His accomplishments, he said, amounted to “ashes, just ashes.” He began to live increasingly in a mythical past. His rural youth took on the patina of an irretrievably lost Eden. “When I think of those golden days amid these parched years of care and distraction,” he said, “I sometimes think that once I lived in Heaven and, wandering, lost my way.” In 1921, Candler plaintively wrote to Howard that “I was once counted with Atlanta’s builders, Georgia’s active sons—your advisor—now I am companionless, not needed nor called to any service.” Awash with self-pity, Candler resolved to find a new wife.
The next year, Candler, seventy, informed his family that he intended to marry a Catholic divorcee, Onezima de Bouchel of New Orleans. His brother the bishop, embarrassed and appalled, did everything in his power to stop the match. Knowing that Asa would not listen to him, Warren persuaded a mutual acquaintance to write a “friendly” letter of advice. Candler scribbled “Et tu Brute” and “Why the stab” on the letter and mailed it back. When Asa finally caved in to family pressure and called off the marriage, Ms. de Bouchel sued him for breach of promise, causing one of the bishop’s friends to write that “I am more and more convinced that your brother’s whole trouble comes out of a Jesuit plot to get his millions for the Catholic Church.”
Only a few months later, Asa Candler married Mae Little, a thirty-seven-year-old stenographer in the Candler Building. “Tomorrow I am taking to my self a life companion,” he wrote Howard, “one I believe who is interested in me and will be a comfort to me.” With her ten-year-old twin daughters, the new Mrs. Candler moved into the mansion on Ponce de Leon Avenue, but eight months later, she made the New York Times when she was caught sharing a quart of bootleg liquor with two men. “We’re just having a little party,” she informed the police. In June of 1924, a year after his wedding, Candler filed for divorce, writing that “from the very first” his wife had ignored his “comfort and convenience,” leaving the house early every morning to seek “the company of a man, driving out into the Country.” In October of that year, weaving on the wrong side of the road, Mrs. Candler ran over and killed a five-year-old girl.
By the end of 1924, Asa Candler was a beaten man. Called to testify in court one last time (as a defense witness in a My-Coca case), he lamented that Frank Robinson was gone. “Everybody is dead but me, and I ought to be dead but I just won’t die. I have lived too long. There are too many days between my cradle and my grave now.” He spent Christmas Day alone in a Biltmore hotel room in New York City, writing that he would “dislike to go out of it at all,” since the room was warm. “Try to think of me as I was,” he pleaded with his children. Candler never rallied. His mental and physical health failing, he died in 1929 at the age of seventy-seven.
It is tempting to regard Asa Candler’s life as a morality play, to think of him as a kind of Willy Loman, obsessed by a success that continually seemed to elude him, even as he brilliantly created its illusion. Fundamentally insecure, he desperately sought bedrock beliefs and found them in American capitalism, a Methodist God, idealized women, and Coca-Cola, the drink that was a blessing to humanity. Without Asa Candler, Coca-Cola would never have become the world’s best-advertised single product; it would never even have attained national distribution. He wanted immortality, and in his drink he achieved it.
Candler had hoped to live on through the grand enterprises of his children, but they suffered from the curse of a domineering, teetotaling father, easy wealth, and fate. Asa Jr. (Buddie) became an engaging alcoholic who kept a public swimming pool, laundry, and zoo in his front yard. He named his four elephants Coca, Cola, Refreshing, and Delicious and was sued when one of his baboons climbed over the fence and ate sixty dollars out of a neighbor’s purse. Walter was involved in a notorious lawsuit when he was caught attempting to rape another man’s wife at 3 a.m. on a cruise ship. William, who built the elegant Atlanta Biltmore, was killed on a south Georgia road when his car ran into a stray cow. Lucy Candler Owens Heinz Leide lost her second husband in a bloody murder for which a black burglar was jailed, though rumors persisted that Henry Heinz had been done in by a relative.
Only Howard, the oldest, always seemed to live up to his father’s expectations. Yet in his own way, it was Howard who resented Asa the most. It was Howard, as president of the Company, who sanctioned the secret sale to the Woodruff Syndicate (along with his brothers), knowing how much his father despised Ernest Woodruff. Driven by a mixture of guilt, love, and repressed rage, it was Howard who wrote the curious book about his father that has been quoted in these pages. On the surface, the biography is an adulatory portrait of Asa Candler. Nothing is said of his breach-of-promise suit or his failed second marriage. But Howard managed to get back at his authoritative father subtly, between the lines, and the portrait is often devastating, particularly in the story of Frank the pony:
Many times, after harnessing and hitching this little horse to the buggy, and after taking his seat, clucking the go-ahead with a tap of the lines on the horse’s back, Father would be unable to get Frank to go ahead or to do anything but spread his feet apart, squat, and tremble. At this Father would unhitch, grasp the lines in his right hand near the bridle bit, and in a towering rage administer a vigorous lashing with a long, willowy whip with his left hand, admonishing the horse in his high-pitched, excited voice to go to work—all to no avail.
In his heart of hearts, Howard Candler often must have longed to balk like Frank the pony. In the battle between man and beast, it is clear where his sympathies lay. Whatever his resentments, though, Howard kept them well buried. When Sam Dobbs was made president in 1919 after the Woodruff takeover, he did not complain. And when, the next year, the bottlers rose up against the new owners, he proved that he was a good Company man.
PREFACE TO REVOLT
The parent and actual bottlers knew almost nothing about the Syndicate maneuvers. Back in Chattanooga, George Hunter heard rumors about ominous New York meetings, however, and wired Harold Hirsch to “take a few minutes and write me what is actually coming off.” Hirsch, at the heart of the negotiations, wrote back on August 8, 1919, to reassure the parent bottler. “Powerful interests are taking this proposition over and will make a big go of it,” Hirsch wrote, “but the bottlers’ rights will be absolutely protected without any thought of annulling the same.”
Hirsch was wrong, and he was soon forced to choose sides in a bitter battle between the new management and the bottlers.
__________________
* J. B. Pendergrast was the author’s grandfather.
* Some sources say the Candler stock gift took place on Christmas Day 1917 rather than 1916, but the earlier date is probably correct.
† Ed Brown’s father, Sam Brown, was Harold Hirsch’s father-in-law, a cotton broker and banker from Albany, Georgia, who had been unsuccessfully negotiating to buy Coca-Cola since 1908.
* On February 15, 1918, the FTC case finally went to trial. Even to the FTC commissioners, the evidence against Coca-Cola appeared too flimsy, and the case was dismissed on November 17, 1919.
* One positive outcome of the war was Howard Candler’s discovery that Coca-Cola syrup did not need to be heated. Coal having been rationed as well as sugar, Candler tried dissolving sugar in cold syrup, as he did with his iced tea. Using what amounted to a giant butter churn, he eliminated the expensive, time-consuming boiling process.
* The matter was finally settled out of court in 1929 for $1 million, though the Trust Company then spent years trying to pry money out of the original sellers.
~ 9 ~
Coca-Cola’s Civil War
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
When you get right down to it, we all really hate each other.
—Sebert Brewer Jr., former Coca-Cola bottler
After th
e syndicate’s triumph, Ernest Woodruff’s glee soured over the contract locking him into a perpetual partnership with the bottlers. The inflexible agreement had already caused trouble in 1917, when the bottlers granted the first temporary price hike. Now, though World War I was over, the sugar situation proved even more threatening. The U.S. Sugar Equalization Board, created in July of 1918 to assure a supply at nine cents a pound, expired at the end of 1919. Even before then, the government lost control over prices, which doubled by the fall. The new president, Sam Dobbs, wrote to the parent bottlers in November, asking for permission to purchase “all the sugar [we] can at such a price as Mr. [Howard] Candler elects to pay.” Dobbs stated that the Company was making no profit under the current arrangement and asked for a sliding scale on the basis of the sugar price, stressing that this was a “temporary proposition.” The bottlers agreed readily enough. In December, they also acceded to the Company’s request for what amounted to a temporary loan. Howard Candler wrote to George Hunter that he was “truly grateful . . . for this further evidence of your liberal policy.”
What Rainwater and Hunter did not know, however, was that even while Dobbs and Candler acted so ingratiating, they were plotting against the bottlers. A week before Dobbs’ November letter, a committee to “investigate the status of the bottling contracts” was formed, and at a December 15 board meeting, W. C. Bradley, a Columbus mill owner brought into the Syndicate and onto the board by his former neighbor Ernest Woodruff, announced a “proposed plan of readjustment” with the bottlers.
The Christmas season passed in peace. In the January 1920 issue of the Coca-Cola Bottler, Howard Candler sent his New Year’s greetings to the bottlers: “May we join with you in hearty fellowship and accord and face the new day together: FRIENDS.” In the same issue, Harold Hirsch wrote that “the new management appreciates to the fullest extent . . . the bottlers and has the greatest confidence in this branch.” Veazey Rainwater reciprocated with a message to “HAVE FAITH!” Less than two weeks later, Rainwater’s faith was shattered when he discovered the Company’s hypocrisy.
Hirsch requested another conference with the parent bottlers over the sugar situation, which was not particularly alarming. When Rainwater and Hunter got together to read over the meeting agenda, however, they could hardly believe it. “We saw,” Rainwater said, “that it was not an amendment for relief as we had supposed it would be, owing to unusual conditions . . . but it was a proposal to change our whole method of doing business.” Refusing to attend the scheduled conference, they wrote to Hirsch offering to consider another temporary price hike. After a few more days of increasingly agitated correspondence, Hirsch called Rainwater and Hunter to his office. “Boys,” he said, “I have called you up here to tell you bad news.” He informed them that the Coca-Cola board of directors had ruled “that your contracts are contracts at will, and can be canceled on reasonable notice.” Hirsch asked the parent bottlers whether they had any suggestions to “prevent the thing from going that far.” The two men were, as Rainwater recalled, “completely dumbfounded.” When they recovered, they asked Hirsch what he thought of the Company position. “I think,” the uncomfortable lawyer answered, “I will eliminate myself from the proposition.”
HIRSCH IN A BIND
Of course, Hirsch could not “eliminate” himself, but he did find himself in an extraordinarily awkward position. For years, he had been co-counsel to the Company and the bottlers, successfully defending their joint use of the Coca-Cola trademark. The bottlers had trusted him completely, in part because Hirsch owned a bottling plant himself. Now, it seemed that Hirsch had been bought. A central figure in the Syndicate buyout, he was rewarded with a seat on the board of directors, while his annual salary jumped to an unheard-of $37,500.
Yet Hirsch actually had little choice in the matter. In vain, he argued with Ernest Woodruff that abrogating the contracts would cause irreparable damage within the Coca-Cola “family.” Woodruff was appalled at the unbusinesslike situation he had inherited. From his vantage point, the parent bottlers weren’t bottlers at all, but leeches. Besides, Sam Dobbs, Howard Candler, and Asa Candler agreed that the contracts were terminable at will. The elder Candler insisted that he had never intended to give away the bottling rights in perpetuity.
Rainwater and Hunter immediately sounded the battle cry among their actual bottlers who, already anxious about the changes taking place in faraway New York and Atlanta, sided with the parent bottlers, apparently their sole protection against the ruin of their “little shops,” as Sam Dobbs contemptuously called them. When Hirsch reported to the board that all parties refused to attend a conference, he was authorized to commence legal proceedings. Instead, the tortured lawyer conferred with Rainwater in a final effort to reach some compromise. In a February 12 joint letter, Hirsch and Rainwater proposed a complicated sliding scale for syrup, along with the Coca-Cola formula in a sealed envelope to be opened “in case of dispute involving proportions” of ingredients. Dobbs vehemently rejected the proposal. “We will not under any consideration, or in any way, disclose or place in anybody’s hands the proportion of ingredients,” Dobbs wrote. “Some things must be taken upon faith.”*
In the final event, both sides lost faith in the other’s integrity. On March 2, 1920, Howard Candler, as chairman of the board of The Coca-Cola Company of Delaware, notified the parent bottlers that their contracts would be terminated as of May 1, 1920. In response, Rainwater and Hunter immediately insisted on the old agreed-upon price of ninety-seven cents per gallon for syrup. Forced to comply, the Company watched the price of sugar spiral over twenty cents a pound in April, by which time the Company was losing $20,000 a day.
King & Spalding, the Atlanta attorneys for the bottlers, wrote a stinging denial of the Company’s right to cancel the contract. The lawyers specifically blamed the Woodruff Syndicate for the action and promised that “our clients . . . will not submit to any such outrage, but will fight in every lawful way to protect and defend their property.” One last-ditch compromise proposal looked promising, but it too fell through. On April 16, the parent bottlers filed suit against the Company in Fulton County Superior Court. “The fight is on,” wrote Sam Dobbs, “and we are determined to see it through.” Coca-Cola’s civil war had officially begun.
LOVE FEAST TURNS TO HATE ORGY
The parent bottlers won the first skirmish, obtaining a temporary injunction preventing the Company from supplying the actual bottlers with syrup after May 1. Attempting to turn this injunction to the Company’s advantage, Sam Dobbs wrote to the actual bottlers, explaining that “your welfare will be materially affected” if the Company could not supply syrup. Although furious at the parent bottlers, Dobbs felt powerless, as he wrote to his friend Bill D’Arcy a few days later: “The Chattanooga crowd are moving heaven and earth to prejudice the actual bottlers against us.”
Rallying the troops, Hunter and Rainwater called for a mass bottler meeting on April 22 in Chattanooga. Though Harold Hirsch was pointedly excluded, he wrote plaintively that he had always tried to encourage a “spirit of cooperation in the Coca-Cola Family” but had failed. He stressed that both sides had the same basic goal—“a continuous and ever-free flowing supply of bottlers’ Coca-Cola syrup.” In the bitterness of the fray, however, “this particular purpose has, to some extent, been lost in the shuffle.” The angry bottlers assembled in Tennessee preferred emotional condemnations of the Company to Hirsch’s plea for sanity. “If I go down,” George Hunter declared, “I’m going to pull the whole business down with me.”
The Company and parent bottlers backed away from their vindictive game of “chicken” before the syrup spigot was actually cut off. They compromised on a temporary solution just before the May deadline, allowing the Company to supply the actual bottlers at $1.72 a gallon with an adjustment for the volatile price of sugar (much to the relief of the Company). As the courtroom filled for what Atlantans knew would be an entertaining trial, sugar still cost over twenty cents a pound as a result
of stockpiling by a consortium of sugar interests in Cuba, whose economy boomed along with Coca-Cola sales. In Atlanta, however, the cost of a fountain Coca-Cola rose to eight cents a glass.
COURTROOM DRAMA
The trial quickly degenerated into a literal tug-of-war. Ben Phillips, the lawyer for the bottlers, grabbed the Coca-Cola minutes book, reading the contents into the record over the opposing counsel’s repeated objections. Finally, Harold Hirsch physically wrenched the minutes away from Phillips. Normally composed, Hirsch sounded more like a petulant schoolboy than a lawyer: “It is not going in the record and I demand the book back. Give me my book back.” Once order was restored, Hirsch and his colleagues argued convincingly that the parent bottlers were parasites, middlemen “who serve no useful purpose, simply buying the syrup at a fixed price and reselling same at a profit—not even seeing the syrup.” During Veazey Rainwater’s cross-examination, he admitted that the parent bottlers took a 25 percent profit on advertising provided by the Company. With hardly any investment, the Southeastern Parent Bottler had made $2.5 million in twenty years.
The parent bottlers responded, with equal justice, that without them there would have been no bottling business. Hunter and Rainwater chronicled the difficult early years, the failed bottlers, the fights against imitators. The actual bottlers had invested over $20 million in real estate, plants, and equipment. The Coca-Cola Company had not had to lift a finger or spend a cent on the entire venture. Far from being leeches, the parent bottlers were constantly training and exhorting their bottlers to put out a uniform, high-quality product. They sponsored conventions and training seminars, arranged for bulk buying, secured the most modern equipment. As for the $2.5 million in profits over a twenty-year period—what about the Syndicate’s one-day earnings of twice that figure, accomplished by financial sleight-of-hand instead of hard, prolonged work?
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 21