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The temperance movement had started in 1826 with the formation of the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance in Boston. By the middle of the century it had become a national political force with thousands pledging to abstain from alcohol and hundreds of local campaign groups spread across the country. As the 1850s ended, the states of Maine, Michigan, and Nebraska introduced laws against the production and sale of hard liquor. But as the Civil War approached, political support for the movement evaporated as politicians focused on the issue of slavery. By the time the first shots were fired, temperance had disappeared from the political agenda and the state-level alcohol restrictions were being dismantled.
The temperance movement spent years in limbo before returning with a vengeance in 1873 when Eliza Thompson of Hillsboro, Ohio, gathered a group of women and began holding daily “pray ins” outside drugstores that sold alcohol-laced medicine. After six months of Thompson and her Christian soldiers turning up every day to pray and sing hymns, all but one of the drugstores stopped selling alcoholic medicine to get them to go away. Word of this victory spread, and similar bands of women formed across America. They gathered outside saloons, Bibles in hand, praying for the souls of those within. Some of the saloons went out of business as their customers were driven away; others renounced alcohol and signed the pledge of abstinence. By Christmas 1874 this countercultural movement had organized itself into the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Unlike its pre-Civil War predecessors, the WCTU was utterly determined to wean America off alcohol. It presented alcohol as a national evil, arguing that alcohol not only caused alcoholism but also made women prostitutes and men wife beaters. Hundreds of thousands of women joined the WCTU, turning it into the first mass movement of women in American politics.
The temperance message found plenty of support in Fulton County, Georgia, and its county seat of Atlanta. In 1885 the electorate of Fulton County narrowly voted in favor of going dry. The move wasn’t a threat to Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, since it only shut the saloons, leaving drugstores free to keep selling their boozy bitters and alcoholic “medicines.” But with local prohibition due to start in July 1886 it is possible that Pemberton feared alcoholic medicines could be next or that he figured soda fountains would pick up most of the regular customers from the bars. Whatever his exact reasoning as prohibition loomed in Atlanta in spring 1886, Pemberton started developing a soda fountain syrup based on the coca leaf that had already fueled his success.
To give his syrup an added punch he added another wonder drug that was getting the medical world all excited: the kola nut. This chestnut-sized seed came from the bean-like pods of a slow-growing West African tree, the most cultivated variety of which, Cola acuminata, originated in the lands east of the Volta River that now form Nigeria and the Congo River basin. The kola nut, which ranges in color from dark reds and browns to creamy whites and pinks, had been an important commodity in sub-Saharan Africa for thousands for years and played an extensive role in many African cultures. In some areas a kola nut would be planted with the umbilical cord of newborn children in recognition of a successful birth, and the tree that grew would become the property of that child. It was a feature of social life, used as a gift to welcome friends and guests to the home, and it had medical uses too. Even as late as the mid-1990s in rural areas, it was being used to treat guinea worm and to ease the pain of childbirth. The African trade in kola nuts was so big that by the 1100s the nut had reached Arabia, where doctors wrote of its warming effects and ability to ease stomachache. The stimulant properties of the caffeine and theobromine within the nut also made it a favorite among African armies. Askia Mohammad, the great ruler of the Songhai Empire in the late 1400s and early 1500s who converted his lands to Islam, supplied kola nuts to his armies. In return they helped him turn his kingdom into the largest nation ever seen in West Africa.
So when European explorers began entering Africa in the 1500s, they quickly picked up on people’s devotion to this stimulating nut. One sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer reported that “the black population would scarcely undertake any enterprise without the aid of kola.” Later that century kola tree seedlings made their way to Jamaica at the request of Caribbean slave masters who wrote to a trader in Guinea with an urgent plea for the plant “to avert, as far as practicable, those attacks of constitutional despondency to which … Negroes were peculiarly liable.”
By the late 1800s, the British and French empires had spread the tree to Martinique, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and beyond, and interest in its medical and military applications was reaching a fever pitch. By 1870, kola was being mixed with sugar and vanilla to produce tonics for the invalid, and in 1880s British soft drink companies, including Schweppes, were selling fizzy kola tonics and kola champagnes. The kola champagne made by London’s Pure Water Company even won an endorsement from the Times newspaper, then seen as the voice of the British establishment, which informed its readers that the drink was “especially good for keeping the brain clear and active.” The rise of the kola drinks so worried British hot chocolate maker Cadbury that it began running ads to discourage people from drinking the stuff.
The world’s militaries were also captivated by the potential of kola in the 1880s. A US Navy medical inspector administered kola paste in hot milk to a thirty-six-year-old woman plagued with an irregular heart beat, fatigue, dyspnea, and headaches, and he reported, “The general condition has materially improved, the heart’s action is more regular, and the attacks of dyspnoea and faintness have nearly disappeared. The most characteristic effect seems to have been an immediate relief of a sense of fatigue, a sense of bien-être and cheerfulness to which the patient had been long a stranger.” The British military tested kola on soldiers stationed in India and found that it reduced their appetite and thirst while boosting their energy levels. The German War Office was impressed enough with its kola experiments to order thirty tons of the stuff for its troops.
The kola nut buzz wouldn’t last. The nut failed to live up to the hype, proving no more intoxicating than two large cups of filter coffee, but in 1886 it was still a wonder drug, so Pemberton mixed it into his cocaine-laced soda syrup. The bitter taste of kola dominated the drink, so he added plenty of sugar to mask it. Eventually he cut the kola back to a trace, replacing it with cheaper synthetic caffeine to either save money or further reduce the bitterness. Next in went citric acid, which gave the drink a pleasing tang similar to that of phosphate sodas. Then more sugar to offset the vinegar-like taste of the acid. Falling back on his Thomsonian know-how, Pemberton then added a combination of flavoring oils that included vanilla, nutmeg, elixir of orange, lemon, lime, oil of coriander, cinnamon, oil of cassia, and neroli. Finally, to give the drink its dark brown color, he added caramel, a popular coloring among patent medicine makers at least partly because it made it hard for customers to see if an insect or other undesirable object had slipped into the bottle by accident.
In April 1886 Pemberton began testing his new drink on customers of Willis Venable’s soda fountain, which was housed within Jacobs’ Pharmacy on Peachtree Street just three blocks from the Pemberton Chemical Company building. Venable would report back on customers’ reactions and Pemberton would adjust the mix before sending a new batch of syrup for testing. As Pemberton slaved over his essential oils and brass kettle, moving ever closer to the ideal formula for his soda, a man named Frank Robinson knocked on his door.
Born in 1845, Robinson grew up in East Corinth, Maine, and had come to Atlanta with his friend David Doe to launch an advertising agency based around their “chromatic printing press” with its ability to print in color. Advertising agencies were a relatively new concept at the time. The earliest agencies developed on the back of the patent medicine business, which dominated advertising in America to such an extent that it was largely responsible for the rapid growth of US newspapers in the 1800s. Initially the agencies formed to carry out the onerous task of placing ads in the ever-growing sea of newsp
rint, but as the century progressed they began offering to help businesses write and create their ads too. Robinson and Doe had been pointed in Pemberton’s direction by a newspaper reporter whom they asked to help them identify businesses that might be interested in their services. But instead of leaving with the Pemberton Chemical Company as a client, Robinson and Doe became convinced that Pemberton’s new coca and kola soda could make a fortune. They put their advertising agency on hold and went into partnership with Pemberton, handing over $6,000 each to buy their way in. Robinson then got his brother and father to shovel an additional $7,000 into the venture. Pemberton’s landlord, Edward Holland, also joined the partnership, giving the company its premises in exchange for a share of the business.
By early May 1886 Pemberton had a formula he was happy with, and Robinson and Doe began planning how to sell this novel soda. At Robinson’s suggestion the drink was christened Coca-Cola in an alliterative nod to its coca and kola content—despite protests from Venable, who thought it was a difficult name to remember. On Saturday May 29, 1886, the first Coca-Cola ad appeared in the Atlanta Journal in a blaze of exclamation marks and rat-a-tat-tat buzzwords: “Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The New and Popular Soda Fountain Drink, containing the properties of the new wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nuts. For sale by Willis Venable and Nunnally & Rawson.” But if Pemberton and his investors expected to reap Hires-like success they were to be disappointed.
Shortly after the drink launched, the stomach and intestinal problems that had plagued Pemberton since his injury at the Battle of Columbus struck again. Pemberton retreated to his bed and, if the later claims of his former associates are to be believed, to the comfort of the painkilling morphine he had become addicted to since the Civil War. With Pemberton bedridden, the Coca-Cola project began falling apart. Atlanta’s soda fountains managed to move less than fifty dollars worth of Coca-Cola that summer despite the ads and the heat. Doe lost faith. He packed up the printing press that he and Robinson came to Atlanta with and left to seek his fortune elsewhere.
Robinson, despite his quiet demeanor, was made of sterner stuff. He soldiered on, carefully inking out Coca-Cola’s now famous logo by writing its name in Spencerian script, which established itself as the standard handwriting style for American business in the late 1800s thanks to its mix of speed, legibility, and elegance. Robinson felt Coca-Cola’s big problem was getting people to try it in the first place. So in spring 1887 he started giving prominent Atlantans tickets they could exchange for two free glasses of Coca-Cola; his goal was to get them talking about it. He also began producing a mountain of advertising materials, including five hundred streetcar signs and more than fifteen hundred posters. By early summer 1887 Robinson’s advertising blitz was paying off. Orders poured in not just from the soda fountains of Atlanta but from all across Georgia and even from fountains in Alabama and Tennessee. But just as Coca-Cola began making progress, Pemberton’s fading health struck again.
In early July he returned to his sickbed, this time convinced he wouldn’t be leaving it again. Desperate for money, Pemberton sold a two-thirds stake in the rights to Coca-Cola to Venable and a patent medicine manufacturer named George Lowndes in exchange for an interest-free loan of $1,200. When Robinson and Holland found out, they felt betrayed and asked local lawyer John Candler to intervene. Candler visited the bedridden doctor, who admitted he had sold the rights but insisted that it was always he who owned them, not the Pemberton Chemical Company. Besides, the cash-strapped Pemberton added, I’ve got no money, so there’s nothing for you to get out of me. Candler informed Robinson there was nothing that could be done to regain the rights.
Meanwhile Lowndes and Venable’s Coca-Cola business was struggling. Lowndes had taken on the job of sales only to find that Venable had failed to cook any of the syrup needed to fulfill the orders he had taken. Within a few weeks of working together the pair agreed to sell. In December 1887 they found their buyer in Woolfolk Walker, the salesman for the Pemberton Chemical Company. Walker bought the rights for $1,200, which he borrowed from his youngest sister, persuading her to hand over the money that she and her husband were saving to buy a home.
By the time Walker bought the controlling stake in Coca-Cola, Frank Robinson was working for Candler’s brother Asa Griggs Candler. Asa was a highly successful local druggist who had left his hometown of Cartersville, Georgia to seek his fortune in Atlanta. He arrived in the city in July 1873 with just $1.75 in his pocket and found work at a Peachtree Street pharmacy run by George Howard. Candler worked his way up to chief clerk before quitting in 1877 to start his own business and marry Howard’s daughter Lizzie. By 1887, when he met the down-on-his-luck Robinson, Candler had not only a thriving drugstore but a line of successful patent medicines such as Botanic Blood Balm, De-Lec-Ta-Lave toothpaste, and Everlasting Cologne. Candler took Robinson on as a part-time bookkeeper but had little interest in his new employee’s constant chatter about how he should invest in Coca-Cola. But then Candler paid a visit to Venable’s soda fountain while suffering from a headache, Venable suggested he try a Coca-Cola, and to the drug maker’s amazement the headache disappeared. On April 10, 1888, he wrote to his brother Warren: “You know how I suffer with headaches, well some days ago, a friend suggested that I try Coco-Cola [sic]. I did and was relieved. Some days later I again tried it and was again relieved…. I determined to put my money into it and a little influence.”
Within days Candler had bought Pemberton’s remaining third of the business in return for writing off the $550 debt the drink’s inventor owed him, and he gave $750 to Walker for another third to gain control of the drink. Four months later Pemberton was dead. On August 16, 1888, at the age of 57, the man who invented Coca-Cola died from gastroenteritis, leaving his widow facing a future of poverty. His son Charles would follow his father to the grave six years later after overdosing on opium.
On gaining control of Coca-Cola, Candler put Robinson back in charge of promoting the drink. Their first act was to change the formula. Candler reduced both the cocaine and kola to mere traces, only stopping short of their complete removal out of concern that the Coca-Cola trademark would be at risk if the two ingredients it was named after were no longer present. Robinson and Candler also worried about the recipe being stolen, so they gave the ingredients code names. Merchandise No. 1 was the sugar. The caramel became Merchandise No. 2 and the synthetic caffeine Merchandise No. 3. The phosphoric acid was recast as Merchandise No. 4 while the combination of kola and coca extract was code-named Merchandise No. 5 and the preservative glycerin became Merchandise No. 6. Finally there was Merchandise No. 7x, the top-secret blend of flavoring oils.
In early 1889 Candler completed his acquisition of Coca-Cola by paying Walker $1,000 for his remaining third. On getting the money, Walker hotfooted it out of Atlanta and headed for Arkansas, leaving the $1,200 debt to his sister unpaid.
With Robinson back masterminding the promotions, a new sweeter formula, and the ownership questions sorted, Coca-Cola was back in action, and in the summer of 1890 sales hit 8,855 gallons—four times the amount sold the year before. In early 1891 business was going so well that Candler shut his drugstore so he could concentrate on making his medicines and Coca-Cola. He set up a factory on the second and third floors of a building in a run-down part of Decatur Street, much to the annoyance of the second-hand clothing store below, which regularly had its stock ruined by hot, sticky Coca-Cola syrup that had boiled over and seeped through the floorboards. Coca-Cola sales were growing, but Botanic Blood Balm remained Candler’s big seller, so weekdays were devoted to cooking up this “blood purifier” while Coca-Cola syrup was confined to weekends. This soon changed.
In early 1892 Candler formed the Coca-Cola Company in the hope of selling enough shares to raise $50,000 to spend promoting the drink. The share sale earned just $7,500. With promotional funds tight, Robinson suggested a novel solution. The company could give away coupons that could be exchanged for
a free glass of Coca-Cola at any soda fountain that stocked the drink. The company would then reimburse the fountains. It would, Robinson argued, introduce people to the drink and encourage consumer demand for Coca-Cola at the soda fountains. Candler agreed to the plan and soon the company was dishing out thousands upon thousands of coupons all over the South, each bearing the words “Good for a 5¢ glass of Coca-Cola at the soda fountain of any druggist.”
In a few months they had given out enough for a million free Coca-Colas in what was the first-ever promotional coupon campaign. Robinson’s marketing innovation would be copied countless times by companies across the world and become a mainstay of business promotion. It also sent Coca-Cola sales soaring, even though Candler almost suffered a heart attack every time the bills from the soda fountains landed on his desk.
As the twentieth century dawned, the Coca-Cola Company was selling 281,000 gallons of its syrup every year and had established itself as the leading soda of the South. Moxie remained ahead, but the gap was narrowing fast. But as Hires, Moxie, and Coca-Cola began to eclipse the generic flavors of the fountains and pushed soda success to ever greater heights, these brands found themselves butting up against another fast-growing force in American society: the temperance movement.