32 Like most coffee firms of the era, Hills Brothers had to compete in every niche. Blue Can, packed without a vacuum, used lower-grade ground beans. Mexomoka combined Mexican coffee beans with cereal. Royal, Vienna, Solano, Pacific, and Tremont were all names for coffee-chicory mixtures. Royal Roast, a glazed whole roast coffee, competed directly with Arbuckles’ Ariosa. The firm also produced “private label” coffee for other brands. Hills Brothers even packed coffee into lunch boxes for California children.
33 Mannie Brandenstein also befriended and hired the legendary Albert Lasker, head of the Lord & Thomas agency and chief exponent of the popular “reason why” school of advertising, to handle the MJB account.
34 Teddy Roosevelt probably never uttered the words “Good to the last drop.” If he had, why didn’t this 1908 advertisement use the phrase? The first Maxwell House Coffee ad to feature the slogan apparently appeared in the 1920s. Coca-Cola had called its beverage “good to the last drop” in 1908.
35 Although purely speculation, it is not beyond possibility that Arbuckle left his considerable fortune to charity and that the will conveniently disappeared. Arbuckle’s sisters moved quickly to close his floating hotels, despite heartfelt pleas from its occupants: “This is the only home the majority of us possess, most of us being orphans.”
36 “Hixson’s Suffragette Coffee” in 1913 featured a pretty young woman and the message “We dedicate this coffee to the suffragette, with the hope and expectation that as we look for all that is pure, noble and uplifting in woman, her sphere of influence for good may be given broader and wider scope through suffrage.”
37 There are other claimants for the invention of soluble coffee. As far back as 1771, the British granted a patent for a “coffee compound.” In the late nineteenth century, R. Paterson & Son of Glasgow invented Camp Coffee, a liquid “essence.” In 1900 Tokyo chemist Sartori Kato introduced a group of Chicago coffee men to his version, sold at the 1901 Pan American Exposition and patented in 1903. Around 1906, while sitting in the Faust Cafe, St. Louis roaster Cyrus F. Blanke noticed a dried drop of coffee on his plate and invented Faust Instant Coffee. German-Guatemalan Federico Lehnhoff Wyld independently developed an instant coffee as well, eventually setting up a French soluble business just before World War I sent it into bankruptcy.
38 As the war ended late in 1918, a deadly flu epidemic killed 50 million people, on every continent. Some believed that coffee cured the flu, but the port of Rio de Janeiro shut down with huge coffee shipments sitting on the docks, because the coffee-drinking stevedores were dying of the flu.
39 Colombia of course was not alone in suffering repeated military disruptions. Many Latin American countries—particularly those where coffee had created great wealth alongside abject poverty—suffered such upheavals. “Many of the countries where coffee is grown,” wrote one commentator in 1914, were “where revolutions are always hatched and brewing.” Indeed, he reported, bullets were sometimes literally exported—perhaps not so accidentally—along with the coffee beans.
40 The U.S. coffee import figures for 1919 do not represent total U.S. consumption, however, since the United States reexported nearly 78 million pounds of coffee that year. The Haitian coffee crop previously had gone primarily to France.
41 In 1862 white explorers had observed Ugandan native use of robusta, but no one thought of using it commercially then. Members of the Baganda tribe separated two robusta beans from the same berry, smeared them with their blood, and thereby declared blood brotherhood.
42 A Chicago journalist wrote a satirical piece about “The Face on the Coffeehouse Floor” in which “the bartender . . . can tell by your trembling hand and your shaken nerves that you are after coffee.”
43 The Coffee Club newsletter sometimes strained for illustrations. On a 1924 cover three bored-looking young men dressed in suits and ties stare into space over their coffee cups, with the caption: “A corner of the Yale Club . . . with a coffee party in full blast.”
44 The author’s mother, an Atlanta native, credited the Alice Foote MacDougall coffeehouses with saving her life when she was a little girl visiting New York with her mother in the twenties. “I was scared to death of white waiters, whom I had never seen. I would only eat at the coffeehouses where blacks served the food.”
45 The rise of the automobile affected the coffee industry of Venezuela as well. Located at the top of South America, east of Colombia, Venezuela’s mountains provided ideal coffee-growing conditions. In 1920 coffee provided two-thirds of the country’s exports, but during that decade rich oil deposits offered a more lucrative alternative, and coffee cultivation declined.
46 Things may have run smoothly under the direction of the second generation, but the generous treatment of employees was eroding. In 1922, according to a company memo, “the practice of distributing coffee gratuitously to employees” was discontinued.
47 John Watson was not the only one who made such observations. In 1922 the novelist Sinclair Lewis created George Babbitt, the quintessential American consumer for whom “standard advertised wares . . . were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.” Every morning the insecure Babbitt “gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul.”
48 The year before, in 1927, Postum acquired the U.S. rights to market Sanka, a decaffeinated coffee. A Southern black “mammy” graced the label, clearly attempting to cash in on the same Southern associations that sold Maxwell House.
49 Herbert Hoover, who objected to the artificial prosperity of the coffee growers, failed to see any parallel to the U.S. economy, inflated by speculative stock buying. “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,” he stated in a stump speech. “We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
50 In Nicaragua, dictator José Santos Zelaya received U.S. government support, as Americans hoped to negotiate a canal through his country. After 1903, however, when the United States engineered a coup in Panama and secured rights to a canal there, Zelaya’s fights against U.S. business interests proved more difficult, and in 1909 he was forced to resign. From 1909 until 1933, with the exception of a brief period in 1926-1927, the U.S. Marines established a protectorate in Nicaragua to ensure the domination of American interests there. North Americans controlled the banks, the military, and the coffee growers. As a consequence, the Nicaraguan coffee economy stagnated in comparison with its Central American neighbors.
51 The Brazilians also opened coffee bars in Great Britain, France, Denmark, Russia, and Japan.
52 Though the rebels committed some atrocities, their actions were greatly exaggerated later by the government, which also minimized the extent of the military massacre to follow.
53 Estimates for the numbers killed in the matanza vary from 2,000 to 50,000. In his classic 1971 book Matanza, Thomas Anderson accepted an estimate of 10,000, but many scholars now agree on 30,000.
54 Bitter Grounds, by Sandra Benitez, is a multigenerational novel set in El Salvador. It begins with the 1932 matanza and follows the intertwining lives of coffee workers and plantation owners. One of the characters writes, “You say, but for the golden hope of coffee / few men would get ahead. / I say, when the people harvest, / all they reap is bitter grounds.”
55 Augusto César Sandino, the illegitimate son of a wealthy coffee planter and one of his harvest laborers, led a rebellion against the U.S. Marines who occupied his country, calling them “blond beasts” and “the enemy of our race and language.”
56 By 1927 A & P was buying one-tenth of Colombia’s entire coffee production, roasting an average of 4,000 bags of Colombian coffee per week.
57 The British owned three prime coffee colonies: Kenya grew arabica, Tanganyika produced both arabicas and robustas, while Uganda specialized primarily in robusta. The French, Portuguese, and Belgians owned the Afric
an robusta coffee-growing colonies of French Equatorial Africa, French West Africa, Somaliland Coast, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Madagascar, Angola, and the Belgian Congo. The Italians were about to take over Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee.
58 Erwin Wasey had taken over the Maxwell House account in 1929 when J. Walter Thompson had to give it up to take on Chase & Sanborn. In the twenties Fleischmann’s Yeast and Maxwell House Coffee were two of the biggest JWT accounts. When Fleischmann’s transmuted into Standard Brands, swallowing Chase & Sanborn, the JWT men had to choose between keeping the huge yeast account and switching coffee accounts or losing all of the Standard Brands business if they stuck with Maxwell House.
59 Novelist Sinclair Lewis applied for a job, but Benton turned him down, telling him, “I don’t want to be the Babbitt or Gantry of your next work.”
60 Through his lawyer, Jerome Kern at first objected to Maxwell House having stolen his theme, but Benton & Bowles’s lawyer reported in May 1933 that Kern told him, “He is a regular listener to the Maxwell House Radio Show Boat hour, which he not only enjoys but considers the best program ever put on the air.”
61 Del Monte Coffee imitated the Maxwell House Show Boat with its own Ship of Joy program, starring Captain Dobbsie.
62 The same year they could have had the Coca-Cola radio account if they had agreed to merge with the D’Arcy agency. Coke boss Robert Woodruff, used to instant obedience, ordered the consolidation but the partners declined.
63 The life of the Depression-era housewife clearly was not easy. On a popular 1932 radio show one commentator advised housewives to “keep a good big supply of coffee in the pantry. You’ll find it something to cling to. . . . Otherwise, the day will surely come when you’ll sit down in the middle of the kitchen floor and scream and yell at the ghastly, damnable futility of it all.”
64 The two original patriarchs, brothers Austin Herbert and Reuben Wilmarth Hills, died in 1933 and 1934, respectively, but their children carried on aggressively. Around the same time the second generation of Folger leadership passed on. Frank Atha died in 1935, followed by Ernest Folger in 1936, leaving third-generation Russell Atha and brothers Peter and James Folger III in charge.
65 Also in 1933 Hills Brothers took advantage of the jigsaw puzzle craze, giving away 20,000 puzzles featuring a large coffeepot with cartoon characters. That same year Hills Brothers made much of its movie tie-in with Eskimo, showing pictures of the cast drinking coffee on the Arctic ice.
66 In 1909 two sisters in Salem, Massachusetts, created the Silex brewer, based on the French vacuum maker created by Madame Vassieux in the 1840s. The Silex used fire-resistant Pyrex glass, however, making it far more durable, and soon was offered with an electric heating element.
67 Such practices are still common, with coffee firms paying slotting allowances to supermarkets for shelf placement.
68 Early pressure-brewers had been invented in nineteenth-century Europe.
69 The founder’s son, Ernesto Illy, a scientific researcher, took over the company after World War II. It is now run by the third generation.
70 The sexist Hills Brothers ads fit the times. Women were considered to be emotional, vain, insecure, and easily manipulated. “Woman clings to purchasable things more than her husband,” advised Margaret Weishaar in a 1937 J. Walter Thompson publication. “They can be a prop for her. They can bolster her courage, help her keep up appearances.”
71 The six countries forming the Pan American Coffee Bureau were Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
72 Bourke-White’s powerful 1936 Brazilian portraits of black coffee laborers reflected her newfound social conscience. She returned from Latin America to photograph faces of the rural South for You Have Seen Their Faces, a collaboration with Erskine Caldwell.
73 See chapter 2 for background on Bernhard Hannstein, Walter’s father, and Erwin Paul Dieseldorff. See also the prologue and chapter 19 for contemporary information on the Hannstein finca run by Walter’s daughter, Betty Hannstein Adams.
74 In 1903 the price of Rio #7 beans fell to 5 cents per pound, but the dollar was worth more in those days, and the Rio bean was inferior to Santos #4, the standard in 1940.
75 “Joe” was slang for the common man. There are two other theories, that “cuppa Joe” derived from a combination of Java and Mocha, or that it was named after Josephus Daniels, who served as secretary of the U.S. Navy from 1913 to 1921 and who banned wine at the officers’ mess, so that coffee became the strongest available drink.
76 During World War II, no Germans were taken to the United States from Brazil, since the program was perceived as an insult to Brazilian national sovereignty. In general, only smaller countries, such as those of Central America, could be forced to agree to it. (Of course, such governments also took advantage of the situation to grab land or get rid of political opponents who were conveniently labeled Nazis.) Vargas created his own wartime internment camp for Germans and Japanese in the Brazilian Amazon.
77 In total over 31,000 so-called enemy aliens were interned during the war, taken from their homes in Latin America and the United States, including 16,849 Japanese, 10,905 Germans, and 3,278 Italians.
78 The age of the dictator appeared to be passing. The previous year, Maximilio Hernández Martínez and Jorge Ubico had been forced from power in El Salvador and Guatemala, respectively, as their restive citizens yearned for the freedom and democracy they had heard so much about during the war.
79 As a Colombian, Uribe must have been exquisitely aware of social problems, since his country had recently begun La Violencia, a decade of terror. Some 200,000 Colombians would die in the internal conflict.
80 In Brazil the Gillette razor company took out a full-page newspaper ad to disclaim any connection with Guy Gillette.
81 In 1950 Americans consumed an average of 177 soft drinks a year. By the end of the decade they would gulp 235 annually.
82 As an adult, Joe Leahy would become a wealthy New Guinea coffee planter (see chapter 17).
83 A jacú is a Brazilian game bird notorious for flying directly toward hunters who whistle properly.
84 The FTC eventually published its 523-page report, blaming the 1954 price hike on poor crop estimates, speculation at the coffee exchange, and inventory hoarding by large U.S. roasters. By that time, however, coffee prices were dropping and the matter no longer seemed urgent.
85 United Fruit also was involved in the coffee trade. Its Great White Fleet offered weekly sailings that handled exported coffee from Colombia and Central American ports.
86 The United States poured over $100 million into Guatemala between 1954 and 1960, but most of it went toward highway construction and other programs designed to help U.S. businesses. “Of all the many millions that we have spent in Guatemala,” noted a U.S. senator in 1958, “little has trickled down to the two million Indians of the country, who are the people who really need our help. They are still poor, while the businessmen are prospering.”
87 John Hartford died in 1951 at seventy-nine, followed by ninety-two-year-old George Hartford in 1957.
88 Such counterintuitive advertising also worked for Wilkins Coffee, a regional Washington, D.C., roaster. In 1957 the firm commissioned local puppeteer Jim Henson to create seven-second television spots featuring Wilkins and Wontkins, two Muppets (from marionette and puppet). In the ads Wontkins, a gruff naysayer, always refuses to drink his coffee, with dire results. Wilkins shoots, brands, drowns, clubs, slashes, freezes, and blows up his buddy Wontkins. In a typical commercial Wilkins asks, “Have some Wilkins Coffee?” Wontkins hesitates, “Well, I . . . I . . . ,” so Wilkins hits him over the head a few times. “I’ll take some,” Wontkins growls. “Surprising how many are switching to Wilkins Coffee.” Coffee sales soared, as did Henson’s subsequent career.
89 Ironically, Latin American countries exported their best beans and consumed cheap instant coffee, much to the chagrin of the growers, who coined the phrase, “Nescafé, no es café,” meani
ng “Nescafé is not coffee.”
90 The name Tchibo derived from Tchilling-Hirrian and bohne, the German word for bean.
91 In 1911 the first café opened, where exorbitantly priced coffee also bought a female companion. Such cafés were forerunners of the expensive Ginza bars and should not be confused with Japanese coffeehouses.
92 Dunkin’ Donuts began as the Open Kettle in 1948, but two years later Bill Rosenberg changed the name of the Quincy, Massachusetts, store to the catchier title. In 1955 he began to franchise the stores. Unlike its Googie brethren, Dunkin’ Donuts prided itself on using whole-bean arabica, introducing middle-class Americans to decent, properly brewed coffee.
93 In 1942 the American inventor Peter Schlumbohm created an hourglass-shaped piece of Pyrex that he dubbed the Chemex, to match its laboratory appearance. The simple, functional drip brewer featured a wood and leather handgrip at its waist. It made good coffee, but it was difficult to clean. It never challenged the percolator, except among high-brows and purists. The simpler German Melitta cone drip system did not appear in the United States until 1963.
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 51