For God, Country, and Coca-Cola

by Mark Pendergrast

  During the festivities, Charlie Ware, an African American, made the mistake of flirting with one of Touchtone’s mistresses. The overseer complained to his friend “Gator” Johnson, the local sheriff, who had a reputation for brutality. That night, Sheriff Johnson went to Charlie Ware’s house, intermittently beating his wife until Ware came home. Then, with the black man handcuffed in the front seat of his car, the sheriff picked up his radio transmitter and said, “This nigger’s coming on me with a knife! I’m gonna have to shoot him.” Wounding Ware twice in the neck, he said, “He’s still coming on!” and shot him a third time.* Miraculously, Ware survived, and the incident sparked what became known as the Albany Movement. Charged with felonious assault, the wounded black man languished in jail for over a year because Woodruff didn’t come forward to meet his bail bond. In fact, Woodruff apparently ignored the entire incident, though he forcibly “retired” Touchtone the next year by giving him a three-hundred-acre farm adjacent to the plantation and constructing a house for him.

  By 1963, neither Kennedy nor Austin could ignore increasingly militant African Americans. In August, Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, declared “I have a dream!” The following month, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demanded that African Americans appear in Coca-Cola’s television and print advertising. “We are appealing to you on a moral basis,” program director Clarence Funnye wrote to Paul Austin, but he added a thinly veiled threat that “selective purchasing committees” would “aid us in our bargaining position.” In other words, there would be a Coke boycott if the Company failed to respond.

  Paul Austin could not afford to antagonize CORE, but at the same time, if he aired integrated commercials in the South, he stood to lose white consumers. In a long memo, Austin bitterly blamed Harvey Russell, Pepsi’s black vice president, for the CORE attack.* In addition, he noted, Coca-Cola, “being a Southern institution,” provided a satisfactory emotional target. “We are the largest advertiser of a single product; the nature of our product makes it vulnerable to an organized boycott.” As a solution, Austin suggested creating a TV commercial at a beach “with a white attendant serving alternatively white and Negro customers.” The Company could also agree to produce an integrated print ad, but “we might run it only in a Negro publication, such as EBONY, if we should decide to run it at all.” Basically, Austin advocated stall tactics, hoping the furor would die down, and he hoped that others would soon be running integrated ads so that “we will not stand out.”

  At the same time, Operation Breadbasket, an Atlanta organization of ministers, pushed the Company to hire African Americans on the production lines of bottling companies. A local white activist found the Coca-Cola men polite and seemingly cooperative, “doing their best under the circumstances.” Black workers were already common in Northern bottling plants. Southerners, however, were still convinced that syphilis was transmitted by drinking fountains and toilets, and they didn’t want blacks bottling their Coke. When a boycott loomed, however, the Atlanta bottler promised to hire blacks and remove signs designating “Colored” and “White” bathrooms.

  Ivan Allen Jr., who replaced William Hartsfield as Atlanta’s mayor in 1962, bore the brunt of civil rights demands. Coming to power at the same time, Allen and Austin were friends, part of a tight group of WASPs Allen later described as “business-oriented, nonpolitical, moderate, well-bred, well-educated, pragmatic.” It was, he recalled, “not a particularly colorful group,” in all of that phrase’s meanings. When these young leaders were confronted with angry African American men and women, they had no idea how to proceed. In 1963, President Kennedy personally begged Mayor Allen to testify before Congress in favor of his civil rights bill on public accommodations, since the mayor was the only moderate Southern politician who might have the guts to do it. Allen agonized over the decision, finally baring his soul to Robert Woodruff. He told the Boss that he felt compelled to testify in favor of the bill, on both moral and practical grounds. The civil rights movement appeared unstoppable, and Atlanta business would suffer from more violence if some accommodation weren’t made.

  Woodruff considered what the mayor had said. He hated change of any kind, particularly if it meant upsetting a well-oiled social order. Only three years ago, he had written scathingly about voting rights for chimpanzees. “You are probably right,” he told Allen, but suggested that the mayor ask Congress to allow a reasonable delay for rural communities. Similarly, Austin convinced Woodruff to hire Charles Boone, the company’s first black bottle sales representative. After all, research demonstrated that while African Americans comprised 11 percent of the population, they consumed 17 percent of all soft drinks.

  When white Coke veteran Charlie Bottoms learned he would train Boone during a six-month partnership, he resented grooming the black man for a higher-paying position. The odd couple soon closed ranks under duress, however. For the white Bottoms, the experience proved illuminating. “When we pulled into a filling station, they’d see Charles and say their rest rooms were out of order,” Bottoms remembered. “When we stayed in a hotel in Greenville, they called my room all night long every fifteen minutes to tell me I was going to be dead by morning.” At bottling plants, Boone and Bottoms had to enter through the back door. Willie Barron, the Rome, Georgia, bottler, told Bottoms not to drive his car on a service visit “because it will be full of blood when you leave.”

  Gradually, however, the bottlers accepted the black Coca-Cola man, who performed his job extraordinarily well. A big man with a deep, booming voice and a startling resemblance to Martin Luther King Jr., Boone had been a college football star, held a master’s degree, and announced radio shows before joining a South Carolina bottler to boost sales to local African Americans. A classically dedicated Coca-Cola man, Boone eventually rose to vice president of Special Markets before dying of a heart attack one Saturday morning, at work in his office.

  FROM CAMELOT TO THE GREAT SOCIETY

  Just as President Kennedy was maturing in office, taking a strong stand on civil rights and making peace overtures to the Russians, he was assassinated in Dallas. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, strove for the Great Society, hoping to unite whites and blacks, rich and poor. As the consummate politician and compromiser, Johnson found a friend and kindred spirit in Robert Woodruff. LBJ imagined the same kind of ideal America—founded, as he put it, on “the desire for beauty and hunger for community”—that Coca-Cola advertising portrayed.

  Furthermore, Johnson deeply needed a stable father figure. During his White House years, Johnson often sought out Woodruff as a drinking companion and counselor. On the surface, the two men were quite different—Woodruff the quiet, reserved gentleman, Johnson the loud, raw buffoon—but they shared similar philosophies and Southern backgrounds. When Johnson won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964, Woodruff wrote to LBJ that “I’m sorry the vote was not unanimous.” The president scrawled an undated message for Woodruff: “Tell Bob to come see me whenever he’s in town.” Johnson’s motorcade once screeched to a stop when he spotted Ovid Davis, the Coca-Cola lobbyist, on the sidewalk. “Hey, there’s Bob’s boy!” the president yelled. “You tell Bob I said hey, you heah?”

  Only a few years earlier, neither Woodruff nor Johnson had espoused black equality, but they were changing. Whether out of pragmatism or ethics, the two white leaders became significant voices for moderation and the end of racism. When Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Ivan Allen’s biracial banquet in his honor nearly foundered, since the Atlanta white establishment at first refused to attend any event featuring “Martin Luther Coon,” as they privately called the black leader. Realizing that the national media would embarrass Atlanta and, by extension, Coca-Cola, Woodruff let it be known through Paul Austin that he favored the dinner, and the rest of Southern society promptly fell in line.*

  At the same time, Woodruff finally permitted Coke advertising to showcase African Americans. In 1965, Barbara McNair appeared i
n the first “main thrust” TV commercial for Coca-Cola to use a black celebrity. The cheerful folky sound of the Limelighters gave way to Ray Charles, the Supremes, the Fifth Dimension, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Marvin Gaye soulfully conveying the message that “Things Go Better With Coke.” Each artist created a distinctive version of the song. The Supremes’ effort, for instance, sounded almost exactly like their hit, “Baby Love.” The Ray Charles blues style featured powerful, emotion-laden visuals of a concert. “In between the sad songs that I sing all night long,” Charles wailed, “it’s so nice to leave the show / let my throat have a Coke, don’t you know.”

  The new advertising was not simply an accommodation to more militant African Americans, though. The entire mood of America was shifting. The docile baby boomers of the fifties had transformed into rebellious teenagers who sought meaning in the revolutionary new music of the Beatles, with their long hair, driving beat, and suggestive lyrics. Coca-Cola couldn’t afford to let Pepsi own the new generation. In addition to black performers, Coke hired white pop stars such as Leslie Gore, the Moody Blues, Petula Clark, Neil Diamond, the Everly Brothers, and Jan & Dean to sing upbeat, youthful versions of the jingle. The McCann men even negotiated with the Beatles, who often posed with Coke, but they proved too expensive for Woodruff’s taste.

  The mid-sixties retained many vestiges of normal middle-class life from the previous decade, however, despite the whiff of change in the air. Pause for Living, an extraordinarily popular Coca-Cola publication since 1953, covered “flower arranging, table settings and decorations, food preparation, teen-age entertaining and various handicrafts.” The flower arrangements, “enhanced” by bottles of Coca-Cola, continued to mesmerize garden clubs and home economics classes across America, pulling some five hundred weekly letters to the editor. Similarly, a 1966 television commercial portrayed a “typical” housewife rushing through her day as mother, wife, and student, with no hint that she sought any liberation other than an occasional drink of Coke. Outside each office at The Coca-Cola Company, one journalist wrote, “sits an engaging, competent secretary who guards her man pleasantly but firmly.” Sexism thrived in the America of the mid-sixties. Coca-Cola’s “Smile Girl” promotion offered prizes to the most toothsome beauties, while “curvaceous misses” added sex appeal to bottler convention skits.

  Unconcerned by sweeping societal changes, Coca-Cola’s legal department fussed and fretted over the proper use of the trademark. One should never relegate the product to the status of a “common adjective,” for instance, as in “Coke party.” Nor should the sacred product ever be pluralized—one drank several bottles of Coke, never several Cokes. Advising disc jockeys in 1965, the Company men gave them a list of appropriate “happy words you may use,” such as “Coca-Cola lifts your spirits,” or “Any meal goes better with Coke.”

  Soft drink sales in 1965 were bubbling along, rising to an annual American per capita of 260 drinks. Coca-Cola commanded 41 percent of the market, with Pepsi trailing at 23.5 percent. Nor was the Company resting on its laurels under Paul Austin’s management. In 1964, it acquired a coffee business with Houston-based Duncan Foods in exchange for $30 million worth of Coke stock. Many Company men surmised that Woodruff had pursued the merger primarily in order to bring dynamic young Charles Duncan Jr. into the Coca-Cola fold. On another front, Coke was offending orange juice competitors by advertising Minute Maid as if it were a soft drink. Ben Oehlert, now the president of the subsidiary, pointed out that traditional ads urged mothers “to see to it the kiddies take a four-ounce dose of the stuff at breakfast.” Abandoning such medicinal claims, Coke stressed the “natural sweetness, natural freshness” of orange juice, selling it in vending machines. Along with Hi-C, the Company’s diluted fruit drink, Oehlert pushed orange juice as a fine refreshment any time of the day.

  Meanwhile, the Company was developing other flavors. In Texas, it introduced Chime, a cherry-flavored cola designed to compete with Dr Pepper. That was a flop, but Fresca, a carbonated grapefruit-lemon diet drink, proved an overnight sensation, surprising even Coca-Cola men. The drink’s cool refreshment was emphasized rather than its lack of calories. As an announcer recounted Fresca’s virtues, snow drifted down, gradually building to a windblown storm. “It’s a blizzard!” he yelled through chattering teeth. Providentially, the worst snowstorm in years hit New York City on February 7, 1967, the day of the local Fresca roll-out. An inspired ad man had his picture taken holding a bottle of Fresca in the white swirls. “New York, We Are Sorry,” read the caption.

  Pepsi-Cola’s Don Kendall matched Coke step-for-step in the creation of other drinks with Teem, Mountain Dew, and others. In 1965, Pepsi joined Frito-Lay to become PepsiCo. “Potato chips make you thirsty,” Kendall offered as explanation of the merger. “Pepsi satisfies thirst.” With the addition of snack foods, Pepsi relied much more heavily than Coke on nondrink income, a trend that would increase with the years. In 1968, Pepsi acquired Trailer Convoy, American Van Lines, and Chandler Leasing.

  The Coca-Cola phenomenon garnered most of the attention, though. The Company “gyrates with new products, new packaging, new acquisitions,” wrote an awed commentator. Not since Robert Woodruff assumed command in the twenties had the Company been so supercharged. “Growth is essential,” Paul Austin said. “We must grow as individuals, as a Company, as a nation.” As a sign of change, Austin authorized construction of a multistory edifice on North Avenue to complement the old red-brick building. New marketing head Fred Dickson stressed that “we sell Coca-Cola to a vast, fickle, forgetful public. Right now some new trend may be starting that will change the whole contemporary scene.”

  Coke was well aware of one clear trend. Fast-food chains were “mushrooming,” a Company publication noted, mentioning McDonald’s, Carrols, Burger Chef, Burger King, Henry’s, Biff-Burger, Jiffy’s, Chip’s, and Braziers. While these new outlets dispensed a flood of Coca-Cola, the Company was convinced they could sell more. “Whaddayahave, whaddayahave?” was the impatient query at the Varsity in Atlanta, the world’s largest fast-food outlet. In the training film Walk-Up Hospitality, Coca-Cola urged counter personnel to smile brightly and suggest a large ice-cold Coke along with that order of fries. McDonald’s and Jiffy’s were viewed as battlegrounds in a deadly serious contest. Veteran Lee Talley reveled in the challenge, issuing a call to arms in the cola wars, taking “joy in the fray, asking no quarter and giving none.” Coca-Cola skits, elaborately staged by Jam Handy Productions with professional actors, whipped Company men into a frenzy. “We’ll fight ’em in the streets, in the drive-ins, in the skating rinks,” an actor playing a district manager promised in 1965.

  THE ARAB BOYCOTT BLUES

  That same year, Paul Austin convinced Woodruff that things could go better for Coke behind the Iron Curtain as well as in the drive-ins and skating rinks of America. The Bulgarian government signed on as a Coca-Cola bottler, importing concentrate from the Company, since the local imitation, Bulgar Cola, failed to find a market. Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia soon followed suit.

  Austin initiated contacts with the Soviet government, but he was afraid that selling Coke in the USSR might prompt an American backlash. Testing the waters, he dispatched Boisfeuillet Jones, who now worked for Robert Woodruff’s philanthropic endeavors, to meet secretly with Averell Harriman, LBJ’s Ambassador at Large, in Washington. When Jones asked whether the State Department would object to the sale of Coca-Cola in Russia, Harriman responded that the venture would be “in the national interest.” After a favorable consensus from other advisers—even cold warrior Jim Farley approved, writing that if Coca-Cola didn’t “get in there,” Pepsi undoubtedly would—Austin sent Alex Makinsky and another Russian-speaking Coke man to the Kremlin to work out the details. Coca-Cola would be bottled in Moscow for sale only to outlets operated by Intourist, the Russian travel bureau, as part of an overall Soviet plan to attract foreign money. When word leaked of the impending deal, however, the Company received negative
press. The profits from Russian Coke, one paper complained, would “help the Kremlin’s pals—in Red China and Viet Nam—pals whose troops and Viet Cong puppets are killing, wounding and capturing good U.S. fighting men.” Concluding that Americans probably weren’t yet prepared for a rapprochement with the Communists, Austin—possibly at Woodruff’s behest—postponed the project.

  In 1966, despite Austin’s best efforts, Coca-Cola became a hot political topic anyway. The Company refused to grant a franchise to an Israeli bottler, and the Anti-Defamation League accused Coca-Cola of compliance with the Arab League boycott of Israel. Within a week, the American Jewish community was calling for a boycott of its own. Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital stopped serving Coke in its cafeteria, and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog emporium on Coney Island threatened to turn off the spigot as well. Offended Jews threw Coke coolers out of second-story windows in Chicago and Los Angeles. Coca-Cola had to act quickly if it didn’t want to lose the lucrative American Jewish market. James Farley defended the Company by pointing out that Coca-Cola had attempted to enter Israel back in 1949 but had been denied because of rampant anti-American feeling. Furthermore, market research had revealed that conditions in Israel weren’t conducive to profitable sales. No one bought Farley’s explanations, and boycott plans progressed.

  Swiftly, The Coca-Cola Company moved to find a bottler, announcing within days that New York banker Abraham Feinberg, one of the original applicants back in 1949, was interested in funding an Israeli franchise, and the Company had signed a letter of intent with him. The hubbub in the United States died down, but the war drums began beating in the Arab countries, where Coca-Cola sold a hundred thousand cases a year through thirty locally owned bottling plants. The hot, dry Middle Eastern countries provided ideal customers for Coke, since Muslims were not allowed to touch alcohol. “From Morocco to Pakistan,” one journalist noted, “the modern oasis is the soft-drink stand.” Now, the Arabs gave Coca-Cola until August 15 to cancel its commitment to Feinberg. The Company stood to lose some $20 million in profits per year, in addition to handing over the huge territory to Pepsi, which was avoiding Israel without fanfare.