Cokelore

...His latest book is "My Tears Spoiled My Aim" and Other Reflections on Southern Culture...

...Cola nuts Pendergrast also examines Coke's changing responses to the Pepsi challenge...

...There are only two things in my life: God...

...In one recent year, North Carolina's per capita consumption was 55.4 gallons—enough, I'm told, to leach the calcium from many Tar Heel bones and make stress fractures a minor public health problem...

...Coke president Robert Woodruff proposed, unsuccessfully, to Pendergrast's grandmother...

...Pendergrast offers a barrage of such interesting Coke facts as the price of a wartime black-market bottle (generally $5 to $40, but one brought $4,000 at an auction in Italy) and the battle password for crossing the Rhine (guess what...

...The company's logo dates from 1887, its formula from the turn of the century, its six-ounce "Mae West" bottle from 1914...

...The company's internationalization illustrates Jefferson's observation that the merchant has no country...

...Coke's often radical marketing innovations have been coupled with extreme conservatism...

...Desmond Tutu defused a protest over Coke's half-hearted South African disinvestment policy by appearing in a smiling picture with the company's president...

...Today, three-quarters of the company's profits come from overseas sales, and Iceland (of all places) leads the world in per capita consumption...

...In its first 50 years, the company sold nearly a billion gallons of syrup...

...When Atlanta went dry in 1886, Pemberton was ready with a "temperance drink" he called CocaJohn Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan Jr...

...Pendergrast is an Atlantan on both sides of his family, and his interest in Coke is practically congenital...

...Bureau of Chemistry in 1902, to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Nazi Health Ministry, Mao Tse Tung (who denounced Coke as the "opiate of the running dogs of revanchist capitalism"), and Jesse Jackson...

...Cola, after the coca leaf and the kola nut used in its production...

...Along the way he looks at Coke's deft dealings with an array of critics at home and abroad, from the U.S...

...Ironically, just as European intellectuals began to complain about the "coca-colonization"—meaning Americanization—of the postwar world, Coca-Cola began its transformation (as one executive put it) from "an American company with branches abroad [to] a multi-national business," overcoming such obstacles as the Arab boycott and the fact that the Chinese characters closest to the sound of Coca-Cola mean "bite the wax tadpole...

...Despite its victories in "scientific" blind taste tests, the new product was rejected by American consumers as inferior in every way (even, according to a Harvard Medical School study, in its spermacidic properties...

...Pemberton quotes extensively from other GIs' letters home to prove the point...

...It has inspired country songs ("Coca-Cola Cowboy") and rock lyrics ("Coca-Cola Douche...

...finally, in 1985, with the sweeter, more Pepsi-like "New Coke...

...True, Pepsi offered more drink for the consumer's nickel, but it was widely viewed as "oversweet bellywash for kids and poor people," and, in the South, as a Negro drink...

...m June 1993/The Washington Monthly 55 In fact, nearly everyone this side of Mother Teresa seems to have had a Coke connection...

...The author of God Is My Co-Pilot was not the only American who believed himself to be fighting for "America, Democracy, and Coca-Cola...

...Fifty years after its invention, Coca-Cola had become as much of a symbol of America as the Statue of Liberty, "a sublimated essence of all that America stands for," in the words of journalist William Allen White...

...Every American sport and entertainment hero except Elvis seems to have appeared in its commercials: Ty Cobb, Jesse Owens, Ozzie and Harriet, Eddie Fisher, Anita Bryant, Floyd Patterson, Ray Charles (who later defected to Pepsi), Neil Diamond, Bill Cosby, and scores of others...

...Professor of Sociology and director of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill...

...Interviewed at a supermarket, one elderly Atlanta lady said, "To use the vernacular of the teenagers, it sucks...

...The company now spends $4 billion annually on &0 "i marketing...

...By its centenary, Coke had transcended mere nationality, and its advertising was teaching the world to sing in over 135 countries and over 60 languages...

...In real life they've figured in allegations of sexual misbehavior against Fatty Arbuckle and Clarence Thomas...

...For decades Big Red could simply ignore its competitor...

...then with competitive advertising, which implicitly recognized that Pepsi existed...

...So important was Coke to the war effort ("the cause that refreshes," as one wag put it) that the company was exempted from sugar rationing, and German and Japanese POWs were assigned to work in its bottling plants...

...The beverage has longstanding ties to such American touchstones as McDonald's and Disneyland, and Coke ads have appropriated icons ranging from Uncle Sam to Santa Claus to Mickey Mouse...

...In post-war Germany, Marshal Zukhov couldn't be seen drinking imperialist brew, so General Mark Clark provided him with Coke specially made to be colorless...

...One chapter, for instance, examines how American fighting men in World War II completed the coalescence of Coke and country...

...Coca-Cola has, after all, affected everything from urban mythology (the Coke and aspirin high) to Cold War mixology (the Cuba Libre...

...Like Carolina's Pepsi and Texas' Dr Pepper, Georgia's Coca-Cola began as a patent medicine...

...At the turn of the century, a $1 gallon of syrup yielded $6.40 at the fountain, enough for everyone involved to make money (often a great deal of it) while leaving enough to spend on marketing to guarantee that nobody could escape the product, its spokesmen, or its advertising...

...By 1902, however, the dope had been removed because of pressure from clergy and public opinion alarmed by the spectre of Negro coke fiends...

...54 The Washington Monthly/June 1993 The key to the Coca-Cola story lies in the enormous profits to be made selling colored, flavored water...

...A $200 share of 1892 stock, with dividends reinvested, would be worth $500 million today...

...He tells this commercial success story well, tracing the ins and outs of ownership and management struggles, examining the tensions between the company and its independent bottlers, and sketching profiles of the powerful and often unpleasant characters who built and managed the company...

...It offers something to offend everyone, whether it be Coke's third-party supply arrangements with Communist China during the Cold War, lingering acquiescence in apartheid, or the replacement of Norman Rockwell by "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing...

...Hitler reportedly quaffed the drink while watching Gone With the Wind in his private theater...

...Certainly the South's hot climate, its religious strictures on alcohol, and perhaps a regional tendency to hypochondria combined in the late nineteenth century to make it the principal font of the modern soft drink, and for whatever reason, Southerners still lead the nation in soda pop consumption...

...Even the young Hillary Rodham makes an appearance in this book, denouncing Joseph Califano as a "sell out" and a "shit" for representing a Coca-Cola executive before a Senate subcommittee investigating conditions for migrant workers in the company's citrus groves...

...In movies, Coke containers have dropped from the Kalakari sky in The Gods Must Be Crazy, and tapped at an end-of-the-world radio key in On the Beach...

...As one company man put it, not exaggerating at all, Coke has "entered the lives of more people . . . than any other product or ideology, including the Christian religion...

...By then the marketing genius of Frank Robinson, a native of Maine and a Union army veteran, had transformed the product from a nostrum to a soft drink, and this Southern gift to civilization soon escaped its native habitat...

...It's all here: everything you ever wanted to know about Coca-Cola (including the secret formula) and probably much else besides...

...The result, as Mark Pen-dergrast amply documents, has been a sort of cultural ubiquity...

...in the next decade, the company sold a billion more...

...Yes, despite what the guides at Coke's new Atlanta museum have been told to say and the company president's insistence in a 1959 statement that Coca-Cola was a "meaningless but fanciful and alliterative name," the real Classic Coke did contain cocaine...

...The company's executives responded reluctantly: first, in 1955, with "King Size Coke...

...Adolfo Calero was a Coca-Cola bottler until the Sandinistas grabbed his plant...

...The company received over 40,000 letters of protest and as many as 8,000 irate phone calls a day...

...only 8 percent chose Pepsi...

...In a 1948 poll of veterans, two thirds identified Coke as their favorite soft drink...

...Cokelore A brief history of America's all-time greatest export 44 s by John Shelton Reed For God, Country, and Coca Cola Mark Pendergrast, Scribner's Sons, $25 outherners need carbonation," according to a character in one of Nan-'cy Lemann's novels...

...But during the fifties and sixties Pepsi slowly gained ground, and by the late seventies it actually surpassed Coke in supermarket sales and advertising dollars...

...My favorite of the many delightful stories in this book has to do with New Coke's reception...

...John Pemberton, a Confederate veteran who had moved to Atlanta to seek his fortune, was one of many Southern pharmacists who saw the commercial opportunities offered by the newly popular soda fountain in a region characterized by widespread "neurasthenia" among Southern ladies (who were supposed to be high-strung) and depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction among Confederate veterans (Pemberton himself was a morphine addict...