Coca-Cola and the New South

May eighth, eighteen eighty-six. A pharmacist named John Stith Pemberton walked a jug of caramel-colored syrup down to Jacob's Pharmacy on Peachtree Street in Atlanta and asked the soda fountain operator to mix it with carbonated water. The resulting drink sold only a handful of servings a day at first. Pemberton, who had been wounded in the Civil War and became dependent on morphine, had been trying for years to create a profitable medicinal tonic. He thought he had made another one.

He had actually made a beverage that would become the most recognized commercial product in the history of the world. Pemberton sold the formula before he understood what he had. Asa Griggs Candler, an Atlanta businessman, bought out the various ownership shares, incorporated the Coca-Cola Company in eighteen ninety-two, and began a marketing campaign of almost evangelical intensity, distributing free coupons for drinks across the South and beyond. By the early twentieth century, Coca-Cola was everywhere.

The company's rise was inseparable from Atlanta's rise. The profits funded hospitals, universities, museums, and arts institutions across the state. Asa Candler's gift of land helped Emory University move to its Druid Hills campus. The Woodruff family, Robert Woodruff served as president for more than thirty years and shaped the company's direction for decades beyond that, contributed to virtually every major civic institution in Atlanta, and when Martin Luther King Junior received the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen sixty-four, it was Robert Woodruff who quietly helped organize the integrated dinner in his honor that Atlanta's business community had initially resisted.

Atlanta became the capital of the New South partly because of geography, partly because of the railroad, and partly because a jug of brown syrup sold well on Peachtree Street on a warm spring afternoon.