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Just around the corner,
There’s a rainbow in the sky.
So let’s have another cup o’ coffee,
And let’s have another piece o’ pie.
—Irving Berlin, 1932
Although U.S. citizens endured hardships during the Great Depression, they generally had enough to eat and drink, even if some had to stand in bread lines for their food and coffee. To divert themselves in their homes, they also had a miraculous new communication medium—the radio, which would provide another way to sell coffee.
Glued to Their Radios
In radio’s infancy in the early twenties, advertisers didn’t make direct brand-specific appeals to consumers, as this would have appeared crassly commercial. Instead they sought an uplifting, educational tone. In 1923, for instance, John Watson of J. Walter Thompson discussed “Glands, the Mysteries of the Human Body,” over WEAF. Although the announcer noted that the talk was given courtesy of Pebeco Tooth Paste, Watson did not mention the product. He concluded that “to keep the glands of the mouth active and healthy . . . it is advisable to brush your teeth after every meal with a tooth paste that cleanses and polishes the teeth without scratching the delicate enamel.” Watson later observed that this talk “illustrates fairly well the technique of commercial advertising by radio. . . .
The speaker does not have to say anything about the product being advertised.”
Slowly advertisers became more aggressive. In 1924 A & P began advertising its three coffee brands on the radio with the “A & P Gypsies,” soon to be followed by the Everready Hour, Lucky Strike Orchestra, Wrigley Review, the Jewel Tea Hour, and the Maxwell House Hour. In the West, Folger’s sponsored “Folgeria,” with a marimba band theme, comic skits, and musical acts. Still, the advertising was, as Erik Barnouw describes it in his history of broadcasting, “brief, circumspect, and extremely well-mannered.”
In 1929, all that changed. That year Americans spent $842 million on new radios, up well over 1,000 percent from seven years earlier. Early in 1929 virtually all of Chicago’s radios were tuned into Amos ’n’ Andy, a show about two black men played by two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. In May, William Benton, a young advertising man with the firm of Lord & Thomas, walked home to his Chicago apartment on a hot, muggy night when everyone had their windows open. “I heard these colored voices leaping out into the street, from all the apartments. I turned around and walked back up the street. There were nineteen radios on and seventeen were tuned to ‘Amos ’n’ Andy.’” The next morning Benton convinced agency chief Albert Lasker that Pepsodent, the firm’s toothpaste client, should sponsor the show nationally. As a result, the radio program became a national obsession, and Pepsodent sales skyrocketed. As comedian Bob Hope recalled, “There wasn’t a theater in the country that opened in the evening before 7:30. Why? Because they knew nobody was going to leave the house until after ‘Amos ’n’ Andy.’ Nobody.”
Benton & Bowles Survive the Crash
On July 15, 1929, William Benton and Chester Bowles opened a new advertising firm in New York City. The two Yale graduates, twenty-nine and twenty-eight years old, respectively, were friends with Charles Mortimer, who worked in the advertising department of General Foods. Mortimer arranged for Benton and Bowles to meet with his boss, Ralph Starr Butler, who headed General Foods’ advertising. Impressed by the bright young partners, Butler gave them Certo and Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, two smaller accounts.
The two partners resolved to concentrate their advertising energies on food and drug products, which they correctly perceived as largely impervious to the Depression. On Benton’s thirty-second birthday, April 1, 1932, Ralph Starr Butler and Clarence Francis, the General Foods sales manager, summoned Benton to explain that they were unhappy with the sales of Maxwell House Coffee, then being handled by Erwin Wasey.58 They asked him whether his agency could handle not only Maxwell House but also Baker’s Chocolate, Post Toasties, Post Bran Flakes, Diamond Crystal Salt, and Log Cabin Syrup. Bill Benton answered, honestly, that he didn’t think they were prepared to take on all of the accounts. The General Foods men then suggested that Benton and Bowles take on a third partner, Atherton Hobler, the restive account manager at Erwin Wasey.
Benton, Bowles, and Hobler formed an equal three-way partnership. Hobler, ten years older than Benton, brought his years of experience to the firm along with an aggressive, competitive edge. Hobe, as he was usually called, drove himself and his subordinates hard. The partners quickly hired new staff, many coming from other agencies, eager to join the exciting young firm.59
Rancid Oils and Coffee Nerves
The admen’s most urgent task was to revive Maxwell House sales. From net profits of nearly $3 million a year on sales of 50 million pounds before the crash, the brand generated virtually no profit on sales of 39 million pounds three years later. General Foods allotted a whopping $3.1 million to Benton & Bowles to advertise Maxwell House.
In the twenties Maxwell House had been the only brand that could truly claim national distribution. Then Chase & Sanborn, with Standard Brands’ aggressive distribution and advertising, claimed that its coffee was fresher than others. “Rancid Oil in Stale Coffee,” a Chase & Sanborn headline announced, was “the cause of indigestion, headaches, sleeplessness.” The company claimed that by avoiding other brands and sticking to its Dated Coffee, consumers could safely imbibe up to five cups of coffee a day. According to Standard Brands vice president Traver Smith, the coffee-as-a-fresh-food approach boosted sales over 300 percent in a little over a year.
Under the creative direction of Stanley Resor’s JWT team, Chase & Sanborn had begun sponsoring a twenty-two-piece choral orchestra in 1929. In 1931 they settled on popular comedian-singer Eddie Cantor, who promoted the coffee effectively.
On the packaging front, many more competitors were discovering the vacuum can, pioneered in 1900 by Hills Brothers. In 1931 General Foods introduced its Vita-Fresh vacuum pack, which purportedly removed 99 percent of the air—not just 90 percent, as with Hills Brothers, MJB, and Folgers. General Foods also installed a huge electric spectacular in Times Square. Designed by Norman Rockwell, it used 7,000 bulbs and showed a Southern gentleman drinking coffee, served by his seventeen-foot-tall black butler.
All Aboard for the Maxwell House Show Boat
Despite its new vacuum can and Times Square presence, Maxwell House continued to lose market share. In October 1932, Atherton Hobler met with the General Foods managers and leveled with them: Maxwell House Coffee was too expensive, it didn’t taste good enough, and it needed a dramatic new advertising approach. He proposed that they improve the blend by using less Brazilian and more high-grown mild beans. Cut the retail price by a nickel. And last, cut the advertising budget by $2 million, down to $1.1 million, but apply all of it to radio. It was a major gamble; sales would have to go up 20 percent just to break even, but the General Foods men were willing to try anything. Later that same month, the first weekly Maxwell House Show Boat went on the air at the unprecedented cost of $6,500 a show.
Inspired by the 1927 Jerome Kern musical (itself based on an Edna Ferber novel), the radio series reverted to the popular Dixieland Maxwell House theme, but with—quite literally—plenty of new bells and whistles.60 “Come aboard, folks,” production manager Tiny Ruffner announced as the steam whistle blew. “Your ticket of admission is just your loyalty to Maxwell House Coffee.” Then jovial Cap’n Henry took over for an hour of music, drama, and comedy.
The radio show was an enormous hit. The sound effects—surging water from the paddlewheel, the clatter of the gangplank—and acting were so convincing that many listeners believed the boat truly existed. Two thousand people waited in vain on the docks of New Orleans when the show’s script was set there.
By the beginning of 1933, Maxwell House Show Boat was the top radio show in the country, a status it would maintain for the next two years. On the January 1 show, Tiny Ruffner announced the 5-cent price cut and the improved blend. Within two months, sales increased 70 percent. Chase & Sanborn matched the price reduction in April. By year’s end, Maxwell House sales had climbed by 85 percent. Under the creative direction of Chet Bowles and Hobe Hobler, the show featured several radio innovations. It was the first show with a live audience. Rather than presenting separate, easily ignored commercials, the Show Boat cast incorporated enjoyment of Maxwell House Coffee in the script itself, complete with the sounds of pouring, rattling coffee cups, and satisfied lip-smacking. Dozens of famous guest stars appeared on the program to sip their coffee, including Bob Hope, Robert Benchley, Gloria Swanson, George Jessel, Jackie Coogan, Amelia Earhart, Dale Carnegie, Lillian Gish, and Gertrude Lawrence.61
With the success of Maxwell House Show Boat, Benton & Bowles quickly added two more radio shows, Palmolive Beauty Box and Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight. By 1934 their shows held three of the top four positions in radio.62 Although radio lacked the visual impact of print advertising, it could reach the one in twenty American adults who could not read, as well as preliterate children. Radio advertising was unavoidable if one wished to listen to a particular show.
Benton & Bowles copywriters took advantage of the popularity of Show Boat by featuring photographs of the actors in character in print ads, which further enhanced the illusion of reality. In 1935 Maxwell House ads offered a new twist, offering little vignettes in the form of popular comic strips of the day.
As Bill Benton later observed, “Maxwell House didn’t know there was a Depression. The chain stores were selling coffee that was almost as good—the difference was undetectable—for a much lower price. But advertising so gave glamour and verve to Maxwell House that it made everybody think it was a whale of a lot better. It doubled and quadrupled in sales.” It also helped, Benton knew, that caffeine was addictive. “Every businessman wants a product that is habit-forming. That’s why cigarettes, Coca-Cola and coffee do so well.”
While Bill Benton and his partners were convincing the American public to drink more Maxwell House Coffee, Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to sell his New Deal and instill hope in a demoralized country. Recognizing the unpopularity and impracticality of Prohibition, Roosevelt approved its repeal in 1933. Coffee did not suffer from renewed competition from legal liquor; rather, it continued, as it had in the speakeasies, to provide an illusory sobering effect for those who drank alcohol to excess.
From billings just shy of $1 million in 1931 Benton & Bowles’s numbers leaped upward: $3.1 million in 1932, the year B & B secured the Maxwell House account; $4.5 million the following year; $7.1 million in 1934; and $10 million in 1935. By that year the staff had grown to 174. Chet Bowles and Hobe Hobler bought huge yachts. Bill Benton built a Connecticut country estate.
At the height of the firm’s popularity, Bill Bowles resigned on his thirty-sixth birthday. He pursued a varied career in which, among other things, he made a fortune by buying and selling the Muzak Corporation. Chester Bowles left advertising in 1941, taking a job with the Office of Price Administration, subsequently becoming the governor of Connecticut and U.S. ambassador to India. While governor, Bowles appointed Benton to fill out a term in the U.S. Senate, where he fought against the witch hunt of Senator Joe McCarthy.
Atherton Hobler remained in advertising. He was stuck with the well-recognized name of Benton & Bowles and became increasingly irritated as his former partners began to disparage advertising. Bill Benton later observed that “the Maxwell House Coffee program was, to my eternal regret, the stimulus that changed the commercials. . . . It inevitably led to the singing commercial and all the current excesses.” He lamented that “I invented things that I now apologize for.”
Arbuckles’ and MacDougall Fade Away
In 1932 the Jamison sisters hired C. King Woodbridge, a noted “turnaround” expert, to supervise Arbuckle Brothers. In the next few years the firm tried a number of different tactics, such as raising cash by selling its Yuban brand to another company. Without national advertising, however, Arbuckle was doomed. In 1937, Woodbridge sold the business to General Foods, where Ariosa was allowed to die. A few years later General Foods bought Yuban, which joined Maxwell House as a sister brand. By the time the two Jamison sisters died in the early 1940s, the vast Arbuckle fortune had disappeared.
When the Depression hit, fewer carefree lovers sought the Italian atmosphere at Alice Foote MacDougall’s elaborate coffeehouses. In 1930 she relinquished active control, and two years later the chain went into receivership, dragged down by the million-dollar lease. MacDougall, then sixty-five, resumed personal control. Within four months she increased business by 50 percent and repurchased the Cortile and Grand Central shops, but they never equaled their former glory, and the 1933 repeal of Prohibition proved the final straw. In place of expensive Italianate splendor, Depression-era consumers now populated the Automat and small coffee shops advertising “Nothing over 5¢.”
Lobbing Coffee Hand Grenades in Chicago
The Great Depression did not hurt the American coffee industry as a whole, though it promoted further consolidation and intensified competition. Comfortable profit margins disappeared. The big brand names continued to add market share while regional coffee companies struggled to maintain their niches. Many small roasters went out of business.
In 1936, Herbert Delafield, the chairman of the national association, lamented that although coffee had traditionally been a “gentlemen’s business,” it was being hijacked by “sharp shooting and scalping operators” who used coffee more than any other product as a “loss leader.” The idea was to offer a popular staple at low prices—or even at a loss—in order to draw customers into the store, where they would buy other products. The more innovative regional roasters managed to survive through clever advertising and loyal customers. They specialized in the restaurant-office institutional market, where local connections and special service still could compete successfully. Others roasted private-label coffee, packing it under different names so that other businesses, such as chain stores, could resell it as their own. In addition, there were “toll” or “trade” roasters, who roasted someone else’s green coffee for a per-pound fee.
Two regional roasters launched consumer brands. Joseph Martinson had built a thriving institutional business in the metropolitan New York area, supplying his high-grade Martinson Coffee to upscale hotels, restaurants, and steamship lines. In the late twenties he entered the packaged coffee field, offering only one top-grade blend for a premium price and advertising it steadily. Martinson’s great rival was Sam Schonbrunn, who produced the high-quality Savarin brand (“the coffee served at the Waldorf Astoria”). Martinson and Schonbrunn demonstrated that quality coffees could rise above the fray of commoditized price-cutting firms—a lesson that had to be relearned periodically in the years to come. They thrived during the Depression.
The once-dynamic National Coffee Roasters Association found itself outmoded and outflanked by the wagon peddlers, chain stores, and green coffee importers. In 1932 the NCRA reluctantly bound together with all the other coffee men to form the Associated Coffee Industries of America, hoping to squeeze general promotional funds from the likes of Jewel, A & P, Standard Brands, and General Foods. Yet none of the coffee producers saw the wisdom of spending their money to promote someone else’s brand. It was therefore “every man for himself,” as a trade editorial lamented.
The San Francisco family businesses of Hills Brothers, Folger’s, and MJB all expanded successfully west of the Mississippi River, with Hills Brothers commanding the greatest share of the market. In 1930 Hills Brothers boasted a cash hoard of $5 million. Having honed its approach to new markets in ninety other towns in the Midwest, the Hills Brothers sales force swung into action with military precision in Chicago in September 1930. For a few months grocers were showered with oversized postcards previewing the campaign. Then, beginning in February 1931, the company hired the Donnelley Corporation to mail half-pound vacuum-packed samples of Red Can Coffee to every Chicago telephone subscriber. They simultaneously mailed notices to over 10,000 independent grocers, announcing the sampling program. In the next few months, over 500,000 families would receive a Hills Brothers coffee gift in the mail. Within a year Hills Brothers surged past Maxwell House and Chase & Sanborn to become the best-selling coffee in Chicago, a position it would hold for the next two decades.
Despite their success in Chicago, however, Hills Brothers’ overall sales slid during the early depression years. Advertising expenses had broken over $1 million for the first time, but sales dropped from 39 to 37 million pounds. E. E. Hills reiterated the family commitment to the firm, refusing to sell out to a conglomerate.
Yet sales figures continued to erode, falling to 25 million pounds in 1932. The company clung to its old campaign, “A Little at a Time,” emphasizing the superiority of its “controlled roasting,” vacuum packing, and high-quality beans. Yet consumers continued to slip away, attracted by the cheaper bargain brands. By 1933 they were also paying less attention to the Hills Brothers newspaper ads; instead they fiddled with their radio knobs to find their favorite show, which may no longer have been Maxwell House Show Boat.
Getting the Gong and Trouble in Eden
In 1935 Standard Brands launched the Major Bowes Amateur Hour for Chase & Sanborn Coffee. Bowes introduced acts that would “get the gong” if they bombed. The J. Walter Thompson men soon modified this reliance on humiliation, stressing the positive aspects of the show and gonging fewer hopeful performers.
The Amateur Hour traveled from city to city, featuring aspiring local acts and attracting immense attention to Chase & Sanborn in those areas. The acts were varied, producing music from saws, jugs, bells, and toothbrushes. Tap dancers pounded the boards. Mimics tried to do FDR or movie stars. A young Frank Sinatra appeared on the show as part of the Hoboken Four, a winning quartet. The show allowed listeners to vote to determine the talent contest winners; ads pleaded with viewers to purchase more Chase & Sanborn Coffee so that more amateurs might make good with Major Bowes. “THEIR CHANCE DEPENDS ON YOU,” headlines asserted. “Your purchases of Chase & Sanborn Dated Coffee help the Americans win fame, fortune.” Civic organizations, retail grocers’ associations, and other groups encouraged their members to buy Chase & Sanborn. By the end of the year the Amateur Hour had become the number-one show on the air.
In May 1937, after Bowes defected to Chrysler for a higher salary, Edgar Bergen and his outspoken dummy, Charlie McCarthy, took over the pitch for Chase & Sanborn, consistently delivering high ratings in radio polls. Through Bergen’s skill and wit, the supposedly fourteen-year-old dummy often seemed more real than his master, as he sparred with guests. One annoyed critic called him “a little vulgarian, a brassy, blustering, sniggering blockhead.” Yet it wasn’t McCarthy who caused problems for the coffee sponsor, but Mae West. On Sunday, December 12, 1937, the sex queen flirted with the “short, dark and handsome” dummy, lasciviously calling him “all wood and a yard long.” Despite the fact that his kisses gave her splinters, she invited him home with her. “I’ll let you play in my woodpile,” she cooed.
Such banter was merely the prelude to a racy Garden of Eden skit. Eve (Mae West) conned the “long, dark and slinky” snake (Edgar Bergen) into squeezing through the fence to get at the apple tree. It was quite clear that the snake—“my palpitatin’ python,” as West called him—was a phallic symbol and that the struggle through the fence represented sexual intercourse.
SNAKE: I’ll—I’ll do it (hissing laugh).
EVE: Now you’re talking. Here—right in between those pickets.
SNAKE: I’m—I’m stuck.
EVE: Oh—shake your hips. There, there now, you’re through.
SNAKE: I shouldn’t be doing this.
EVE: Yeah, but you’re doing all right now. Get me a big one. . . . I feel like doin’ a big apple. . . . Mmm—oh . . . nice goin’, swivel hips.
The studio audience howled. Many listeners, however, were outraged. “Mae West Pollutes Homes,” an editorial cried in the Catholic Monitor. Professor Maurice Sheehy from Catholic University fumed that Mae West, “the very personification of sex in its lowest connotation,” had “introduced her own sexual philosophy” into the Bible. A politician read Sheehy’s statement into the Congressional Record. Another senator called for a board of review “to prevent the recurrence of such broadcasts.” Frank McNinch, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, declared that the skit was “offensive to the great mass of right-thinking, clean-minded American citizens.”
Standard Brands executives hastened to apologize for Chase & Sanborn. Edgar Bergen and the irascible Charlie McCarthy survived the flap, not least because ratings soared following the racy broadcast. They continued to sell Chase & Sanborn Coffee for years—especially after a survey showed that four times as many regular listeners used Chase & Sanborn as those who never tuned in.
Other major coffees also sponsored regional radio programs. Folger’s first offered a detective serial, then a daytime soap opera. G. Washington, the instant coffee, aired Professor Quiz and His Brainbusters, featuring brainteasers. The various Depression-era coffee-sponsored radio programs, combined with an onslaught of print ads, clearly got the message across. In 1933 some 1,500 housewives were asked to name the product with the “date on the can.” Sixty-nine percent identified it as Chase & Sanborn.
By the end of 1937 Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy drove the Maxwell House Show Boat off the air. In 1938 Maxwell House sponsored Fanny Brice as the hysterical Baby Snooks, along with an entire stable of MGM stars, twenty-two of whom appeared on the first show, including George Murphy, Buddy Ebsen, Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland, Jeannette MacDonald, and Allan Jones. In addition to being good to the last drop, Maxwell House now boasted of its “Friendly Stimulation” and “Radiant Roasting.”
Coffee Brutes and Bruises
The battle for coffee market share in the United States intensified in the mid-1930s with attack ads. Chase & Sanborn’s print assaults escalated. “Stale Coffee loses flavor . . . is nervously irritating,” an ad proclaimed late in 1934. A cartoon strip provided a dramatic—and alarming—illustration: “Here’s your coffee, dear,” a wife says to her scowling businessman husband over the breakfast table. “I thought we were too old to play mud pies,” he growls. Flinging the hot coffee at her, he yells, “What did you put in it this time? Bricks or gunpowder? See how you like it!” She cries, “Oh, you brute! I’m all black and blue.” In the final two frames she wears a catcher’s mask and holds a shield while offering him a cup of Chase & Sanborn. “The grocer said no husband would ever throw a cup of dated coffee,” she observes anxiously. “I’ll soon find out.” The husband loves it. “Take off the mask, darling. Your grocer knows his coffee. This is too fresh and good to waste a drop.”
Wives, hoped J. Walter Thompson admen, would purchase Chase & Sanborn in hopes of avoiding such confrontations; or perhaps the ad appealed to men—emasculated and powerless during the Depression—who could at least feel that they were asserting themselves at home through their choice of coffee.63
Hills Brothers Coffee ads weren’t quite so negative or violent, but they were equally sexist.64 “Block That Kick,” a 1933 ad headline read. “If His Royal Highness, the husband of your house, starts to kick about the coffee—block it at once with Hills Bros. Coffee.” The ad went on to assure the housewife that “there’s nothing that soothes the savage masculine heart more quickly than steaming cups of this magnificent brew.”65 Trying to lure back consumers who were buying bargain brands, the company instituted a Coffee Floaters campaign to stop “floating” from one brand to another. “I’m tired of this confounded changing of coffees, Mary,” a husband yells. The solution is to stick with Hills Brothers, which according to the ad, “actually made more delicious cups” than the cheaper brands.
To halt sliding sales—particularly after Maxwell House lowered its price by a nickel—Gray Hills reluctantly authorized spot radio ads in 1934, featuring an orchestral “hit of the day” and a human interest skit about Coffee Floaters. That same year the company established a beachhead in New York City in some two hundred stores, sending a half-pound sample to each customer on a grocer’s list. They did not advertise in the papers or blanket the city as they had in Chicago, however, and Red Can failed to capture the East Coast market. Nonetheless, total sales for the year came back up over 30 million pounds and continued to grow throughout the decade. By 1939 Hills Brothers was selling over 60 million pounds a year.
General Foods’ Postum ads reverted to their roots. Roy Whittier of Young & Rubicam created a cartoon strip featuring “Mr. Coffee Nerves,” a villainous character who caused innumerable problems until Postum banished him, foiled again. Ovaltine, another health drink made of eggs, barley, and malt extract, also sought to woo coffee drinkers.
The two major decaffeinated coffees were Kaffee-Hag and Sanka. Kellogg’s Kaffee-Hag offered a cartoon strip with Artful Annie, a maid who couldn’t stand her mistress’s erratic performance at the wheel. “Please, Miss Mary, it’s all that coffee that makes your driving so nervous.” Without her knowledge, Annie substituted Kaffee-Hag. As a result, Miss Mary drove smoothly. Other Kaffee-Hag ads warned against “COFFEE HEART,” “URIC ACID,” “NEURITIS,” and “COFFEE SLEEPLESSNESS.” “Does your heart pound and act up? See your doctor. But don’t rebel when he says, ‘No Coffee!’”
Sanka, owned by General Foods, didn’t employ such overt scare tactics, but its advertising too was negative toward coffee. One ad featured an illustration of an apple. “In it, there are SEEDS. Nobody eats them. They do not make the apple taste better. . . . This is a COFFEE BEAN. In it, is CAFFEIN. Caffein has as little to do with the goodness of coffee as do the seeds with the goodness of the apple. So we take the caffein OUT of SANKA COFFEE. The PUNGENT AROMA remains.” In 1939 General Foods bought Kaffee-Hag, giving it sole possession of the small American decaf market.
When the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal asked members of the trade for suggestions on increasing coffee consumption, over half answered that false and misleading advertising should be stopped. “We feel that one large coffee firm, in particular, has said so much about the bad effects of coffee that many consumers . . . are giving up coffee in favor of other beverages,” one respondent observed. He of course was referring to Chase & Sanborn.
Those other beverages were likely to be soft drinks. Indeed “the competition feared most by coffee [is] Coca-Cola,” wrote a Business Week reporter in 1936. “In the South Coca-Cola is sometimes a breakfast drink and now the practice of a ‘coke’ and a cruller in the morning is invading New York.”
In addition, coffee was seasonal. “The drop in coffee sales from winter to summer is startling,” a 1932 survey noted. “As a mid-morning and mid-afternoon drink,” one speaker at a 1938 coffee convention admitted, “[coffee] has been almost completely replaced by other rapidly growing beverages.”
For Better, For Worse
Due to the increasing popularity of the vacuum can and ads about stale coffee, more consumers were learning that fresh-roasted, fresh-ground coffee really was ideal, and that coffee should be kept in a cool, airtight container and used quickly. Most important, the percolator was increasingly displaced by the infinitely preferable drip method or the newly popular vacuum coffeemaker. Glass Silex vacuum brewers appeared in upscale restaurants and kitchens, where the dramatic brewing method—in which water from a lower container boils into a higher one, only to be sucked back through the coffee when a partial vacuum ensued—could impress the bridge club.66
Surveys during the Depression showed that a growing number of households were switching from perk to drip and vacuum methods. Still, 40 percent of those surveyed used an inadequate amount of coffee, regardless of their brewing habits. Many roasters, including Maxwell House, took advantage of the situation to advertise different grinds for different methods (coarse for percolator, medium for drip, and finer for vacuum), while others, such as Hills Brothers, advertised the “Correct Grind” for all methods.
The net effect, according to former advertising copywriter Helen Woodward, was simply to confuse the consumer. “The housewife experiments with percolators, with drip coffee, with Silex machines, and still most of the time the coffee isn’t right,” Woodward wrote in 1937. “She is battered and bewildered by new packages and new brands, by advertising.”
In general, the Depression had a paradoxical effect on coffee quality in the United States. Due to lower prices and better education, consumers were developing an appreciation for the finer coffees of the world, such as Colombians and Kenyans. They also took greater care to avoid stale beans, utilize a proper grind, and brew by drip or vacuum pot. At the same time, fierce competition caused many roasters to cut corners in order to lower costs. They made their low-end blends with inferior beans, and after roasting intentionally added back the chaff to the grind.
Hammering the Chains
Jewel Tea, A & P, and other chains were thriving. Due to Jewel’s direct home delivery, promoted through advanced premiums that kept customers hooked, the firm rarely advertised other than through Jewel News, its newsletter. The company couldn’t resist bragging in the Chicago papers when the Depression-era popularity of negative ads reached its peak. “We have never joined the Coffee Knockers Circus,” Jewel piously advised readers. “Frankly, we don’t know of any coffee so poor that it will make a man desert his family, horsewhip his wife, or shoot his stenographer.” But of course Jewel Coffee “will give you a new idea of just how good a cup of coffee can be.”
Jewel had its share of troubles in the early 1930s, when retailers and roasters lobbied for local ordinances to keep the wagon men from stealing their coffee business. The first legislation banning out-of-town solicitation was passed in Green River, Wyoming, and such laws subsequently came to be known collectively as Green River Ordinances. To get around them, the company arranged for customers to “invite” Jewel men into their homes. At the same time, fearing that the wagon routes might have to be abandoned, company president Maurice Karker diversified in 1932 by purchasing seventy-seven Loblaw stores in the Chicago area, along with four others from another chain. The company added more outlets to the newly named Jewel Tea chain of retail stores over the years.
As it turned out, Jewel successfully fought the ordinances in court, and national legislation never materialized. The company added branches in San Antonio, Houston, and Sacramento. By 1936 Jewel operated a fleet of 1,500 delivery vehicles serving over a million customers in 6,000 U.S. communities. The wagon men appeared every two weeks, always at the same time on the same day of the week.
“Why worry about the competition of advertised brands,” a Jewel executive told the wagon men, “when one can prove to his customer that she pays for the advertising—which goes into her waste basket; she pays for the can—which goes into her alley; she pays for the aroma—which goes into the air?” Instead, he asserted, Jewel offered fresh coffee for the same price and threw in a useful premium as well.
The most serious competitor to Maxwell House and Chase & Sanborn was still A & P, whose brands accounted for 15 percent of all U.S. coffee consumption. A & P sold three brands of coffee, Eight O’Clock, Red Circle, and Bokar, increasing in quality in that order. Bokar offered a truly superior cup, “vigorous and winey,” composed only of high-grown milds. Whole roasted beans were “ground before your eyes,” as an ad asserted, right in the store. Moreover, all the A & P brands sold for 12 to 20 cents less per pound than most competitors. The company sponsored the fifteen-minute Coffee Time, featuring Kate Smith belting out her hits three times a week, and advertised in local papers. The firm’s entire $6 million annual advertising outlay was paid by kickback “advertising allowances” from other national brands. In fact, the firm didn’t need much promotion beyond its own stores and low prices.
In 1929 company sales had topped $1 billion dollars for the first time, and A & P was sitting on nearly $41 million in cash and government bonds. During the worst years of the Depression, from 1929 through 1932, A & P earned over $100 million in after-tax profits.
The Hartford brothers nevertheless watched with concern as their sales slipped by the mid-thirties, challenged by the rise of the supermarket. In 1930 Michael Cullen, a former A & P executive, opened a gigantic food store in Jamaica, Long Island, calling it King Kullen, the Price Wrecker. In 1933 the Big Bear Supermarket chain opened in an abandoned five-story factory building, offering at-cost groceries to attract shoppers to the other departments, such as a bakery, delicatessen, auto parts shop, shoe repair, and barber. Other grocery outfits quickly followed suit, including the Streamline markets of Pittsburgh.
These new supermarkets challenged A & P, Kroger, and Safeway chains. Whereas the older chains had offered discount goods without home delivery, the supermarkets slashed prices even further by giving shoppers baskets to pick their own purchases off shelves. They also offered free parking to the automobile-driving public. In 1936, with company sales dropping to $800 million, John Hartford of A & P finally convinced his conservative brother, George, to begin closing smaller, unprofitable stores while opening 100 new, big self-serve supermarkets. By 1938 the company had opened over 1,100 supermarkets, each designed to snare at least a 25 percent market share in its area, while the total number of stores had been whittled from nearly 16,000 to 10,800.
The real challenge to A & P and other grocery chains came from a different direction, however. The surge of chain store growth in the 1920s and 1930s brought protests from independent grocers and druggists. One Indiana legislator thundered that the chain stores were “sapping the life-blood of prosperous communities and leaving about as much in return as a travelling band of gypsies.” A Montana senator prophesied that “this nation will soon be converted into a plutocracy where a few supremely rich men will rule.” Anti-chain store legislation proliferated on the state level after 1931, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that special taxes against chains were constitutional. Thirteen states enacted such legislation in 1933 alone.
While the Roaring Twenties had crowned the American businessman king, the Great Depression dethroned him. A vociferous new consumer movement surfaced. In 1933, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs became a best seller. “In spite of the loud cries of rage and pain from small merchants,” the authors wrote, “no action is taken to block the gradual displacement by A & P and Woolworth and other chain stores, of small retailers in America.” Business Week, certainly pro-business, observed in the mid-1930s that “six years of abnormality have shaken the national admiration for bigness, both in men and in corporations.”
To combat this anti-big business movement, the chains and department stores formed the American Retail Federation in 1935 under the direction of a former Kroger executive. The new association backfired when it was labeled a “superlobby” for the chains, and a congressional investigation subsequently looked into chain store operations. Committee chairman Wright Patman of Texas launched a personal anti-chain crusade that would last for three decades. In an address to the Associated Coffee Industries of America, Patman called the chains “an unholy alliance of tremendous concentrated wealth and enormous influence.”
Patman’s congressional investigation uncovered the inner workings of A & P, which admitted to receiving $8 million annually in so-called advertising allowances and brokerage fees. To ensure their products received prime shelf space, General Foods paid a total of $360,000 a year to A & P, without specifying how much applied to Maxwell House. Standard Brands paid nearly $100,000 annually for Chase & Sanborn’s advertising allowance. The testimony revealed that A & P extracted an extra 5 percent discount on top of the bulk discounts they already received.67
The Robinson-Patman Act, intended to eliminate such advertising allowances and other “discriminatory” price breaks for the chains, became law in 1936, though it proved difficult to interpret. John Hartford’s lawyers told him that the Robinson-Patman Act was so vaguely worded that he could safely resume demanding advertising allowances and brokerage fees. He did. In addition, he began to feature A & P’s own brands of coffee and bread more prominently in advertisements. In 1937 the company published Woman’s Day, a new monthly magazine that charged over $1,000 a page for a Maxwell House ad.
As a result of lobbying from small businessmen and the Anti-Monopoly League, in 1935 the California legislature passed an anti-chain act. The only way to avoid its implementation was to invoke a state referendum, which required over 115,000 signatures on a petition, or 5 percent of the voters. The chains banded together and hired the advertising firm Lord & Thomas. Through radio programs, newspaper ads, booklets, posters, speeches, and essay contests, they spread the message that Proposition 22, the chain store tax, would increase food prices. The catchy slogan, “22 Is a Tax on You!” became the battle cry. As a result, the tax was defeated in 1936 by a narrow margin.
Wright Patman sponsored even harsher federal anti-chain legislation in 1938. His bill proposed a progressive tax that for A & P would have totaled $471 million, dwarfing the company’s earnings for the year, which were barely over $9 million. It truly was a “Death Sentence Bill,” as the media promptly dubbed it. Patman campaigned hard for his tax, attacking the fortune amassed by brothers John and George Hartford.
The Hartfords struck back by hiring public relations counsel Carl Byoir and his firm. In 1939 A & P ran “A Statement of Public Policy,” a two-page advertisement, in 1,300 papers. George and John Hartford could “retire without personal or financial inconvenience and live very comfortably if chain stores were put out of business,” the lengthy ad explained. But 85,000 A & P employees would lose their jobs. Consumers would be denied prices 25 percent lower than the average individual grocer offered. Such a loss would mean that “in millions of homes they would have to leave meat off the table another day a week,” not to mention more expensive coffee. In addition, 8 million farm families would be harmed, since 30 percent of their produce was sold through chain groceries.
The campaign succeeded. Carl Byoir organized A & P-funded false front organizations, such as the National Consumers Tax Commission and Business Property Owners. During congressional hearings, the public relations men orchestrated an impressive parade of 150 witnesses—farmers, manufacturers, organized labor, marketing authorities, consumers—to testify in favor of the chains. Patman’s bill died in 1940.
The European Coffee Scene
During the 1920s and 1930s the European coffee industry developed along parallel lines to that in the United States, but with far less centralization, hype, or price wars. Northern European consumers in general (in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland) drank more coffee per capita than their American counterparts and demanded higher quality. The French, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish enjoyed darker roasts that hid some of the bitter-tasting robustas they now added to the arabica beans. The farther south, the darker the roast tended to be, so that southern Italians nearly turned their beans to charcoal, while northern Italians enjoyed a moderate roast. Throughout most of Europe, the superior drip method predominated. Many housewives still roasted green beans at home.
In Italy and to a lesser degree in France the new espresso (“made on the spur of the moment”) method increased in popularity during the thirties. Made by forcing hot water under high pressure through very fine grounds, espresso coffee, which takes less than thirty seconds to brew properly, is dark, rich, complex, concentrated, and satiny, with a rich hazel-colored crema on top and an overwhelming aroma.
In 1901 an Italian named Luigi Bezzera invented the first commercial espresso machine, an imposing, gorgeous, complicated affair with assorted spigots, handles, and gauges, all topped with a resplendent eagle.68 Desiderio Pavoni bought the Bezzera patent, and along with other Italian inventors such as Teresio Arduino, soon produced steam pressure machines capable of spurting out 1,000 cups of espresso in an hour. By the 1930s these had spread to cafés all over Europe and to Italian restaurants in the United States. One of the advantages of this quick, concentrated brew was that it hid all manner of inferior beans; in fact, cheap robusta blends made a richer crema.
In sidewalk cafés, fine restaurants, smoky subterranean coffeehouses, dining rooms, and kitchens, Continentals enjoyed their coffee—either black or with varying amounts of milk, whipped cream, spices, sugar, or alcohol. From Vienna to Amsterdam, they frequented their favorite coffeehouse to read the paper, play chess, or simply observe life over the rim of a coffee cup.
Thousands of regional family roasters, many going back generations, supplied the European coffee thirst, but none were owned by conglomerates as in the United States. A few were carving out large market shares, however. The Norwegian roaster B. Friele & Sons, founded in 1800, opened a seven-story plant in 1938 in Bergen, featuring electric roasters and other modern refinements. The Dutch coffee firm Douwe Egberts had been in the same family since 1753. In 1853 young Victor Theodor Engwall began selling green coffee beans door to door in Gävle, Sweden, eventually founding the roasting firm Gevalia, purveyors of coffee to the royal family. In Finland, Gustav Paulig established Finland’s first roasting plant at the turn of the twentieth century.
In Germany, Johann Jacobs had opened a small coffee shop in 1895, then began roasting his own coffee. In 1930 his nephew, Walther Jacobs, joined the firm, fresh from the United States, where he had learned the value of advertising. With aggressive salesmanship, slick packaging, and slogans such as “Jacobs Coffee—Satisfaction Down to the Last Bean,” the company expanded during Hitler’s Third Reich. Many Italian firms also boasted a long history, such as Caffé Vergnano, founded in 1882, or Lavazza, begun in Turin in 1895. Founder Luigi Lavazza retired in 1936, but his sons carried on the family business.
Other firms had begun more recently. In 1933 Francesco Illy started illycaffé in Trieste (the lowercase “i” is correct). He invented an improved espresso machine two years later that did not use steam to push water through the grounds, thus preventing overextraction. He also created an arabica-only espresso blend packaged under pressure with inert gases.69
In 1924 in Bremen, Germany—already the home of Jacobs Kaffee—Eduard Schopf created Eduscho (a combination of his first and last names) as a mail-order house—the only way at the time to achieve national distribution. By the end of the 1930s, Eduscho was the largest roaster in Germany.
European coffee firms feared for their businesses as war appeared more and more likely. In 1938, as part of a program to limit imports in preparation for war, Hitler ordered the cessation of all coffee advertising. In January 1939 German coffee imports were reduced by 40 percent, and just before the war began, the Nazi party confiscated the country’s entire coffee stocks for use by the military.
At the end of the 1930s, a long-established European firm entered the world of coffee. In 1867 Henri Nestlé, a German chemist who had settled in Vevey, Switzerland, had invented an infant feeding formula for women who couldn’t nurse. By 1900 he had set up production facilities in several countries, including the United States, where he also made condensed milk. During the next thirty years the international beverage company added chocolate and confectionary products, while establishing factories and purchasing subsidiaries around the globe.
In 1938, after eight years of experimentation, Nestlé launched Nescafé, an improved powdered instant coffee destined to revolutionize the way many consumers around the world drank their coffee. Rather than using the drum method, in which brewed coffee was boiled down to crystals, Nestlé sprayed the liquid into heated towers, where the droplets turned to powder almost instantly. The manufacturers also added an equal amount of carbohydrates (dextrin, dextrose, and maltose), which they believed helped maintain flavor. The next year the company began marketing Nescafé in the United States.
The World of the Future
As the 1930s and the Depression came to an end, the United States looked toward the future with much greater optimism than either Latin America or Europe. Now in his third term, Franklin Roosevelt represented stability and confidence as he opened the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
At the fair, Standard Brands had built the world’s longest coffee bar to serve Chase & Sanborn, made from beans roasted and ground in a miniature demonstration plant nearby. In an open-air theater, visitors could laugh while Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy put on a live show, taking care to plug Chase & Sanborn appropriately. “New swing bands at World’s Fair are phenomenally popular; can’t swing it too fast for the jitterbugs,” an ad declared, illustrated by a girl flung high in the air by her partner. “Chase & Sanborn are popular, too, for thrilling, fast delivery.” August 31 was set aside as Coffee Day at the fair.
At the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, Hills Brothers opened the Coffee Exposition Theater, where they showed their promotional film, Behind the Cup, and where tourists could sip coffee while viewing colorful murals depicting scenes from Hills Brothers’ history. The company’s ads tied in with the event. “To a Woman, Every Day is EXPOSITION Day,” the headlines read. “Where is the woman who doesn’t take a quick glance at every mirror she passes—to ‘check-up’ and make sure she is looking her best?” asked the copy, while the illustration showed a woman checking herself out. “Is your coffee always at its best?”70
In 1939 a major national advertising campaign—funded by six Latin American countries that had formed the Pan American Coffee Bureau—spent $35,000 to encourage summer iced-coffee consumption.71 They even crowned a buxom swimsuited Miss Iced Coffee. They sponsored a fall-winter marketing campaign, reaching 25 million families through newspapers and magazines, offering true-false quizzes such as “Coffee Makes Physical Work Easier” (True) and “Coffee Makes Your Brain Work Better” (True). The bureau also published Coffee Facts and Fantasies, a booklet to combat the “health fetish” that branded coffee a drug. It reported on an experiment conducted at the University of Chicago in which two groups of college students were given coffee and milk, respectively. The coffee group complained of disturbed sleep, while the milk group did not. The students did not know, however, that the coffee was decaffeinated, while caffeine had been added to the milk. Thus, concluded the booklet, their reaction was psychological rather than physiological.
G. Washington advertised its availability on Eastern Air Transport flights: “Every Cup a Masterpiece Aboard These Giant 18-Passenger Planes”—and all in only three seconds to stir the instant brown crystals. Not to be outdone, Pan American Airways conducted a much-publicized “scientific experiment” to demonstrate that its drip coffee was satisfactory.
The American Can Company, which produced most of the vacuum cans for the nation’s coffee, created its own Bureau of Home Economics, designed to indoctrinate schoolchildren into the wonders of coffee. The company paid the famed photographer Margaret Bourke-White to spend a month in Brazil taking photographs of coffee cultivation and harvesting, then sent out educational coffee packets to over 700,000 students.72 The schools were delighted to get the free material as long as it didn’t come directly from a coffee company. As a result, thousands of elementary schoolchildren penned coffee anthems and poems, such as the following effort from a young student who must have observed her parents:
It’s a pick-me-up at breakfast,
It’s a stimulant at night.
If you ever miss your coffee,
You’ll sure be apt to fight.
National surveys revealed that 98 percent of the families in the United States drank coffee, with 15 percent of children between six and sixteen years old partaking, and 4 percent of those under age six. The A & P brands held the lead with 15 percent of the market, while Maxwell House and Chase & Sanborn had snared 13 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The rest of the market was split among some 5,000 other brands, all of which had managed to survive the Depression. Annual U.S. coffee consumption finally had topped fourteen pounds per capita. Seeking an explanation, a Time reporter felt that “high-pressure advertising plus cheap retail prices” had helped, along with “the nervous national tempo.” He also surmised that “when depression nips an average man’s buying power, he finds a 5¢ cup of coffee a sort of emotional ersatz for more expensive things.”
To cap off the self-congratulatory year of 1939, grocers displayed a “Parade of Progress” of national brands, with coffee leading the list. In all this jitterbugging, promotional, bigger-and-better hubbub, the caffeinated nation paid scant attention to the gathering war clouds. The American coffee men were more concerned that Mussolini had declared war against coffee as an unhealthy drink. “Granting that the Nazis and the Fascisti are developing a race of supermen,” an editorial in the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal stated, “the sure way to make them invincible, in the last analysis, is to feed them coffee in constantly increasing quantities and not to deny them the one drink that has ever been the indispensable beverage of strong nations.”