For God, Country, and Coca-Cola

by Mark Pendergrast

  —Asa G. Candler

  I don’t know a single day in my life when I have been moved by a desire to make money.

  —Asa G. Candler, aged sixty-four

  Asa Candler, a short bantam of a man with a high, squeaky voice, may not fit the ideal image of the Big Business Man, but even as a youth he was the quintessential capitalist. Born on December 30, 1851, the eighth of eleven children, Candler liked to paint a log-cabin portrait of his poor-but-happy rural youth. In fact, Sam Candler, his father, was a well-to-do planter and merchant who founded the town in which Asa was raised.

  A gold prospector, the elder Candler named Villa Rica (“Rich Town” in Spanish) to attract others who had the gold bug. He must have passed on this spirit of enterprise and promotion. Despite his relative wealth, however, Asa Candler’s father did not believe in spoiling his children—they earned every penny of their spending money. Asa soon proved that he would do almost anything for a dollar. He once chased down a wild mink, which bit him severely when he finally caught it. As Candler told the story,

  I hadn’t heard of people selling mink skins, but it seemed to me it might be a good idea and I decided to try. Atlanta was thirty-six miles away and there was no railroad, but that seemed to be the best possible market, so I sent the skin in to town by wagon, and I said to myself, “Maybe I’ll get twenty-five cents!” I got a dollar—the first I had ever made.

  Thrilled, the young Candler soon organized other children to do the mink-trapping for him, and he established a regular Atlanta trade. On the return wagon, he purchased straight pins for resale in Villa Rica and learned a lesson he would later apply to Coca-Cola: there was good money to be made from penny and nickel sales. “Seems you couldn’t make anything off pins, doesn’t it? But when I went away to school, I had more than $100 saved up through the sale of mink skins and speculation in pins.”

  Asa Candler received little formal education, because the Civil War closed schools when he was ten. After the war, he managed to complete two years of high school before quitting to apprentice as a pharmacy clerk. Candler undoubtedly received a proper Christian home education, however, from his strong-willed mother, Martha Beall Candler.

  Married at the age of fourteen, the diminutive Mrs. Candler, who rose ramrod straight to less than five feet and never weighed a hundred pounds, had eleven children and dominated the family. Though her husband wasn’t a churchgoer until his later years, Martha Candler belonged to the Primitive Baptist Church, whose members were more descriptively known as Hardshell Baptists. And woe unto the child who crossed her. “She tried to boss everybody in sight and came very near doing it,” one of her grandchildren recalled. Martha Candler’s imprint on her seven sons is quite apparent in an 1891 photograph that shows the indomitable matron surrounded by her grown male offspring. All in the picture—mother and children—display the solemn downturned mouth characteristic of the Candlers.

  A YOUT H’S APPRENTICESHIP

  When he abandoned his schooling in 1870, Asa Candler went to Cartersville, northwest of Atlanta, to apprentice in a drugstore run by two physicians, friends of his family. He lived in the rear of the store and studied Latin, Greek, chemistry, and medicine at night. As a child, he had dreamed of becoming a doctor—“I would concoct imaginary potions and doctor sick pigeons, hogs, dogs, and cattle”—but after two years of working in the drug business and observing the doctors’ country practice, he changed his mind. He would remain a druggist, but not in small-town, small-pay Cartersville, where after two years he was earning only twenty-five dollars a month. “I think there is more money to be made as a druggist than as a physician,” he wrote in the fall of 1872, “and I know it can be done with a great deal less trouble of soul and body.”

  At the age of twenty-one, Candler arrived in Atlanta with his trunk on January 7, 1873. In later years, he liked to tell the story of how he came to the big city looking for work, wearing homemade clothes and carrying only $1.75 in his pocket, but he told a reporter in 1909 that he had been “promised a place with a wholesale druggist.” Although he had little cash, he told the journalist, he also had a note for salary due him from his old job.

  Even if Asa Candler’s rags-to-riches fable doesn’t ring quite true, he displayed unusual fortitude once he discovered there was no job waiting for him that chilly day, applying at virtually every drugstore in Atlanta (including Pemberton’s establishment) for work. Finally, at 9 p.m., he tried George J. Howard’s drugstore, where he encountered a bored prescription clerk sitting on a counter. The clerk interrupted Candler’s recitation of his resume to ask, “When can you go to work?” When Candler said he could start right away, the clerk led him into the back room, introduced him to Dr. Howard, and tendered his resignation, effective immediately. Asa Candler had a job. He also found a boardinghouse that was willing to wait for his first paycheck.

  Howard owned stores at several Atlanta locations. In March of 1877, he took John Pemberton as a partner—an arrangement that lasted only a few months—simultaneously selling one of his stands to his two young clerks, Marcellus Hallman, twenty-eight, and Asa Candler, twenty-five. The Dun credit agent was impressed, noting that Hallman and Candler were “clever young men . . . economical & reliable.” They had saved $3,000 to begin the business. “They are very energetic,” wrote the credit rater. “Have no pending debts hanging over them & will no doubt be successful.”

  The Dun man proved to be a good prophet. Two years later, he wrote that the partners were carrying a full stock, had an active trade, paid their bills promptly, and claimed to be worth $10,000. He added that they were “correct reliable young men, close in business matters, addicted to no extravagant habits.” This description was an understatement, as far as Candler was concerned. He was a workaholic, never touched liquor, and was tightfisted with his money.

  THE OVERWORKED BOSS’S DAUGHTER

  In the meantime, Asa Candler had gotten married. Lucy Howard, only eighteen, must have seen more in the small, determined young man than her father, who was violently opposed to her marriage to his former clerk. Grudgingly, George Howard finally wrote a curt note to his son-in-law in November of 1878: “I am disposed to ‘bury the hatchet’ and to be friendly in the future—if this should meet your approval you can let me know.” Eight days later, Lucy gave birth to Charles Howard Candler, who was always known by his middle name. Asa and Lucy Candler appear to have had a genuinely happy marriage, eventually producing four boys and one girl. Howard later wrote, however, that “my Mother’s patience was tried by household responsibilities with which she had to cope with little help from her husband, engrossed in the perplexities and problems of a growing business.”

  While Asa was thus engaged, Lucy was “superintendent and well-nigh slave” to a household of his relatives. Her mother-in-law, the imperious Martha Candler, moved in after her husband’s death, along with Asa’s mentally disabled older brother Noble and his youngest brother, John. At various points, Asa’s brother Warren (with his family) and sister Jessie (who gave birth to a third child shortly after arriving) also moved in for a while. Little wonder, then, that Asa and Lucy Candler bought a home in 1879, then a larger one three years later. Lucy must have been quite relieved when her flint-willed mother-in-law finally moved to a home of her own two doors away in 1882. For the next fifteen years, until her death, Asa Candler visited his mother every day before and after work, anticipating “her every need and . . . wish,” as Howard Candler recalled.

  In 1881, Asa Candler bought out his partner, Marcellus Hallman, and the next year formed a partnership with his father-in-law and former boss, George Howard. Soon afterward, the pair purchased Pemberton’s drug business while he lay sick in bed, then survived a disastrous fire. In 1886, Candler bought Howard’s interest in the partnership, renaming the firm Asa G. Candler & Company.

  ASA AND ATLANTA ARE WIRED

  That spring, as Pemberton was perfecting Coca-Cola, Asa Candler cast around for a ticket to wealth. Thirty-four years old, he felt that
he had served his apprenticeship in the drug trade. It was time to make some real money, and he knew that fortunes were building all over the country. As the patent medicine capital of the South and the home of major successes such as B.B.B. and S.S.S., Atlanta exceeded all cities in the country in the proportion of manufacturing income derived from questionable drugs.

  The city may have been hustling to recover from Sherman’s devastation when Pemberton arrived on the scene back in 1869, but by 1886 Atlanta was booming. It had become the capital of the state in 1877 and was, according to an observer of the 1880s, a “great, populous, and thriving metropolis . . . famous for the greatness and brilliancy of its enterprises.” The Atlanta newspapers of the period were awash with boosterism and particularly delighted in quoting praise from Yankees. The city, noted a Massachusetts visitor in 1886, “has all the push and energy of the North coupled with a most delightful climate. . . . Atlanta has become one of the best advertised cities in the United States. People have come here to settle from all parts of the Union.”

  In their pursuit of everything they considered progressive, Atlantans naturally were fascinated by the newly invented electric generator, even though it had few practical applications. Direct current, which could travel a mile or less, was considered the only safe form of the new energy source. Still, in the mid-eighties, one innovative Atlanta druggist was advertising his electric doorbell, which rang in his residence to summon him “at all hours during the night.” Another ad featured “Dr. Dye’s Celebrated Voltaic Belt with Electric Suspensory Appliances” for the speedy relief of impotency. An 1885 Atlanta editorial used electricity as a metaphor for the kind of businessman the city needed. In retrospect, it appears an apt description of Asa Candler, who fairly bristled with nervous energy: “What we now need is a few electric men—men who will put their electric shoulders to the great wheel of Southern progress.” Their “electric brains” would crackle with “electric ideas,” which would “induce capital in abundance and immigration of an acceptable class to come southward.”

  In his 1886 ads, Candler described himself as “active, pushing, and reliable.” His new patent medicine was appropriately called Electric Bitters, only fifty cents a bottle. Candler’s ad, like many others, obviously aimed to induce the symptoms he claimed to cure:

  You are feeling depressed, your appetite is poor, you are bothered with headache, you are fidgetty, and nervous, and generally out of sorts, and want to brace up. . . . What you want is an alterative that will purify your blood, start healthy action of liver and kidneys, restore your vitality, and give renewed health and strength. Such a medicine you will find in Electric Bitters.

  ASA’S AILMENTS

  If Candler’s copy sounds convincing, it is because he often experienced all of those symptoms himself. His son recalled that “many times when Father got home at the end of a day of hard work at the store or the office he was miserable and exhausted, suffering intense headache”—often exacerbated by eyestrain. In addition, if he were living today, Candler might be diagnosed as bipolar. Although he normally functioned at a manic, high-energy level, he was periodically morose, even at the peak of his success. He also suffered from dyspepsia, caused in part by his irregular eating pattern and his tendency to bolt his food. He often skipped lunch and came home for dinner long after the rest of his family had eaten.

  This impressive list of ailments was magnified by Candler’s hypochondria. His letters to family members were filled with complaints and health concerns. “Do not allow yourself to get billious or to feel in a drowsy, sleepy state,” a typical message read. “Such symptoms generally indicate miasma.” He sought cures for his afflictions in patent medicines (no doubt sampling the products he pushed), as his son Howard recalled: “He knew in a general way the properties of drugs and believed in and practiced self-medication, which was not only unwise but fraught with some danger,” given the sometimes lethal ingredients with which he must have dosed himself.

  THE ROAD TO COCA-COLA

  Unlike John Pemberton, Asa Candler was no brilliant inventor. Instead, he specialized in hard-sell copy, offering a money-back guarantee if customers were not satisfied, knowing that few would take advantage of it. In addition to Electric Bitters, Candler bought the rights to a number of other proprietaries before finding Coca-Cola. These included Everlasting Cologne (presumably a perfume with an alarmingly permanent odor), Bucklen’s Arnica Salve (“for cuts, bruises, sores, ulcers, salt rheum, fever sores, tetter, chapped hands, chilblains, corns, and all skin eruptions, positively cures piles”), King’s New Discovery (“for consumption, colds and coughs, will surely cure any and every affection of throat, lungs, or chest”), and De-Lec-Ta-Lave (“will whiten the teeth, cleanse the mouth, harden and beautify the gums”).

  Even after he purchased the rights to Coca-Cola in 1888, Candler continued to look for other likely patent medicines. In 1890, he bought the venerable Botanic Blood Balm (B.B.B.), which had been a big seller for its inventor, Dr. J. P. Dromgoole. A landmark Georgia Supreme Court case in 1889 had considerably reduced the value of the company, however, when the court ruled against the Blood Balm Company in favor of a Mr. Cooper, who had taken three bottles to cure a rash on his leg. He would have been better off settling for the rash, according to the court records, because by the time he’d consumed the recommended dosage, “his head, neck and breast were covered with red spots and the inside of his mouth and throat filled with sores.” Eventually, “a large part of the hair fell from his head.” It is easy to see why Candler may have picked up B.B.B. at a bargain-basement price after that lawsuit.

  ASA’S 1889 EMPIRE

  As active and pushy as Candler may have been, there was nothing particularly unusual about him in 1888 when he finally gained complete legal control of Coca-Cola. To a casual observer of the Atlanta scene, he was just one more enterprising businessman. No one would have guessed that by the turn of the century, he would be one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta, and Coca-Cola would be the most popular soft drink in America.

  In an interview, Candler later said that at the beginning of 1889, he was “in bad health, $50,000 in debt and Coca-Cola on [my] hands.” But in the next months, he overcame his headaches, stomach problems, and dour outlook enough to impress an Atlanta Journal reporter, who described the Peachtree Street facilities of the “enterprising druggist” that May. Frank Robinson supervised the manufacturing in the basement, while Asa Candler’s “private sanctum” took up the rear of the first floor, which housed the retail outlet. The shipping department, on the second floor, was “practically packed” from floor to ceiling (fourteen feet high) with $10,000 worth of various Atlanta patent medicines. Finally, on the top floor, a group of young women bottled “extracts, medicines, oils, etc.”

  Candler, “a continuous worker, always confined in his office,” relied on Frank Robinson and one other full-time salesman to hawk his products, including Coca-Cola, identified as “one of their leading specialties.”* Another salesman joined the small firm soon afterward. Sam Dobbs, who would play a key role in the company’s early history, arrived as a seventeen-year-old to ask his Uncle Asa for a job. At first he was refused, but the black porter, a former Candler family slave, died the following day, and Dobbs got his position, soon proving himself as a salesman—the first of many Candler relations to find work through Coca-Cola.

  Traveling salesmen in those days were known as drummers, because they drummed up trade, and the Atlanta variety already had a reputation for hustle, as an 1881 observer noted: “The trade of Atlanta is rapidly extending into wider and more distant territory. The drummers . . . for Atlanta houses swarm over Georgia and surrounding States.” Candler’s men must have followed the pattern, because the testimonial letters for Coca-Cola printed in the May 1889 article came from Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia in addition to Georgia. By 1890, only 40 percent of Coca-Cola sales were made at Atlanta soda fountains, and by the following year, the figure had shrunk to 27 percent.

  A few
months later, veteran fountain man Foster Howell described Coca-Cola as “one of the most popular drinks ever sold in Atlanta.” Howell was less circumspect than Candler in explaining Coca-Cola’s popularity as a hangover cure: “Men who get on a razee the night before come up in the morning and drink . . . coca-cola . . . one of the finest nerve tonics in the world.” He then recounted how one of Pemberton’s employees, a “longheaded chemist,” had introduced him to the new headache cure in 1886, appearing early one morning carrying a syrup bottle with “Coca-Cola scribbled on the label.” Just then, a badly hung-over customer staggered in, so Howell tried the “new discovery” on him. “It worked like a charm. He came back in a few minutes and in an hour he had swallowed four glasses.” Howell described another customer who drank five glasses straight, then “went away with a regretful look, seeming to feel unhappy because he could hold no more.”

  The combination of cocaine and caffeine must have induced repeated calls for Coca-Cola, and we have here the first indication of habitual users, soon labeled “Coca-Cola fiends.”* Nonetheless, Howell insisted that there was no danger of addiction; people would not become “soda drunkards.” But he added that “if you drink it of a night you don’t go to sleep.”

  Throughout 1889, without much advertising, Candler saw sales of Coca-Cola mushroom. He personally went back to Cartersville to ask his first employers to stock Coca-Cola. Total sales for 1889 amounted to 2,171 gallons of syrup. Because each drink called for one ounce of syrup, that meant that almost sixty-one thousand drinks were sold.