The Coke Machine

The c.o.ke machine.

The dirty truth behind the world's favorite soft drink.

by Michael Blanding.

Introduction.

The Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia, is an unlovely pile of brick on the outskirts of a sweltering Caribbean backwater. It sits past sad dogs blinking away flies on dirty streets, men loading yuccas and plantains into peddle carts, and gaudy open-roof chivas chivas spewing diesel fumes as they idle by the roadside. Surrounding it, fields stretch to the horizon, studded with lonely palm and banana trees. The only consolation is a roadside Madonna on the edge of the gravel parking lot, a solitary benediction to bless the way of those leaving town. spewing diesel fumes as they idle by the roadside. Surrounding it, fields stretch to the horizon, studded with lonely palm and banana trees. The only consolation is a roadside Madonna on the edge of the gravel parking lot, a solitary benediction to bless the way of those leaving town.




On the morning of December 5, 1996, two men pulled a motorbike into the gravel driveway. They circled the parking lot a few times before coming to a stop in front of the gate. Inside the battered chain-link fence was a courtyard piled with soda crates waiting to be loaded onto delivery trucks. On either side was a wall of heavy pink brick, painted with the c.o.ke logo. And to the right, a small gatehouse set into the wall looked through metal slats at the parking lot.

The motorcycle's pa.s.senger dismounted, while the driver sat with the engine idling. Walking up to the fence, he addressed the gatekeeper, a thin man with light brown skin, coffee-colored eyes, a mustache, and heavy eyebrows. That matched the description the visitor had been given, but he had to be sure.

"Are you Isidro Gil?" he asked.

Inside, the man hesitated slightly before replying. "Yeah. But why do you want to know?"

"We need to go inside and see a client."

"Wait a minute," replied Gil, who just then saw a delivery truck rumbling up from the yard. "Let me deal with this truck first, and then I'll help you out."

With nothing to do but his job, Gil unlocked the gate and pulled the chain-link fence toward either side to allow the truck to pa.s.s. Perhaps he suspected the danger he was in and simply resigned himself to his fate. More likely he somehow thought he would be spared from any potential violence by his position in the hierarchy of the bottlers' union, by promises the plant management had given ensuring his safety, by the fact that it was nine in the morning in a public location with plenty of people milling around the plant.

In fact, this was not the first strange motorcycle that he had seen this morning. A half-hour earlier, another had pulled up to the small kiosk by the side of the road that served c.o.ke to workers before and after their shifts. Gil had watched one of his coworkers point him out, and the cyclist nod before driving off. Gil was still worrying about the incident when the second motorcycle appeared.

In Colombia, a motorcycle isn't just a motorcycle. It's also the transport of choice for the paramilitary death squads that target guerrillas and anyone remotely a.s.sociated with them on the other side of the country's smoldering thirty-five-year-old civil war. In Medellin at the time, men were forbidden from carrying another man as a pa.s.senger, since it was so common for one to drive while the other pulled a trigger.

But Gil wasn't the kind of person to back down from confrontation. Among his coworkers, the twenty-eight-year-old was a natural leader. Gregarious and charismatic, he'd organize fishing trips to the river and soccer and baseball tournaments on the weekends. He started out on the production line, but was rea.s.signed to his current job at the front gate in 1994, just around the same time the paramilitaries started ominously appearing in the region.

Ostensibly, the death squads targeted the guerrillas who used the Caribbean location to import guns from Panama or tax drug shipments heading farther north. But the guerrillas were difficult targets, hiding in camps buried deep in the jungles. So soon the death squads turned their attentions to the civilians whom they suspected of supporting the guerrillas-a long list, including left-wing politicians, academics, health and human rights workers, teachers, and trade unionists.

The union at the c.o.ke plant, SINALTRAINAL, was a natural target. Two of its leaders had already been killed by the time Isidro Gil was named secretary-general and put in charge of renegotiating the workers' contract with the bottling company. On November 18, 1996, the union submitted its final proposal for a new contract, demanding increased pay and benefits, along with protection from firing and new security measures to keep union leadership safe from violence.

The c.o.ke plant's local managers and its Florida-based owners had until December 5 to respond to the collective bargaining proposal. As he stood at the gate that morning, Gil was mentally preparing for the meeting that day, not knowing it would never take place. As he opened the gate to let out the delivery truck, he stepped back behind the gatehouse. The truck rumbled past, its bright red c.o.ke logo shining in the morning light. Before Gil could push the metal frame closed, the visitor walked right through the gate behind it. Pulling out a .38 Special, he raised it to Gil's face and shot him between the eyes.

On the face of it, this was just one more casualty in a Third World country's long and b.l.o.o.d.y civil war, a war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives-including more than 2,500 union members in the last twenty years. For the national leaders of SINALTRAINAL, however, this was something more: part of a coordinated campaign to stamp out union activism at the bottling plant, orchestrated by the bottler and the Coca-Cola Company itself. Before it was over, eight union leaders would be killed in Carepa and the union driven to extinction. At best, they charged, c.o.ke stood by and let it happen. At worst, they said, company managers directed the violence through regular coordinated meetings with paramilitaries inside the plant.

It's a shocking allegation to level at the company that has presented through its advertising one of the most compelling visions of international peace and harmony the world has ever seen. And yet it's not the only charge that has been leveled in recent years against the Coca-Cola Company, which stands accused of decimating water supplies of villagers in India and Mexico, busting up unions in Turkey and Guatemala, making kids fat throughout the United States and Europe, and hoodwinking consumers into swallowing glorified tap water marketed under its bottled water brand Dasani.

Perhaps it's not too much of a surprise to find the Coca-Cola Company on the stand for these injustices. In this era of cynicism, it's standard practice to believe corporations from Halliburton to ExxonMobil capable of every form of evil, trained by the profit drive of capitalism to turn a blind eye to the worst consequences of their actions. The Coca-Cola Company, however, represents a special case-at once the quintessential example of a giant American multinational corporation and a beloved pop culture symbol that has spent billions of dollars to present an image of wholesomeness and harmony that has made it cherished by millions of people around the world. Finding the Coca-Cola Company accused of murder is like finding out Santa Claus is accused of being a pedophile.

So how is it that a company that, in its own words, "exists to refresh and benefit everyone it touches" now stands accused of drought, disease, exploitation, and murder? To truly understand that contradiction, it's necessary to go back to Coca-Cola's origins as a cocaine-laced "nerve tonic" in the turn-of-the-century American South. It's there that the seeds of its inexorable drive to growth were planted, along with the decisions that have allowed it to disavow responsibility for its bottlers around the globe. That's the essence of Coca-Cola-what one of its legendary executives once called "the essence of capitalism." that a company that, in its own words, "exists to refresh and benefit everyone it touches" now stands accused of drought, disease, exploitation, and murder? To truly understand that contradiction, it's necessary to go back to Coca-Cola's origins as a cocaine-laced "nerve tonic" in the turn-of-the-century American South. It's there that the seeds of its inexorable drive to growth were planted, along with the decisions that have allowed it to disavow responsibility for its bottlers around the globe. That's the essence of Coca-Cola-what one of its legendary executives once called "the essence of capitalism."

Step, now, inside the c.o.ke Machine.

Part One

"ALL THAT AMERICA STANDS FOR"

Coca-Cola represents the sublimated essence of all that America stands for, a decent thing, honestly made.

-NEWSPAPER EDITOR WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, 1938.

ONE.

A Brief History of c.o.ke.

In Atlanta, c.o.ke gets in your face. The drink is everywhere, from the Coca-Cola memorabilia store in the airport entry hall to the announcements on the subway train for Coca-Cola headquarters. All around the city, c.o.ke's leading executives have lent their names to the city's major landmarks: Pemberton Park, the Candler Building, the Woodruff Arts Center, and the Goizueta Business School at Emory University to name just a few. But few authentic landmarks remain from the drink's history. The home of its inventor and the pharmacy where it was first served have both disappeared.

Those faithful seeking out the origins of Coca-Cola are directed instead to the World of Coca-Cola, a ma.s.sive homage to the beverage in the center of the city that remains virtually the only place in the world where the public can come face-to-face with the history of its favorite soft drink. And come they do. One million visitors crossed under the thirty-foot c.o.ke bottle hanging over its entrance in the year after it relocated here from a smaller s.p.a.ce across town in 2007. Visitors still must call ahead to reserve a time for a tour, paying $15 for the privilege.

What they get when they do, of course, is an image of c.o.ke completely mediated by c.o.ke. Even before they enter, ambient advertising ditties-"Always Coca-Cola," "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing"-float down from speakers above. Inside, the company starts early to establish a spirit of benign internationalism, with a lobby full of giant "folk art" bottles decorated by artists from around the globe, set against a conspicuously multicultural portrait wall of world citizens-j.a.panese teenagers, a white-bread couple on the beach, three tropical dark kids, a pierced chick in a bar-all enjoying their c.o.kes.

The theme continues as the doors open into a blinding atrium whose walls churn with words like "refresh," "heritage," and "optimism" printed in every language. There are more multicultural portraits here, too. A phone receiver hanging next to each one, playing a recorded loop that describes c.o.ke-funded work to tackle HIV/AIDS in Africa, water depletion in Pakistan, and child malnutrition in Argentina. There's even an American doctor from the Beverage Inst.i.tute for Health and Wellness, which is pioneering research to counter the national childhood obesity epidemic.

If you knew nothing else about it, you'd think the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated for the sole purpose of spreading peace and social equality around the world. The real work of the museum, however, happens when visitors step out of the lobby and into the first exhibit-called "Milestones of Refreshment"-telling the story of how it all began.

"When John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, he had no way of knowing what a phenomenon his creation would become," narrates a soothing baritone emanating from a video screen. Upon entering, visitors meet a bronze statue of the man himself, stirring a kettle with a wooden spoon. Broad-shouldered, bearded, and wearing overalls, the man in the statue looks more like a Soviet-era paean to the proletariat than one of the great progenitors of capitalism. "His idea," the video continues, "was to create a beverage specifically formulated to be served ice-cold." In doing so, he "invented a completely new category for refreshment, and his formula for Coca-Cola became one of the world's most closely guarded secrets. Still, people began to discover the most exciting thing about Coca-Cola: that it's delicious and refreshing. And that's no secret at all."

The short video is impressive for hitting all of c.o.ke's marketing leitmotifs-Delicious. Refreshing. Ice-Cold. Secret Formula. In reality, however, it was not so poetic. Pemberton's goal was hardly to create a new category of cold drink; like many people, he wanted to make himself rich. And in 1880, the quickest way to do that was found inside a bottle, through the creation of medicinal cure-alls called "patent medicines." The Coca-Cola Company doesn't like to talk about its early medicinal past; the sordid proto-history doesn't fit in well with the clean-scrubbed mythology it promotes in the World of Coca-Cola (and more broadly in the world of Coca-Cola). Even today, however, traces of the company's patent-medicine past are present in how it promotes and markets the drink.

The term "patent medicines" has nothing to do with the United States Patent Office, originating instead in the practice of British kings' granting "patents of royal favor" to favorite medicine makers. A few decades after b.u.mping up against Plymouth Rock, colonists began importing medicines like Hooper's Pills and Daffy's Elixir to treat rheumatism, gout, tuberculosis-even cancer. Their inventors took great pains to guard the secret formulas of their proprietary combination of ingredients. As late Atlanta historian James Harvey Young writes in the definitive Toadstool Millionaires Toadstool Millionaires, "Rivals might detect the major active const.i.tuents, but the original proprietor could claim that only he knew all the elements in their proper proportions."

If Britons invented patent medicines, Americans became obsessed with them. After the Revolutionary War, vast swathes of the newly independent United States were a mucky, roadless wilderness. Doctors were scarce, and even when available, they were as apt to kill their patients as to heal them. The cutting edge of medical practice, after all, included bleeding with a sharp lancet and "purging" the bowels with mercury, thereby weakening and poisoning already sick patients. By the early 1800s, a backlash against doctors was in full swing, with many people avoiding them altogether in favor of whatever home remedies they could find. The practice grew into a fad with the publication of New Guide to Health New Guide to Health by Samuel Thomson, a self-taught herbalist from New Hampshire who claimed any man could be his own doctor using plants readily available in the fields and woods of the young country. by Samuel Thomson, a self-taught herbalist from New Hampshire who claimed any man could be his own doctor using plants readily available in the fields and woods of the young country.

Less scrupulous entrepreneurs and con men exploited the trend with their own American patent medicine blends that went far beyond the British concoctions in both claims and popularity. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Connecticut physician Samuel Lee, Jr., mixed up a batch of soap, aloe, and pota.s.sium nitrate and pressed them into "Bilious Pills," which he touted as a cure against indigestion and flatulence. Within a decade, they were sold as far away as the Mississippi River. Soon after, Thomas W. Dyott ama.s.sed a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars with concoctions such as the hot-selling Robertson's Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges. These tyc.o.o.ns found a ready clientele with the rapid industrialization of the early 1800s, when laborers crowded into disease-ridden tenements. The Civil War brought new patients in the form of soldiers suffering from wounds and disease, many of whom received tonics along with their rations.

In truth, most patent medicines were little more than laxatives or emetics (to induce vomiting), often containing up to 50 percent alcohol. Consumers didn't seem to care. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were big business, with anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 different concoctions on offer and total sales of $80 million. For every fortune, however, a dozen vendors went bankrupt. The winners were those who created the best story, the coolest shaped container, or the catchiest advertis.e.m.e.nts to cement their names in consumers' minds. Some relied on tales of exotic ingredients from Africa or the Far East. Others drew upon American Indian lore, pegging their origins, for example, to a secret formula given by an Indian chief to a trapper in exchange for rescuing his son from a bear.

No one exploited these gimmicks more relentlessly than a new breed of traveling salesmen who staged elaborate presentations known as "medicine shows." A fixture of American life for nearly a century, these roving productions traveled the country in the hundreds during their height, from 1880 to 1900. After a "ballyhoo" of musical bandwagons, magicians, and comedians to warm up the crowd, salesmen reeled in buyers with their pitches, often whipping up fears of disease before magically "healing" a planted crowd member. One of the most notorious showmen, Clark Stanley, publicly killed hundreds of rattlesnakes to advertise his Snake Oil Liniment, which was eventually discovered to be little more than camphor and turpentine-forever making the term "snake-oil salesman" synonymous with fraud.

But most customers convinced themselves that the elixirs they bought from these traveling road shows actually worked. As one 1930s-era pitch doctor explained, the key was to hypnotize the buyer into thinking he'd come up with the idea to buy the product himself: "First, attention; second, interest; third, suggestion; fourth, imagination; fifth, desire; sixth, decision," he explained. After years of shows, medicines such as Kickapoo Indian Sagwa and Hamlin's Wizard Oil sold themselves, bringing crowds flocking whenever their wagons rolled into town. It was this kind of success that Civil War colonel and pharmacist John Pemberton was seeking when he moved to Atlanta from nearby Columbus, Georgia, in 1870. Pemberton was an early devotee of Samuel Thomson's "every man his own doctor" philosophy, stirring local herbs and flowers into his own concoctions in a lab behind his pharmacy shop. He sold some, including Globe Flower Cough Syrup, marketed for consumption and bronchitis, and a "blood medicine" called Extract of Stillingia. convinced themselves that the elixirs they bought from these traveling road shows actually worked. As one 1930s-era pitch doctor explained, the key was to hypnotize the buyer into thinking he'd come up with the idea to buy the product himself: "First, attention; second, interest; third, suggestion; fourth, imagination; fifth, desire; sixth, decision," he explained. After years of shows, medicines such as Kickapoo Indian Sagwa and Hamlin's Wizard Oil sold themselves, bringing crowds flocking whenever their wagons rolled into town. It was this kind of success that Civil War colonel and pharmacist John Pemberton was seeking when he moved to Atlanta from nearby Columbus, Georgia, in 1870. Pemberton was an early devotee of Samuel Thomson's "every man his own doctor" philosophy, stirring local herbs and flowers into his own concoctions in a lab behind his pharmacy shop. He sold some, including Globe Flower Cough Syrup, marketed for consumption and bronchitis, and a "blood medicine" called Extract of Stillingia.

Yet Pemberton was no sleazy snake oil salesman. Wounded in one of the Civil War's last battles, he was constantly plagued with pain himself, and took to self-dosing in an effort to find relief for the rest of his life. In fact, one tidbit that doesn't make it into the official Coca-Cola myth is that he probably regularly dipped into his pharmacy cabinet for hits of morphine. Three of Pemberton's colleagues in the drug trade later named him an addict. If that was true, the addiction likely led him to the substance that would seal his legacy: cocaine.

"I am convinced from actual experiments that [coca] is the very best subst.i.tute for opium, for a person addicted in the opium habit, that has ever been discovered," he told The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Journal in 1885, adding that "the patient who will use it as a means of cure may deliver himself from the pernicious habit without inconvenience or pain." He wasn't alone in thinking so. Years before cocaine was found to be addictive, the little leaf from Peru was celebrated as a miracle drug. One Albany, New York, manufacturer marketed Cocaine Toothache Drops, picturing two contented children on a package trumpeting an "Instantaneous Cure!" (Indeed.) in 1885, adding that "the patient who will use it as a means of cure may deliver himself from the pernicious habit without inconvenience or pain." He wasn't alone in thinking so. Years before cocaine was found to be addictive, the little leaf from Peru was celebrated as a miracle drug. One Albany, New York, manufacturer marketed Cocaine Toothache Drops, picturing two contented children on a package trumpeting an "Instantaneous Cure!" (Indeed.) But the most popular coca-laced "medicine" was a concoction called Vin Mariani, created by Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani by mixing red Bordeaux with a half a grain of cocaine. He cheerfully recommended three gla.s.ses a day for whatever ailed you-approximately one line of powder daily. A born promoter, Mariani landed endors.e.m.e.nts for his product from celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic-including Thomas Edison, Queen Victoria, and three popes.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pemberton was obsequious in his 1884 invention French Wine Coca-a thinly veiled knockoff of Mariani. Pemberton's formula differed by only a few extra ingredients, the most significant being kola nut, a stimulant chewed by manual laborers in West Africa containing caffeine in higher concentrations than tea or coffee. After sc.r.a.ping along for fifteen years in Atlanta's patent medicine industry, Pemberton finally hit pay dirt with this new beverage, selling French Wine Coca by the case.

His timing, however, was impeccably bad. In November 1885, Atlanta declared it would be joining many states and counties in banning alcohol, taking effect the following July. That gave Pemberton only a few months to retool his formula to appeal to an America newly obsessed with sobriety. That obsession, which had been slowly gaining steam for almost a hundred years, led to the creation of the soft drink industry that would a.s.sure Pemberton's success.

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In early years, in fact, most beverages in America had been alcoholic. Despite the dour image of Puritans and Pilgrims, beer was one of the first luxuries imported to New England, not to mention the cheapest form of water purification in a world of haphazard hygiene. Soon enterprising drunkards were fermenting anything they could get their hands on-Indian corn, birch bark, even twigs boiled in maple sap. Children drank hard cider at breakfast, and college students pa.s.sed two-quart tankards down their cafeteria tables. in fact, most beverages in America had been alcoholic. Despite the dour image of Puritans and Pilgrims, beer was one of the first luxuries imported to New England, not to mention the cheapest form of water purification in a world of haphazard hygiene. Soon enterprising drunkards were fermenting anything they could get their hands on-Indian corn, birch bark, even twigs boiled in maple sap. Children drank hard cider at breakfast, and college students pa.s.sed two-quart tankards down their cafeteria tables.

Not everyone was such a lush, however. Some abstemious colonists served nonalcoholic drinks flavored with sugar cane or juniper berries under the name "beverige," the direct ancestors of soft drinks. Meanwhile, the well-to-do made pilgrimages to effervescent mineral springs such as those at Saratoga Springs, New York, which were thought to have healing properties. In 1767, Englishman Joseph Priestley discovered how to produce the same carbonation artificially by mixing crushed chalk with sulfuric acid to create "fixed air" (carbon dioxide), and then pumping it into water or other beverages to make them fizzy.

The discovery coincided with a growing movement against alcohol led by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who first identified alcoholism as an addictive disease in the 1780s and spoke out for the first time against drinking by children. Over the next few decades, the growing temperance movement founded the forerunner of Alcoholics Anonymous and pa.s.sed statewide prohibition laws in some thirteen states. (Difficult to enforce, many were repealed by the end of the Civil War.) Soon, teetotalers had a new venue for socializing as well. Just after the Civil War, a Philadelphia pharmacist improved Priestley's carbonation methods and added fruit and sugar, creating the world's first "soda fountain." Drugstores began sprouting elaborate marble beverage dispensers as a place for men, women, and children to all hang out together. As the patent medicine craze grew, they expanded their offerings with branded formulas, including the first trademarked soft drink, Lemon's Superior Sparkling Ginger Ale, which appeared in 1871. Then came Hires Root Beer, a combination of pipsissewa, spikenard, dog gra.s.s, and other botanical goodies marketed as a blood purifier; followed by Dr Pepper, a Texas cherry drink touted as a digestion aid; and Moxie, a "nerve food" from Boston marketed-despite its high caffeine content-as a cure for insomnia and nervousness.

Nerves were something the newly prostrate South had in abundance. Broken by the Civil War as completely as Pickett's Charge was broken by the Union Army at Gettysburg, the South suffered a complete disruption in its social fabric, with newly liberated black slaves, deposed plantation owners, wounded veterans, and Northern carpetbaggers all anxious to find their place in the new order. Atlanta was better off than many locales-known as the "Phoenix City" for the speed with which it rebuilt itself after the war, the city's location at the terminus of major railway lines positioned it well for trade and manufacturing. All of the striving and ambition, however, only compounded the anxieties of urban life, providing the perfect market for a soothing nerve tonic. That's exactly what Pemberton set out to make.

Driven by the impending prohibition, Pemberton raced to remove the wine from his drink and tinkered with dozens of reformulations in the lead-up to the spring of 1886, when the annual soft drink season began. Frustrated by the bitter taste of the kola nut, he removed it entirely and replaced it with synthetic caffeine. Then, to further improve the taste of his new drink, he added sugar, citric and phosphoric acids, vanilla, lemon oil, and extracts of orange, nutmeg, and coriander. Just to make it a bit more exotic, he sprinkled in a few drops of oil derived from two trees found in China, bitter orange and ca.s.sia. To this day, no one knows the exact proportions that Pemberton used for the first batch of what would become Coca-Cola. But the vaunted secret formula is only the beginning of the lore built around c.o.ke over the decades, which makes the drink's origins seem more like a religious creation myth than a product formulation. the impending prohibition, Pemberton raced to remove the wine from his drink and tinkered with dozens of reformulations in the lead-up to the spring of 1886, when the annual soft drink season began. Frustrated by the bitter taste of the kola nut, he removed it entirely and replaced it with synthetic caffeine. Then, to further improve the taste of his new drink, he added sugar, citric and phosphoric acids, vanilla, lemon oil, and extracts of orange, nutmeg, and coriander. Just to make it a bit more exotic, he sprinkled in a few drops of oil derived from two trees found in China, bitter orange and ca.s.sia. To this day, no one knows the exact proportions that Pemberton used for the first batch of what would become Coca-Cola. But the vaunted secret formula is only the beginning of the lore built around c.o.ke over the decades, which makes the drink's origins seem more like a religious creation myth than a product formulation.

Nearly every version of the drink's origins starts with a virgin birth in a kettle in Pemberton's backyard. In his 1950 book The Big Drink The Big Drink, New Yorker New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn refers to a "three-legged iron pot" stirred with a boat oar. In his 1978 c.o.ke biography, southern historian Pat Watters makes it a "bra.s.s kettle heated over an open fire" on the authority of longtime c.o.ke archivist Wilbur Kurtz, Jr. (For good measure, he says the formula was perfected on the same day the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor, which didn't actually happen until October, some six months later.) writer E. J. Kahn refers to a "three-legged iron pot" stirred with a boat oar. In his 1978 c.o.ke biography, southern historian Pat Watters makes it a "bra.s.s kettle heated over an open fire" on the authority of longtime c.o.ke archivist Wilbur Kurtz, Jr. (For good measure, he says the formula was perfected on the same day the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor, which didn't actually happen until October, some six months later.) Reversing the spiritual order, next comes the immaculate conception, when c.o.ke's trademark fizziness is added accidentally at Jacob's Pharmacy, the soda fountain around the corner from Pemberton's factory. In some accounts, it's a random soda jerk too lazy to walk to the fresh water tap who adds the soda water instead. In others, it's pharmacy owner Willis Venable himself. An heir to the Coca-Cola fortune, Elizabeth Candler Graham, even gives the name of a man, John G. Wilkes, who came in asking for a hangover remedy and accidentally got one with a fizz.

However romantic these accounts may be, all of them are fanciful revisions, if not outright fabrications. Firsthand accounts dug up by more recent c.o.ke biographers such as Mark Pendergrast and Frederick Allen describe Pemberton's pharmacy laboratory as state-of-the-art for the time, with a forty-gallon copper kettle beneath an enormous sand filter built into the ceiling above. A contemporary account by Pemberton's nephew confirms that the idea from the beginning was to sell the drink carbonated; all spring, in fact, runners were sent back and forth from the headquarters of Pemberton Chemical Company to Jacob's Pharmacy for soda water to use in testing the drink. Even the claim made at the World of Coca-Cola that Pemberton created an entirely new category of beverage-cola-is a stretch, since fountain drinks containing kola nut, such as Kola Phosphate and Imperial Inca Cola, had been served for several years before 1885.

The truth puts the company into a bind, however, since dispelling the myth would force the company to explain the drink's origins in the shady patent medicine industry. Over the years, Coca-Cola has worked to construct its image as zealously as any medicine show barker hoping to win over a new potential client. Like them, the company has learned that it's not what the product actually contains, but what a customer thinks it represents that is important (even if that means distancing themselves from the showmen who first taught that lesson).

Maybe that's why the company's more recent official histories gloss over the truth, stating that Pemberton created the drink, "according to legend, in a three-legged bra.s.s pot in his backyard," and that "whether by design or by accident, carbonated water was teamed with the new syrup." In that way, the company is able to preserve its mythology while still technically being truthful. Whatever the facts, promotion of the drink was conceived right along with the drink. Everyone agrees the name Coca-Cola was coined by one of Pemberton's partners, Frank Robinson, who riffed off the alliteration popular in the names of Atlanta patent medicine at the time. A Yankee from Maine by way of Ohio, Robinson had shown up at Pemberton's door a year earlier with a special printer that could produce two colors at one time, quickly taking over advertising and marketing for Pemberton Chemical Company. One of his first acts was to write out Coca-Cola's distinctive cursive trademark, done with a flourish in Spencerian script, a flowing font then taught in grammar schools.

Hedging its bets between the twin crazes of patent medicines and prohibition, the label for the syrup advertised it as both an invigorating "brain tonic" and a refreshing "temperance drink." Company lore has it that initial sales were weak, at just twenty-five gallons the first year. Pemberton didn't live to see the drink's eventual success. Soon after inventing Coca-Cola, he took to his bed with illness. Within two years, he died of stomach cancer. Even from his deathbed, however, he set in motion a number of backroom maneuverings that took the drink away from his partners and eventually put it into the hands of an ambitious Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Candler.

Candler is Captain c.o.ke, the hero of c.o.ke's early history and the first man to espy the drink's potential to become the great American beverage. His purchase of Coca-Cola for the paltry sum of $2,300 was hardly simple, however, taking years of legal maneuverings and possibly outright theft.

Napoleonic in stature and ambition, Candler was by all accounts a humorless workaholic who lived for his business. He neither drank nor smoked, he saved envelopes on his desk for sc.r.a.p paper, and he was not above coming into the office on a Sat.u.r.day to mix up a single gallon of Coca-Cola in order to make a sale. Initially, he aspired to be a doctor but changed course after realizing there was "more money to be made as a druggist." In later years, he loved to stress the Horatio Alger roots of his story, telling people he had arrived in Atlanta in 1873 with only $1.75 in his pocket. Within a decade, he owned a chain of drugstores.

Like Pemberton, Candler knew the real money was to be found in selling patent medicines. Rather than tinker with his own formulas, however, he bought those made by others, including Botanic Blood Balm and the unfortunately named Everlasting Cologne. It was Frank Robinson who convinced Candler to buy c.o.ke just a few years after Pemberton invented it. Ill and in need of cash, Pemberton had sold two-thirds of the company out from under his partners in 1887, leaving Robinson-the adman who named c.o.ke-with nothing. Livid at seeing his hard work taken away from him, Robinson cajoled Candler with visions of c.o.ke's national potential-and with its efficacy at treating headaches, which Candler had suffered from all of his life. Swayed by the hard sell, Candler quietly began buying up outstanding shares by any means possible. On two occasions, according to c.o.ke historian Mark Pendergrast, doc.u.ments seem to include forged signatures, including Pemberton's own signature on a bill of sale signed with his son (who died soon after, under mysterious circ.u.mstances). Perhaps to cover his tracks from those early misdeeds, Candler later had all of the earliest records of the company burned.

At any rate, once he had the company under his control, Candler wasted no time spreading the drink around the country. His business model was simplicity itself-the company mixed sugar and water to create the syrup, added the flavoring, and sold jugs of the stuff to drugstores to peddle in their soda fountains for a nickel a drink. At those prices, however, the company wasn't going to make money unless it sold a lot of drinks. That is where Frank Robinson comes in, since it was Candler's quiet sidekick who directed the early strategy for selling the product.

Put in charge of sales and marketing, Robinson in large part literally gave the drink away, handing out tickets for free c.o.kes all over Atlanta and mailing them to Atlanta's most prominent citizens. Later he expanded the practice into a Victorian precursor to the now ubiquitous "reward cards" at stores promising discounts in exchange for customers' personal information. Each soda fountain operator got free syrup for 256 gla.s.ses of Coca-Cola, provided it gave the company names and addresses for 128 of its best customers, who then received free drink tickets. Soon the company was sending out coupons for more than 100,000 drinks a year. The buzz was well worth the cost. Sales took off as soon as Candler took over, multiplying nearly ten times between 1889 and 1891, from around 2,000 to nearly 20,000 gallons a year. Within another two years, sales had more than doubled again to nearly 50,000 gallons.

No doubt, those sales had something to do with the kick early imbibers got from the drink, from its namesake ingredient-cocaine. The World of Coca-Cola never mentions the word, of course, and the company goes out of its way to deny it whenever the issue crops up. Present c.o.ke archivist Phil Mooney states flatly in a posting on c.o.ke's corporate website: "Coca-Cola has never used cocaine as an ingredient."

At best, that claim is a technicality, since early formulas for c.o.ke called for coca leaf, not cocaine, though it amounts to the same thing. Apparently no records survive showing how much Pemberton put in the drink, though one early copy of the formula held by a descendant of Frank Robinson calls for a relatively small one-twentieth of a grain per dose. When Candler took over the company, he reduced the amount of cocaine and caffeine over the span of several years in response to growing public controversy. Even so, an a.n.a.lysis by the president of the Georgia Pharmaceutical a.s.sociation in 1891 found what amounted to one-thirtieth of a dose per gla.s.s, shrugging that off as "so small that it would be simply impossible for anyone to form the cocaine habit from drinking Coca-Cola."

Candler picked up on that diagnosis, including it in a 1901 pamphlet. That didn't stop him, however, from simultaneously touting the narcotic kick on his letterhead, identifying c.o.ke as "containing the tonic properties of the wonderful COCA PLANT and the famous COLA NUT." Pamphlets he handed out to retailers claimed the syrup "contains, in a remarkable degree, the tonic properties of the wonderful Erythroxylon Coca Plant of South America." Candler even admitted on the stand in trial in 1901 that the drink contained "a very small proportion" of cocaine, which wasn't entirely removed until around 1906.

In the face of so much evidence that the drink contained cocaine, albeit a very small amount, it's a wonder the company continues to insist otherwise.1

Of course, it took more than chemical appeal for the drink to expand as rapidly as it did. It also took money. With little cash on hand in 1891, Candler decided he needed to raise at least $50,000 to build a bigger factory and pay for salesmen and advertising. He found it in a relatively new form of business: the corporation.

Despite the ubiquity of corporations in our modern era, the arrangement is really only as old as America. One of the very first corporations chartered by the British Crown raised capital for the costly undertaking of exploring the New World. The Virginia Company wasn't particularly successful as a company-losing 100,000 before it was disbanded-but it did succeed in transplanting the survival of the corporation itself. After dozens of British families lost their fortunes from the collapse of the notorious South Seas Company in 1720, Parliament banned the risky propositions. When the father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, wrote The Wealth of Nations The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he spoke out against corporations, arguing that the "directors of such companies . . . being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery." in 1776, he spoke out against corporations, arguing that the "directors of such companies . . . being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery."

That was all very well in Europe, however, where a landed aristocracy could form partnerships to fund costly projects. In the United States, businessmen had comparatively fewer wealthy investors to fund their projects, requiring them to sell greater amounts of lower-priced shares to create the same investment. The corporation took off as the most popular form of business, with more than three hundred of them taking root in the United States in the two decades after the Revolution. And unlike their British counterparts, some American corporations such as the great maritime trading companies of New England were incredibly profitable. Their owners, in turn, created the textile mills that rapidly industrialized the United States beginning in the 1830s. No corporations were as successful, however, as the railroads, which raised huge reserves of capital-more than $1 billion by 1860-to build their networks, along with sophisticated management structures to operate them.

The increasing wealth of corporations led to an increase in their power. In their early days, corporations were chartered by states for specific purposes, with strict time limits, to prevent them from being "detrimental to, or not promotive of, the public good," according to a ruling by Virginia's top court in 1809. Some states even pa.s.sed laws allowing them to revoke corporate charters whenever they deemed fit. That changed, however, in the mid-nineteenth century, when after increased lobbying at state capitals, some states began loosening their rules in an effort to attract more corporate dollars. Delaware and New Jersey led the pack, allowing corporations to exist in perpetuity for any purpose they desired, and codifying the concept of "limited liability," which shielded share owners from responsibility for the actions a corporation performed in their name. Then the courts, most notably in a California case won by Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, declared corporations to be virtual "persons" who could sue or own property in their own rights. And in 1880, the federal government struck down state laws requiring companies to abide by local health and labor laws in order to trade in other states, allowing companies to sell their products nationally for the first time. "Had Coca-Cola appeared twenty years sooner, it might have withered inside Georgia, forbidden to trade outside its state of manufacture," writes social historian Humphrey McQueen. "Candler took over Coca-Cola just as the law a.s.sured capitalists of their right to spread geographically as well as financially."

Before the Civil War, in fact, there were few "national" products. Groceries were mostly made locally and sold generically out of the proverbial cracker barrel. The need to keep 4 million soldiers fed and clean while they shot at each other up and down the East Coast changed that, leading to innovations in shipping and packaging that allowed products to travel great distances. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution lowered the cost of manufacturing goods, and urbanization led to new markets in city department stores. Finally, the power of corporations was made complete when states starting with Delaware and New Jersey enabled them for the first time to merge, acquire, and buy stock in other corporations. In the four years between 1898 and 1902, there was a ma.s.sive bloodletting, with the number of American companies falling from 2,653 to 269.

The companies that succeeded in the great winnowing, says Harvard business historian Richard Tedlow, were those that shifted from producing a small amount of high-quality goods to producing a large amount of goods at a low profit margin. With its nickel-a-gla.s.s price tag, c.o.ke was the quintessential example. Candler incorporated the Coca-Cola Company in Georgia in 1892, creating one thousand shares of stock (five hundred of which he kept for himself) in order to raise the necessary funds for expansion. In first promoting the drink, he shrewdly limited the company's take of the profits, selling syrup wholesale at $1.50 a gallon, which retailers could then sell by the gla.s.s for $6.40 a gallon-ensuring them more than 400 percent profit.

Setting his margin low, however, meant that Candler had to rely on growth as a source of increasing profits. c.o.ke employed legions of salesmen, usually off-season cotton farmers hired on a contract basis for the summer, who literally rode the rails to drum up business for c.o.ke around the country. Known as "Coca-Cola Men," they epitomized the cult of the traveling salesmen in the era before w.i.l.l.y Loman died. Despite the fact they made only $12.50 a week-a low wage even at the time-they relished their freedom and expense accounts, proudly proselytizing for the beverage with a near-religious devotion. By 1895-less than ten years after it was created-Coca-Cola was sold in all forty-four states in the Union, with Hawaii, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba soon to follow.

After Candler, no "Coca-Cola Man" was as pa.s.sionate as his nephew Sam Dobbs. Starting out sleeping on a cot in the back of the factory, he went on to drum up clients all over Georgia and the Carolinas in the first two years of the Candler era. Called back to headquarters, he was put in charge of all salesmen in 1900, freeing Robinson to concentrate solely on advertising. Strict where Robinson was lenient, he exhorted his troops like a one-man pep squad as they expanded the drink around the country. By the turn of the century, c.o.ke was metastasizing. In 1899, the company sold more than 250,000 gallons of syrup annually; by 1902, it surpa.s.sed 500,000 gallons; and by 1904, it was selling over a million, earning $1.5 million in sales. By this time, those sales were helped by one more factor that more than any other would lead to the dominance of Coca-Cola in the beverage industry: bottling.

c.o.ke's relationship with its bottlers has been fraught with mutual conflict and benefit from the moment it began. In 1899, a Chattanooga lawyer named Benjamin Thomas saw a bottled pineapple drink in Cuba during the Spanish-American War; when he got home, he thought he'd try the same with c.o.ke, which until then had been sold exclusively at fountains. He headed to Atlanta with some home-sealed bottles and a friend, Joseph Whitehead, in search of a contract. Candler, as the story goes, was unimpressed, but figured he had little to lose in giving the Chattanoogans a chance. With little thought, he granted them the rights for free, setting a fixed price of 92 cents per gallon for syrup for as long as they worked their territory. with its bottlers has been fraught with mutual conflict and benefit from the moment it began. In 1899, a Chattanooga lawyer named Benjamin Thomas saw a bottled pineapple drink in Cuba during the Spanish-American War; when he got home, he thought he'd try the same with c.o.ke, which until then had been sold exclusively at fountains. He headed to Atlanta with some home-sealed bottles and a friend, Joseph Whitehead, in search of a contract. Candler, as the story goes, was unimpressed, but figured he had little to lose in giving the Chattanoogans a chance. With little thought, he granted them the rights for free, setting a fixed price of 92 cents per gallon for syrup for as long as they worked their territory.

The six-hundred-word contract would eventually revolutionize c.o.ke's distribution, establishing the franchise system of bottling that remains to this day around the globe. In theory, the bottlers take on all of the risk and responsibility, while the parent company provides the product and the two split the profit. In practice, however, the company and its franchisees have tussled constantly over the years, in both the United States and around the world, each one fighting to minimize its risk and maximize its control-to say nothing of the lion's share of profit.

In the early days, at least, c.o.ke and its bottlers existed harmoniously, in part because they had a common enemy against which to join forces. Hard-driving Sam Dobbs had been urging his uncle Asa to begin bottling for years-only to see a host of imitators crop up as soon as Coca-Cola bottling plants started roaring into operation. Some, like Chero-Cola, had been around as long as c.o.ke. Others were fly-by-nighters capitalizing off king c.o.ke's success, sporting copycat names like c.o.ke-Ola, Ko-Cola, and even Coca & Cola. "Unscrupulous pirates," Candler fumed, "find it more profitable to imitate and subst.i.tute on the public than to honestly avail themselves of the profit and pleasure which is ever the reward of fair dealing and compet.i.tion."

Asa Candler was a firm adherent to the principles of the free market; nothing infuriated him so much as government regulation or taxation, at least whenever it infringed on the company's right to make money. Taxes, he criticized in biblical terms, calling them "gourd vines in wheat fields" that strangled the ability for a business owner to make profit. Child labor he called "the most beautiful sight we see." And as for unions, he did everything he could to discourage their formation, calling them "a political parasite sprung from the feculent acc.u.mulations of popular ignorance and fattened upon the purulent secretions of popular prejudice."

When it came to imitators, however, he gave Dobbs free rein to bring the full force of government down on them to protect the business. c.o.ke had the perfect cudgel in the recently pa.s.sed 1905 Trademark Law, part of the nascent Progressive movement that had emerged in a backlash against the unbridled capitalism of the previous decade. By the turn of the twentieth century, the power of corporate interests had reached its peak, as muckraking journalists writing in the nation's first magazines such as Collier's Collier's and and McClure's McClure's increasingly exposed the political corruption and excesses of the robber barons in the railroad, coal, and meatpacking industries. The diatribes led to a political backlash resulting in increased regulation, breaking up monopolies and ensuring quality standards. increasingly exposed the political corruption and excesses of the robber barons in the railroad, coal, and meatpacking industries. The diatribes led to a political backlash resulting in increased regulation, breaking up monopolies and ensuring quality standards.

The new trademark law was originally pa.s.sed as a way to protect consumers against deceptive marketing. c.o.ke, however, was one of the first and most aggressive ent.i.ties to use the law to defend its own rights to profit. Dobbs enlisted the company's head lawyer, Harold Hirsch, to lead the charge against the "loathsome following," his name for the bottlers who tried to steal c.o.ke's business. "I have spent my nights and my days thinking about Coca-Cola," Hirsch once said, and he wasn't kidding-eventually, he would ama.s.s a seven-hundred-page volume of case law that virtually created trademark law in the United States. Starting in 1909, he brought a case a week against other soft drink companies, arguing they had deliberately created their names to ape Coca-Cola.

It was a suit against one of Pemberton's old partners that finally put the imitators to rest. Years earlier, Pemberton had sold some of the rights of Coca-Cola to his partner J. C. Mayfield, who had begun selling the formula around Atlanta under the name Koke. When he revived the drink two decades later, however, Hirsch brought suit, arguing in 1914 that "c.o.ke" was in such common use as a stand-in for Coca-Cola, Mayfield could only be trying to piggyback on its success. Despite a promising beginning, c.o.ke lost the case in District Court. The Court of Appeals was even harsher, accusing c.o.ke, not Koke, of engaging in deceptive practices by saying it hadn't contained cocaine when it once had, and did contain kola nut when it didn't.

At the darkest hour, however, the United States Supreme Court came to c.o.ke's rescue. In a December 1920 ruling that c.o.ke executives love to quote to this day, judicial lion Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., essentially declared that whatever its past practices, Coca-Cola had transcended its own name to become "a single thing coming from a single source, and well known to the community. It hardly would be too much to say that the drink characterizes the name as much the name the drink." In other words, c.o.ke was so popular that no one in his right mind would consider its name as merely describing its two main ingredients. Therefore, any beverage with a similar name was merely riding c.o.ke's coattails. In one fell swoop, the U.S. government had ensured c.o.ke's right to exist, clearing the field of virtually anyone who would oppose it.

Dobbs's aggressive strategy of taking on all comers had paid off, setting the stage for the continued rapid growth of the company. Sales of the drink by 1920 were now in the tens of millions of gallons, leading to more than $4 million in annual net profit. As the money poured in, Candler bought up skysc.r.a.pers in Kansas City, Baltimore, and New York, each of which he inevitably named the Candler Building. Meanwhile, as Dobbs ama.s.sed power, Robinson's star waned. In a tiff over advertising, Candler sided with his nephew, making him head of advertising and sales, as well as his de facto successor. As the company grew bigger and more successful, however, there was one person who remained unsatisfied, even appalled, by the growth-Asa G. Candler. of taking on all comers had paid off, setting the stage for the continued rapid growth of the company. Sales of the drink by 1920 were now in the tens of millions of gallons, leading to more than $4 million in annual net profit. As the money poured in, Candler bought up skysc.r.a.pers in Kansas City, Baltimore, and New York, each of which he inevitably named the Candler Building. Meanwhile, as Dobbs ama.s.sed power, Robinson's star waned. In a tiff over advertising, Candler sided with his nephew, making him head of advertising and sales, as well as his de facto successor. As the company grew bigger and more successful, however, there was one person who remained unsatisfied, even appalled, by the growth-Asa G. Candler.

The strict Methodist upbringing that made Candler frugal and austere also made him feel guilty about the obscene profits he made from such an ephemeral product, and envy his brothers Warren, a Methodist bishop, and John, a state judge. Asa had always run in two modes-manic and depressed-and finally as the decade turned, depression got the best of him. He fretted about his legacy and his four sons, who were almost universally disappointing to him. (The most entertaining of the lot, Asa Jr., eventually became an eccentric drunk, who kept a menagerie of zoo animals in his mansion and created a minor scandal when his baboon scaled a fence and ate $60 out of a woman's purse.) The only one of his sons who showed any promise was Howard, who followed him into the company. But while Howard showed apt.i.tude in the technical side of the soda business, he lacked his father's vision and management skill.