Fizz (14 page)

Whatever the details, the end result was the same: a distinctively ribbed, green glass prototype bottle with a thin neck that widens into a bulbous middle with the Coca-Cola logo embossed onto it, before tapering away until the very bottom, where it widens slightly to form the base of the container. The design was patented in November 1915 and sent to the committee of seven Coca-Cola bottlers charged with picking the winning design. In
early 1916 after several days of discussion the Root Glass Company's “contour bottle” won the vote six to one. After being selected, the bottle underwent further changes. The fat middle became less bulbous and the tapering between it and the base made less drastic, changes that gave the bottle a more appealing hourglass figure and made it better suited to the rigors of bottling plant production lines. By 1918 every Coca-Cola bottler was using the new bottle, and the royalties had made Chapman Root the richest man in Indiana.

The contour bottle was a packaging masterpiece, instantly recognizable by touch and in silhouette. The distinctive cocoa pod-inspired ribs ensured that even when a broken fragment of the glass was found, it was clear that it came from a Coca-Cola bottle. Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer who created some of the most iconic designs of the twentieth century, including Lucky Strike cigarette packets and Studebaker's classic Avanti car, called it “the most perfectly designed package in use today.” It became one of the best-known packages in the world, gaining an iconic status to rival that of Robinson's handwritten Coca-Cola logo. In 1960 the Coca-Cola bottle was so well recognized that it became one of the few items of packaging to be awarded a trademark.

While Dobbs and Hirsch had set to work destroying the competition with unique bottles and a blizzard of lawsuits, Asa Candler had been thinking about his future. He doubted that fizzy pop had much of a future and had started investing his fortune in real estate, erecting Candler Building skyscrapers across North America, including a seventeen-story tower in Atlanta that was the city's tallest structure when it opened in 1906. He also used his wealth to help build the Atlanta suburb of Druid Hills and to bankroll Emory College's transformation into Emory University.

He started thinking about selling Coca-Cola and moving on, but with the federal government case over caffeine that threatened the company's all-important trademark dragging on, no one was willing to buy. Candler still lacked a buyer in 1916 when he decided to run for mayor of Atlanta. So he quit the company, divided up his shares among his five children and his wife, and appointed his son Howard president of the business. He went on to win the election by a comfortable margin.

With his uncle gone, Dobbs saw an opportunity to finally become the boss of Coca-Cola. He found a potential buyer of the company in Ernest Woodruff, the battle-hardened Atlanta businessman who ran a bank called the Trust Company of Georgia. Woodruff had a reputation as a ruthless operator who did whatever it took to advance his business interests. Once he bought a bunch of houses in a red light district in Atlanta, where he planned to build a factory for one of his companies. After evicting the prostitutes and pimps, he made sure they and their customers stayed away by spending night after night patrolling the street with a shotgun.

Like many people in Atlanta, the Candlers knew who Woodruff was and they didn't like him, so while Woodruff was interested in buying Coca-Cola, he knew they wouldn't make a deal with him. Aware that this was the case, Dobbs offered to play deal maker by encouraging the Candler family to sell their shares to Woodruff and his partners. Dobbs's bridge building worked. In 1919 Woodruff's coalition of bankers bought the Coca-Cola Company for $25 million. Howard Candler was moved into the chairman's seat, and Dobbs was rewarded for his role in the takeover with the post of company president that he had coveted for so long. But his soda boss dreams rapidly turned sour when, just a few months after taking charge, Coca-Cola was plunged into crisis.

The problem was sugar. World War I had shattered Europe's sugar industry, which had been dominated by the sugar beet growers of the newly dismantled Austro-Hungarian Empire, causing a global shortage of the sweetener. Wartime price controls had kept sugar prices stable at nine cents a pound, but on December 1, 1919, the federal government lifted the restrictions. With sugar in short supply, prices skyrocketed. Within a few weeks the cost of sugar had climbed to twenty cents a pound and continued to rise. The price spike sent shock waves through the fizzy drink industry. Sugar was the main ingredient in the syrups they used to make their sodas, and in just a few days the price of this crucial commodity had more than doubled.

For Coca-Cola this was a serious problem. Coke was now one of the biggest consumers of sugar in the world, gobbling up nearly one hundred million pounds of the sweet stuff every year. Soon Coca-Cola profits were
being sucked into a sugar price black hole that threatened to ruin the company. By early May 1920, with sugar prices hitting twenty-eight cents a pound, Candler decided Coca-Cola needed to protect itself against further increases and ordered the company to buy half a year's supply of sugar for an eye-watering sum. To pay for all this sugar, Coca-Cola borrowed millions from Wall Street banks. As collateral for the loan, the company handed over the sole copy of its secret formula, which was promptly locked inside a New York City bank vault. Coca-Cola wasn't the only soda company thinking this way. As the crisis deepened, Pepsi-Cola, Chero-Cola, and Moxie all started buying up sugar in large quantities.

Then in early August 1920 sugar prices collapsed, the speculative bubble bursting as eastern Europe's sugar beet producers got back on their feet. Within days the price of sugar had slumped to ten cents a pound. The soft drink giants that had bet on further price rises had miscalculated and were now saddled with mountains of overpriced sugar. For Moxie it was the beginning of the end of its days as a national force. In 1920 the company was still ahead of Coca-Cola in sales and riding high on its successful “What this country needs is plenty of Moxie” wartime ads, which turned the soda's name into a byword for a can-do attitude. Moxie had also scored a hit with its off-the-wall Horsemobiles. These attention-grabbing promotional vehicles consisted of model horses welded onto automobile chassis that Moxie salesmen could drive while riding the horses. These strange motor vehicles became a regular sight in New England and attracted huge crowds wherever they went. But the sugar crisis caused Moxie to slash its advertising budget, a move that destroyed its sales momentum. By 1925 sales of the Massachusetts soda had peaked.

Compared to Pepsi-Cola, Moxie got off lightly. Bradham's sugar-buying spree brought his company to its knees. Desperate, he tried selling his business to Coca-Cola without success. In 1922 he found himself with little choice but to file for bankruptcy. Pepsi-Cola was dead. Chero-Cola was also badly wounded by its sugar-buying error and received a further blow when Coca-Cola's lawyers won a trademark suit that forced it to drop the word cola from its name. Within a few years Chero, as it would now be called, was fading fast.

But over at Coca-Cola, the sugar crisis became a means for Woodruff to tighten his control over the business. Relations between Woodruff and Dobbs had deteriorated rapidly since the takeover. Dobbs resented Woodruff's constant interference, and Woodruff had became increasingly fed up with Dobbs's objections to his plans. The sugar crisis brought these tensions to the fore. They clashed over how to handle the company's network of bottlers, who were rebelling over increases in the price of Coca-Cola syrup due to the spike in the value of sugar. Woodruff wanted the company to impose a price and the bottlers to lump it. Dobbs wanted a compromise that would split the burden of high-price sugar between the company and its bottlers. Dobbs got his way, but when the cost of sugar plunged, Coca-Cola still had large stockpiles of the sweetener that it had bought at the peak of the price bubble and so couldn't reduce the price it charged bottlers for its syrup. The bottlers responded by suing the company.

The pair also fought over advertising. Dobbs wanted a bigger promotional budget so that he could keep advertising Coca-Cola during the winter when sales of the drink would fall off. Woodruff wanted larger dividends and opposed Dobbs's high-spending ad plan. Dobbs regarded Woodruff as a man ignorant of the power of advertising; Woodruff regarded Dobbs as a man out to waste his money. The disagreements came to a head in September 1920 when Woodruff and his boardroom allies showed Dobbs who was the real boss of Coca-Cola by blocking his request for more advertising funds. The following month Dobbs resigned.

With Dobbs gone, Woodruff reinstated Howard Candler as president. After all, Coca-Cola was in trouble, and Candler already had experience running the business. Candler wasn't keen on the job but took it, in part, out of a sense of duty toward the business that his father had built. Candler successfully steered Coca-Cola out of the sugar crisis. Unlike Moxie, Coca-Cola kept advertising its product, which helped sales continue to rise. More sales not only meant more money for repaying the loans the company had taken out but also caused its expensive sugar mountain to erode faster. By summer 1921 most of Coca-Cola's sugar stockpiles were gone and the company had reached an out-of-court settlement with its bottlers.

Despite his success in pulling Coca-Cola out of the crisis, Woodruff and the company's board were unhappy with Candler. They felt he lacked the fire needed to take Coca-Cola forward, and they hadn't forgotten that it was Candler who bought all that sugar in the first place. The board wanted a more go-getting boss, and there was an obvious choice: Woodruff's son Robert, the vice president of the Cleveland-based White Motor Company. Robert accepted the offer to become Coca-Cola's president but on one condition: that he would be free to run the business as he saw fit and that his father would butt out. Ernest agreed and in April 1923 the thirty-three-year-old replaced Candler as the president of Coca-Cola.

By then the mess caused by the sugar crisis had been cleaned up and Coca-Cola had weathered the storm. In fact all of the company's problems seemed to have been solved. All of its competitors were in retreat. The overpriced sugar mountain was gone and the debts incurred from buying it had been repaid. Even the Wiley case that had dogged the company for years had been settled, after Coca-Cola agreed to reduce the amount of caffeine in its drink and the government agreed not to challenge its trademark. Finally, the cola king was ready to cash in on the soda boom that the introduction of Prohibition had just kickstarted.

On January 17, 1920, America ran dry. Years of vigorous campaigning by the temperance movement had ended in victory; the demon liquor had been slain and was now banned throughout the United States.

For the triumphant prohibitionists, the Eighteenth Amendment that introduced the ban and the Volstead Act that enforced it marked the dawning of a new era. No longer would drunken American men beat their wives or blow their pay in smoky saloons. Instead the new American male would be a model citizen. He would hold down a job, save his money for his family, and go to church. Firebrand temperance campaigner Reverend Billy Sunday envisaged the birth of dry America as an express elevator to utopia. “The slums soon will be only a memory,” he proclaimed as the nation headed for last orders. “We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs.”

Prohibition's puritan supporters believed their “noble experiment” would banish every social ill, but not every American greeted the ban with joy. As wet America's final hours approached, the
New York Evening Post
wrote of “liquor stampedes” as New Yorkers scrambled to stockpile alcohol to see them through the dry days ahead. For the nation's breweries, Prohibition threatened nothing less than ruin. With their core business abolished, they started hunting for new sources of profit to mine. Some reinvented themselves as car part manufacturers, hoping to cash in on the fast-growing automobile market. A few took to smoking hams. Others
retooled to become ice cream producers, among them Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch.

Many sought salvation in near beer, the super-low-alcohol beer permitted under Prohibition since its alcohol content was under 0.5%. The trouble was that near beer verged on tasteless since the boiling process that removed the alcohol also destroyed the chemicals that gave beer its flavor. The resulting liquid was a bland, buzz-free beer substitute that food critic Waverley Root described as a beverage that “might have been dreamed up by a puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers.” Despite these shortcomings, near beers such as Miller's Vivo and Anheuser-Busch's Bevo sold briskly at first, although their appeal was short-lived. Near beer sales peaked at three hundred million gallons in 1921 but come 1929 annual sales had dwindled to one hundred million gallons.