive coffee-house ever seen in the world, before or since, the Exchange burned down in 1818.
The Exchange Coffee House, Boston. This was the largest and most costly coffeehouse ever built. Erected in 1808, of stone, marble, and brick, it stood seven stories and cost $500,000. It was modeled after Lloyd’s of London, and was, like Lloyd’s, a center for patrons from the shipping business. (W.H.Ukers, All about Coffee)
The early days of American coffeehouses were times of heavy alcohol drinking both in England and the colonies. The English “gin epidemic,” against which the College of Physicians had warned in 1726, asserting that it was a “growing evil which was, too often, a cause of weak, feeble, and distempered children,” continued unabated on both sides of the Atlantic. The revolution and the decades after marked a high level of alcohol use that exceeded any achieved in the twentieth century. In 1785, this widespread drunkenness prompted Benjamin Rush (1735–1814), a famous physician and reformer, to found an anti-alcohol movement, that, like many other such movements since, began by advocating temperance and later advocated abstinence. Rush was as fervent an advocate of the temperance beverages as he was an opponent of the alcoholic ones. His followers, who purchased tens of thousands of copies of his temperance booklets, helped to advance the cause of coffee, tea, and chocolate drinking in the new nation. Yet despite his efforts, around 1800 Americans still annually consumed about three times as much alcohol per person as they were to consume in the 1990s.
Amercia, Land of the Free—Refill
By the second half of the nineteenth century, America was consuming more coffee than any country in the world, and the drink had, in the minds of many of its inhabitants, come to be more identified with their pioneering, robust, democratic country than the stuffy, effete, class-stratified society of Europe. Coffee’s status in America is attested by Mark Twain (1835– 1910) in his travelogue A Tramp Abroad, in which he celebrates coffee, which he has obviously come to regard as quintessentially American, and recounts experiences with it abroad that many American travelers may find familiar today:
In Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel…. After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,” one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream
on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.
In an 1892 entry in his Autobiography, Twain presents a somewhat more attractive picture of Italian tea drinking, which he observed while passing through Florence on the way to Germany:
Late in the afternoon friends come out from the city and drink tea in the open air, and tell what is happening in the world; and when the great sun sinks down upon Florence and the daily miracle begins, they hold their breaths and look. It is not a time for talk.3
As the emergent capital of industry and the marketplace and the symbol of revolution and the mixing of peoples, America was the country best fitted to assume leadership in the twentieth-century saga of caffeine. However, if you ask a European visitor what, in his opinion, is the most noteworthy feature of American cafés, he is most likely, instead of mentioning complex ideological or social factors or the characteristic taste complexity of the American roast, to say, “They refill your cup without charge, even without asking!” American readers may wonder why this ordinary courtesy should be regarded as so important. But if you consider that many European coffee lovers and coffeehouse habitués spend hours nursing small cups that cost them twice as much as Americans pay, and that if they want another they must pay the full price again, you can see how, in the course of a life of café hopping, these refills could add up to a small fortune.
Perhaps the endless refill is symbolic of America’s special affection for coffee and of its general culture of largesse and informality as well. Coffee certainly plays the dominant part in the story of caffeine in the United States. Ever since their defiance of British tea taxes inspired the colonials to exchange the leaf for the bean as a patriotic duty, Americans cultivated a taste for coffee to the extent that they became by far the largest single national coffee importers on earth, and today they account for more than half of world coffee imports. Coffee is overwhelmingly the source of most of the caffeine consumed here.
The coffeehouse tradition of troubadour and balladeer, which began in the Middle East in the early sixteenth century, continued in the English coffeehouses of the Restoration (when these establishments became “the usual meeting-places of the roving cavaliers, who seldom visited home but to sleep”),4 and was impressively revived in twentieth-century America, first by the nonconformist Beat Generation of the 1950s and then by the folk and flower child social rebels of the 1960s. The Beat Generation movement began in San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York’s Greenwich Village. Its members affected an exhausted sophistication and demoralized bohemian irony that put them in the company of a certain tradition of coffeehouse denizens. The apolitical Beat Generation take on café culture is represented by Beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, who read their works at coffeehouses such as the Coexistence Bagel Shop in San Francisco and emphasized personal fulfillment through self-expression, nonconformity, free love, and the use of drugs and alcohol. Their more socially minded but more drug-dependent hippie successors are represented by folk singers such as Bob Dylan, who began performing professionally in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, where he sang Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era songs and others of his own composition to a young audience that had ridden into adulthood on an unprecedented wave of prosperity that had not yet crested. Dylan’s works, and those of his fellow singer-composers, such as Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, helped shape the music of a generation and embodied the social values of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
What are we to make of the coffeehouse renaissance of the 1990s? Certainly it is no flash in the pan. New York real estate prices have seemed high for generations, but they have recently been driven still higher by the competition for space among a new generation of coffeehouse and café proprietors. Many of the new establishments are the progeny of the chain behemoths, such as Starbucks, Timothy’s, and Brothers Gourmet Coffee, each of which boasts many new outlets in Manhattan. Others, like Coopers Coffee and New World Coffee, are the offspring of smaller ventures hoping to expand to compete with their bigger rivals. Bookstores and department stores are increasingly including cafés under their roofs. Some traditional proprietors are benefiting from the upswing. For decades Chock Full o’ Nuts was the ultimate coffeeshop chain, providing cheap but good cups of coffee and fast sandwiches to busy city workers. After ten years of relying on institutional sales and sales of coffee beans and spices, it is again turning to the development of coffeehouses and cafés.
Bubbling Caffeine: The Hard Soft Drinks
The caffeinated drinks, coffee and tea, wherever they were first encountered, were invariably regarded as medicines before they came into use as comestibles. Coca-Cola, the first of the caffeinated soft drinks, also began as a patent medicine, and was first sold in the form of a tonic syrup at pharmacies. Before the turn of the century, however, Coca-Cola had become a popular soft drink that encountered public relations problems, first over its still unverified cocaine content and then because of its caffeine. In the decades since, the Coca-Cola Company has distanced itself from any association in the public’s mind with drugs. Cocaine, if it was ever present in more than a negligible quantity, was eliminated. The caffeine content was cut in half. However, caffeine remains to this day the only pharmacologically active ingredient present in beverages that are dispensed from vending machines, soda fountains, and convenience stores.
Coca-Cola and the Wiley Campaign: Wiley as the Kha’ir Beg of the Twentieth Century
Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley (1844–1930), who at the height of his career enjoyed great national celebrity and power, waged a war against Coca-Cola in the early twentieth century that almost wrecked the company. Like Kha’ir Beg in early-sixteenth-century Mecca, Wiley was a governmental official charged with protecting the public welfare. As the first director of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, the forerunner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Wiley found nothing amusing about the blithe and celebratory indulgence in caffeinated soft drinks that was sweeping the country. Kha’ir Beg had been concerned about social subversion; Wiley was worried about food adulteration and the health of the nation’s children. Each had a large measure of reason on his side.
Wiley saw an essential difference between coffee and tea as caffeinated beverages and Coca-Cola and its imitators. Adults were by far the primary consumers of coffee and tea, and everyone was keenly aware that these drinks contained caffeine. Children, however, were the greatest consumers of Coca-Cola, and most people did not associate the drug with the drink, an association strongly discouraged and underplayed by the company’s brilliant advertising and public relations efforts.5 The epochal conflict between Wiley and the Coca-Cola Company, one of the nation’s most powerful corporations, epitomizes the issues and players that have featured in the centuries-long struggle between caffeine’s purveyors and detractors. In 1902, after twenty years of leading the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry in a fight against the adulteration of food, Wiley achieved national prominence when he created a “poison squad,” a group of twelve young healthy adult volunteers who would test the safety of additives. He campaigned against the nostrums of the patent medicine industry and became a fervent advocate of the frequently proposed and invariably defeated efforts to enact pure food and drug legislation. In 1906 public sympathies began to change, and the Pure Food and Drugs Act, known then as “Dr. Wiley’s Law,” was finally passed. Wiley wasted no time investigating Coca-Cola as a vehicle of caffeine. Headlines appeared in 1907 reading, “Dr. Wiley Will Take Up Soda Fountain ‘Dope.’” John Candler, who was running Coca-Cola at that time along with his brother Asa, was outraged. Candler could not understand Wiley’s animus, asserting, “There can be no more objection to the consumption of caffeine in the form of Coca-Cola than there is to the importation of tea and coffee and their use.”6 The company had no sooner overcome the scandalous rumors about cocaine, which had finally been decisively dispelled, than this new problem over caffeine had arisen. It was to prove more difficult to resolv
e.
Candler and Wiley had similar backgrounds, including fundamentalist upbringings and training in medicine and chemistry, but they took opposite positions on this central issue. Wiley had no quarrel with caffeine as it occurred naturally in coffee or tea. His lifelong campaign was against adulterants, in acknowledgment of which his followers called him “a preacher of purity,” while his detractors dubbed him “a chemical fundamentalist.” It was from this perspective of concern about adulterants or additives that Wiley saw the caffeine question. He regarded the introduction of the drug into soft drinks as pernicious and deceptive and potentially harmful, especially to the children. Wiley’s positions, which he maintained for the rest of his life, are well represented in his speech in favor of coffee, “The Advantages of Coffee as America’s National Beverage,” and the magazine articles from the same period which he used to batter the Coca-Cola Company.
Wiley was caught in a bind. He had tried to initiate seizures of Coca-Cola, but the federal government refused to cooperate, arguing that caffeine had not been proved harmful and that, furthermore, should it be so proved, coffee and tea would have to be banned as well as Coca-Cola. However, Wiley insisted that if parents really understood that their children were using a drug every time they drank a Coke, there would be more sympathy on his side.
The conflict was finally joined in a federal suit, called, in the legal fashion of such things, The United States vs. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, which opened in court on March 13, 1911, the second case do so under the new drug laws.7 The witnesses included religious fundamentalists who argued that the use of Coca Cola led to wild parties and sexual indiscretions by coeds and induced boys to masturbatory wakefulness. But most of the testimony was scientific in nature. Coca-Cola presented an array of expert witnesses with impressive credentials. Unfortunately, by today’s standards, the experiments on which their testimony relied were compromised by inadequate protocols. That is, their conclusions tended to support the prior opinions of the investigators regardless of the data actually gathered.
The World of Caffeine Page 28
