The Coke Machine (43 page)

It was pure political theater—but it started a roll for the activists in the crowd. With floodlights in Isdell’s eyes, he had no control over whom he called on, and one by one the forces of Killer Coke took the mic. Srivastava stood up to blast operations in India, warning investors that Coke may be forced to pay hefty fines in India. Next Camilo Romero blamed Coke for failing to bargain in good faith with the Colombians. Then it was Kellett, describing Coke’s newly announced global “water neutrality” policy as just a big Ponzi scheme, sucking down water in one part of the world while conserving it in another.

And so it went. Emerging into the bright Georgia sunshine, Rogers was elated. “If Neville Isdell thought it was his swan song, that he was going to end on a high note, then he was wrong,” he said. In real terms, of course, the meeting achieved nothing. But symbolically, it put Coke on notice that however hobbled, the campaign against it wasn’t finished.

After the meeting, Rogers’s mobile billboard led an activist caravan back down the highway to Atlanta as cars honked and people waved. Like bees drawn to an open bottle of pop, the caravan ended up arriving downtown at the World of Coca-Cola. Few people were in Pemberton Park to see the billboard truck as it drove around blaring an original folk song called “Coke Is the Drink of the Death Squads.” But Rogers would never miss an opportunity to educate one more person about Coke’s misdeeds. Jumping out with a clutch of “Drink That Represses” flyers in his hand, he ran up to a bus of schoolkids on a field trip to the Georgia Aquarium.

“Hey, kids, look here!” he shouted, jumping aboard the bus and gesticulating wildly at the billboard as it drove past. Before the chaperone could react, he jumped back out, while the billboard truck circled back around the World of Coca-Cola. For a moment a snatch of muzak floated across the park from the entrance to the museum. It took a second to place the tune before it became clear: “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony . . .”

Obviously, to write a book of this scope, I have a great many people to thank. First and foremost, I want to thank my agent, Elisabeth Weed, who believed in this book from the beginning, encouraged me through two years of proposal revisions and pitch meetings before it had become a reality, and then through another two years of writing after it had. A huge thanks, as well, to my incredible editor, Rachel Holtzman, who was a calm in the storm throughout the writing and editing process, and offered just the right combination of prodding and trust to see me through multiple stages of rewriting, cutting, and framing the manuscript. Thanks, as well, to her assistant, Travers Johnson, and the excellent team at Avery for the behind-the-scenes work they did in making the book the best it could be.

I’d also like to express a measure of debt to the authors who have previously tackled the rich subject of Coca-Cola, on whose work I drew from heavily (and in some cases, shamelessly) in order to tell various aspects of the history and current practices of the company. For the first chapters dealing with the history of the company, Mark Pendergrast’s
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola
was enormously helpful, as was
Secret Formula
by Fred Allen. I was also helped immensely by the collections of documents that Pendergrast and Allen left at the rare book library at Emory University, as well as other collections there, from which most of the historical documents I relied on are drawn. For the later history of the company, I relied on Constance Hays’s
The Real Thing
and Thomas Oliver’s
The Real Coke, The Real Story
. In the chapter detailing the fight to get soda out of schools, I was greatly assisted by Michele Simon’s
Appetite for Profit
(and by Simon herself, who freely shared information with me from the beginning stages of the manuscript). And on international affairs, I relied on Laura Jordan’s excellent thesis on Coke in Mexico, and on Nantoo Banerjee’s book—also called
The Real Thing
—to elucidate Coke’s problems in India.

In addition to those written sources, I’d like to acknowledge all of the patient time and effort granted to me by those struggling to keep Coke accountable, including: Ray Rogers, Lew Friedman, Terry Collingsworth, Dan Kovalik, Camilo Romero, Amit Srivastava, Jackie Domac, Ross Getman, Michael Jacobson, Stephen Gardner, Dick Daynard, Gigi Kellett, and Javier Correa and all of the other union leaders in Colombia. On the other side, I’d like to thank the executives of Coca-Cola India, especially Kalyan Ranjan, who, quite unlike their counterparts in the United States or Mexico, granted me the access I asked for and shared with me their perspective; their openness and candor have made this a better book.

I’d also like to acknowledge the Herculean efforts of my research assistants, David Mashburn, Tony D’Ovidio, Alexis Hauk, Hannah Martin, and Maddy Schricker, without whom I quite literally could not have written this book (especially David and Tony, who helped draft some early sections of Chapters 3 and 4); and the translators who helped me understand foreign perspectives along with foreign words, including Arup Chanda and Nandan Upadhyay in India; Paco Vasquez and Erin Araujo in Mexico; and my translator in Colombia, whose name I must unfortunately withhold for safety reasons. Many thanks to Laura Bravo Melguizo, who spent countless hours translating Spanish-language documents with me and correcting multiple facts and translations in the text. I’d be remiss, as well, if I didn’t give a shout-out to Ula Café, whose strong coffee and friendly baristas sustained me through many long hours of writing.

Last but absolutely not least, I must thank my wife, Alexandra, who not only came up with the title for this book, but also suffered through interminable conversations about soft drinks and corporate accountability, working “vacations” in Atlanta and Chiapas, and babysitting two unruly toddlers during my long nights of writing and revising at the office. I can’t thank you enough,
sangsai
, and only hope I can do the same for you with your next book.

Page 1 On the morning of December 5, 1996:
The description of Gil’s murder relies on eyewitness accounts by Luis Hernán Manco Monroy, Oscar Alberto Giraldo Arango, and Luis Adolfo Cardona Usma, interviews by the author.

Page 2 twenty-eight-year-old was a natural leader:
Martín Gil, interview by the author.

Page 3 union submitted its final proposal:
Complaint (Docket Entry 1),
SINALTRAINAL, et al. v. The Coca-Cola Company, et al.
, United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, 1:2001-cv-03208 (hereafter
SINALTRAINAL v. Coke
), 23.

Page 3 .38 Special:
Ballistics report, December 2, 1998, Isidro Gil investigation, Fiscalía de la Nación, Unidad de Derechos Humanos, Radicado Preliminar No. 164, Republica de Colombia (hereafter Gil), vol. 2, pp. 72-76.

Page 3 shot him between the eyes:
Gil autopsy report, December 10, 1996 (Diligencia de Necropsia, No. UCH-NC-96-412),
Gil
1:87.

Page 3 more than 2,500 union members:
Human Rights Watch,
World Report 2009—Colombia
, January 14, 2009.

Page 9 One million visitors:
The World of Coca-Cola
^®
—Atlanta,
http://www.worldofcoca-cola.com
.

Page 11 “patents of royal favor”:
Gerald Carson,
One for a Man, Two for a Horse: A Pictorial History, Grave and Comic, of Patent Medicines
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 9.

Page 11 Hooper’s Pills . . . “Rivals might detect”:
James Harvey Young,
The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 13.

Page 11 bleeding . . . and “purging”:
Mary Calhoun,
Medicine Show: Conning People and Making Them Like It
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 24-25, 65-67; David Armstrong and Elizabeth Metzger Armstrong,
The Great American Medicine Show
(New York: Prentice Hall, 1991), 1-10; Alyn Brodsky,
Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician
(New York: Truman Talley, 2004), 29.

Page 12 practice grew into a fad:
Young, 44-45; Armstrong and Armstrong, 23-25; A. Walker Bingham,
The Snake Oil Syndrome: Patent Medicine Advertising
(Hanover, MA: Christopher, 1994), 13.

Page 12 Connecticut physician Samuel Lee, Jr.:
Bingham; Young, 32-34.

Page 12 Thomas W. Dyott amassed:
Young, 34-35.

Page 12 The Civil War brought new patients:
Young, 97.

Page 12 little more than laxatives or emetics:
Young, 98-99; Carson, 30; Armstrong and Armstrong, 178.

Page 12 between 20,000 and 50,000 . . . concoctions:
Young, 109.

Page 12 total sales of $80 million:
Calhoun, 70.

Page 12 The winners were . . . rescuing his son from a bear:
Bingham, 91-92.

Page 12 “medicine shows”:
Calhoun, 1-8.

Page 13 notorious showmen, Clark Stanley:
Carson, 41.

Page 13 As one 1930s-era pitch doctor . . . sold themselves:
Calhoun, 45, 58.

Page 13 early devotee of Samuel Thomson’s . . . Extract of Stillingia:
James Harvey Young, “Three Atlanta Pharmacists,”
Pharmacy in History
31, no. 1 (1989), 16-22.

Page 13 later named him an addict:
A. O. Murphy testimony,
Coca-Cola Co. v. Koke Co.
, 254 U.S. 143 (1920) (hereafter
Koke
), 392; J. C. Mayfield testimony,
Koke
, 776; “The Original Coca-Cola Woman: Mrs. Diva Brown,”
The Southern Carbonator
, September 1907; Hugh Merrill, “The Formula and Diva Brown: ‘The Original Coca-Cola Woman,’”
Atlanta Business Chronicle
, January 7, 1991.

Page 14 “I am convinced from actual experiments”:
“A Wonderful Medicine,”
Atlanta Journal
, March 10, 1885.

Page 14 Cocaine Toothache Drops:
Armstrong and Armstrong, 160-161.

Page 14 concoction called Vin Mariani:
Mark Pendergrast,
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It
(New York: Basic Books, 2000 [orig. pub. 1993]), 22-23; Frederick Allen,
Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World
(New York: HarperBusiness, 1994), 23-24.

Page 14 French Wine Coca . . . kola nut:
J. C. Louis and Harvey Yazijian,
The Cola Wars: The Story of the Global Corporate Battle Between the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, Inc.
(New York: Everest House, 1980), 15.

Page 15 beer was one of the first luxuries . . . cheapest form of water purification:
Armstrong and Armstrong, 39, 5.

Page 15 Soon enterprising drunkards . . . “beverige”:
John Hull Brown,
Early American Beverages
(Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1966), 13-16.

Page 15 mineral springs such as those at Saratoga Springs:
Stephen N. Tchudi,
Soda Poppery: The History of Soft Drinks in America
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), 6.

Page 15 Joseph Priestley discovered how to produce:
Robert E. Schofield,
The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773
(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 256-258.

Page 15 movement against alcohol led by Benjamin Rush:
Brodsky, 95-97, 100; Armstrong and Armstrong, 41-42.

Page 15 Alcoholics Anonymous . . . statewide prohibition laws:
Brown, 78.

Page 15 many were repealed:
Armstrong and Armstrong, 44.

Page 15 creating the world’s first “soda fountain”:
H. B. Nicholson, “Host to Thirsty Main Street” (New York: Newcomen Society, December 18, 1953), 9; Franklin M. Garrett, “The Development of the Soda Fountain in Drug Stores for the Past 50 Years” (The Coco-Cola Company, n.d.); Joseph L. Morrison, “The Soda Fountain,”
American Heritage
13, no. 5 (August 1962).

Page 15 Lemon’s Superior Sparkling Ginger Ale:
Lawrence Dietz,
Soda Pop: The History, Advertising, Art and Memorabilia of Soft Drinks in America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 83.

Page 16 Hires Root Beer:
Tchudi, 21-22.

Page 16 Dr Pepper . . . Moxie:
Dietz, 82-84.

Page 16 the South suffered a complete disruption:
Louis and Yazijian, 14-15.

Page 16 Atlanta . . . known as the “Phoenix City”:
Pendergrast, 20.

Page 16 dozens of reformulations . . . bitter orange and cassia:
Frederick Allen,
Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World
(New York: HarperBusiness, 1994), 28.

Page 17 “three-legged iron pot”:
E. J. Kahn,
The Big Drink: An Unofficial History of Coca-Cola
(London: Max Reinhardt, 1960), 56-57.

Page 17 “brass kettle heated over an open fire”:
Pat Watters,
Coca-Cola: An Illustrated History
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 5, 9; see also Wilbur Kurtz, “Dr. John S. Pemberton: Originator of the Formula for Coca-Cola, A Short Biographical Sketch,” January 1954.

Page 17 pharmacy owner Willis Venable himself:
Watters, 16; Allen, 28.

Page 17 John G. Wilkes, who came:
Elizabeth Candler Graham and Ralph Roberts,
The Real Ones: Four Generations of the First Family of Coca-Cola
(Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade, 1992), 6.

Page 17 Pemberton’s pharmacy laboratory as state-of-the-art:
Pendergrast, 28-29; Allen, 27-28.

Page 17 fountain drinks containing kola nut:
Tchudi, 25.