For God, Country and Coca Cola.

• Author: Reed, John Shelton

"Southerners need carbonation," according to a character in one of Nancy Lemann's novels. Certainly the South's hot climate, its religious strictures on alcohol, and perhaps a regional tendency to hypochondria combined in the late nineteenth century to make it the principal font of the modem soft drink, and for whatever reason, Southerners still lead the nation in soda pop consumption. In one recent year, North Carolina's per capita consumption was 55.4 gallons--enough, I'm told, to leach the calcium from many Tar Heel bones and make stress fractures a minor public health problem.

Like Carolina's Pepsi and Texas' Dr Pepper, Georgia's Coca-Cola began as a patent medicine. John Pemberton, a Confederate veteran who had moved to Atlanta to seek his fortune, was one of many Southern pharmacists who saw the commercial opportunities offered by the newly popular soda fountain in a region characterized by widespread "neurasthenia" among Southern ladies (who were supposed to be high-strung) and depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction among Confederate veterans (Pemberton himself was a morphine addict). When Atlanta went dry in 1886, Pemberton was ready with a "temperance drink" he called Coca-Cola, after the coca leaf and the kola nut used in its production. Yes, despite what the guides at Coke's new Atlanta museum have been told to say and the company president's insistence in a 1959 statement that Coca-Cola was a "meaningless but fanciful and alliterative name," the real Classic Coke did contain cocaine.

By 1902, however, the dope had been removed because of pressure from clergy and public opinion alarmed by the spectre of Negro coke fiends. By then the marketing genius of Frank Robinson, a native of Maine and a Union army veteran, had transformed the product from a nostrum to a soft drink, and this Southern gift to civilization soon escaped its native habitat. Fifty years after its invention, Coca-Cola had become as much of a symbol of America as the Statue of Liberty, "a sublimated essence of all that America stands for," in the words of journalist William Allen White. By its centenary, Coke had transcended mere nationality, and its advertising was teaching the world to sing in over 135 countries and over 60 languages. Today, three-quarters of the company's profits come from overseas sales, and Iceland (of all places) leads the world in per capita consumption. In its first 50 years, the company sold nearly a billion gallons of syrup; in the...