Fizz
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Hires was the first to feel the movement’s wrath. In 1895 the WCTU realized that root beer was brewed with yeast and therefore contained alcohol. Fearing that many of its members were at risk of being conned into drinking an alcoholic beverage branded as a temperance drink, it called for a national boycott of root beer and started printing literature to warn teetotal citizens about this sinister brew. Other temperance groups rallied to the call and teetotalers began turning their back on root beer, even though newspapers joked that more people would want to drink it now that they knew it had alcohol in it. The temperance movement’s root beer backlash hit Hires hard, and sales began to plunge. Hires spent the next three years battling the temperance movement that he personally supported to prove that their boycott was misjudged. He eventually emerged victorious after publishing a chemical analysis that showed that the level of alcohol in a Hires Root Beer was less than that in a loaf of bread. Embarrassed, the WCTU quietly dropped its boycott in 1898.
Coca-Cola faced a tougher challenge. By 1900 cocaine was no longer seen as a wonder drug and was increasingly being talked of as a dangerous and addictive narcotic. Candler may have slashed the cocaine back to the merest of traces, but the image of Coca-Cola as the cocaine soda had stuck in people’s minds. Soda fountain customers continued to order it by nicknames that gave knowing nods to its Peruvian connection—names like dope, coke, “a dose” or “a shot in the arm.” Matters only worsened in July 1898, when Congress imposed a tax on medicines to raise money for the Spanish-American War. Since Candler had registered the Coca-Cola Company as a medicine manufacturer, it found itself caught by the new tax. Keen not to pay more tax, Candler sued the federal government on the grounds that Coca-Cola was a beverage not a medicine. When the case reached court in 1901 Candler got his tax back but the hearings also dredged up the issue of cocaine yet again. In their defense the federal government lawyers noted that Coca-Cola contained the medical drug cocaine, a point Candler confirmed. To defuse the situation Coca-Cola called in Dr. George Payne, secretary of the Georgia State Board of Pharmacy, who informed the court that “a man would explode” before he could drink enough Coca-Cola to get a cocaine high.
A year after this uncomfortable court examination of Coca-Cola’s cocaine traces, a further blow came when the news broke in July 1902 that a railroad cashier in Virginia had tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a penknife and was now in jail charged with lunacy. A friend of the man told the Times of Richmond, Virginia, that the man’s “breakdown was not so much due to the use of liquor as to the Coca-Cola habit, which had a hold upon him.”
Cocaine was back in the news in June 1903 when the New-York Tribune interviewed Colonel J. W. Watson of Georgia, who issued a stark warning about how the “cocaine sniffing” habit was growing at an alarming rate in Atlanta, particularly among the city’s black population. “I am satisfied that many of the horrible crimes committed in the southern states by the colored people can be traced directly to the cocaine habit,” he told the paper. Action was needed to curb this habit before a generation lost their minds, he continued, before noting that the drug was present in “a soda fountain drink manufactured in Atlanta and known as Coca-Cola” and that “men become addicted to drinking it, and find it hard to release themselves from the habit.”
Candler had had enough. He traveled to New York to find a way of ridding his drink of the troublesome drug. In New York he found Dr. Louis Schaefer, the German founder of the Schaefer Alkaloid Works, who said it was possible to remove all the cocaine from the coca leaf, allowing Candler to keep the coca in his drink while also banishing the cocaine taint. Candler put Schaefer in charge of producing Merchandise No. 5, and Schaefer developed a method for eliminating every last molecule of the cocaine from the coca leaves. By the end of 1903 Candler could confidently declare that Coca-Cola was cocaine free. But if Candler thought he could finally put his drink’s drug problems behind him, he hadn’t reckoned with Dr. Harvey Wiley, the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, who now had Coca-Cola firmly in his sights.
4
A Snail in a Bottle
On October 1, 1902, a dozen young men sat down to eat a meal laced with benzoic acid and America held its breath. They were the Poison Squad, hired by the federal government to dice with death for the sake of the nation’s health. For five dollars a month they would munch on additive-loaded feasts to find out if they were harmful, and their fate gripped the country.
Newspaper reporters clamored to get the exclusive on their latest toxic dinner. People in soda fountains gossiped about what might happen to these human guinea pigs. The era’s most famous blackface minstrel showman, Lew Dockstader, composed a ditty in their honor: “If ever you should visit the Smithsonian Institute, look out that Professor Wiley doesn’t make you a recruit. He’s got a lot of fellows there that tell him how they feel, they take a batch of poison every time they eat a meal. For breakfast they get cyanide of liver, coffin shaped, for dinner, undertaker’s pie, all trimmed with crepe. For supper, arsenic fritters, fried in appetizing shade, and late at night they get a prussic acid lemonade.”
The Professor Wiley that the vaudeville star referred to was Dr. Harvey Wiley, the chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture and the mastermind behind the Poison Squad. He was a bureaucrat but one far removed from the shy, faceless pen-pusher that description brings to mind. In 1902 the very name of this tall, broad-shouldered chemist struck fear into the hearts of patent medicine manufacturers with their misleading medicines and nostrums and caused the social reform campaigners of America’s growing Progressive movement to swoon.
Wiley grew up on the southern Indiana farm where he was born on October 18, 1844. His pious parents raised him on a diet of bread made from unbolted cornmeal and a brand of fundamentalist Christianity that regarded whistling and fishing on a Sunday as terrible sins. The religious sermons didn’t stick. Wiley left home an agnostic, but he did inherit his parents’ taste for pure, unadulterated food and their zealous sense of righteousness. After leaving the family farm he got a medical degree from Indiana Medical College, but instead of becoming a doctor he turned to chemistry, gaining a second degree from Harvard and becoming Indiana’s state chemist. In 1883 Washington called and he was appointed chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture.
The science of chemistry had progressed in leaps and bounds since the start of the 1800s. The days of Yale asking law students to become professors of an embryonic science were over. Chemistry was now a science that had given humanity the ability to alter the very nature of the world around us. Nowhere was chemistry’s great leap forward as evident as in food and drink. A flood of new artificial flavorings, sweeteners, colorings, and preservatives had made it possible to change what people put in their stomach beyond all recognition. Wiley was deeply suspicious of this mania for adulterated and manufactured food, but what annoyed him most was the thought that people no longer knew what they had on their plates. After all, how could anyone trust that their meat was what they thought it was, when chemicals could change how it tasted, how it looked, and how long it took to spoil? So on arriving in Washington, the iron-willed bureaucrat made it his goal to usher in a new era of purity in American food and beverages.
But while Wiley had a fanatical streak and an intimidating glare, he was also a skilled political operator capable of winning people over with his charm, wit, and eye for headline-grabbing stunts. The drama of the Poison Squad was his biggest stunt yet. Its creation swelled public interest in the issues he held dear as well as arming him with more data to help nudge politicians into seeing things his way. That all of the Poison Squad walked away from their meals unharmed was merely a bonus.
In 1905, a few years after the Poison Squad’s creation, a freelance reporter named Samuel Hopkins Adams contacted Wiley asking for help with his current investigative assignment. Adams had been hired by Collier’s magazine to probe the patent medicine business, and he wanted Wiley’s help in identifying what substan
ces and so-called medicines were of greatest concern. With Wiley’s support, Adams dug deep into the world of the nostrum makers, discovering the poisons lurking in popular medicines and the lies they used to sell their products. On October 7, 1905, Collier’s published the first article in Adams’s ten-part “The Great American Fraud” series. It became one of the most significant pieces of journalism ever written. It ripped away the curtains hiding the pathetic truth of this Wizard of Oz industry. The articles picked apart the bogus claims of the health-giving pills, shamed the newspapers that had turned a blind eye to their shameful practices in order to feast on their ad dollars, and exposed opium-addiction and alcoholism “cures” that were themselves packed full of liquor and opiates. In December 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt responded to the resulting clamor for government action in his annual address: “I recommend that a law be enacted to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks, and drugs.”
The man who would write that law was Wiley, and when the Pure Food and Drug Act passed in June 1906 he became its enforcer. The act didn’t destroy the patent medicine business, but it blew the legs out from under it and ended a century of nostrum mania in America. But the snake oil salesmen were not the only ones who needed to worry about Wiley’s law, for the campaigning chemist already had soda, and Coca-Cola especially, on his hit list.
Wiley disapproved of soda. He believed that people should “be contented with water, which is the only real thirst quencher and the one beverage for which you can safely form a habit.” He had heard the rumors about the cocaine-laced soda of the South but was too busy fighting nostrum makers to focus on it. Then in spring 1907 the US Army banned the sale of Coca-Cola from its bases after receiving complaints that it contained alcohol and cocaine. Coca-Cola was, understandably, horrified by this decision and sprang into action. Coca-Cola lawyer John Candler contacted the War Department to inform them that these claims were false and the ban unjust. The War Department responded by asking Wiley to investigate the claims. Wiley already viewed Coca-Cola with suspicion, but his concerns about this southern menace only deepened when his deputy Dr. Lyman Kebler returned from a tour of the South with wild tales about the popular soda. Kebler painted a vivid picture of Coca-Cola fiends hanging out in Atlanta soda fountains, of soldiers driven wild by mixing whiskey and Coke, and of four-year-old children drinking it from beer jugs. Kebler’s tales fueled Wiley’s determination to use his new powers to stop this dangerous beverage.
The summer came and went without word from Washington, so Candler caught a train to the capital and find out what was going on. On arriving he was informed that Wiley had completed his tests and found Coca-Cola to be free of cocaine and that the tiny amount of alcohol in the syrup was acceptable as a preservative. But instead of reporting his team’s findings to the War Department, Wiley had homed in on the caffeine content of the drink and was using the Poison Squad to test the toxicity of the stimulant in the hope of proving that its presence made Coca-Cola harmful. Wiley believed caffeine was a dangerous, habit-forming drug. In speeches he talked about “tea and coffee drunkards” and once claimed: “In England, I have seen women who, if they were denied their tea at four o’clock, would become almost wild.” Wiley figured that if he and his Poison Squad could build a case against caffeine, then instead of giving Coca-Cola the all-clear he could attack the southern menace on a new front. All he needed was enough time to show that the government should be concerned about the beverage’s added caffeine.
Having learned of Wiley’s intentions, Candler secured a meeting with Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson and urged him to force Wiley to issue his report on the cocaine and alcohol content of Coca-Cola. Six days later on October 16, 1907, Wiley’s report was released. It confirmed that the claims that Coca-Cola was an alcohol and cocaine laced beverage were nonsense, but the government chemist used the opportunity to publicly moan about how he and the Poison Squad were not given enough time to investigate the caffeine content of the drink. Despite his objections American troops were once again able to buy Coca-Cola for their canteens that November.
Wiley seethed at having his hand forced by the soft drink company, but rather than give up, he became even more determined to continue his fight against Coca-Cola and its caffeine content. He hatched a plan to charge Coca-Cola under the Pure Food and Drug Act for adulterating its drink with caffeine and failing to say so on its labels. All he needed to do this was permission to seize a shipment of Coca-Cola syrup that had crossed a state border. That, however, was going to be tricky.
In 1906 Wiley had fallen out with Roosevelt after lecturing the president about the dangers of saccharin, an artificial sweetener discovered in 1879. For the president this was a rant too far. “Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot,” Roosevelt thundered, pointing out that his own doctor gave him the sweetener every day. Wiley found himself excommunicated. The president refused all of the chemist’s subsequent requests for meetings and appointed a committee of scientific experts to keep tabs on Wiley’s activities. Wilson began refusing to approve any case Wiley wanted to pursue unless two or more officials from the Bureau of Chemistry also supported the action.
In March 1909 Wiley requested permission to confiscate a shipment of Coca-Cola syrup headed for New Orleans. Roosevelt’s experts blocked it. Wiley tried repeatedly to get permission to seize various shipments of the soda syrup but time after time he was blocked. Eventually Wilson, probably thinking the obstinate official needed the message spelled out to him, wrote a letter telling Wiley to leave Coca-Cola alone. Unknowingly the agriculture secretary had just given Wiley the stick of dynamite he needed to explode the political roadblocks holding him back.
Wiley leaked Wilson’s letter to the Atlanta Georgian, an antiestablishment newspaper that had it in for Coca-Cola chief Asa Candler. It had already threatened to expose the dire conditions at the Decatur Orphans’ Home, where Candler was a trustee. The newspaper contacted Wilson and told him that if he did not give Wiley the green light for his Coca-Cola investigation they would publish his letter. The agriculture secretary relented on the condition that the case was not heard in Washington, DC, but somewhere in the Coke-friendly South. He and Wiley settled on Chattanooga, Tennessee. “It is remarkable what the fear of publicity will do,” Wiley remarked afterwards.
On the evening of October 20, 1909, a team of federal agents gathered on the Tennessee-Georgia border and laid in wait for a truck that was making its way from Atlanta to Chattanooga loaded with Coca-Cola syrup. When the truck crossed the state line into Tennessee, the agents pounced and seized its cargo of forty barrels and twenty kegs of the soda syrup. Earlier that day Kebler paid an unexpected visit to the Coca-Cola syrup plant in Atlanta and, despite the plant manager’s pleas, began poking around. Howard Candler, Asa’s oldest son and vice president of operations at Coca-Cola, returned from lunch to find federal inspectors combing the factory. The inspectors said they had come to collect a sample of Merchandise No. 5, the coca leaf and kola nut extract used in the drink. Unsure what to do, Howard gave them the sample and told them to leave, before going to find his father. Asa ran to the scene, catching the inspectors as they were heading out the door. Furious at the intrusion, he demanded they give the sample back, but the federal inspectors refused and left for Washington to start analyzing the secret Coca-Cola ingredient.
The seizure of the syrup at the border and the Merchandise No. 5 sample from the plant was followed by a lawsuit filed in the federal court in Chattanooga. It charged the Coca-Cola Company of breaching the Pure Food and Drug Act by failing to declare that caffeine was added to the drink and by calling itself Coca-Cola when coca and kola were barely present in its product. The second accusation was especially worrying for the company. If it lost the case on that count, its trademark would be lost, and with it the entire business. Coca-Cola was now in a fight for its very survival.
For one Texan rival of Coca-Cola, this situation was fabulous news. Dr Pepp
er was born in a Waco pharmacy and soda fountain called the Old Corner Drug Store in December 1885, five months before John Pemberton created Coca-Cola. Back then Waco was the epitome of a Wild West town with its dusty streets, saloons, and gunfights. Cowboys and outlaws would come from miles around, attracted by its legal brothels, which would remain in operation until 1912. Charles Alderton, the Old Corner Drug Store’s Brooklyn born pharmacist, invented the drink that became Dr Pepper after noticing that customers were growing bored with the soda fountain’s usual favorites of sarsaparilla, lemon, and vanilla. Keen to revive interest, he started experimenting with new flavor combinations, eventually settling on a unique combination of twenty-three flavors mixed with the popular tang of phosphoric acid. The result tasted unlike anything else available at America’s soda fountains. Impressed by his pharmacist’s creation, the Old Corner Drug Store’s owner Wade Morrison agreed that they should offer his unusual fruity soda to customers. The city’s soda fountain loafers loved it and, since the drink had no name, they began to ask the soda jerk to “shoot a Waco.”
Morrison decided the drink needed a name and opted for Dr Pepper. The inspiration, he told his customers, was Dr. Charles Pepper, with whom he had worked in Rural Retreat, Virginia, before moving to Texas in 1882. While working for the Virginia physician, Morrison fell in love with the doctor’s daughter, but Dr. Pepper believed their romance was premature, so Morrison left. The drink, he explained, was named in honor of his lost love. What Morrison’s wife, Carrie, whom he married while working as a pharmacist in Round Rock, Texas, thought of this romantic yarn isn’t recorded, but she need not have worried, because the story was just that: a story. There was a Dr. Charles Pepper who lived in Virginia, but at the time when Morrison headed west, he was working in the town of Bristol, not Rural Retreat. What’s more, his daughter, Ruth, was just eight years old at the time. But it was a good romantic tale to spin at the soda fountain when people asked about the drink’s name.