There Will Always Be Coca-Cola

Consider the special pressures if Jesus Christ actually did return for the Second Coming. Salvation might still be his aim but if, despite the previous bad example of Judas, the Apostles still included a treasurer, he'd be fending off the most cut-throat competition for the sponsorship rights.

For the loaves and the fishes, make sure it's Butterkrust and John West. And as for the Wedding Feast at Cana, J.C. might have to decide whether to turn the water into Jacob's Creek, Blue Nun or Piat D'Or. Or perhaps dispense with the grape altogether. Even Christ might have to acknowledge that things go better with Coke.

Apologies if I'm being blasphemous. But once you read For God, Country and Coca-Cola, Mark Pendergast's unauthorised but alarmingly thorough history of the company, you realise that, even now, 107 years after Coke was originally formulated, the corporation's ambitions have no limits.

Things Go Better (With Cocaine)

Towards the end of his book, Mark Pendergast speculates that Coke just might be the 20th Century version of the medieval Elixir of Life.

Advertising has made it so ubiquitous, the century's most fetishised consumer product, a fly-paper to which all our associations, all our dreams and unconscious drives have sooner or later attached themselves. It may not be true but you can appreciate the reasoning behind the company legend that insists a Second World War chaplain once used Coke instead of altar wine.

Certainly Coke is promoted as an universal panacea, albeit a social not a medical one. Advertising is about faith and its manipulation and the image of Coke has been so deftly and single-mindedly manoeuvred that we now see it as the symbol of the American Way, a mirror or a shorthand archetype of what Time once pronounced the American Century.

The Real Thing is always what you want it to be and as American popular culture flooded across the world after 1945, Coke became a symbol of everything that was to be reviled or applauded in American society. At the company's first international sales convention in Atlantic City in 1948, a placard proudly read: "When we think of Communists, we think of the Iron Curtain BUT when they think of democracy, they think of Coca-Cola".

Check the data-bank on almost any subject and you'll find a Coke connection. Race relations: Coke footed the bill to stem riots in Atlanta after Martin Luther King was slain. Rock 'n' roll sponsorship: Coke had its own nationally syndicated radio shows as far back as 1930. Santa Claus: Coke advertising campaigns invented the image of the cheery, flossy-bearded uncle, robed in the company's own standard colours of red and white. Nazism: the

Second World War economic blockade forced its German subsidiary to concoct Fanta.

The great Coke-Pepsi wars, meanwhile, throw a spotlight on American politics. Coming from the solid South, Coke tended to support Democrats but made an exception for Dwight Eisenhower. Not to be outmanoeuvred, Pepsi then forged links with his Vice-President, Richard Nixon. Out of office, Nixon then looked after Pepsi's legal affairs and later helped it beat out Coke, through exclusive distribution deals in China and the Soviet Union.

Even golf is part of the story since Pendergast makes a connection between the U.S. Masters, its venue, Augusta which until recently barred black members and the involvement of Eisenhower and his big business golf partners in a syndicate behind Coke bottling plants in South America.

And of course, drugs. For, after all, didn't things first start to go better with cocaine.

The Child at Labour

To be fair, there were no cocaine witch-hunts in 1886. Quite the contrary, since the first chemical drugs were only then being marketed to the greatest medical applause. One can still find the most embarrassingly enthusiastic plugs for heroin in the medical literature of the era.

Pendergast can't resist including an extract from a letter by an exceedingly lascivious Sigmund Freud to his fiancée, wherein the future of psychology rants: "Woe to you, my fiancée, when I come, I will kiss you quite red . . . and you will see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl . . . or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."

Somewhat more respectably, Coca-Cola may have been partly inspired by Vin Mariani, a concoction that added coca leaves to Bordeaux wine. Invented by an Italian, Angelo Mariani, his strategy was to secure testimonials from the drink's most reputable customers such as Queen Victoria, President McKinley, Thomas Edison, Sara Bernhardt and Buffalo Bill. Another patron was Pope Leo XIII, who granted a Papal gold medal to Mariani. Entirely without irony, a contemporary writer attributed the Pope's long life and his "all-radiant eyes" to his daily dose of Vin Mariani.

This was the era of both the patent medicine and the soda fountain. It was often difficult to distinguish between them, especially in Atlanta where both businesses prospered and overlapped. Soda fountains were an early triumph of the most opulent industrial design, costing up to 40,000 dollars in contemporary prices and capable of serving 33,000 different beverages. One writer describes them as "temples resplendent in crystal, marble and silver . . . made glorious with California onyx, rare marbles and plate glass."

Has much changed? Is there really any difference between products like Vin Mariani and New Age libations like Aqua Libra and even Ballygowan? In 1885, the original Dr. Pepper promoted itself as a beverage that aids "digestion and restores vim, vigour and vitality". Should there be any doubts about precisely what vitality it restored, the original Dr. Pepper bottle featured a portrait of a naked woman with her crotch covered only by the sea.

Coke's inventor was John Pemberton. A druggist, Pemberton had been inspired by herbalist, Samuel Thomson, who'd led an earlier revolt against the vicious, bloodletting practises of professional medicine. But Pemberton was a bad business manager who'd become bankrupt in 1872. Since he also had a morphine habit, Pemberton was easy prey and he and his family soon lost control of both the business and the original sacred Coca-Cola formula.

The beneficiary was one Asa Candler, a typical Puritan workaholic. Writing in 1894 to his son Howard, he sanctimoniously advised him: "Don't be religious in word only, but in your life . . . Let your life constantly EXHIBIT Christ. We live for him."

But later in 1908, Candler would defend child labour, claiming that it, "properly conditioned, is calculated to bring the highest measure of success to any country on the face of the earth. The most beautiful sight we see is the child at labour."

Candler's peculiar definition of charity is shown in his treatment of the Pemberton family. Twenty years after Coke's formulation, he was investing lavishly in the railroads, tramways, cotton and banking of Atlanta but refusing to aid the impoverished widow of John Pemberton.

But he was only displaying the marvellous ethical flexibility of both American religion and capitalism, where both Christianity and Coke could be so elastically anything you wanted. So his brother, Bishop Warren Candler, who dominated Southern Methodism through this era, would attack unions and claim that "disturbances between labour and capital are most frequent in those industries in which the labourers have been brought from the unevangelised (Or Catholic and Jewish - B.G.) masses of Continental Europe."

By 1900, cocaine was no longer a miracle drug. Apparently the caffeine in the kola nuts may have amplified the cocaine in the coca leaves and, in 1901, Candler began removing cocaine from the formula. His timing was smart. In 1906 after Atlanta race riots when whites attacked blacks, the racists would claim that the cocaine in Coca-Cola caused black men to attack white women.

Biting The Wax Tadpole

Coca-Cola might endeavour to present an immaculate image but there were those who thought it an abomination. And not because its sugar might damage teeth. In 1911, a Methodist evangelist, George Stuart claimed that, at girls' schools, it "led to wild nocturnal freaks . . . violations of college rules and female improprieties, and even immoralities."

Even D.W. Griffith presented the tear-jerking tale of a woman Coca-Cola addict in an early silent movie and in 1921, Senator Tom Watson stood up on Capitol Hill to insist that "a woman who becomes an addict to it loses her divine right to bring children into the world."

Sales were immune to such calumnies. By 1913, Coca-Cola was the most advertised product in America. If, in 1891, it sent 20,000 gallons of its basic syrup to bottlers, by 1907, the amount was 3 million. Through the efforts of Candler and his advertising partner, Fred Robinson, Coke had progressed from being a patent medicine fad to become the All-American beverage.

After the First World War, the Candler era ended and an Atlanta syndicate gained control. Coca-Cola would enter the Corporation Age under the leadership of their second great patriarch, Robert Woodruff. Another marketing evangelist, he would claim in 1936 that "in the long life of Coca-Cola, this half-century is hardly more than a flicker but we can use it, if we will, to light a beacon that will be a guide to us and those who follow."

It was, of course, 99 per cent sugar and water - all the more reason to create a transcendent mystique around Coke. "It isn't what the product is but what it does" was the philosophy of one of its advertising gurus, Archie Lee. So Coca-Cola would build the first neon display in Times Square and ensure the drink was endorsed by a gallery of Hollywood stars including Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Randolph Scott, Claudette Colbert and Johnny Weissmuller.

However Coke preferred to forget one scandalous association, the alleged placement of a bottle in a vagina by silent comedian, Fatty Arbuckle, at the orgy that drove him out of Hollywood. But still Coke's coffers swelled; it was one of the very few stocks not unhinged by the Wall Street Crash.

Under Robert Woodruff, Coca-Cola would go international. But before World War II, success abroad was patchy since Coke didn't necessarily translate to foreign cultures. Funniest were its PR problems in China where the Chinese characters that most closely reproduced 'Coca-Cola' translated roughly, very roughly, as 'Bite The Wax Tadpole. '

Then the Japanese unwittingly gave them their opportunity. When they bombed Pearl Harbour, America went to war with Coke . . .

All The President's Men

As a major corporation, Coca-Cola could successfully lobby for government favours, especially since it maintained close links with the Southern senators and congressmen, Washington's most successful legislators who even President Roosevelt had to keep sweet. So, unlike other soft drinks, it escaped the worst of sugar rationing by claiming Coke was essential to the soldiers' morale. Heroic generals like Eisenhower, Patton and McArthur regularly let themselves be photographed with a bottle in their hand. Coke wasn't sugar and water; it was Zelig, marching towards the sounds of gunfire.

Churchill's daughter launched a destroyer with Coke instead of champagne, and the Nazi press chief, Otto Diedrich, foolishly and inadvertently added to its prestige when he pronounced: "America never contributed anything to world civilisation but chewing gum and Coca-Cola."

Coke would henceforth be identified with the liberators and Robert Woodruff was quick to exploit that advantage. He persuaded the U.S. government to allow bottling plants behind the lines to serve the soldiers but also, crucially for Coke's future plans, any friendly civilians who might get a taste for it. Sixty four were established, managed by Coca-Cola employees who were dubbed "technical advisors" and given military rank.

It was a free ride of a kind, never given to any other consumer product. The first plant in Iceland ensured that, even today, Icelanders have the highest per capita consumption of Coca-Cola in the world, a fact that may or may not explain the Sugarcubes.

So when the troops rolled back the Axis forces, the grateful populace were introduced to Coke by their Yankee liberators. That gratitude could get absurd as when a Filipino general, Carlos Romulo, went verbally over the top to proclaim: "That day, I had seen men blown to shreds, I had seen white-faced nurses drag themselves from the bloody debris of a bombed hospital. All this paled and was forgotten before the miracle of a five-cent drink any American could buy at his corner store."

The war also set up Coke's first intimate encounter with Communism. The Soviet general Zhukov, who'd liberated Berlin, took a fancy to it but, fearful of Stalin's own paranoia, he asked the local Coke exec to eliminate the drink's identifying caramel colour. For once, Coke relented; their supplies travelled through the Soviet zone with special protection from black market bandits and Stalin and his spies never learned of their most famed general's flirtation with the capitalist elixir.

But come the Cold War, other Communists vilified Coke. In France, they made a strange alliance with wine and mineral water interests to ban it as a poison. Coke trucks were overturned by mobs and Le Monde insisted "the moral landscape of France is at stake." But after U.S. diplomatic pressure, the French government stopped the legislation and a senior Coca-Cola executive would claim that "the best barometer of the relationship of the U.S. and any country is the way Coca-Cola is treated."

Coca-Cola was now both a global player and a force in the U.S. business establishment. With other senior tycoons, Robert Woodruff eased the path of Eisenhower to the White House. In 1950, two years before Ike's election victory, he told a confidant:

"Some of us wanted to see him made President. We sent him overseas to give him an international flair, then we made him President of Columbia (University) so the eggheads would like him." So confidant was Woodruff that he and his associates hadn't yet decided whether Eisenhower should run as a Democrat or a Republican.

But despite its global expansion, Coca-Cola would now face a new opponent, far more formidable than either Nazism or Communism - Pepsi Cola.

Trouble At Mill

Formulated in 1894 in South Carolina, Pepsi had been a struggling company, thrice bankrupted and offered to Coca-Cola - who refused to buy. Suddenly in the Thirties, new management transformed Pepsi with novel campaigns like the use of skywriters and the first 30-second radio jingle. It even sought to sponsor the Popeye cartoons, in the hope that the mariner would get his special strength from Pepsi not spinach.

Then, in 1949, a senior Coke executive, Alfred Steele, crossed over to Pepsi, taking many young staffers with him. Pepsi president in 1950, Steele transformed sales ratios. Pepsi's share of the American market jumped from 21 per cent to 35. When once Coke had outsold Pepsi world-wide 5 to 1, it now became 2 to 1. In 1958, Steele married Joan Crawford, who'd once endorsed Coke. Eventually Mommie Dearest would join the Pepsi board, but only after Steele died of a heart attack in 1959.

This competition engendered a savage response. A non-union company, Coke prided itself on its paternalism. Jobs were secure and employees got free Coke and 35-cent lunches. But on the company's own Black Friday, November 8 1957, 10 per cent - and some believe more - of its employees were summarily fired. One sacked employee drowned himself while a woman in the personnel department shot herself in the head.

Yet these traumas went unreported. Pendergast insists "Black Friday" is unmentioned in the company archives. Equally revealingly, such was Coke's power in Atlanta that the city's newspapers fawningly ignored the events.

Then there was Coke's ambiguous relationship with blacks. A product from the segregationist South, it was nonetheless especially popular with poor blacks throughout the States and Coke recruited sporting heroes like Jesse Owens and Sugar Ray Robinson to endorse it - but only in black publications like Ebony. In the Fifties, an executive would try to reconcile these divided loyalties with a quip: "Sure, we'll stand up and be counted but we're on both sides of the fence." Then in 1960, the first civil rights sit-in occurred when four black students were refused hamburgers and Coke at a whites-only luncheon counter in Greenboro', South Carolina.

Robert Woodruff could be especially embarrassed. In 1956, he'd supported a racist senator, Herman Talmadge and he'd once sensitively remarked that equal rights for blacks was akin to the "right of a chimpanzee to vote."

Then in 1961, scandal arrived at his own Ichauway demesne. Its white manager, Guy Touchtone slept with any black woman employee, he wanted. At the 4th of July barbecue, a black man, Charlie Ware flirted with a Touchtone 'mistress' and was then shot and wounded by the local sheriff, 'Gator' Johnson. But this was the South. Ware was charged with felonious assault and languished in prison for a year without any bail bond from Robert Woodruff before the charges were dropped and Touchtone 'retired.'

Meanwhile Civil Rights groups demanded blacks appear in all Coke ads but the company feared integrated commercials would bomb in the South, where the good ole boys still believed syphilis was transmitted through toilets and drinking fountains. But Coca-Cola eventually bowed to the integrated facts of American life and commissioned ads from such as Ray Charles, The Supremes, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. As balance, they also hired white stars like Leslie Gore, Neil Diamond, The Moody Blues, Jan and Dean, The Everly Brothers and Petula Clark. Even the Beatles agreed to sing for Coke but they were turned down because they cost too much.

Robert Woodruff put his own Southern shoulder to the wheel. When Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize, he worked to compel reluctant Southern society to support an Atlanta civic banquet in King's honour.

The Goose Refuses To Die

But the Sixties wasn't always kind to Coke's image. When America went to war again in Vietnam, Coke opened bottling plants in Saigon and Da Nang but they didn't exactly shout out about it back home. And when Pepsi's friend Richard Nixon became President, Coca-Cola coincidentally was faced with needling interference from the Federal Trade Commission.

Finally in 1977, Coke got its own President in the Georgian, Jimmy Carter. Again Coke had smoothed his passage. As with all Georgia governors, Carter could always borrow a plane from Coke. The company's President, Paul Austin sponsored his membership of the insiders' body, The Trilateral Commission. As governor, Carter also gained from the company's own international contacts, remarking in 1974; "We have our own built-in State Department in the Coca-Cola company."

The connection also reinforced Coca-Cola's position abroad. For instance, when Austin met Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader started talking about Arab-Israeli relations not Coke's own business in Egypt, telling Austin he wanted him to report their discussion to Carter.

Meanwhile Woodruff had retired into the background as Coke's own version of Deng Xhiao Peng. Under Austin, Coke diversified with a tenfold expansion of its market value from 1962 to '80. In the Eighties, it even briefly owned Columbia pictures and used its own stringent marketing practises to monitor and pre-test script concepts. But not always successfully, since Colombia produced the decade's most expensive flop, Ishtar, while Coca-Cola ran it.

But as the company expanded, it began to face market resistance to its core product, Coca-Cola itself. New company president, Roberto Goizueta decided to rejig the formula and launch an allegedly improved drink, New Coca Cola.

In spring '85, the company walked into a media blizzard. Fidel Castro directed Radio Havana to claim that the death of Coke reflected the decay of America. A national news broadcast devoted twenty minutes to the controversy. In Atlanta, the company received 1000 calls per day from protesters, one claiming that "Coca-Cola had just killed God."

Startled, the company retreated and reintroduced the old brand as Coca-Cola Classic. ABC interrupted a soap opera with the news and the concession got more coverage than Ronald Reagan's cancer operation. Arkansas Senator David Pryor stood up on Capitol Hill to tell his fellow legislators that the change was "a meaningful moment in American history."

But if Coca-Cola hadn't killed God, the change did cause the death of Robert Woodruff. Told of the decision, he literally stopped eating and had to be fed by intravenous tube. On March 7, 1985, he died, aged 95.

Coca Cola Is . . . Forever

Long live Coca-Cola, its king was dead. Would he be proud of one recent comment that "Coca-Cola is more durable, less vulnerable than the Roman Empire. The product is destined to outlast the U.S.A."?

On his deathbed, he certainly must have identified with the philosophy of one of Pepsi's advertising gurus, Phil Dusenberry who claimed that he was "always going to be searching for emotion. In an age when most products aren't very different, the difference is often the way people feel about them."

It never really mattered what the bottle contained. As Asa Candler and Robert Woodruff had demonstrated, Coca-Cola was the formula with feeling.