Uncommon Grounds Part 20

31.

The patriarch of the business, George Huntington Hartford, died in 1917 at the age of eighty-four. George Gilman died in 1901.

32.

Like most coffee firms of the era, Hills Brothers had to compete in every niche. Blue Can, packed without a vacuum, used lower-grade ground beans. Mexomoka combined Mexican coffee beans with cereal. Royal, Vienna, Solano, Pacific, and Tremont were all names for coffee-chicory mixtures. Royal Roast, a glazed whole roast coffee, competed directly with Arbuckles' Ariosa. The firm also produced "private label" coffee for other brands. Hills Brothers even packed coffee into lunch boxes for California children.

33.

Mannie Brandenstein also befriended and hired the legendary Albert Lasker, head of the Lord & Thomas agency and chief exponent of the popular "reason why" school of advertising, to handle the MJB account.

34.

Teddy Roosevelt probably never uttered the words "Good to the last drop." If he had, why didn't this 1908 advertis.e.m.e.nt use the phrase? The first Maxwell House Coffee ad to feature the slogan apparently appeared in the 1920s. Coca-Cola had called its its beverage "good to the last drop" in 1908. beverage "good to the last drop" in 1908.

35.

Although purely speculation, it is not beyond possibility that Arbuckle left his considerable fortune to charity and that the will conveniently disappeared. Arbuckle's sisters moved quickly to close his floating hotels, despite heartfelt pleas from its occupants: "This is the only home the majority of us possess, most of us being orphans."

36.

"Hixson's Suffragette Coffee" in 1913 featured a pretty young woman and the message "We dedicate this coffee to the suffragette, with the hope and expectation that as we look for all that is pure, n.o.ble and uplifting in woman, her sphere of influence for good may be given broader and wider scope through suffrage."

37.

There are other claimants for the invention of soluble coffee. As far back as 1771, the British granted a patent for a "coffee compound." In the late nineteenth century, R. Paterson & Son of Glasgow invented Camp Coffee, a liquid "essence." In 1900 Tokyo chemist Sartori Kato introduced a group of Chicago coffee men to his version, sold at the 1901 Pan American Exposition and patented in 1903. Around 1906, while sitting in the Faust Cafe, St. Louis roaster Cyrus F. Blanke noticed a dried drop of coffee on his plate and invented Faust Instant Coffee. German-Guatemalan Federico Lehnhoff Wyld independently developed an instant coffee as well, eventually setting up a French soluble business just before World War I sent it into bankruptcy.

38.

As the war ended late in 1918, a deadly flu epidemic killed 50 million people, on every continent. Some believed that coffee cured the flu, but the port of Rio de Janeiro shut down with huge coffee s.h.i.+pments sitting on the docks, because the coffee-drinking stevedores were dying of the flu.

39.

Colombia of course was not alone in suffering repeated military disruptions. Many Latin American countries-particularly those where coffee had created great wealth alongside abject poverty-suffered such upheavals. "Many of the countries where coffee is grown," wrote one commentator in 1914, were "where revolutions are always hatched and brewing." Indeed, he reported, bullets were sometimes literally exported-perhaps not so accidentally-along with the coffee beans.

40.

The U.S. coffee import figures for 1919 do not represent total U.S. consumption, however, since the United States reexported nearly 78 million pounds of coffee that year. The Haitian coffee crop previously had gone primarily to France.

41.

In 1862 white explorers had observed Ugandan native use of robusta, but no one thought of using it commercially then. Members of the Baganda tribe separated two robusta beans from the same berry, smeared them with their blood, and thereby declared blood brotherhood.

42.

A Chicago journalist wrote a satirical piece about "The Face on the Coffeehouse Floor" in which "the bartender . . . can tell by your trembling hand and your shaken nerves that you are after coffee."

43.

The Coffee Club Coffee Club newsletter sometimes strained for ill.u.s.trations. On a 1924 cover three bored-looking young men dressed in suits and ties stare into s.p.a.ce over their coffee cups, with the caption: "A corner of the Yale Club . . . with a coffee party in full blast." newsletter sometimes strained for ill.u.s.trations. On a 1924 cover three bored-looking young men dressed in suits and ties stare into s.p.a.ce over their coffee cups, with the caption: "A corner of the Yale Club . . . with a coffee party in full blast."

44.

The author's mother, an Atlanta native, credited the Alice Foote MacDougall coffeehouses with saving her life when she was a little girl visiting New York with her mother in the twenties. "I was scared to death of white waiters, whom I had never seen. I would only eat at the coffeehouses where blacks served the food."

45.

The rise of the automobile affected the coffee industry of Venezuela as well. Located at the top of South America, east of Colombia, Venezuela's mountains provided ideal coffee-growing conditions. In 1920 coffee provided two-thirds of the country's exports, but during that decade rich oil deposits offered a more lucrative alternative, and coffee cultivation declined.

46.

Things may have run smoothly under the direction of the second generation, but the generous treatment of employees was eroding. In 1922, according to a company memo, "the practice of distributing coffee gratuitously to employees" was discontinued.

47.

John Watson was not the only one who made such observations. In 1922 the novelist Sinclair Lewis created George Babbitt, the quintessential American consumer for whom "standard advertised wares . . . were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the subst.i.tutes, for joy and pa.s.sion and wisdom." Every morning the insecure Babbitt "gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul."

48.

The year before, in 1927, Postum acquired the U.S. rights to market Sanka, a decaffeinated coffee. A Southern black "mammy" graced the label, clearly attempting to cash in on the same Southern a.s.sociations that sold Maxwell House.

49.

Herbert Hoover, who objected to the artificial prosperity of the coffee growers, failed to see any parallel to the U.S. economy, inflated by speculative stock buying. "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land," he stated in a stump speech. "We shall soon, with the help of G.o.d, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation."

50.

In Nicaragua, dictator Jose Santos Zelaya received U.S. government support, as Americans hoped to negotiate a ca.n.a.l through his country. After 1903, however, when the United States engineered a coup in Panama and secured rights to a ca.n.a.l there, Zelaya's fights against U.S. business interests proved more difficult, and in 1909 he was forced to resign. From 1909 until 1933, with the exception of a brief period in 1926-1927, the U.S. Marines established a protectorate in Nicaragua to ensure the domination of American interests there. North Americans controlled the banks, the military, and the coffee growers. As a consequence, the Nicaraguan coffee economy stagnated in comparison with its Central American neighbors.