FOR GOD, COUNTRY & COCA-COLA: THE UNAUTHORIZED HISTORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SOFT DRINK
Mark Pendergrast
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20.00)
A message in a bottle? Astonishingly enough, it was as late as 1938 before anyone got around to describing Coca-Cola™ — the world’s only truly in¬ternational word as well as the world’s most recognisable trademark — as “the sublimated essence of America”. Considering that Coca-Cola™ is a former patent medicine which owed its initial suc¬cess to the original recipe’s not inconsiderable cocaine and caffeine content (and its subsequent institutionalisation to hardball business and strenuous marketing) this may just be a libel on America. Allegedly. The central thrust of Mark Pendergrast’s biography of a beverage is that capitalism, religion and patriotism are irrevocably fused in the crucible of the American psyche, and that this caramel-coloured, mysteriously-flavoured sugar-water has become that fusion’s most emblematic mythical incarnation: the very lifeblood of the nation. Even the standard Father Christmas image — obese hirsute pensioner in Coke™-red rompers — was defined by one of the company’s 1931 ad campaigns.
A little history is required, because this bulging 2-litre family-size book — 410 pages of basic text, an epilogue, an appendix (which finally reveals the religiously guarded ‘7X’ secret formula), 110 pages of notes and sources, and one of the most comprehensive, reader-friendly indices of our era — provides a lot. The original pre-1903 Coca-Cola™ recipe, complete with full-strength coca leaf and cola nut, was created in 1886 as a tonic for the neuræsthenics of the temperance era by Dr John Pemberton, the small-town druggist of company legend, but also a formidable pharmacist with a sizeable morphine habit. Its institutional, as opposed to alchemical, father was Atlanta drugstore tycoon Asa Candler, who emerged with the rights to the name and formula after an epic battle involving multiple sales of the same stock, forged signatures and the odd dead body. It was Candler who trans¬formed a dodgy patent medicine into a dominant soft drink, and built a monument to wholesome patriotic values out of a product so thoroughly linked to its druggy origins that, until the mid-’20s, you could get a glass of it in any drugstore by wandering up to the soda fountain and ordering “dope”. For many years, the company even resisted the use of the ‘Coke™’ diminitive because it’s equally applied to the Bolivian marching powder which caused them so much embar¬rassment in the early days.
It was Candler, and his immediate successor Robert Woodruff, who pulled Pemberton’s beverage ahead of its many competitors in an initially crowded soft-drink market. These days, whether or not Coca-Cola™ is outsold by Pepsi-Cola™ in any given fi¬nancial year is only relevant to the company’s stockholders: Pepsi™, after all, is only a drink — and an oversweet, faintly metallic one at that — while Coca-Cola™ is an iconic product which, attempting to dissociate itself from the disreputable past, sought to locate itself at the psychic centre of American life, and found itself, as part of the process, defining the key values of that life. Their battle was simply a wrangle for the same dollar between two near-identical products, but in sheer self-defence, the upstart Pepsi™ — labouring under the handicap of being considered a low-rent ‘nigger drink’ — had to develop its own vision thing. The result was ‘The Pepsi Generation™’ — the young whizzy one for go-ahead youth — but Pepsi™ covered its bets by backing conservative Republican presidential candidates, as opposed to Coke’s fondness for Southern Democrats. In fact, every time the White House changes hands — as when Carter took over from Ford — they have to replace all the soft-drink machines.
Each fizz has backed its own pet Presidents and enjoyed its media-event coups: Coca-Cola™ got in first because Woodruff was a key Eisenhower booster and financial adviser both before and after the 1952 election; and they stayed ahead by sponsoring every post-war President with the exception of Richard Nixon. Reagan, typically, accepted donations from both, though Pepsi™ provided his packagers. Coke™ got the 1984 Olympics, but Diet Pepsi™ snaffled the Gulf War, thanks to a bigtime photo-op as Stormin’ Norman signed the cease-fire. “There was no more essential difference between Coke™ and Pepsi™ than the line separating most Democrats and Republicans”, writes Pendergrast, whose Atlanta-druggist grandfather had a walk-on part in the early stages of the Coke™ saga.
Pepsi’s greatest triumph was the celebrated ‘new Coke™’ debacle, when Coca-Cola™ — shaken by taste tests in which consumers claimed they preferred Pepsi™ — lost their nerve and changed the formula. (Bill Clinton, spiritually a true Pepsi™-generation President but politically a Coke™ man, re-enacted this in reverse by caving in to the competition’s values as soon as he got his trainers under the Oval Office desk.) The resulting consumer revolt was skilfully spin-doctored by Coke™ into a marketing triumph which left them with two brands instead of one: Classic Coke™ and Coca-Cola II™, but the point it proved was that, for batallions of punters, tampering with Coca-Cola™ was like redesigning the flag or rewriting the Constitution. The obvious questions — for Brits, at any rate — is: why? After all, it’s only a bloody fizzy drink. Isn’t it?
This is another of Pendergrast’s points: that, for Americans, virtually every aspect of national life is specifically associated with branded goods. The first Brit to get a handle on this stuff was Ian Fleming, whose Bond books effectively introduced the notion of the metaphysics of branded goods into postwar Britain, even though he got it wrong half the time. Bond was obsessed with the notion that you define yourself by what you consume — even though Fleming himself wasn’t — and even though this obsession was manifested in a pecksniffy British way, the notion of brand loyalty was fundamentally American. The Coke™ ritual differs from its equivalent British ritual experiences of pint-and-cuppa because they exist independently of brand specifics. Any tea or ale will do as long as it’s tasty enough: indeed, ale snobs take pride in swilling the most stubbornly obscure regional pint they can locate. Other great American product icons — like the Zippo® lighter, the Fender® Telecaster, Levi’s™ denims and the Harley-Davidson® motorcycle, to name but four — pride themselves on the durability that comes with genuine craftsmanship and quality of manufacture. Buy one and, with a little care and maintenance, it’ll serve you faithfully for decades: in fact, the Zippo® was guaranteed for life to the original purchaser. (The current Levi’s™ are an unfortunate exception: possibly because contemporary consumer taste demands jeans that fade and fray almost instantly, and possibly because it’s cheaper to make ’em out of dyed and compressed tissue paper. Allegedly.) Coca-Cola™, on the other hand, is gone in seconds — unless you allow it to get warm and flat; believe me, you don’t want to do that — and then you need to buy another. Though the unit price of a Coke™ is a lot cheaper than a Harley, consider the cost of a supply of Coca-Cola™ which lasts as long as a well-made, well-kept motorcycle.
In the meantime, Coca-Cola™ rules the world, and very probably has designs on the next. It has even provided a template for that other Atlanta success story, CNN, which mass-circulates canned fizzy news packed with additives, only palatable when consumed ice-cold, given to rapid evaporation and leaving a sticky residue as the sole trace of its presence.
New Statesman, 1993
