Beverage Battles

In this week’s issue, both the cover, “Soda Noir,” by Owen Smith, and Lizzie Widdicombe’s Talk of the Town story, “Fluid Ounces,” refer to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to limit the sale of large containers of sugary beverages at restaurants and other outlets in New York City. (The mayor’s plan was submitted to the city’s health board yesterday and will be voted on in September.) Bloomberg is not the first mayor to cause a beverage controversy. In 1940, Fiorella LaGuardia used a radio address to tell the citizens of the city that there was essentially no difference (other than the price) between Grade A and Grade B milk. The uproar, as M. R. Wemer reported in our pages, led to the creation of a single grade of “approved milk.”

Bloomberg is also far from the first critic to raise public-health concerns about soft drinks. In a multi-part Profile of Coca-Cola, published in 1959, E. J. Kahn, Jr., wrote about the contentious relationship between government and the beverage manufacturer during Coke’s early years. At the center of the fracas was nutritional science:

The feeling persists in some scientific quarters that the drink is a cheeky upstart and must be periodically put in its place. Coca-Cola officials shudder whenever they hear of another science teacher conducting the hoary classroom experiment of inserting a chunk of prime beef in a goblet of Coca-Cola and inviting his students to watch the flesh gradually disintegrate.

On the contrary, as Kahn notes, in the late nineteenth century, Coca-Cola often touted its signature product’s health benefits: “Coke has been advertised as a ‘remarkable therapeutic agent,’ a ‘sovereign remedy,’ and a cure for, among other indispositions, headaches, neuralgia, hysteria, melancholy, insomnia, biliousness, and spring fever.”

These claims ceased in 1902, when the company sued the government for a refund of nearly eleven thousand dollars in federal taxes that had been imposed on it because the drink was classified by the government as a “medicinal proprietary.” A jury decided in favor of Coca-Cola, which got back its tax money with interest.

Perhaps no government official was more critical of Coca-Cola than Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, a physician and chemist who worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry. To Wiley’s mind, the makers of Coca-Cola and all other caffeine-containing drinks were “dope peddlers” and “poisoners.” As Kahn wrote:

Coke was his bête noire—or, rather, his bête brune. He considered it a habit-forming, nerve-wracking potion and once wrote about a ten-year-old Coca-Cola addict whose mother had brought him around to hear from Wiley’s own lips of his depravity. “His eyes grew steadily larger,” the doctor reported, “and at the end he said with great earnestness: ‘But why do they let them make it?’” And Dr. Wiley added, “Why indeed?”

In 1909, Wiley prodded the government into accusing the Coca-Cola Company of violating the Pure Food and Drug Act. The case, known as the United States v. Forty Barrels and Twelve Kegs of Coca-Cola, dragged through the judiciary for nine years, going all the way to the Supreme Court, which remanded it back to the federal district court in Chattanooga where it had begun. By then, Wiley had left the government. Kahn describes the outcome:

The Coca-Cola Company agreed to make certain vague modifications in its manufacturing processes, and, on condition that it pay all the costs of the protracted trial, was allowed to reclaim its forty barrels and twenty kegs. That was the last major tussle Coca-Cola had with its native land, a country the company has come to identify itself with so closely that it has made up replicas of portentous historical documents for its bottlers to distribute to schoolchildren; in urging a conclave of bottlers to get behind one such venture, a company spokesman ringingly announced, “And now, gentlemen, something as American as Coca-Cola itself—the Declaration of Independence!” _The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.


Illustration by Owen Smith.


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