Fizz (10 page)

By the time Walker bought the controlling stake in Coca-Cola, Frank Robinson was working for Candler's brother Asa Griggs Candler. Asa was a highly successful local druggist who had left his hometown of Cartersville, Georgia to seek his fortune in Atlanta. He arrived in the city in July 1873 with just $1.75 in his pocket and found work at a Peachtree Street pharmacy run by George Howard. Candler worked his way up to chief clerk before quitting in 1877 to start his own business and marry Howard's daughter Lizzie. By 1887, when he met the down-on-his-luck Robinson, Candler had not only a thriving drugstore but a line of successful patent medicines such as Botanic Blood Balm, De-Lec-Ta-Lave toothpaste, and Everlasting Cologne. Candler took Robinson on as a part-time bookkeeper but had little interest in his new employee's constant chatter about how he should invest in Coca-Cola. But then Candler paid a visit to Venable's soda fountain while suffering from a headache, Venable suggested he try a Coca-Cola, and to the drug maker's amazement the headache disappeared. On April 10, 1888,
he wrote to his brother Warren: “You know how I suffer with headaches, well some days ago, a friend suggested that I try Coco-Cola [sic]. I did and was relieved. Some days later I again tried it and was again relieved…. I determined to put my money into it and a little influence.”

Within days Candler had bought Pemberton's remaining third of the business in return for writing off the $550 debt the drink's inventor owed him, and he gave $750 to Walker for another third to gain control of the drink. Four months later Pemberton was dead. On August 16, 1888, at the age of 57, the man who invented Coca-Cola died from gastroenteritis, leaving his widow facing a future of poverty. His son Charles would follow his father to the grave six years later after overdosing on opium.

On gaining control of Coca-Cola, Candler put Robinson back in charge of promoting the drink. Their first act was to change the formula. Candler reduced both the cocaine and kola to mere traces, only stopping short of their complete removal out of concern that the Coca-Cola trademark would be at risk if the two ingredients it was named after were no longer present. Robinson and Candler also worried about the recipe being stolen, so they gave the ingredients code names. Merchandise No. 1 was the sugar. The caramel became Merchandise No. 2 and the synthetic caffeine Merchandise No. 3. The phosphoric acid was recast as Merchandise No. 4 while the combination of kola and coca extract was code-named Merchandise No. 5 and the preservative glycerin became Merchandise No. 6. Finally there was Merchandise No. 7x, the top-secret blend of flavoring oils.

In early 1889 Candler completed his acquisition of Coca-Cola by paying Walker $1,000 for his remaining third. On getting the money, Walker hotfooted it out of Atlanta and headed for Arkansas, leaving the $1,200 debt to his sister unpaid.

With Robinson back masterminding the promotions, a new sweeter formula, and the ownership questions sorted, Coca-Cola was back in action, and in the summer of 1890 sales hit 8,855 gallons—four times the amount sold the year before. In early 1891 business was going so well that Candler shut his drugstore so he could concentrate on making his medicines and Coca-Cola. He set up a factory on the second and third floors of a building in a run-down part of Decatur Street, much to the annoyance of
the second-hand clothing store below, which regularly had its stock ruined by hot, sticky Coca-Cola syrup that had boiled over and seeped through the floorboards. Coca-Cola sales were growing, but Botanic Blood Balm remained Candler's big seller, so weekdays were devoted to cooking up this “blood purifier” while Coca-Cola syrup was confined to weekends. This soon changed.

In early 1892 Candler formed the Coca-Cola Company in the hope of selling enough shares to raise $50,000 to spend promoting the drink. The share sale earned just $7,500. With promotional funds tight, Robinson suggested a novel solution. The company could give away coupons that could be exchanged for a free glass of Coca-Cola at any soda fountain that stocked the drink. The company would then reimburse the fountains. It would, Robinson argued, introduce people to the drink and encourage consumer demand for Coca-Cola at the soda fountains. Candler agreed to the plan and soon the company was dishing out thousands upon thousands of coupons all over the South, each bearing the words “Good for a 5¢ glass of Coca-Cola at the soda fountain of any druggist.”

In a few months they had given out enough for a million free Coca-Colas in what was the first-ever promotional coupon campaign. Robinson's marketing innovation would be copied countless times by companies across the world and become a mainstay of business promotion. It also sent Coca-Cola sales soaring, even though Candler almost suffered a heart attack every time the bills from the soda fountains landed on his desk.

As the twentieth century dawned, the Coca-Cola Company was selling 281,000 gallons of its syrup every year and had established itself as the leading soda of the South. Moxie remained ahead, but the gap was narrowing fast. But as Hires, Moxie, and Coca-Cola began to eclipse the generic flavors of the fountains and pushed soda success to ever greater heights, these brands found themselves butting up against another fast-growing force in American society: the temperance movement.

Hires was the first to feel the movement's wrath. In 1895 the WCTU realized that root beer was brewed with yeast and therefore contained alcohol. Fearing that many of its members were at risk of being conned into drinking an alcoholic beverage branded as a temperance drink, it called for
a national boycott of root beer and started printing literature to warn teetotal citizens about this sinister brew. Other temperance groups rallied to the call and teetotalers began turning their back on root beer, even though newspapers joked that more people would want to drink it now that they knew it had alcohol in it. The temperance movement's root beer backlash hit Hires hard, and sales began to plunge. Hires spent the next three years battling the temperance movement that he personally supported to prove that their boycott was misjudged. He eventually emerged victorious after publishing a chemical analysis that showed that the level of alcohol in a Hires Root Beer was less than that in a loaf of bread. Embarrassed, the WCTU quietly dropped its boycott in 1898.

Coca-Cola faced a tougher challenge. By 1900 cocaine was no longer seen as a wonder drug and was increasingly being talked of as a dangerous and addictive narcotic. Candler may have slashed the cocaine back to the merest of traces, but the image of Coca-Cola as the cocaine soda had stuck in people's minds. Soda fountain customers continued to order it by nicknames that gave knowing nods to its Peruvian connection—names like dope, coke, “a dose” or “a shot in the arm.” Matters only worsened in July 1898, when Congress imposed a tax on medicines to raise money for the Spanish-American War. Since Candler had registered the Coca-Cola Company as a medicine manufacturer, it found itself caught by the new tax. Keen not to pay more tax, Candler sued the federal government on the grounds that Coca-Cola was a beverage not a medicine. When the case reached court in 1901 Candler got his tax back but the hearings also dredged up the issue of cocaine yet again. In their defense the federal government lawyers noted that Coca-Cola contained the medical drug cocaine, a point Candler confirmed. To defuse the situation Coca-Cola called in Dr. George Payne, secretary of the Georgia State Board of Pharmacy, who informed the court that “a man would explode” before he could drink enough Coca-Cola to get a cocaine high.

A year after this uncomfortable court examination of Coca-Cola's cocaine traces, a further blow came when the news broke in July 1902 that a railroad cashier in Virginia had tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a penknife and was now in jail charged with lunacy. A friend of the
man told the
Times
of Richmond, Virginia, that the man's “breakdown was not so much due to the use of liquor as to the Coca-Cola habit, which had a hold upon him.”

Cocaine was back in the news in June 1903 when the
New-York Tribune
interviewed Colonel J. W. Watson of Georgia, who issued a stark warning about how the “cocaine sniffing” habit was growing at an alarming rate in Atlanta, particularly among the city's black population. “I am satisfied that many of the horrible crimes committed in the southern states by the colored people can be traced directly to the cocaine habit,” he told the paper. Action was needed to curb this habit before a generation lost their minds, he continued, before noting that the drug was present in “a soda fountain drink manufactured in Atlanta and known as Coca-Cola” and that “men become addicted to drinking it, and find it hard to release themselves from the habit.”

Candler had had enough. He traveled to New York to find a way of ridding his drink of the troublesome drug. In New York he found Dr. Louis Schaefer, the German founder of the Schaefer Alkaloid Works, who said it was possible to remove all the cocaine from the coca leaf, allowing Candler to keep the coca in his drink while also banishing the cocaine taint. Candler put Schaefer in charge of producing Merchandise No. 5, and Schaefer developed a method for eliminating every last molecule of the cocaine from the coca leaves. By the end of 1903 Candler could confidently declare that Coca-Cola was cocaine free. But if Candler thought he could finally put his drink's drug problems behind him, he hadn't reckoned with Dr. Harvey Wiley, the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, who now had Coca-Cola firmly in his sights.

On October 1, 1902, a dozen young men sat down to eat a meal laced with benzoic acid and America held its breath. They were the Poison Squad, hired by the federal government to dice with death for the sake of the nation's health. For five dollars a month they would munch on additive-loaded feasts to find out if they were harmful, and their fate gripped the country.

Newspaper reporters clamored to get the exclusive on their latest toxic dinner. People in soda fountains gossiped about what might happen to these human guinea pigs. The era's most famous blackface minstrel showman, Lew Dockstader, composed a ditty in their honor: “If ever you should visit the Smithsonian Institute, look out that Professor Wiley doesn't make you a recruit. He's got a lot of fellows there that tell him how they feel, they take a batch of poison every time they eat a meal. For breakfast they get cyanide of liver, coffin shaped, for dinner, undertaker's pie, all trimmed with crepe. For supper, arsenic fritters, fried in appetizing shade, and late at night they get a prussic acid lemonade.”

The Professor Wiley that the vaudeville star referred to was Dr. Harvey Wiley, the chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture and the mastermind behind the Poison Squad. He was a bureaucrat but one far removed from the shy, faceless pen-pusher that description brings to mind. In 1902 the very name of this tall, broad-shouldered chemist struck fear into the hearts of patent medicine manufacturers with their misleading medicines
and nostrums and caused the social reform campaigners of America's growing Progressive movement to swoon.

Wiley grew up on the southern Indiana farm where he was born on October 18, 1844. His pious parents raised him on a diet of bread made from unbolted cornmeal and a brand of fundamentalist Christianity that regarded whistling and fishing on a Sunday as terrible sins. The religious sermons didn't stick. Wiley left home an agnostic, but he did inherit his parents' taste for pure, unadulterated food and their zealous sense of righteousness. After leaving the family farm he got a medical degree from Indiana Medical College, but instead of becoming a doctor he turned to chemistry, gaining a second degree from Harvard and becoming Indiana's state chemist. In 1883 Washington called and he was appointed chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture.

The science of chemistry had progressed in leaps and bounds since the start of the 1800s. The days of Yale asking law students to become professors of an embryonic science were over. Chemistry was now a science that had given humanity the ability to alter the very nature of the world around us. Nowhere was chemistry's great leap forward as evident as in food and drink. A flood of new artificial flavorings, sweeteners, colorings, and preservatives had made it possible to change what people put in their stomach beyond all recognition. Wiley was deeply suspicious of this mania for adulterated and manufactured food, but what annoyed him most was the thought that people no longer knew what they had on their plates. After all, how could anyone trust that their meat was what they thought it was, when chemicals could change how it tasted, how it looked, and how long it took to spoil? So on arriving in Washington, the iron-willed bureaucrat made it his goal to usher in a new era of purity in American food and beverages.

But while Wiley had a fanatical streak and an intimidating glare, he was also a skilled political operator capable of winning people over with his charm, wit, and eye for headline-grabbing stunts. The drama of the Poison Squad was his biggest stunt yet. Its creation swelled public interest in the issues he held dear as well as arming him with more data to help nudge politicians into seeing things his way. That all of the Poison Squad walked away from their meals unharmed was merely a bonus.