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By Bart Elmore

In the 1960s, Coca-Cola had a cocaine problem. This might seem odd, since the company removed cocaine from its formula around 1903, bowing to Jim Crow fears that the drug was contributing to black crime in the South. But even though Coke went cocaine-free in the Progressive Era, it continued to purchase coca leaves from Peru, removing the cocaine from the leaves but keeping what was left over as a flavoring extract. By the end of the twentieth century it was the single largest purchaser of legally imported coca leaves in the United States.

Yet, in the 1960s, Coke feared that an international counternarcotics crackdown on cocaine would jeopardize their secret trade with Peruvian cocaleros, so they did a smart thing: they began growing coca in the United States. With the help of the US government, a New Jersey chemical firm, and the University of Hawaii, Coca-Cola launched a covert coca operation on the island of Kauai. In 1965, growers in the Pacific paradise reported over 100 shrubs in cultivation.

How did this bizarre Hawaiian coca operation come to be? How, in short, did Coca-Cola become the only legal buyer of coca produced on US soil? The answer, I discovered, had to do with the company’s secret formula: not it’s unique recipe, but its peculiar business strategy for making money—what I call Coca-Cola capitalism.

What made Coke one of the most profitable firms of the twentieth century was its deftness in forming partnerships with private and public sector partners that helped the company acquire raw materials it needed at low cost. Coca-Cola was never really in the business of making stuff; it simply positioned itself as a kind of commodity broker, channeling ecological capital between producers and distributors, generating profits off the transaction. It thrived by making friends, both in government and in the private sector, friends that built the physical infrastructure and technological systems that produced and transported the cheap commodities needed for mass-marketing growth.

In the case of coca leaf, Coca-Cola had the Stepan chemical company of Maywood, New Jersey, which was responsible for handling Coke’s coca trade and “decocainizing” leaves used for flavoring extract (the leftover cocaine was ultimately sold to pharmaceutical firms for medicinal purposes). What Coke liked about its relationship with Stepan was that it kept the soft drink firm out of the limelight, obfuscating its connection to a pesky and tabooed narcotics trade.

But Stepan was just part of the procurement puzzle. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) also played a pivotal role in this trade. Besides helping to pilot a Hawaiian coca farm, the US counternarcotics agency negotiated deals with the Peruvian government to ensure that Coke maintained access to coca supplies. The FBN and its successor agencies did this even while initiating coca eradication programs, tearing up shrubs in certain parts of the Andes in an attempt to cut off cocaine supply channels. By the 1960s, coca was becoming an enemy of the state, but only if it was not destined for Coke.

In short, Coca-Cola—a company many today consider a paragon of free-market capitalism—relied on the federal government to get what it wanted.

An old Coca-Cola bottling plant showing some of the municipal pipes that these bottlers tapped into. Courtesy of Bart Elmore.

Coke’s public partnerships extended to other ingredients. Take water, for example. For decades, the Coca-Cola Company relied on hundreds of independently owned bottlers (over 1,000 in 1920 alone) to market its products to consumers. Most of these bottlers simply tapped into the tap to satiate Coke’s corporate thirst, connecting company piping to established public water systems that were in large part built and maintained by municipal governments.

The story was much the same for packaging materials. Beginning in the 1980s, Coca-Cola benefited substantially from the development of curbside recycling systems paid for by taxpayers. Corporations welcomed the government handout, because it allowed them to expand their packaging production without taking on more costs. For years, environmental activists had called on beverage companies to clean up their waste. In fact, in 1970, 22 US congressmen supported a bill that would have banned the sale of nonreturnable beverage containers in the United States. But Congress, urged on by corporate lobbyists, abandoned the plan in favor of recycling programs paid for by the public. In the end, Coke and its industry partners were direct beneficiaries of the intervention, utilizing scrap metal and recycled plastic that was conveniently brought to them courtesy of municipal reclamation programs.

In all these interwoven ingredient stories there was one common thread: Coke’s commitment to outsourcing and franchising. The company consistently sought a lean corporate structure, eschewing vertical integration whenever possible. All it did was sell a concentrated syrup of repackaged cheap commodities. It did not own sugar plantations in Cuba (as the Hershey Chocolate Company did), coca farms in Peru, or caffeine processing plants in New Jersey, and by not owning these assets, the company remained nimble throughout its corporate life. It found creative ways to tap into pipes, plantations, and plants managed by governments and other businesses.

In the end, Coca-Cola realized that it could do more by doing less, extending its corporate reach, both on the frontend and backend of its business, by letting other firms and independent bottlers take on the risky and sometimes unprofitable tasks of producing cheap commodities and transporting them to consumers.

This strategy for doing business I have called Coca-Cola capitalism, so-named because Coke modeled it particularly well, but there were many other businesses, in fact some of the most profitable of our time, that followed similar paths to big profits. Software firms, for example, which sell a kind of information concentrate, have made big bucks by outsourcing raw material procurement responsibilities. Fast food chains, internet businesses, and securities firms—titans of twenty-first century business—have all demonstrated similar proclivities towards the Coke model of doing business.

Thus, as we look to the future, we would do well to examine why Coca-Cola capitalism has become so popular in the past several decades. Scholars have begun to debate the causes of a recent trend toward vertical disintegration, and while there are undoubtedly many causes for this shift, it seems ecological realities need to be further investigated. After all, one of the reasons Coke chose not to own commodity production businesses was because they were both economically and ecologically unsustainable over the long term. Might other firms divestment from productive industries tied to the land be symptomatic of larger environmental problems associated with extending already stressed commodity networks? This is a question we must answer as we consider the prudence of expanding our current brand of corporate capitalism in the years ahead.

Bart Elmore is an assistant professor of global environmental history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of “Citizen Coke: An Environmental and Political History of the Coca-Cola Company” (available to read for free for a limited time) in Enterprise and Society. His forthcoming book, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism, is due out with W. W. Norton in November of 2014.

Enterprise & Society offers a forum for research on the historical relations between businesses and their larger political, cultural, institutional, social, and economic contexts. The journal aims to be truly international in scope. Studies focused on individual firms and industries and grounded in a broad historical framework are welcome, as are innovative applications of economic or management theories to business and its context.

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by Rudy Garcia

Last week, Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed California poet laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown. If this is confirmed by the California Senate, Herrera will become the first Chicano to ever receive this recognition.

You can go here to read about it, here to read more about him, and you can send him felicidades via E-mail to juan.herreraATucr.edu.

La Bloga can only say: Era tiempo!


Last Call for Ice Cream?

Not as significant as Herrrera's achivement, this zany story of mine was accepted by Rudy Rucker (of cyberpunk fame) for his Ezine Flurb #13. You can access a copy for FREE to see what at least one Chicano is doing to widen our presence in the spec fiction world. You can get Flurb #13 as an ebook that can be read on any e-reading device---Kindles, iPhones, Androids, NOOKs, Windows laptops, iPads, whatever. Mobi (for Kindle) and Epub (for the others) available for download at http://www.flurb.net/ebook/
Please leave comments there.


Chicano summer arts camp

Denver's Museo de las Americas is proud to present the 2012 summer camp program, "Animales." Students will have the opportunity to discover the wild world of animals through this multidisciplinary summer arts camp.

For three consecutive weeks, participants will immerse themselves in visual arts, dance, music, and theater classes to better understand the bond between animals, humans, and the environment. Each class is conducted by a trained teacher who is committed to advancing the students' understanding of animals through arts integration techniques and cultural competencies.

Dates: June 25th -July 13, 2012
July 4th: No Camp
July 13th: Final Performance

Hours: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm, snack provided
Ages: K through 6th grade
Cost: Scholarships available to DPS students on a first-come, first serve basis

If interested, contact Christina Gese, our Education Director at [email protected], (303) 571-4401, ext. 28, or in person at 861 Santa Fe Dr., Denver.

Space limited; request registration form today. Deadline May 1st, 2012.

Carole Boston Weatherford is the vibrant author of some of the best children’s books  exploring African-American history.  I met Carole a year ago after she flew up from North Carolina to come visit our school library. As a snowstorm barreled in that day, we had to change our schedule at the last minute. Carole mastered the situation with grace and verve, adjusting each of her three sessions to relate perfectly to the age group. She recited poems to the youngest; she had children participating by chanting, jingling bells and tapping a triangle. They left the library joyous and inspired.

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With the fourth and fifth-graders, she discussed Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins and presented a sensitive and nuanced look at Jim Crow as it still existed when she was a child in Baltimore. She showed a photograph of the park where she and her family were not allowed to go. The students were solemn and spellbound. Carole Boston Weatherford knows how to make history real to children.

One of my favorite read-alouds for Black History Month, is Freedom on the Menu (Dial, 2004), which works well with ages 6-10. Told from the point of view of eight-year-old Connie, the story takes readers to the Woolsworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Connie and her mother often stop there for a soda after shopping downtown. Connie would like to sit down and have a banana split instead, but can’t; only whites may sit at the counter.  “All over town signs told Mama and me where we could and couldn’t go,” Connie lamented. Lagarrigue’s somber, impressionistic paintings show the hateful Jim Crow signs that warp the community. Changes are in the air, though, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to town. Connie sees her older siblings become politically involved and join in the lunch counter sit-ins. As the protests spread through the South, laws change. Six months later, Connie gets to savor her banana split at the counter, and it tastes like so sweet — like freedom. The author’s note about the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins provides additional information that will help young people understand the Civil Rights movement. See Weatherford’s web site for lesson plans inspired by this exemplary picture book.

And don’t miss these treasures …

For older children:

The Beatitudes: From Slavery to Civil Rights. illus. by Tim Ladwig. Eerdmans, 2009. Ages 7-12. Anyone looking for a picture book to illustrate the role of faith in helping people survive and eventually overcome tragedy should take a look at this beautiful book. While the religious tone might be too heavy for some people, there is a place for a book that fosters faith in God and respect for all.

Birmingham, 1963. Wordsong, 2007.

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Today is the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous stand sit during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her daring refusal to move to the back of the bus was not a decision made lightly because she was simply “too tired.” “The only tired I was,” Parks wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), “was tired of giving in.” The following short biography of Parks comes from Darlene Clark Hine, editor of  Black Women in America.

Parks, Rosa (b. 4 February 1913 ; d. 24 October 2005 ), civil rights activist. From the moment her photograph was first published in newspapers across America, Parks, with her quiet dignity, has been a symbol for the civil rights movement in this country. Those who orchestrated the Montgomery bus boycott bypassed several other women to choose Parks as a representative of all the black women and men who were forced to live with Jim Crow laws and customs in the South, and she lived up to their expectations.

Early Life and Activism
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James McCauley , a carpenter, and Leona Edwards , a teacher. Her father migrated north to find work when Rosa was two years old and did not often communicate with the family after that. Her mother moved Rosa and a younger brother to Pine Level, Alabama, to be nearer her own parents and siblings. In Pine Level, Parks worked as a field hand, in addition to taking care of her grandparents while her mother worked, often as a teacher. Parks’s mother homeschooled her until she was eleven, then sent her to live with her aunt in Montgomery so that she could go to school. While attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, she did household chores for her aunt and also went out to do domestic work outside the home. She attended the Booker T. Washington High School but left before graduation to take care of her mother. Her experience in all these situations left her angry about the injustices in the world, and, when she was nineteen, she met Raymond Parks , a barber who was involved in the civil rights movement. On 19 December 1932 they were married.

The couple did not have children. With her husband’s encouragement, Parks completed her high school education, receiving a diploma in 1934 . From the beginning of their marriage, both were social activists. They worked to secure the release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white girls. Parks joined the Montgomery Voters League and worked to enfranchise African Americans in the community. During the 1940s she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and served as secretary of the branch from 1943 until 1956 . Edgar Daniel Nixon Jr. , organizer of the Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in Montgomery and head of the Progressive Democrats, was president of the local NAACP chapter.

Particularly good at working with young people, Parks helped train a group of NAACP youths to protest