Coca-Cola Series

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola by Mark Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts

In order to thrive inside Nazi Germany, its Coca-Cola franchises had waged a rigorous campaign to disassociate themselves from their American roots. While the soft drink came to symbolize American freedom, the same Coca-Cola logo rested comfortably next to the swastika. The drama of German Coke’s survival before, during, and after World War II swirls around one central figure – Max Keith, at once the quintessential Coca-Cola man and Nazi collaborator.

The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin marked a moment of triumph for Max Keith, who provided enormous quantities of Coca-Cola for athletes and visitors. As young men goose-stepped in formation at Hitler Youth rallies, Coca-Cola trucks accompanied the marchers, hoping to capture the next generation.

Goring and Goebbels hosted elaborate parties for foreign guests, most of whom were suitably impressed by what they saw. One of those guests was Robert Woodruff, who had brought over an entire Coca-Cola entourage. Woodruff belonged to network of corporate executives, many of whom were worried about their German subsidiaries and interests. With was clouds darkening, these titans of American industry quietly maneuvered to protect themselves against all contingencies. Some, like Henry Ford, were in fact Nazi sympathizers, while others, such as Walter Teagle of Standard Oil, avoided taking sides but saw nothing wrong with doing business with the Nazis. Like his friend and hunting companion Teagle, Woodruff practiced expediency. His politics were Coca-Cola, pure and simple.

In March of 1938, as Hitler’s troops stormed across the Austrian border.  Far from expressing horror at Nazi aggression, Keith and his men swiftly followed the troops into Austria, establishing a Vienna branch in September. And as the Allied forces pushed the Germans back toward Berlin, the Coca-Cola men surged into Germany along with their bottling plants, refurbishing European mineral water operations and continuing to serve the troops their favorite beverage.

And therein lies the true beauty of capitalism. The Coca-Cola religion has no real morality, no commandment other than increased consumption of its drink. Consequently, it has been perfectly willing to co-exist with Hitler, bejeweled Maharajas, impoverished migrant workers, malnourished Africans, Guatemalan death squads, clear-cut Belizean rainforests, or repressive Chinese.  Unlike most world governments, however, the Coca-Cola Company eventually acts out of enlightened self-interest. Because it values its squeaky-clean image above all else, it reacts far more quickly to bad publicity than any potentate.

Whenever you hear "Have a Coke," you hear the voice of America.

[1945 Coca-Cola Advertising Slogan]

Coca-Cola at War on Both Sides

While touring the Dusseldorf fair, Hermann goring paused for a Coke, and an alert Company photographer snapped a picture. [Find the photo, post it]

Billboard Series

Buyways by Catherine Gudis, 2004, Excerpts

For Lyndon Johnson, the decision to fight for highway beautification was not sympathy for the cause, but love for his wife, Lady Bird. Even as he hit brick walls in Congress, Johnson persisted, telling his staff, “You know I love that woman and she wants that Highway Beautification Act. By God, we’re going to get it for her.” Attention to beauty, no matter what the burly Texan in the White House said, was woman’s work and the highway beautification act was “Lady Bird’s Bill,” “a frivolous frill, and woman’s whim,” as some senators took to calling it.

Journalists loved to report – often sarcastically – on Lady Bird’s affection for flowers and her belief in the power of beauty to uplift even the economically depressed, as if she was the leader of the garden club armies that were championing beautification. However, the women of the roadside councils and garden clubs, despite their field of experience, were offered no role in helping to shape legislation and had scant contact with members of the administration. The roadside reformers were never invited into the inner sanctum of the White House, and for good reason. The seats there were already filled by the competition, the lawyers and lobbyists of the billboard industry.

What finally passed as the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 could hardly be called a victory for the roadside beautifiers. The act called for controls on federally funded primary and interstate highways, restricting billboards to within 600 feet of highways but permitting them in areas zoned commercial and industrial. The billboard brethren achieved, essentially, what they had been proposing for forty years.

Even federal standards for the size and height of billboards had been left to the billboard industry to decide. Sure enough, the maximum size finally specified was twelve hundred square feet; no height restrictions were included. The absence of height restrictions left open to the industry a huge now species of billboard, the monopole. Monster billboards resting atop a single galvanized steel pole whose height “was limited only by the law of physics” had begun popping up across the country.

As a result of the zoning allowances, many people besides roadside reformers declared the Highway Beautification Act to be a failure. The act actually recognized the outdoor advertising industry as a “legitimate business use of land.” It also helped put the outdoor advertising industry in the hands of fewer and bigger companies, sounding a death knell for small-scale, rural billposting businesses and sign companies.

Billboard Series

Buyways by Catherine Gudis, 2004, Excerpts

Opposition to outdoor advertising began in the late-nineteenth-century urban arena and then stretched into the countryside along with cars, highways, and national advertising campaigns. By the 1920s and 1930s, resistance to outdoor advertising became a national battle over aesthetic rights to the roadside environment.

If the roadside vista was public space and thereby open to democratic access, then billboards comprised both a physical and a conceptual blight. They blocked the view from the road, that was obvious enough, but they also blocked the notion that the American landscape was held commonly, without property borders and free to all. By placing images if commodities in the midst of this landscape, advertising interrupted the ideal conception of the imperial eye that this landscape was somehow owned by all, and reminded motorists that not they, the people, but rather the market was in possession of even the most remote American vista.

Exploitation by advertisers was often cast in the most dire medical terms. Threatening to deform and disfigure the entire countryside, the “landscape leprosy” or “billboard rash” was “rapidly becoming virulent and infectious.” The commercial contagion had spread out of control and threatened to overtake a civic body whose good health and spiritual rejuvenation relied upon a natural order now corrupted. And what corrupted the civic body would also affect the civic mind.

General Federation of Women’s Clubs [GFWC] and Billboards

Roadside reformer’s, drawn from the ranks of women’s clubs, garden clubs, and other civic associations, set out to rid the public highways of the signs of commerce [General Federation of Women’s Clubs GFWC]. Outdoor advertisers comprised their foe, men who asserted their private commercial right to broadcast across public space. The billboard war thus emerged as a struggle as much over the public roles of women and men as it was over the shape and appearance of the road and he roadside.

A woman emerged from this club scene of activism who would come to dominate the arena of roadside reform for forty years until her death in 1952. A graduate of Vassar College, Elizabeth Boyd Lawton dedicated her life to obliterating “billboard blight.” Her epiphany was as sudden as it was visceral. While she established a base of grassroots consumer activism and welded “a chain of community interest,” the real core of her activity was aimed toward the men’s realm – the legislature. Her true purpose was to induce zoning restrictions, taxation, and other regulations that limited outdoor advertising.

Billboard Series

Buyways by Catherine Gudis, 2004, Excerpts

As motoring speeds increased, from 35 mph in the mid 1920s, to 45 mph and 55 mph in the 1930s, just how to communicate with moving audiences became a pressing question. Just as the text-heavy billboard of the nineteenth century had slowly given way to pictorially based posters in the twentieth century, so did the complicated and ornate scenes that featured panoramic landscapes, history, and pastoralism progressively give way to more simplified, abstract, and streamlined means of representing and selling the lessons of mobility.

To accomplish this, an aesthetics of speed was required that could deliver messages yielding unblinking recognition. This set of aesthetic practices, which incorporated what we today consider logos. Advertisers wished to make superficial correspondences graspable without requiring focus, without calling upon the conscious reasoning powers of their audiences. An image, a logo, and few words were the ideal forms of communicating to mobile audiences in a state of distraction.

By flattening and reducing the number of forms employed in the advertisement, these techniques offered ways in which meaning might be left open. With the logo as the tool of communication, greater numbers of products and advertisements can be distributed without loss in legibility. As time wears on, readership may recognize with greater speed the even slighter variations, especially notable when viewed with less time and attention. These aesthetics of speed and powers of pictualization were strategies by which outdoor advertisers could both represent and induce mobility.

Figure of 5 in Gold - 1928: Artist Charles Demuth 1883-1935]