• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 511 0

featured the opposite of Coke’s usual thin and beautiful people, showing instead a portly older gentleman with a white beard and furry red suit. Despite some claims, Coke didn’t create the image of Santa Claus we recognize today. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and artists were gradually following the lead of Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in creating their picture of the gift-bestowing elf with “red garments . . . ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows, and a jolly, paunchy effect,” as The New York Times wrote in 1927. But even though the Coca-Cola Company didn’t create the image, it did solidify St. Nick for generations of children when its ads of jolly Santa created by artist Haddon Sundblom became ubiquitous starting in the 1930s. More often than not, they featured a story line of children leaving a Coke in lieu of milk and cookies for Santa to pause and refresh himself on Christmas Eve, inspiring many children to adopt the practice as their own.

With its conquest even of Christmas, Coke became the darling of Wall Street. Profits of $14 million during the height of the Great Depression in 1934 more than doubled to $29 million by decade’s end. Woodruff took to calling the beverage “the essence of capitalism”; he fetishized Coca-Cola, insisting that the company sell one product and one product only. In order to keep alive its mystique, he dragged the secret formula out of a company vault in New York and personally transferred it by train to a safe-deposit box in the Trust Company bank in Atlanta—where it supposedly remains to this day. In his mind he’d hit upon the perfect product, one that could sell in any economic time, and—with the success of its “Thirst Knows No Season” ad campaign—any climate. “Robert Woodruff could still look out on an America that justified his bedrock faith in laissez-faire capitalism,” write J. C. Louis and Harvey Yazijian. “This faith informed his fundamental opposition to socialism, and later, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

Roosevelt’s New Deal was, like the Progressive movement half a century earlier, a backlash against the greed of corporations, who were blamed by many for the crash. The government moved in to regulate the stock market and the banking industry, along with other businesses. Woodruff was, if anything, even more adamant than Asa Candler that he owed the government nothing. When Georgia began to tax stock held by residents in out-of-state corporations, he up and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where Coke was incorporated, spending just over six months out of the year there to make it official.

And he had bigger plans as well. As Coke emerged unscathed from the Depression, its advertising constantly repeated two essential points: that it was available everywhere, and it was available for a nickel. But until now, Coke’s claims of ubiquity included only the United States. “The opening of foreign markets is a costly undertaking,” Woodruff wrote in the introductory letter to the 1928 Annual Report, laying out difficulties in distribution, trademark protection, and acceptance by foreign consumers. “Successful prosecution of this undertaking will require time, courage, and patience, as well as large expenditures.” Though Coke had made tentative inroads into countries including Mexico, Canada, England, and Germany, it wasn’t until the United States entered World War II in 1941 that it was able to expand its reach into more and more foreign markets. And as luck would have it, the American taxpayer footed the bill.

In the “Milestones of Refreshment” exhibit at the World of Coca-Cola, there is a whole room devoted to World War II, full of wartime advertisements and newspaper clippings. Among them, one black-and-white photo stands out: “Charles B. Hall was the first African-American fighter pilot to down an enemy aircraft in World War II,” reads the caption. “His reward was a bottle of Coca-Cola.”

When war struck America, it struck Coca-Cola, too, with the inevitable return to sugar rationing. Determined not to be left behind again, the company