Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  “One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway,” he said that night at Riverside Church. “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

  Here was a higher calling for the culture, a muezzin’s cry at dawn, the faint line of orange against the purple horizon of a new day. But in the thunder and bluster of the coming decades of the culture wars, it would go largely unheard.

  From Rainbow Power, 1973. Originally published in 1971. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.

  Stills from “Buy the World”: Coke teaches the world to sing in perfect harmony, 1972.

  CHAPTER 3

  “THE REAL THING”

  LIFESTYLING AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  Every advertisement is an advertisement for success.

  —Andy Consumer, from a 1925 magazine campaign to educate consumers about advertising

  From the turgid summer of 1971 through the terrible autumn of 1972, TV newscasts must have seemed unrelenting: millions marching to stop the war, prisoners attacked at Attica, the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers, the Manson and Serpico and My Lai trials, guns in Munich, bombs in DC, and troops in Derry. Pain and hatred and misery. Where was the harmony, sweet harmony? It was in the ad-break, in a commercial for Coca-Cola.

  The spot begins with a woman, eyes as blue as her tunic, lip-synching a strange lyric, “I’d like to buy the world a home, and furnish it with love.” There is an even weirder second line, about growing apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtledoves.

  The camera pans across rows of young singers smiling with the rising sun—Spanish, Swedish, Nigerian, Nepalese, dressed in a dashiki, a kimono, a dirndl, a Nehru, a turtleneck. Together they lip-synch, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” Each holds a green glass hobble skirt bottle in their right hand, one branded in English script, the next in Arabic, another in Thai. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” they sing, “and keep it company.” The camera pulls up to an aerial view, revealing two hundred singers aligned on a green hillside like an open fan, a youth chorus of the world.

  “It’s the real thing—Coke is,” they sing in unison, “what the world wants today.”

  It was a sweet and earnest-seeming commercial that made no kind of sense. So Coke wanted to buy a home for the world? Who could sell such a home? Why was the home even for sale? Was it being foreclosed? Did snow-white turtledoves even exist? If you put the birds in the same trees as the bees, couldn’t they get stung in their eyes and die? The most effective commercials are bound only to the laws of desire.

  The commercial, first aired on July 8, 1971, had been conceptualized by Bill Backer, a McCann-Erickson executive who had been searching for a way to rebrand Coke. Backer wanted “a big basic idea—one that would involve the entire United States market for Coca-Cola,”1 everyone regardless of race, color, class, or creed. The jingle he and his team wrote would come to be known as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

  The campaign’s code name was “Buy the World,” the budget for this commercial alone was nearly $1.3 million in 2013 dollars, and through it Coke might have a shot at more than just glass-bottle redemption.2 Imagine in a season of racial division, imperialist deception, capitalist malaise, and national despair the whole world gathered upon a hill sharing a fizzy brown drink. It might look like a picture of renewed American faith.

  At the same time, Los Angeles radio DJ Tom Clay’s six-minute version of the Burt Bacharach song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” was climbing toward the top of Billboard and a million singles sold. A French horn traced the melody. The all-girl Blackberries sang of love—not just for some, but for everyone. Then Clay added the sounds of a drill platoon and gunfire, Martin Luther King Jr.’s final “Mountaintop” speech, and raw broadcast clips from the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

  Clay began and ended the song with a clip of an interview with a guileless child:

  Clay: What is segregation?

  Child: I don’t know what seggeration is

  Clay: Uh, what is bigotry?

  Child: I don’t know what biggery is.

  Clay: What does, uh, hatred mean?

  Child: I don’t know what it is.

  Clay: Uh, what is, uh, prejudice?

  Child: (Inhales) Um. I think it’s when somebody’s sick.

  Maybe sugary sentiment really could conquer blood anxiety. But if Clay said that the world needed love, sweet love, Coke was saying that the world just wanted a cola. Buying a Coke was like buying the world shelter and peace.

  The hilltop commercial was among the first that Coca-Cola shot in full color. More importantly, it was perhaps the nation’s first colorized one—an unusual advertisement that admitted a possible multicultural future beyond whiteness.

  THE LIFESTYLING OF AMERICA

  Back at the beginning, when Coca-Cola had been first introduced in the late 1800s, it faced the question that would bedevil all marketers of the coming era of mass production: Who in the world would want this stuff?

  Americans needed to be convinced that this brown sugary liquid was delicious, healthful, and quenching, better even than water. The copy for one 1905 print ad boasted of its attributes:

  It Relieves Fatigue and Is Indispensable for Business and Professional Men, Students, Wheelmen, Athletes. It Relieves Mental and Physical Exhaustion. Is the Favorite Drink for Ladies when Thirsty, Weary, Despondent.

  But medicinal appeals could go only so far. By 1913, Coca-Cola was spending at least a million dollars a year transforming the word “refreshment” from an emotional state into a craved commodity.3

  In Coca-Cola’s early years, over seven thousand imitation brands tried to cut away slices of its massive market share. There was an Afri-Cola brand marketed to Blacks. And there was also a Klu-Ko Kola brand marketed not just to whites, but the apparently underserved hooded supremacist niche.4 Advertising helped maintain Coke’s status as “the universal drink,” the market leader for racists, antiracists, and everyone in between.

  Indeed it made Coke into a symbol of America itself—freckled Norman Rockwell boys, rose-cheeked Bradshaw Crandell girls, and jolly Haddon Sundblom Santa Clauses. According to legend, rum and Coke had been the invention of U.S. soldiers in Cuba in the early 1900s, who called the drink “Cuba Libre.” A World War II soldier said, “If anyone were to ask us what we are fighting for, we think half of us would answer—the right to buy Coca-Cola again.”5

  As America ascended the world stage, the drink bubbled up with it. In 1945, the company sent representatives and large shipments of the product to the United Nations Charter meeting in San Francisco. During the Cold War, more copycat colas from Mexico to Germany folded before the imperial red American can. Coca-colonization broke through the Iron Curtain and disrupted Arab and Asian markets.

  French and Italian leftists protested Coke as a symbol of Yankee hegemony. Guerrillas everywhere filled the bottles with gasoline, stuffed them with cloth, lit them, and flung them at tanks and government buildings—proto-IEDs called Molotov cocktails. One security-conscious company exec assigned to a volatile Latin American country was heard to say, “Coke bottles can be pretty bad in riots. They’re such handy, wonderful things to throw.”6

  By midcentury Pepsi had emerged from the niche cola scrum as Coca-Cola’s main challenger. It had come out of its second bankruptcy during the Great Depression, and survived through the Second World War by positioning itself kind of like crack, a low-price downmarket alternative—you could get twice as much drink for the same nickel. But after the war, price inflation forced Pepsi to compete directly with Coke.

  The history of consumerism in communities of color is surprisingly tied to the history of aggressive second-place competitors. Like other future upstarts
—Nike, Apple, Fox TV—Pepsi concentrated on the market leader’s underserved segments. If at their peaks Reebok, Microsoft, and Coke advertised with broad appeals, challengers needed a different kind of approach. They experimented with the content of their ads and the structure of their staffing.

  Pepsi began mixing old-school product-attribute marketing with what would come to be known as lifestyle marketing. Its agency BBDO designed ads that spoke less to what the drink offered—great taste and low calories—and what the drink did—quench, refresh, relax—than what the drink represented—status, leisure, modernity. In print-ad illustrations, gorgeous young couples mixed at cocktail parties or lounged beside resort pools. “You’re one of the Sociables,” the copy said. The company’s new commercial jingle went “Stay young and fair and debonair / Be Sociable, have a Pepsi!”7 Every laborer, housewife, and striver could buy this world.

  In 1947 the company hired a pioneering group of young Black marketers.8 Although the group was short-lived, its success was apparent. In parts of the South, Pepsi became known as the “nigger drink,” a development partly explained by the fact that some of Coke’s bottlers had long been aligned with White Citizens’ Councils.9 When African Americans began boycotting Coca-Cola for exactly this reason, the company’s frustrated ad director, Delony Sledge, was heard to complain, “For God’s sake, just let us go on selling Coca-Cola to anyone who’s got a gullet we can pour it down.”10

  Belatedly, Coke enlisted endorsements from Satchel Paige, Floyd Patterson, and the Harlem Globetrotters.11 But their marketing seemed careless and inconsistent. In the November 1959 issue of Ebony, a full-page Coke ad shouted “Coke with Franks!” and showed a white woman’s hand pouring a glass in front of four different hot dogs. The copy offered up recipes for hot dog toppings and proclaimed unironically, “So Good in Taste … In Such Good Taste…”12 How was this supposed to flatter African Americans?

  In the same issue, Pepsi’s ad depicted a young Black woman presenting a birthday cake to her friend’s husband, flanked by her husband and his wife. The giftee stood mostly outside of the frame, but it was hard not to miss his presence: a Black man’s single hand resting on a golf bag. “They do nice things for others,” read the copy. “Have fun with The Sociables.”13 Pepsi had placed its product at the center of the post-segregated good life, heralding the coming triumph of segmented marketing.

  Between 1950 and 1960, Pepsi increased its sales more than sixfold to $157 million.14 Its ads seemed to be touching desires much deeper than comfort and distinction. In the February 1960 issue of Ebony an ad featured two well-dressed Black couples singing around a piano. The copy read “Have a Pepsi anywhere … at play, at home or at your favorite soda fountain.”15 On the first of that month, a group of North Carolina A&T students took seats at a Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter to try to do just that. They were refused food and refreshments. Yet they stayed, holding the breakthrough sit-in of the civil rights movement. Suddenly the simple act of buying and sharing a soft drink in a public facility seemed almost revolutionary. Unlike Coke, Pepsi had positioned itself on the right side of history.

  In its first major TV campaign, launched in 1963 just weeks after the March on Washington, Pepsi focused on Kennedy youth, the rising baby boomer generation. Here were fast, stylish young Americans zipping down Disneyland’s Matterhorn or scootering through golden California hills—carefree, confident New Frontier optimists.16 Shot with soaring helicopter cameras and zooming handhelds, framed askew and jump-cut like French New Wave, the commercials shouted excitement. “Come alive!” beckoned twenty-two-year-old singer Joanie Sommers, in a voice described as “like wind through sugar cane.”17 “You’re in the Pepsi Generation!”

  Coke responded with the bland slogan “Things Go Better with Coke,” replacing the even blander “Be Really Refreshed.” The admen at McCann-Erickson desperately wanted Coca-Cola to take on the Pepsi challenge. Bill Backer and Coca-Cola ad director Sledge often argued. “Let’s not go back to defining what (Coke) is, ‘the greatest taste ever known to man,’ et cetera,” Backer would tell Sledge. “Let’s talk about what it does for people.”18

  A paradigm shift in the consumer economy had begun. Pepsi had staked its future on youth, women, and African Americans—vanguard buyers who embodied postwar optimism and the largest reserves of unmobilized demand. Meanwhile, Coke was still aiming for the median American—the white, middle-aged suburban professional, the mirror image of the image-makers themselves.

  The main question the Pepsi Generation commercials answered was not “Why do you want this drink?” It was “Who the hell wants to be old?” A drink was now more than a drink. It represented a lifestyle. Pepsi sold drinks by selling youth, which was no longer a mere biological condition, but an emotional condition enabled by the products of youthiness. If you felt young and hip, then you, too, could enjoy “the official drink of today’s generation.”

  Business scholar Stanley C. Hollander once asked, “Was there a Pepsi Generation before Pepsi discovered it?”19 There was not. Lifestyle marketing was less about persuasion than seduction, less about necessity than aspiration, less about reason than mood, less about ego than id. It was about the notion that, in the words of one beverage industry insider, “We are what we drink.”20 Capitalism sped toward the twenty-first century on this closed logic: you are what you buy, and what you buy defines who you are.

  Advertising would provide you with the signs needed for the making of you: your desires, ambitions, and dreams, the entire conscious and unconscious thrust—the styling—of your life. Bill Backer would later call the youths in his commercial “a chorus of a hundred I’s wishing the same wish.”21 Consumerism would teach the world, harmonize the world, buy the world.

  THE REAL (AMERICAN) THING

  By the time that the Civil Rights Act had passed, Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals had its national debut, and the United Farm Workers had begun its grape boycott, Coke was beginning to get the point. They still had a squeaky clean young singer named Anita Bryant as their “Ambassadress of Goodwill.”22 But they expanded their use of radio, print, and television spots by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Ray Charles.23

  More than just the consumer economy, the culture had shifted, and they knew it. On the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff was sitting in the White House with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Immediately Woodruff arranged for Coretta Scott King to fly back to Atlanta on his personal jet.24

  The sixties would soon be over, but not Coca-Cola’s troubles. In Florida, Cesar Chavez and the UFW was striking its Minute Maid company over its poor treatment of Black migrant workers. Environmentalists were pushing Coke to recycle its bottles and reduce waste. The company was being targeted for doing business in apartheid-ruled South Africa.25 Federal Trade Commission lawyers were charging the company with false advertising and antitrust violations. Ralph Nader was in Congress attacking the company for “pumping syrupy brown drinks into people’s stomachs.”26

  But Coke’s biggest problem was that the Pepsi Generation campaign had softened its hold on the leading demographic—the soft-drinkers of the future. After the “Things Go Better with Coke” campaign, Sledge began to trust Bill Backer’s instincts. McCann-Erickson’s market research had found—surprise!—that young boomers hated insincerity and inauthenticity. So they created a new campaign based on an old slogan from 1942, another war-torn year: “It’s the Real Thing.”

  Conceived during the fall of 1968, the Real Thing commercials would incept the drink into a new dream of America, in which divisions between young and old, counterculture and mainstream, Black and white, poor and rich, liberal and conservative had been resolved.27 In this era of fragmentation and unrest, it was time for the universal drink, like Brand U.S. itself, to reassert some alpha swag.

  McCann-Erickson went to an earlier grand dream of one America, the social realist vision of the cultural front, which had found expres
sion through Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Depression-era jobs programs for artists. The Works Progress Administration and Farm Security Administration had employed virtuoso artists, writers, and photographers like Stuart Davis, Thomas Hart Benton, Orson Welles, and Gordon Parks. From Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother to Zora Neale Hurston’s collections of Black folklore, Social Realism advanced the themes of inclusion, struggle, and triumph that would come to be associated with the “American Century.”

  But Social Realism would be increasingly hounded and suppressed. Lange, whose government assignment had once been to create images that would support the case for FSA programs, now found her images of the internment of Japanese Americans being impounded by the army. Paul Robeson’s promising radio, musical, and theatrical career was derailed. The long culture war that began with the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s, and climaxed with the Hollywood Blacklist—framed as a battle between capitalist democracy and New Deal socialism, national patriotism and Communist subversion—ended the high period of Social Realism.

  Now at the start of the 1970s, McCann-Erickson was sending teams of photographers and art directors again into the great land. Their mission was to capture—or to stage—slices of American life far from the cultural battlefronts. The earliest Real Thing spots, which began airing in 1969, were montages of these images.

  One Real Thing spot was called “Friendly Feelings,” a subtle turnabout of that fog-of-war phrase “friendly fire.” The images included teenagers taking a break from fixing a roof, a boy and a girl dancing in a wheat field, a young woman cutting her husband’s long hippie hair. It included two close-ups of a Black family, a mother and daughter and a father and son, both parents enjoying a bottle of the brown sugary stuff. The jingle concluded, “Coca-Cola, it’s the real thing, like friendly feelings.”