Despite the free samples and name change, sales of Hires Root Beer would remain sluggish until a chance meeting changed Hires’s fortunes. One morning while Hires traveled to his store on the Market Street cable car, a man named George Childs sat next to him. The two began talking and Childs, the publisher of the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper, told Hires, “I have had a taste of your root beer, and think it fine. Why don’t you advertise it?” Hires explained that all his money was tied up in his business and he had none to spare. “Let the advertisements make money for you,” responded Childs, who then offered to delay billing Hires for any ads he bought until he was making enough money from his root beer to settle the bill. Shortly after, Hires placed his first advertisement.
“Sales increased slowly at first, and then more rapidly, until I felt justified in asking the Ledger for a bill,” recalled Hires years later. When the bill came it was a shock. “It amounted to more than $700! I nearly had heart failure, for while I knew advertising cost money, I had no idea that it cost that much. That was really the turning point of my career as an advertiser, for I found courage enough to let the advertising go on running while I was paying off the $700. For the next 10 years I put every penny of profit from the root beer business back into advertising.”
As sales grew so did Hires’s commitment to advertising his root beer extract, a packet of which would cost twenty-five cents and could produce five gallons of the drink. His promotional campaigns became bolder and bolder, setting the tone for not just the soft drink industry but advertisers everywhere. He pushed Childs to let him run ads over two newspaper columns rather than the standard one-column width, and he became one of the first advertisers to buy an entire page of a US newspaper. Soon he was timing the publication of his daily newspaper ads to coincide with hot weather so that people were more likely to see the promotions for his refreshing drink while feeling thirsty. By 1884 Hires Root Beer ads were appearing in papers throughout the United States and Canada.
Hires’s promotional assault didn’t end there. He opened a printing division within his company that produced a blizzard of promotional cards, lithographs, booklets, and pictures, many of which emphasized the link between Hires and Christian temperance with painted scenes from the Old Testament or quotations from scripture. He hired seventy-three salesmen to travel the length and breadth of America, going from town to town sticking his booklets into letterboxes. The lithographs and cards were sent to stores to help jolt customers into buying some Hires Root Beer extract. To improve brand recognition among children, Hires came up with the Hires Root Boy, a chubby infant mascot who always wanted one more root beer.
The scale of Hires’s promotional campaign was unheard of for a soft drink. It was a campaign worthy of the biggest-spending patent medicine makers, who had set the pace for advertising ambition for most of the 1800s with their brazen claims, spectacular medicine shows, and giant billboards. Hires’s promotional push caused a rapid rise in sales. Within five years he had gone from selling enough extract to make 11,520 glasses of his root beer every year to selling enough to make nearly 1.5 million drinks. As the mustached business tycoon noted in an interview: “Business success is built upon two foundation rocks. One is to make your product as nearly perfect as possible. The second is to be energetic and tireless in selling it.” Hires’s recipe for success would not be lost on two new carbonated drink brands that burst into life a few years later in the mid-1880s, both fueled by their creators’ interest in patent medicine and dreams of wealth: Moxie and Coca-Cola.
Moxie started out in 1876 as Moxie Nerve Food, a nostrum invented by a spiritualist named Dr. Augustin Thompson. Born in Union, Maine, in 1835, Thompson trained as a blacksmith before deciding to become a doctor while serving in the Union infantry during the Civil War. On being discharged in July 1865 he enrolled at the Hahnemann Homeopathic College in Philadelphia, a medical school that taught the theories of Samuel Hahnemann, a German with a distrust of mainstream medicine to rival that of Samuel Thomson. Hahnemann believed that “like cures like,” so if a substance induced symptoms similar to a specific disease then it would cure that illness. After finding his medicines often proved toxic, he decided his cures would work safely if diluted and devised a dilution method so extreme that what he gave patients was nothing more than water. It was outlandish quackery, but in an age when professional medicine often failed to deliver results, his remedies caught on. By 1875 there were six thousand homeopathic doctors at work in the United States alone.
Thompson lapped up Hahnemann’s theories, and on completing his studies in 1867 he headed to Lowell, Massachusetts, doctorate in hand. On reaching the industrial textiles town he opened a homeopathic practice. Within ten years it was the largest homeopathic practice in New England, but by then Thompson was captivated by the stories about the druggists who had gotten into the patent medicine business and were now making incredible profits.
Thompson decided to make some nostrums of his own and in 1876 launched Moxie Nerve Food. He told his customers that this powerful, dark brown potion was named after his good friend Lieutenant Moxie, whom he met while studying at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Lieutenant Moxie went on to discover a nameless miracle plant in the Strait of Magellan. This turnip-shaped plant, he continued, is the basis of Moxie Nerve Food and has incredible curative powers. It could, Thompson claimed, “recover brain and nervous exhaustion; loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness.” Not only that but “paralysis, softening of the brain, locomotor ataxia, and insanity when caused by nervous exhaustion” too. Not to mention restoring the appetite, banishing tiredness, and curing alcoholism.
In common with most patent medicines sold at the time, the sales pitch for Moxie Nerve Food was nothing but lies. Thompson never attended West Point. Lieutenant Moxie didn’t exist nor did the magic turnip from South America. The main flavorings were sugar, wintergreen, and gentian root extract, resulting in a drink that tasted like a bitter root beer with a licorice-like aftertaste. The Moxie name was likely borrowed from the landscape of Maine, where there is a Moxie Falls, Moxie Mountain, and Moxie Cove.
Despite being sold on the back of a tale as fictional as the amateur plays Thompson took to writing in his twilight years, Moxie Nerve Food achieved modest success. But it still wasn’t the patent medicine hit Thompson had hoped to create. So in 1884 he carbonated his potion and relaunched it as a soda that he sold in twenty-six-ounce bottles and as a fountain syrup. To help promote his drink, Thompson hired Frank Archer, a former soda fountain clerk from Lincoln, Maine. Archer quickly proved himself as a man with a knack for attention-grabbing gimmicks. His first stunt was the Moxie Bottle Wagon, a giant recreation of the drink’s bottle in which a salesman would sit and sell soda through a hatch. Launched in the summer of 1886, Archer ordered the enormous bottle to be hauled around New England by horse-drawn cart, knowing that wherever it went it was bound to get people talking about Moxie. Soon Archer had a fleet of Moxie Bottle Wagons roaming the northeastern states.
In 1907 Archer went one better with a thirty-five-foot replica Moxie bottle that toured expositions around New England before becoming a fixture at the Pine Island Amusement Park in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 1919 the company, feeling the bottle had run its course, sold off the giant bottle to a local man called Louis Messier. Messier turned the oversized promotional item into a tower-like extension for his two-bedroom cottage, creating an instant landmark and prompting jokes in newspapers about old ladies living in shoes. It remained part of the house until 1999 when it was finally dismantled. Coupled with more traditional advertising, Archer’s zany promotions turned Thompson’s reinvented nostrum into the leading soda of the Yankee North with sales of just under 2.3 million bottles in 1899. By then, however, an upstart from the south called Coca-Cola was nipping at its heels.
John Pemberton, the creator of Coca-Cola, was born in July 1831 in Knoxville, Georgia, and like the creator of Moxie, he found himself drawn to the world of alternativ
e medicine. In 1850 he became a student at the South Botanico Medical College, one of the schools that taught Samuel Thomson’s medical system and had so angered the firebrand herbalist in his final years. On completing his studies, Pemberton—in true Thomsonian tradition—became a “steam doctor” and set to work trying to sweat the ailments out of patients. In 1853, while still working as a steam doctor, he married Cliff, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a plantation owner. She gave birth to their only child, Charles, a year later. Pemberton eventually tired of sweating patients and in 1855 he and his family moved to Columbus, Georgia, where he opened a drugstore selling medicines, cigars, perfumes, dyes, and surgical instruments. The business thrived. But in spring 1861 as Pemberton wrote to his mother-in-law telling of his success, dark clouds were forming on the horizon.
A few days after writing to Cliff’s mother, the seven Confederate states announced their secession from the United States in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election victory and the new president’s opposition to slavery. A month later civil war broke out. Life continued as normal for the Pembertons for a while, but in May 1862 as the fighting intensified and the Union made gains in Tennessee and Virginia, Pemberton closed his store and enlisted in the Confederate cavalry. Pemberton became a lieutenant colonel in the Third Georgia Cavalry but soon quit because he didn’t like taking orders. So instead of going to war he formed a militia cavalry that would fight to protect Columbus should the Yankees make it that far.
That moment finally came on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865, in what would prove to be the final battle of the Civil War. The Confederate strategy was to prevent the Union troops from crossing the Chattahoochee River and entering the city. So they burned down one of the city’s two bridges and gathered at the remaining crossing to face the Northern forces. Just after nightfall the Battle of Columbus began with Pemberton’s cavalry among the Southern forces gathered for the last stand of the Confederacy. During the two-hour battle for the bridge, Pemberton was wounded: shot and slashed by a saber that sliced him open from abdomen to chest. Against the odds Pemberton survived the battle. The Confederacy did not. Ten days later the war was over.
The South had been crushed. Many of its cities were in ruins and its people were defeated and malnourished. A sense of moroseness infected the defeated states and patent medicine sales boomed as citizens searched for nostrums capable of ridding them of the disease and deep depression that blighted daily life. This was especially true in Atlanta, which was particularly hard hit in the war. The city had formed in 1837 as Terminus, a collection of shanty homes, whorehouses, and saloons stuck at the southern end of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which stretched north to Chattanooga and was intended to be extended east to Augusta. By 1860 this dead-end hamlet had changed its name to Atlanta and become a railroad hub where nearly ten thousand people lived. But when General William Sherman of the Union army reached the city in November 1864 on his way to capture the port of Savannah, he ordered Atlanta to be leveled. As the general recalled in his memoirs when his forces finally left for Savannah, “Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.” Atlanta, however, would rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
Instead of brooding on its destruction, Atlanta rebuilt itself with a new vigor, rallying around the vision of a New South as championed by Henry Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Daily Herald and, later, the Atlanta Constitution. Through his newspapers Grady pitched his vision of Atlanta as the place where the New South would be forged. “There was a South of slavery and secession; that South is dead,” he remarked in an 1866 speech. “There is a South of union and freedom; that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour…. From the ashes [General Sherman] left we have raised a brave and beautiful city; somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the brick and mortar of our homes and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory.”
To illustrate the need for a new, industrial South he told the story of a poor Georgia farmer who, when he died, was buried in a coffin made in Cincinnati. The nails that sealed his coffin and the clothes he was buried in also originated from the factories of the North. So too his marble headstone, which came from Vermont, and the Pittsburgh-made shovel that dug his grave. All Georgia did, he noted, was provide a body and some cotton. Atlanta took Grady’s impassioned vision to heart and in the final decades of the 1800s turned itself into a boomtown. In 1870 there were just 2,200 residents. Ten years later it was a thriving city of 37,000 people. By 1900 there were 90,000 citizens living there. In just thirty years Atlanta went from smoking ashes to a modern city with paved streets, electric lights, streetcars and tall office blocks that cast long shadows over the churches that once dominated its skyline.
At the center of this fast-growing metropolis were the patent medicine men. Postbellum Atlanta was the national capital of patent medicine, packing in more quacks per head than any other US city. And it was the city’s insatiable appetite for nostrums that drew Pemberton to its bright lights, dazzling energy, and potential for profit in 1869. Pemberton opened a drugstore in Kimball House, an upscale hotel with more than three hundred rooms and a steam-powered elevator. He hoped to find plenty of business there for his Globe Flower Cough Syrup and Extract of Stillingia blood purifier. But his business crashed and burned. By 1872 he was bust, and he would have to spend the next seven years paying off the debts from the failed venture. Undeterred, Pemberton started making nostrums to sell to Atlanta’s drugstores, including a rheumatism cure called Prescription 47-11. It was while cooking up these new patent medicines that he read an article by Sir Robert Christison, the president of the British Medical Association, reporting on how he managed to climb the Ben Vorlich mountain in the Scottish Highlands by chewing coca leaf.
Peruvians might have been using coca leaf as a stimulant for centuries, but the chemists and physicians of Europe and North America only started taking an interest in this unusual plant after 1855, when the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke isolated its active ingredient—cocaine. The plant’s reputation grew further in 1859 when the Italian doctor Paolo Mantegazza wrote about his experiences of chewing coca leaf while out in Peru. So impressed was Mantegazza that he boldly declared, “I would rather have a life span of 10 years with coca than one of 10,000,000 centuries without coca.” On reading Mantegazza’s enthusiastic endorsement, Angelo Mariani, a Corsican chemist and businessman living in Paris, started looking for a way to turn this new wonder plant into a product he could sell. He tried it in teas, in lozenges, and in pâtés before, in 1863, he combined it with red wine to create a coca-wine cordial called Vin Mariani.
Mariani sold his cocaine-laced wine as a luxury tonic and sent cases to the rich and famous along with a request for an endorsement and a photo. When celebrities responded with praise, he would use their words and image in his advertisements and to gain publicity in newspapers across the world. Among those who became advocates for Vin Mariani were Pope Leo XIII, who took to carrying it around with him in a hip flask, and the prolific inventor Thomas Edison, who spoke of how the drink kept him awake. Another fan was the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who declared that if he had been drinking Vin Mariani when designing the Statue of Liberty he would have made it hundreds of meters high rather than forty-six. And he very well might have because Vin Mariani was rather potent. The recommended dose was three full claret glasses of Vin Mariani a day, equivalent to a line of cocaine spread over a day washed down with three glasses of 22 proof wine.
Mariani’s coca wine became a global success, well known not just in Europe but also in America. It inspired so many copycats that the French businessman began running advertisements warning his customers about “the many worthless, so-called coca preparations” and the dastardly people who made them. One of those dastardly people was Pemberton. Having read about the wonders of cocaine, which was still legal at the time, the Atlanta druggist gave it a try and reported “a feeling a
s though the body was possessed of a new power formerly unknown to the individual.” Impressed, he joined the coca-wine bandwagon by launching French Wine Coca in 1884. To promote this buzzy brew, Pemberton ran advertisements listing the multitude of ills his coca wine could allegedly treat, including “nerve trouble, dyspepsia, mental and physical exhaustion, all chronic and wasting diseases, gastric irritability, constipation, sick headaches, neuralgia.”
As Pemberton began selling his French Wine Coca for a dollar a bottle, cocaine’s reputation was at its peak. A year earlier Austrian ophthalmologist Karl Koller discovered the drug was an effective and revolutionary local anesthetic allowing eye, throat, and nose surgery to be performed on conscious patients. His famous Viennese friend Sigmund Freud was writing about its value as an antidepressant and about his own use of cocaine. Back in America, former president Ulysses S. Grant told the country how he was using cocaine to ease the pain of the throat cancer that would kill him in July 1885, and the Hay Fever Association had declared it their official remedy. There was no shortage of cocaine to buy either. Stores and mail-order businesses offered not just cocaine itself but coca-leaf cigarettes, ointments, and sprays too. All were available for anyone to buy over the counter.
In light of the interest in cocaine, French Wine Coca’s launch couldn’t have been better timed. By the summer of 1885 Pemberton had sold hundreds of bottles of his coca wine and finally, at the age of fifty-four, his run of bad luck in Atlanta seemed to be over. He relocated his business and his family to a two-story redbrick house on Marietta Street, where he turned the basement into a manufacturing lab and the ground floor into an office and storage room. The top floor became his home. In January 1886 he founded the Pemberton Chemical Company and began work on a new product, one he could sell to the five soda fountains that were now open in Atlanta. What exactly drew Pemberton to making a soda fountain syrup is unclear. Certainly the brisk trade at the fountains would have appealed to his business sense, but another factor may have been the growing clout of the temperance movement.
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