Real thing Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola

COCA-COLA BEGAN SIMPLY, as so many things do. Filled with sparkle and democratically priced, it was as American as baseball, as accessible as jazz. It cost a nickel, which almost anyone could afford. Before long, it was everywhere. It originated in a time of turmoil, as an antidote cloaked in innocence. It was marketed vigorously upon a willing public. And in its essence there is conflict. A swallow of Coca-Cola is both sweet and tart. A single formula joins together elements as commonplace as table sugar and as exotic as the cola nut. It began as a drink, as dark as night, and became an experience, flowing over time and place, linked by memory to the meal on the table and the company at hand. Over more than a hundred years it came to be seen as a constant amid change, a rock standing against the tide. It was the most ubiquitous soda, sold at every grocery store and luncheonette and stadium across the land. It was the drink of the people, but it also possessed an odd power, a power that lifted it above other soft drinks. Much of that was the work of the Coca-Cola Company, where salesmanship was everything. But there was also, after a little while, a romance that developed between this soft drink, born to an America still repairing itself after the Civil War, and the people who bought it. “We love our Coca-Cola,” they would say. And that was true. The Coke story begins near the close of the nineteenth century, before the Wright brothers launched their plane from the dunes at Kitty Hawk.

It continues through war and peace, boom times and recessions, coasting along through the Gilded Age and the Marshall Plan, outlasting Prohibition and Reaganomics, becoming a relic of the Great Depression as well as the great bull market. Cast in small relief against everyone else’s highs and lows, enduring everything that history handed to it, Coca-Cola provided brief, carbonated, affordable interruptions— simple moments of pleasure, as the company liked to say— in the daily struggles and routines of life. It could be adapted to fit almost any market condition and made to seem appropriate for almost any occasion. It was just a soft drink, after all. At the same time, to the men in charge of Coke it was virtually limitless in its prospects. From the start they held it up as an elixir brimming with promise, a “brain tonic” that would ease the headaches of a South enduring Reconstruction. As the Depression settled in they harnessed Santa Claus to their cause, creating for him a new image that always included a bottle of Coke—“a luxury you can afford”—in his glove.

World War II gave them cause to festoon their product with the Stars and Stripes. Later they made Coke go hand in hand with the quest for world peace. Through relentless advertising, clever marketing, and sometimes plain old luck, Coke came to stand for the glamorous, prosperous, flag-waving side of America, the part that always looked forward, not back. The soldiers fighting the good fight drank Coca-Cola, and so did presidents and rock stars and other heroes Americans might imagine themselves to be. The men of Coke could have found themselves pouring all their effort into an unresponsive nation, but people returned the affection. First they loved Coke because it was something new and different, and maybe because it did indeed cure what ailed them.

Later they regarded it as a comforting souvenir of eras that had come and gone. It stood for a simpler time, when silos held nothing but corn and when Berlin and the Bay of Pigs were only places on a map. Coke was still the same as it had been a long time ago, when they were young. But love was worth only so much within the Coca-Cola Company, where executives lived in a state of constant agitation.

They were hugely ambitious, driven to capture as much of the world as they could for Coke. Their thoroughly modern business ran independently of the climate, the calendar, and the clock. They developed a lust for power, and consequences barely figured in their plans. They rapidly conquered America, then repeated the performance across the planet. By 1981, the Coca-Cola Company was a ninety-five-year-old colossus pumping soda to practically every shoal and rain forest and concrete-paved corner on earth. At home, Coke stood for all-American notions like free enterprise and runaway success. Abroad, it was even more intoxicating: a bottle of optimism, the liquid substitute for liberty.

Governments might come and go, but Coke would always find a way to be for sale in the cafés and the bus stations, its curvaceous image visible as the smoke cleared, beckoning toward the American way. Around the world, Coke crossed the line between consumer product and object of desire. It imprinted itself upon cultures everywhere, appearing in movies, in literature, in paintings and sculpture, and in the lyrics of songs. Well before the Coca-Cola Company marked its one hundredth anniversary, all kinds of people could see that Coca-Cola possessed an image that exceeded the sum of its parts. It was Marilyn Monroe and the Statue of Liberty in a single package, tantalizing and familiar all at once, the world’s best-known brand. The men running the Coca-Cola Company in 1981 recognized Coke’s awesome power. But they were sure they could improve on it.

The first century of Coke had had its high points, but so much had been sloppy, undisciplined, or left to luck— unpredictable forces no one could trust. So they planned a future that they would control from top to bottom, in their company’s best interests— a future that would be far different from the reality they knew. First, though, they needed a revolution.

The Coca-Cola empire of that moment bore little resemblance to the original Coca-Cola Company that began in 1886. At first, Coke was served only at marble-fronted soda fountains. But it was the self-starting Coca-Cola bottlers who fanned the public’s affinity for a product that was neither essential nor especially good for them. They made it portable, and they made it easier to get. And they changed the Coca-Cola Company. They were independent businessmen who built factories right in the middle of dusty, impoverished towns. Inside, they turned Coke syrup into soft drinks; outside, they put up signs that read, drink coca-cola.

They became the owners of machinery that everyone could see and began to wield authority that everyone could feel. The bottlers took Coca-Cola afield, out of the cities and towns and into the farmland and the coal mines and the rest of rural America— to all the places where there would never be a soda fountain. They guessed right— that Americans craved convenience as much as they craved that sugary soda. Taking in a nickel for every bottle of Coke they sold, they wound up better off than anybody else around. They towered over small-town life, serving as mayor, heading up the Chamber of Commerce. But first and foremost, they were Coca-Cola bottlers. That was an identity, not just a job. By the 1920s, a quarter century after the first bottle of Coca-Cola was created, more Coke was being sold in bottles than at soda fountains. The bottlers were indispensable, and life was more difficult for Coke. The company owned the brand; the bottlers owned the markets, splintered all across America, each with a personality of its own. The bottlers were exceedingly powerful, the closest thing to an equal that the company would ever know. Coke needed them and depended on them, but it could not control them. In Atlanta, a fire of resentment began to burn. It would never go out.

The bottlers existed, according to the prevailing theory inside the Coca-Cola Company, only because one of Coke’s leaders had suffered an extraordinary lapse in judgment. And for nearly as long as there was Coca-Cola in bottles, breaking the bottlers’ hold would be a strategic priority for a parade of senior executives at Coke. They wanted to go back and start over. They tried, and failed,


to all the places where there would never be a soda fountain. They guessed right— that Americans craved convenience as much as they craved that sugary soda. Taking in a nickel for every bottle of Coke they sold, they wound up better off than anybody else around. They towered over small-town life, serving as mayor, heading up the Chamber of Commerce. But first and foremost, they were Coca-Cola bottlers. That was an identity, not just a job. By the 1920s, a quarter century after the first bottle of Coca-Cola was created, more Coke was being sold in bottles than at soda fountains. The bottlers were indispensable, and life was more difficult for Coke. The company owned the brand; the bottlers owned the markets, splintered all across America, each with a personality of its own. The bottlers were exceedingly powerful, the closest thing to an equal that the company would ever know. Coke needed them and depended on them, but it could not control them. In Atlanta, a fire of resentment began to burn.
It would never go out. The bottlers existed, according to the prevailing theory inside the Coca-Cola Company, only because one of Coke’s leaders had suffered an extraordinary lapse in judgment. And for nearly as long as there was Coca-Cola in bottles, breaking the bottlers’ hold would be a strategic priority for a parade of senior executives at Coke. They wanted to go back and start over. They tried, and failed,



Hays, Constance. Real Thing : Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company.
Westminster, MD, USA: Random House, Incorporated, 2004. p x.
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