As word spread of Alderton’s creation, other soda fountains around central Texas started asking to buy the syrup. Morrison and Alderton began cooking up the syrup in the cramped basement of the Old Corner Drug Store but found themselves unable to keep up with demand, so Morrison turned to Robert Lazenby, the clever but hot-headed founder of the Circle “A” Ginger Ale Bottling Company.
Born in Johnson County in 1866, Lazenby grew up in Waco and launched his soda business there in 1884. His Circle “A” Ginger Ale quickly found success, and by the time Morrison asked for his help with Dr Pepper he had a second bottling plant in St. Louis, Missouri. Together with Alderton they formed the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, named after the artesian water wells that were once common in Waco. They promoted Dr Pepper as a drink of purity, strength, and discretion, adopting the slogans “Vim, Vigor, Vitality” and “King of Beverages.” Their advertising presented proud lions, the stoic King George V of Britain, Native American chiefs on the hunt, and curvaceous nude women reclining as the sea waves swelled around them to preserve their modesty. Alderton and Morrison would quit the business before the century was out but under Lazenby’s stewardship, Dr Pepper entrenched itself in Texas and began reaching out into other states. By 1901 Dr Pepper had even put in an appearance at a stall in Rag Town, the Oklahoma encampment where thousands of people had gathered to bid for 1,126 lots of land near Anadorko that were being auctioned off by the federal government. On the day of the auction an estimated twenty thousand people had gathered. When the sale was over, they and the Dr Pepper stand selling them bottled soda vanished.
As part of his efforts to take Dr Pepper beyond the Lone Star State, Lazenby exhibited the drink at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition World’s Fair in St. Louis. Even by the grand standards of world’s fairs, this was a biggie. It cost $50 million to put on, and the site for the seven-month event packed 1,500 buildings into 1,240 acres. By the time the fair ended in December 1904, around twenty million people had visited the site. The exposition popularized the concept of convenience food, with visitors treated to an enormous selection of sweet drinks, instant hot snacks, and sugary treats. As well as Dr Pepper, Coca-Cola, and Hires Root Beer, many visitors got their first taste of iced tea, peanut butter, Jell-O, ice cream cones, and cotton candy. The event also popularized hot dogs and hamburgers as we now think of them. Most of these products existed before the event, but the coming together of these sweet beverages and handy snacks in St. Louis showed them in a new light. Instead of being a collection of disparate products, they could now be seen clearly as part of a new all-American cuisine unified by common traits of being quick, tasty, instantly satisfying, and rarely, if ever, demanding the use of a knife or fork. It was the moment that fast food was born, and soda was clearly an integral part of this culinary revolution.
Dr Pepper also sought to widen its appeal by emphasizing its lack of caffeine, cocaine, and other “injurious drugs.” One ad showed the heroic Roman centurion Horatius fending off the armies of Clusium accompanied with the words: “Dr Pepper stands alone on the bridge defending your children against an army of caffeine-doped beverages as the great Horatius defended Rome.” So when Wiley got his claws into Coca-Cola, Lazenby wrote him an opportunistic letter offering his full support for the caffeine crackdown and presenting him with a copy of the Dr Pepper formula to show that his drink was free of such drugs. Lazenby’s opposition to caffeine wouldn’t last. In 1917 he changed his mind about caffeine and added the stimulant to the drink’s mix.
Another competitor that would have welcomed Wiley’s clash with Coca-Cola was a copycat from North Carolina called Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi’s creator was Caleb Bradham, the son of a rich businessman. Bradham was born in Chinquapin, North Carolina, on May 27, 1867. He went to the University of Maryland to study medicine, but when his father’s business collapsed in 1891 he found himself unable to afford the fees and quit. He moved to New Bern, a North Carolina lumber town located at the meeting point of the Trent and Neuse rivers. There he became a teacher, and when the local drugstore owner died in 1893, he bought the business and became the town’s pharmacist.
Bradham’s Drug Store had the usual mix of soda fountain treats, general goods, and medicine, but the conscientious pharmacist also liked his gadgets. He had a prescription case for storing medicines with a skull and crossbones painted on it that would sound an alarm if someone opened it. Instead of offering customers a piano and some sheet music to play as some soda fountains did, he had a primitive jukebox machine that would play selections of violin or piano music in exchange for a nickel. The chatty pharmacist also enjoyed playing soda jerk, mixing up new drinks for his friends and fountain regulars to try.
In the summer of 1898 he decided to create a cola, but one designed to help customers suffering from indigestion and free from the narcotic taint of kola nut, cocaine, alcohol, and caffeine. His friends gave his cola the thumbs up and christened it Brad’s Drink. Bradham wasn’t too keen on this and decided he had better come up with a different name, eventually settling on Pepsi-Cola in August 1898. The cola part of the name was an obvious nod to the cola flavor of the drink, while the word Pepsi referred to his goal of making an indigestion-easing beverage. Whether the word Pepsi came from the digestive enzyme pepsin or dyspepsia, the medical name for indigestion, or both isn’t known.
Promoting it as a safe, drug-free, and cleanly made cola, Bradham slowly built Pepsi up over the next five years. He began selling it to other fountains, opened a bottling plant in New Bern, and advertised widely. By the time he married his wife, a nurse named Charity Credle, in January 1901, he was beginning to believe his drink could make it big. In 1902 he sold nearly eight thousand gallons of his syrup to fountains across the mid-Atlantic states of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. By the end of the year he had founded the Pepsi-Cola Company. He began finding bottling plants around the United States to bottle his drink, sent a squad of wall painters to comb the nation for places to paint Pepsi ads, and even landed a celebrity endorsement from world-record-holding race car driver Barney Oldfield who said, “It’s a bully drink—refreshing, invigorating, a fine ‘bracer’ before a race, and a splendid restorer afterwards.” By 1907, as Wiley’s men moved in on Coca-Cola, Bradham was selling more than one hundred thousand gallons of syrup every year and was confident enough in the drink’s future to register its trademark in Canada and Mexico.
Despite Pepsi’s growth, Coca-Cola paid it little attention. For the Atlanta firm it was just another imitator, one of hundreds of me-too colas that had burst into life to cash in on the success of Pemberton’s creation. Besides, with Wiley’s legal action threatening its future, the company had more to worry about than some North Carolina upstart with comparatively paltry sales. In March 1911 the case finally came to court, and from the start the Chattanooga hearings were a media circus. Newspaper reporters descended on the Tennessee city to grab the scoop on this epic clash between the preacher of purity and the famous but controversial soda.
The buildup to the first day in court set the tone. Fearing Coca-Cola might try to influence the jury, federal agents were sent to Chattanooga to keep tabs on the jurors and make sure they had no links to the soft drink firm or secrets that could derail the case. Coca-Cola responded by sending private detectives to Chattanooga to watch the federal government’s spies. Then there was Wiley himself. Just before the trial the sixty-six-year-old married Anna Kelton, a prominent suffragette half his age. The couple used the trip to Chattanooga as their honeymoon. Journalists followed every move of this celebrity couple, reporting back to their readers on where the two had dined and what these icons of the Progressive Era had picked from the menu.
On March 13, 1911, the hearings began. Wiley’s lawyers told the court that Coca-Cola had adulterated its drink with caffeine, “a poisonous ingredient.” They accused the company of using colorings and flavorings to cover up the muck hidden in its syrup and, contrary to its name and the coca leaf and
kola nut pictures on its labels, the drink contained almost no coca or kola. The federal lawyers informed the court that the syrup it had seized was found to contain flies, bees, mice, and spiders. A Department of Agriculture inspector told how he visited Coca-Cola’s syrup plant in July 1909 and saw a black man cooking the syrup while wearing “a dirty undershirt,” “an old, dirty pair of trousers,” and tatty shoes with bare feet poking out. This man, he added, was sweating and chewing tobacco while making the syrup, and both his spittle-covered tobacco and perspiration went into the mix. The factory, he continued, was also filthy, covered in cobwebs and with syrup-cooking kettles encrusted with crystallized sugar. Other prosecution witnesses informed the court that the beverage kept boys awake at night, tempting them with masturbation, that lab rabbits died when given the company’s syrup, and that a Philadelphia streetcar conductor was now in an asylum after being driven mad by his twelve-a-day Coca-Cola habit.
Coca-Cola’s legal team responded by deftly picking apart Wiley’s collection of flimsy evidence. James Gaston, the black Coca-Cola syrup worker, informed the court he had never chewed tobacco in the twelve years he had worked at the company. The insane streetcar conductor’s doctor confirmed that his patient did hear voices and see visions but that had nothing to do with him drinking Coca-Cola. It turned out that the rabbits had not been given syrup but large doses of Merchandise No. 5, the potent mix of kola and cocaine-free coca leaf that was only used in minuscule amounts in the actual syrup. With the government case collapsing around him, Wiley suddenly remembered an urgent appointment in New York City and grabbed the first train out of Chattanooga. At the end of the hearing the federal case had unraveled to such an extent that the judge directed the verdict, ruling that people expect caffeine in Coca-Cola and understand it as a branded product rather than a drink of kola and coca.
Coca-Cola emerged from the courtroom victorious, and to celebrate, the company published a booklet declaring that there is “not one indivisible atom of cocaine in a whole ocean of Coca-Cola.” But the drink’s enemies were down, not out. In March 1912 Wiley stepped down as chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture and landed a gig as a columnist for Good Housekeeping magazine, a platform from which he continued to rage against Coca-Cola. That same year a little-known film director called D. W. Griffith, who would later find fame with his controversial 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, responded to the case with a short silent film entitled For His Son. The film told the story of a physician who develops a drug-laced soda called Dopokoke, which hooks its customers and makes him rich, only for his son to become an addict and eventually die from his soda-fueled drug habit.
The federal government was not about to give up its legal fight either. The Chattanooga verdict had undermined the whole Pure Food and Drug Act by allowing a product to name itself after ingredients it barely contained. Unwilling to let this key piece of legislation become toothless, the government vowed to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But while the lawyers rallied for a second round, the Coca-Cola Company could get on with establishing itself as America’s number-one drink, a campaign that had come on in leaps and bounds during the first decade of the twentieth century.
The first big development was Coke’s largely unintentional move into the bottled drinks market. The first man to bottle the drink was Joe Bieden-harn, the jolly and bushy-eyebrowed owner of a candy store in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Biedenharn began selling Coca-Cola at his soda fountain in 1890 and loved it so much he couldn’t help himself from trying to introduce all his customers to it. In summer 1894, with demand for Coca-Cola soaring, Biedenharn figured that his rural customers would appreciate being able to buy it in bottles and began using his syrup supplies to put the drink in plain bottles that he then sold in his store. “I did not say anything to Mr Candler about it, but I did ship [him] the first two-dozen case of Coca-Cola I bottled,” he told the Coca-Cola Bottler magazine in August 1944. “Mr Candler immediately wrote back that it was fine. He made no further comment at all that I remember.”
This informal arrangement reflected the Coca-Cola chief’s general disinterest in bottled drinks, which he believed were often produced in filthy conditions. By the start of 1899 the only other step Candler had taken toward bottled Coke was to give the company’s New England wholesaler an option to bottle the soda, an option it never used. So when two Chattanooga lawyers turned up at his office in mid-July 1899 to ask for the rights to bottle his drink throughout the United States, he could barely be bothered to meet them; his mother was on her deathbed and the company had a five thousand gallon backlog of syrup orders to fill.
The men who came to see Candler that July were Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead. The idea of making their fortunes bottling Coca-Cola came from Thomas, a grocer’s son born in Maysville, Kentucky, in 1861. Although trained as a lawyer, the sandy-haired baseball fan dreamed of becoming a successful businessman and, being an optimistic soul, believed it was just a matter of finding the right idea. He finally found that idea in 1898 when he signed up for the US Army to do his bit in the Spanish-American War. The army sent him to Manzanillo, Cuba, to work as a quartermaster’s assistant. While there he noticed how popular a bottled pineapple soda called Piña Frio was with Cubans. He wondered why his own favorite drink, Coca-Cola, wasn’t sold in bottles. When he got back home later that year, he was convinced that bottled Coca-Cola was the money spinner he had been searching for. He persuaded his friend Whitehead, a tax attorney born in Virginia, to join him in the venture and the pair headed to Atlanta to strike the deal of their lives.
At the meeting with Candler they explained how they would open a bottling plant in Chattanooga and then expand to the rest of the United States. Candler didn’t think much of their plan. Bottling was an expensive business, needing huge upfront investment in machinery, real estate, horses for distribution, bottles, and boxes, before even a single drink could be sold. Despite his pessimism about their venture, Candler offered them a deal. He would give them the bottling rights to everywhere except Mississippi, New England, and Texas on the provision that they adhere to quality standards set by the Coca-Cola Company. The pair rushed back to their hotel and drafted a contract that would give them the perpetual right to bottle Coca-Cola in almost every part of the United States. It also fixed the price of the syrup they would buy from the Coca-Cola Company at one dollar a gallon. Candler signed. As the excited pair left, Candler told them not to come crying to him when it all went wrong.
A few months later they understood why Candler had been so discouraging. They had spent all their money and an extra $2,500 from an investor named John Lupton to open their first bottling plant, and it wasn’t going well. The bottling machinery of the time was cranky and slow. Because of the pressure of carbonation, exploding bottles were a regular occurrence, a hazard that meant the employees had to wear wire-mesh masks like those of a fencer to protect themselves from flying glass. One day the rope suspending a keg of syrup snapped, drenching the plant’s manager in gallons of thick, sticky gloop. The pair realized that at this rate it could take months, maybe years, to earn back enough money to open a second bottling plant. Their hope of a national Coca-Cola bottling empire seemed impossibly distant.
The three investors decided to rethink the business. Instead of trying to open bottling plants they decided to dice up the country into tiny pieces and sell the exclusive right to bottle Coca-Cola in these areas. They would make money from selling the rights and then take a cut from the money these bottlers spent buying Coca-Cola syrup. In short, the people who bought the rights would fund the expansion of their bottling empire. While the three businessmen agreed on the principle, they differed on the details of the contracts they would offer bottlers, so in early 1900 they took a map and split America in two. Thomas got the mid-Atlantic states, Whitehead and Lupton the South and the Midwest. In 1901 they sold just five franchises between them, but the following year they made twenty-nine deals. In 1905 they sold nearly two hundred. Lupton par
ted ways with Whitehead and took control of the western states. By 1919 there would be nearly one thousand Coca-Cola bottlers, each with a slice of America to call their own. The arrangement made Coca-Cola bottling one of the first franchised businesses in America, and almost everyone involved got exceedingly rich.
Lupton, Thomas, and Whitehead made millions from their cut of syrup sales. The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta saw its syrup sales rocket. The bottlers got rich too, thanks to their local monopolies on selling bottles of what was fast becoming America’s favorite carbonated drink. Lupton used his millions to build a ten-bedroom mansion complete with a gym, two swimming pools, a ballroom, and a bowling alley. Oklahoma bottler Virgil Browne bought a Louisiana sugar plantation and a 110-foot boat that he christened by smashing a bottle of Coca-Cola against its bow. Biedenharn and his sons used some of their Coca-Cola fortune to help a small aerial crop-dusting business expand into airmail and passenger flights. Today that company, Delta Air Lines, is one of the biggest airlines in the world.
The immense wealth of the Coca-Cola bottling “family” also found its way into countless acts of philanthropy, as bottlers used their wealth for the good of their communities and to build goodwill toward their product. They funded hospitals, bought sports equipment for schools, created endowments for universities, and lavished money on libraries and churches. In some cases they quite literally built cities. Thomas helped to develop the Tennessee town of Lookout Mountain. Lupton funneled his soda millions into the construction of Lupton City, Tennessee, to house the hundreds employed at his textile factory, providing them and their families not only with homes but also with a cinema, a church, a public swimming pool, a post office, and a school.
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