Mention the name Teddy Roosevelt and different people conjure up different images of the man. To some Roosevelt was a progressive Republican president and a famous Rough Rider in the U.S. Cavalry during the Spanish-American War; to others he was the man who inadvertently lent his name to stuffed children's toys after a famous newspaper photograph depicted him saving two cuddly, orphaned bear cubs.
Our twenty-sixth president was many things: an historian, a biographer, a statesman, a big game hunter who traveled to Africa, a devout naturalist and an accomplished speaker. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 after brokering peace between warring Japan and Russia, Roosevelt truly deserved the label "A Man for All Seasons."
Amongst his campaigns—and he mounted many during his prodigious life—was the little known political and legal war his administration visited upon the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia.
This strange footnote of history began with Roosevelt's appointment of a man on a mission: the medical crusader and nutritional agitator Dr. Harvey W. Wiley.
Before Wiley's appointment as chief of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry, the good doctor had invested decades of his life towards the goal of making Americans healthier. Indeed, by the time this activist doctor met Roosevelt he had become almost obsessed with the nation's health. His list of evils seemed to grow each month and heading that list was the Coca-Cola Company and their flagship brand. Wiley accused the company of manufacturing sweetened poison in a fancy bottle.
Roosevelt, somewhat of a crusader himself, was impressed with the knowledge and the passion that Wiley radiated. Defining himself as a new breed of Republican—a progressive—Roosevelt accepted some of the socialist fervor sweeping across Europe. He believed that part of the mission of the U.S. government should be to make life better for Americans whether they wanted it or not. In Wiley, Roosevelt saw a comrade-in-arms: a crusader, a man of vision and a fellow progressive.
The food additive industry had grown almost exponentially during the last few decades of the 19th Century. Newspaper editors and public interest groups had pressured the U.S. Congress for years to establish a government agency empowered to police the burgeoning list of chemicals agricultural processors were adding to the nation's food supply. Finally Congress acted and on January 1, 1907 a law went into effect (the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906) that authorized Wiley's Bureau of Chemistry to regulate the United States' food industry. Dr. Wiley's bureau had the power to regulate, inspect, and if deemed appropriate, to sue violators of the Bureau's edicts.
Wiley and his agents immediately set to work. They targeted everything from the fake whiskey business to makers of ketchup. They also set their sights on string beans and the dubious canning processes and, of course, the Coca-Cola company.
When Wiley set his cross-hairs on Coca-Cola he unwittingly set into motion a war with one of America's most aggressive and successful promoters: Asa Griggs Candler.
Candler, the power behind the product marketing and the acknowledged leader of the burgeoning soft drink industry, became the first president of Coca-Cola following his $2,300 purchase of the young (then) primarily pharmaceutical company. By 1895 Candler had established syrup plants in Los Angeles, Dallas and Chicago. The very first bottling plant located in Chattanooga had to keep expanding its facilities to meet the demand of a nation thirsty for their product.
The United State's Bureau of Chemistry solicited expert testimony from a gaggle of conscripted experts. All roundly condemned the Coca-Cola Company as an unhealthy product. Some even labelled it as an outright poison.
Under the auspices of the authority granted to him by Roosevelt, Wiley forged ahead. Under his direct orders shipments of the product crossing state lines were seized by Federal Agents. The company was accused of allegedly misbranding and adulterating its product. [1]
Coca-Cola was accused of being a habit forming drug. This charge was levied against them by the collection of experts Wiley had gathered to indict the company, drive its product from the marketplace and the corporation out of business.
Originally marketed in the late 1800s as "A wonderful nerve and brain tonic and remarkable therapeutic," the Bureau of Chemistry decided to analyze this wonder tonic shortly after the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. What they found shocked and infuriated them.
Coca-Cola, they charged, was nothing more than a concoction of habit forming drugs sweetened with processed sugar and designed to addict millions of otherwise healthy Americans to a substance with no nutritive value at all. In fact, far from being nutritious, Cocoa-Cola was made with the processed syrup of the cola nut—a mild narcotic and high in caffeine, a stimulant. To that narcotic the company added cocaine from the processed coca plant—a carryover from its pharmaceutical origins. Sugar, in prodigious amounts, made the whole thing palatable. To make matters worse, the actual formula was a closely held secret and the investigative body of the Bureau of Chemistry could only guess what other evils lurked in the viscous brown syrup. [2]
When the Bureau began its crackdown and intiated seizures of the product being trucked out of Georgia, Candler fought back. At first he ordered drivers to ignore the Feds and just keep on driving.
It didn't work.
The Bureau's agents were simply instructed to embargo the borders and not let any Coca-Cola trucks pass. At that point, Candler countered by assigning shotgun riders with the drivers. Their orders were to protect the shipment at all costs and to fire back if fired upon. Several incidents followed. Brief shootouts occurred between the agents and Coca-Cola employees. They were reported in the local press at the time but ignored by the major newspapers.
Dr. Wiley did not ignore the incidents. Acting before true tragedy struck he rescinded the order of embargo. The Bureau had confiscated samples of the product and decided to file a federal lawsuit with the aim of banning the product from America.
In the end it proved impossible for any of the Bureau's charges to be backed by higher authority within the Department of Agriculture. Many saw Wiley's campaign as bad for American business; others muttered it was downright unpatriotic.
Thus it seemed a stalemate had been reached until an activist newspaper editor, Seeley, threatened to blow the lid off the intra-agency "conspiracy" blunting the Bureau of Chemistry's attempt to indict the Coca-Cola Company. The editor, a health crusader, had been made privvy to the chemistry report of the cola's contents. He vowed to help Wiley get it off the market.
The case was brought to court in Chattanooga, the location of the comapny's primary distribution center, and promptly dismissed by the presiding judge on a technicality. The primary offensive ingredient, caffiene, was found by the judge to be part of the original formula and so could not legally be considered an additive.
Furious, Wiley and his fellow crusaders regrouped. They fought the case up to the Supreme Court. The opinion reached was unanimous and the lower court judge's ruling was overruled. Caffeine (as well as the coca) was deemed an added ingredient. The case was referred back to the Chattanooga court. [3]
In 1907 the Coca-Cola Company pleaded no contest and at the motion of the district attorney the court passed the sentence. The Bureau of Chemistry had beat Coca-Cola!
Or had they?
The actual ruling ordered that the company pay all costs of the action. The product that had been seized would be released back to the company provided that the product "not be sold or otherwise disposed of contrary to the provisions of the Federal Food and Drug Act, or the laws of any state, territory or district, or insular possessions of the United States." [4] In essence, on the surface it seemed the court had ordered Coca-Cola not to distribute or sell its product outside the borders of Georgia. Except for the fact that the judgment included a slickly worded weasel clause.
Tagged on to the end of the ruling—almost as an afterthought—the verbiage drolly stated: "[The] judgment of forfeiture shall not be binding upon the said Coca-Cola Company or its product, except as to this cause, and the particular goods seized herein."
And that effectively sealed the doom of the government action. In essence, Coca-Cola could distribute and sell its product anywhere in the United States. If the government chose to follow up on its actions against the company it would have had to seize more product, bring it to court and continue the absurd process—literally a gruelling case-by-case, keg-by-keg basis.
Not long after the debacle, the Secretary of Agriculture arranged a meeting to discredit Wiley in the Oval Office. Wiley—who had also mounted a campaign against saccharin—was manuevered into a condemnation of the artificial sweetening product. He argued an impassioned plea that Roosevelt ban the product for health reasons.
Unbeknown to Wiley the twenty-sixth president was battling diabetes and his personal physician, a man Roosevelt had trusted for many years, had recommended saccharin as a way to avoid the advance of the disease (then called sugar diabetes).
According to the records of the meeting, the President became infuriated, declaring that, "Anyone who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot." [5]
With that the meeting came to an abrupt ending. Shortly thereafter the Bureau of Chemistry was disbanded and the enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act ceased. Wiley left Washington under fire and with his reputation tarnished.
Coca-Cola had won the war. It went on to become a multi-billion dollar, world-wide enterprise.
Footnotes:
[1] "The History of a Crime Against the Food Law."—Wiley, H. W., Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research : 1929; 1955.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] "Sugar Blues."—Dufty, William, Warner Books: 1976.
[5] "The History of a Crime Against the Food Law."—Wiley, H. W., Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research : 1929; 1955.