The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [28]
Austin also confronted the changing reality of America, as blacks, women, and other groups were finally demanding their civil rights. The civil rights debate began, in fact, when four students at a Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, demanded their right to a Coke, by now the symbol of American prosperity. Caught between rumors it financed White Citizens’ Councils on one side, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the other, the company stayed on the sidelines. “I’ve heard the phrase ‘Stand up and be counted’ for so long from both sides that I’m sick of it,” groused one vice president. “Sure, we want to stand up and be counted, but on both sides of the fence.” Taking a moral stand, after all, could only lose the company customers. Even as Woodruff personally risked his reputation in Atlanta to support a Nobel Prize dinner for Martin Luther King, Jr., the company dragged its feet on producing racially integrated advertising.
Similarly, when the war in Vietnam broke out, the company virtually ignored the controversial conflict; there would be no soldier made of sugar in Danang, no “Have a Coke” in Saigon. With nothing much to lose, Pepsi filled the gap, courting hippies and love children with the countercultural slogan “You’ve Got a Lot to Live, Pepsi’s Got a Lot to Give.” Not that Coke slipped behind the times. When the “depth boys” at McCann told Coke that youth of today didn’t like phoniness in their leaders, lyricist Bill Backer reached into the World War II archive to pull out “The Real Thing,” a slogan that could brilliantly appeal to disenfranchised youth searching for a more authentic world, as well as disaffected adults longing for a simpler time before all of the national discord.
The times were catching up with Coke, however. As the socially conscious 1970s hit, farm labor organizer César Chávez followed up his successful grape boycott with a campaign protesting the deplorable conditions in Florida orange groves—focusing particularly on Coke’s Minute Maid subsidiary. An NBC documentary revealed substandard housing and inadequate toilet facilities for workers making less than minimum wage. Coke was livid at being singled out by the program but appeared publicly contrite. Testifying before the U.S. Senate, Austin sympathized with the “profound sense of futility” suffered by the workers, and promised to change. Eventually, Coke signed a union contract with the United Farm Workers in 1972, leading to higher wages and benefits for Minute Maid workers compared with other fruit pickers. (The contract lasted only until 1994, however, when Coke sold its Florida orange groves, which effectively ended union representation in the state.)
On some level, Austin’s rhetoric about changing the world was genuine. Under a principle he dubbed the “halo effect,” the company launched new initiatives on recycling and acquired a company called Aqua-Chem to produce desalinization plants to provide clean water in the Middle East—even though the subsidiary never turned a profit. The company’s new social thrust, however, wasn’t completely uncalculated. Now that love beads and folk music were safe cultural touchstones, Coke glommed on to the hippie movement for its biggest transformation in decades. The company had already gone from a medicinal cure-all to sign of good breeding, from refreshing pause to all-American icon. Now it would tackle world peace.
Bill Backer supposedly came up with the idea when his plane was fogged in in Ireland, and he saw his fellow passengers sharing Cokes to pass the time. At that moment, he realized Coke was “a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples.” He set out to re-create