Despite his tyrannical ways—or perhaps because of them—Bekker effectively fostered the business in a difficult territory. For years, the profit margin for Coke in South America was quite thin, due not only to the poverty of the people but to government-imposed price controls. At the same time, Bekker had to contend with a well-entrenched trucking union. He solved that problem by abolishing regular Coca-Cola vehicles and hiring fleteros, independent truckers who would work for less money and make multiple daily trips without complaint. The main offices in New York demanded that Bekker send his profits back north, but he refused, plowing the money back into his Argentine trade.
While the South American business may not have been terribly profitable, it overcame most prejudice against Coca-Cola. By 1953, a Brazilian intellectual identified the drink as a symbol of the “complete overthrow of the gloomy concepts of a dark, moldy past.” On the contrary, he said, Coca-Cola was emblematic of “light, health, air, frankness, simplicity, strength and hope for a better future for Brazil.” Coca-Cola, he asserted, meant progress and was opposed to diverse ills such as corrupt politicians, bad roads, gangsters, malaria, yellow fever, and bare feet.
THE ROYAL SOFT DRINK
To promote Coca-Cola as a high-status product, Company photographers loved to catch snapshots of the rich and famous drinking it. King Farouk reportedly had such a love for Coke that every restaurant in Egypt kept an iced supply in case the monarch should arrive unexpectedly. Two boy kings, Hussein of Jordan and Faisal of Iraq, sipped Coke together, as did four Dutch princesses. Batista drank it in Cuba, while Nixon and Eisenhower upended bottles in the United States. The sultan of Morocco kept his palace supply well chilled, while all elegant foreigners with fine sensibilities treated Coca-Cola as if it were the rarest champagne—or so Company executives claimed.
Many of the potentates who drank their Coke so religiously had an economic incentive. “The leading commercial, social and government leaders in all countries of the world wish to become associated with our product,” one Coca-Cola man bragged, and he wasn’t far off the mark. Like the American government, The Coca-Cola Company was perfectly happy to conduct business with dictators, as long as they were professed anti-Communists. Several ministers serving Franco, Spain’s fascist ruler, doubled as Coca-Cola bottlers. James Farley met and befriended Getulio Vargas, the Brazilian dictator; while in Nicaragua, he solicited Anastasio Somoza’s autograph for his daughter. Big Jim was always lavishly entertained in Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek and his wife. He even unsuccessfully wooed Portugal’s autocratic ruler, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, undeterred by the fact that Salazar ran a police state. In 1954, the United Fruit Company, Coke’s Guatemalan bottler, helped overthrow the democratic leftist government, replacing President Jacobo Arbenz with a series of strong-arm dictators. In a Coca-Cola Overseas feature three years later, the Company blandly ignored the overthrow, praising United Fruit for supplying workers on its banana plantations with Coca-Cola, their favorite soft drink.
In India, the maharaja of Patiala oversaw his Coca-Cola holdings from his huge, ornate palace, complete with golf course, tennis courts, four swimming pools, gardens, and lakes—all maintained in manicured splendor by hundreds of servants. Coca-Cola Export representative Frank Harrold, who traveled the world to encourage local bottle sales, was awed by the maharaja’s opulent lifestyle. “His jewels have been estimated at one hundred million dollars,” he wrote, casually adding that “outside the palace walls and so on for three thousand miles is the worst squalor and filth and poverty in the world.”
THE ADVENTURES OF FRANK HARROLD
Harrold kept a diary of his world travels in the early 1950s that paints a fascinating portrait of the business. Riding the Coca-Cola trucks for two days in Bombay, he saw “a seething, boiling mass of humanity striving to survive from one day to the next.” Despite their wretched lives, they still managed to purchase a miraculous amount of Coca-Cola. By the end of the day, Harrold had an overwhelming desire to lock himself into the Taj Mahal Hotel to “shut away all the misery.” The next day, with no apparent sense of irony, Harrold described the “perfectly gorgeous” Coca-Cola bottling plant, surrounded by five acres of grounds. “There is nothing else like it in Bombay, so I am told,” he noted with pride. At a party one night, he met several Indian movie stars. “Coca-Cola has a marvelous tie-up with the moving picture industry here,” he wrote, explaining that the actors felt a part of the Coca-Cola family. This was fortunate, since the movie industry in India was second in size only to that of the United States.
Wherever he went, Frank Harrold found that “the best way to feel a city is to put on a Coca-Cola uniform” and follow the local route salesmen for a day. “A Coca-Cola truck goes anywhere and everywhere,” he wrote, “to the finest cafes and hotels as well as to the lowliest dumps in the slums.” His uniform gave him entrée where no other white men dared go, such as Algiers’ infamous Casbah, a “criss-cross puzzle of crooked alleys” where desperate hands grabbed at anything.
In Hong Kong, Harrold saw rickshaws, tattoo artists, and little Buddhist shrines in local groceries. He later marveled at the Filipino women and children who carried Coca-Cola on their heads in “buckets, cases, baskets, chamber pots.” In Marrakech, he met Malika, a renowned high-class prostitute, “the most beautiful creature of color” he’d ever seen. He was taken by “the flickering flames, the tinkling bells, the shouting showmen, the smell of smoke” of Casablanca. He posed for a photograph with Iola the Coca-Cola lion, who rode as a mascot on a Kenyan delivery truck. In Cairo, Harrold socialized with King Farouk, who told him dirty jokes.
“How did you ever get here?” the man from Americus, Georgia, frequently asked himself. The answer, of course, was Coca-Cola, the former patent medicine, now seasoned world traveler. Spurred by foreign growth, sales volume soared. While it took until 1944 to sell the first billion gallons of Coca-Cola syrup, the second billion had gurgled down thirsty throats by 1953.
THE LIMITS OF CIVILIZATION
Coca-Cola men loved to point out that, wherever they went, they boosted the beverage market for everyone. Once local competitors were faced with Coke’s sampling and advertising campaigns, they usually rose to the challenge, resulting in a more competitive but larger market. People drank less water and milk, lured by sugary drinks. In fact, one Coca-Cola president bragged in the 1950s that Coke was often imbibed by people who had never drunk milk.
Unfortunately for the Coke men, Pepsi representatives could attest that Coca-Cola did indeed open up attractive new markets. Following on the leader’s heels, Pepsi salesmen soon claimed an alarming share of the market, particularly in poor areas such as Egypt, Thailand, Mexico, and the Philippines, where the sweeter, bigger drink made heavy inroads. Nonetheless, in 1950, Coca-Cola enjoyed a five-to-one worldwide dominion over Pepsi. As in the United States, Pepsi suffered from a downscale image. It was, according to one Coca-Cola representative, “like the difference between an orchid and a bunch of wild daisies.”
By the early fifties, travelers couldn’t avoid the cheery red Coke signs, which appeared, as one British writer put it, “like a measles rash over scores of countries.” While Coke men might not like the analogy, they appreciated the thought. “No matter where one goes, cool, refreshing Coca-Cola is near at hand,” a Company publication crowed. “No other soft drink has ever enjoyed such world-wide popularity. None has been so enthusiastically accepted by so many different races in so many different climes.” As proof, Company officials loved to tell the story of the Mexican Indian who had never heard of World War II but broke into a grin at the mention of the soft drink. “Sí, sí, Cola-Cola es perfecto, es magnifico!” he exclaimed.
Halfway around the world, an American traveling across the Sahara asked his driver when they would leave civilization behind. The native asked for a definition of the term. “Well, when will we reach the point where there won’t be any Coca-Cola?” The driver shrugged. “Never,” he answered, pointing to a billboard emerging from behind
the next sand dune.
__________________
* While Coke officials could rely on powerful politicians, Pepsi had to woo more unsavory types such as Senator Joe McCarthy, dubbed the “Pepsi-Cola Kid” for his blatant lobbying.
* When China disappeared behind the Bamboo Curtain, it caused a panic at Coca-Cola, since one of the key ingredients of 7X was cassia, otherwise known as Chinese cinnamon. Through a London intermediary, however, Coke continued to do business with the Chinese, who willingly sold the secret ingredient of the capitalist beverage.
* In her 1951 novel, The Blessing, British satirist Nancy Mitford drew a nasty portrait of Hector Dexter, the quintessential American blowhard. In order to spread the “American way of living,” he said, “I should like to see a bottle of Coca-Cola on every table in England, on every table in France, on every—” He was interrupted by his British hostess. “But isn’t it terribly nasty?” Not at all, Dexter said. It tasted good. But that wasn’t the point. “When I say a bottle of Coca-Cola, I mean it metaphorically speaking. I mean it as an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual, I mean it as if each Coca-Cola bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civilization ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global universe with its great wide wings.”
~ 15 ~
Breaking the Commandments
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
—Arnold Bennett
It may be mere sentimentalism, but there are some of us who can never see an old way of doing things passing without regret.
—Robert Lynd
At the onset of the fifties, Robert Woodruff exercised unprecedented power on the local, state, and national level. Known affectionately by employees as the Old Man, he was a vigorous sixty years old in 1950, reveling in his established lifestyle. Woodruff’s tenure as president had lasted only briefly after Arthur Acklin fell apart in 1945. The next year, the Boss appointed Bill Hobbs, a former government functionary, as his chief executive. Freed of day-to-day responsibility, Woodruff resumed his comfortable nomadic existence, hunting quail at Ichauway in the fall and winter and stalking big game at his Wyoming ranch during the summer. He visited Europe once a year, usually finding time to golf at Scotland’s Gleneagles. In between, he nested briefly at his Atlanta and New York homes. Woodruff often hit New York bars with singer Morton Downey, who served as a kind of court jester there and at Ichauway. The Boss put away an astonishing amount of Scotch without any apparent effect on his athletic constitution.
Everywhere he went, Woodruff conducted business, facilitated by an eager staff who jumped at his every command. His man Friday from 1943 until the end of Woodruff’s life was Joseph W. Jones, a quiet, tactful Delaware native who arranged the Woodruff itinerary, bought his custom-made clothing and cigars, handled correspondence, and served as gatekeeper to the Boss. Joe Jones’ work was unremittingly demanding, a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week project without vacation. As Woodruff’s virtual slave, Jones lost two wives, but he remained the faithful retainer to the end.
Woodruff’s power base unquestionably lay in Atlanta, where the Coca-Cola magnate’s influence was subtly omnipotent. When Woodruff got an idea, “you can depend upon it, others will get the idea,” lawyer Hughes Spalding explained in 1950, because the Boss would summon a few of the inner circle and tersely introduce it, sometimes at 3 a.m., when the restless Woodruff often had his brainstorms. “We do not engage in loose talk about ideals and all that other stuff. We get right down to the problem. All of us are assigned tasks to carry out.” Spalding amiably admitted that, like many others, he was a “stooge” for The Coca-Cola Company. “I guess I’m a top stooge,” he said. “When Mr. Woodruff wants something done, and if I can possibly do it, I do it!”*
Similarly, Mayor Bill Hartsfield told an interviewer that “I never made a major decision, that I didn’t consult Bob Woodruff.” The mayor periodically hunted as an Ichauway guest and kept a prominently framed picture of Woodruff in his office. He invariably offered visitors a Coke as his first gesture of Southern hospitality. Without any apparent anxiety over conflict of interest, Hartsfield accepted a $6,000 annual retainer from The Coca-Cola Company while he served as mayor.
In Community Power Structure, which featured sociologist Floyd Hunter’s classic 1950 “sociogram” of the Atlanta power structure, Hartsfield and Spalding nested obviously in the center, while Woodruff, hovering to the side, was attached by strategic lines to important points, like a spider monitoring its web from the fringes. “The actions of the top leaders who may attend meetings of the lower echelons are watched with acute attention,” Hunter wrote. “Even grunts of disapproval are carefully recorded.” In fact, as Woodruff grew older, he seldom spoke, and his minions became adept at deciphering his rumblings, which could either indicate approval, indecision, or absolute disagreement, depending on their inflection.
By this time, Woodruff had added two other soubriquets. At meetings, he was sometimes called “the Consensus,” ever since one memorable moment when the Coca-Cola board had convened, only to find that Woodruff was absent. The chairman had banged his gavel and declared, “This meeting is cancelled for lack of a quorum.” In Georgia, Woodruff was also known as “Mr. Anonymous,” since his enormous gifts to Emory University, cancer research, and other charities† were never attributed to him—partly because Woodruff was genuinely reclusive, but mostly to avoid beggars. In 1941, Ralph McGill wrote an article on his friend Woodruff for the Saturday Evening Post entitled “The Multimillionaire Nobody Knows.” The Boss was annoyed, since it prompted an onslaught of requests for money.
The Atlanta realm over which Woodruff ruled in 1950 featured a meticulously balanced, graciously administered, smoothly functioning “old boy” network. Nonetheless, there were signs of friction. Floyd Hunter was dismayed to find that no African Americans were part of the official Atlanta power structure, though he could construct a separate (but unequal) sociogram for them. When Hunter interviewed Benjamin Mays, the distinguished black president of Morehouse College, the educator told him that “the first thing I can remember is a white mob looking for a Negro to lynch.” Significantly, Hughes Spalding called segregation the major issue facing Atlanta. Many of the two thousand annual Atlanta black college applicants were shunted North. “Maybe it is not what the Negroes want,” Spalding said, “but it is what they are going to get!”
Woodruff wasn’t involved with such petty details of Atlanta life, however, but rather devoted his energy to a national and international vision, informing Hunter that he wanted to “put Atlanta in the center of the world.” In reality, the Boss himself resided at the hub of the action. “How is policy really developed?” Hunter asked him. “Is it made in board rooms, or where?” Unblinkingly, Woodruff told him, “It’s made wherever I am. I may be at Ichauway, on a boat, anyplace I call it.” Alexander Makinsky once compared Woodruff to a Russian czar who, when asked to identify the important people in his court, replied that “they’re the people to whom I talk—and only while I’m talking to them.”
THE BOSS LIKES IKE
One indication of Woodruff’s awesome power, which reached well beyond Georgia, was a casual remark he made to Floyd Hunter in 1950 when the sociologist asked why General Eisenhower’s picture hung on the wall. “Some of us want to see him made president,” Woodruff said. “We sent him overseas to give him an international flair, then we made him the president of Columbia so the eggheads would like him.”* No one had decided just yet, Woodruff concluded, whether Eisenhower should run as a Democrat or a Republican.
The popular general had resisted a movement to draft him as a candidate in 1948, but by 1952 he had been thoroughly prepared by his “gang,” as he called them—a group of calculating, high-powered businessmen, all of whom played golf with Ike at Augusta National.† Aside from his demonstrated wartime fondness for Coca-Cola, Eisenhower had other qualities that endeared him to
Woodruff and his cronies. For one thing, he wasn’t a business-bashing New Dealer. Instead, Ike genuinely believed in the partnership of free enterprise and moderate government. He was also the perfect leader to calm the country’s postwar anti-Communist jitters and usher in a decade of good feeling and conspicuous consumption.
An astute investor as well as military man, Eisenhower kept close tabs on his portfolio. In October of 1951, for instance, he wrote from Paris to Cliff Roberts, his (and Woodruff’s) financial adviser, asking whether he should consider moving some bonds into stocks because of increased inflation. By that time, the general and his son had invested in the Joroberts Corporation, which owned Coca-Coca bottling plants in South America. Morton Hodgson, who managed the plants from his Montevideo office, invited Eisenhower to Uruguay to see the Coke operations in person, and though Ike never ventured there, as president he routinely sent aides to assess the progress of his South American Coca-Cola plants.
For the Coca-Cola executives, Eisenhower was the perfect antidote to Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy. Ike believed in “reasonable protection for American industry,” declaring that an explicit purpose of foreign policy should be the encouragement of a hospitable climate for U.S. investment abroad. Not only that, he emerged from World War II as a popular symbol on a par with Coca-Cola, with a boyish grin that was a public relations man’s dream. “Ike, with that puss you can’t miss being President,” one of his friends told him. With Woodruff and his gang behind the popular candidate, his election was assured. Eisenhower’s presentation to the public was as carefully packaged as a bottle of Coca-Cola. Ike appeared as a somewhat naive, straightforward guy, not really a politician, but representing all of the American virtues. In reality, Eisenhower carefully calculated every move he made. “Frankly,” he wrote to Cliff Roberts, “my discard of manuscript at Detroit was on the unanimous advice of everybody around me” in order to produce “an atmosphere of complete spontaneity.”
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 38