Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick
In a century, the harvest in El Salvador had taken on a new meaning—picking and milling coffee bound for American cups—and its bounty had changed hands. —
In many ways, the textile business could not have been more different from coffee. Cloth was an unglamorous but steady trade, which did after all provide a basic necessity. Coffee by comparison was a high-wire act of agriculture and finance. The fragile and temperamental trees demanded years of hard labor and delicate tending before giving a real harvest.
Three hundred years ago, coffee was cultivated commercially in only one place, Yemen, its supply controlled by a small group of merchants. Today it is a cash crop for more than twenty-five million people in over seventy countries.
Two hundred years ago, coffee was a luxury for society’s privileged classes, enjoyed in coffeehouses that were centers of ideas, conversation, art, politics, and culture. Today it is the unrivaled work drug, filling billions of cups around the world each day and consumed by nearly two-thirds of Americans.
A hundred years ago, planters in Latin America and merchants in the United States concerned about the consequences of low coffee prices began to try to teach American coffee drinkers about conditions on plantations and why they mattered. Today coffee is by far the leading “fair trade” product, the commodity we use more than any other to think about how the world economy works and what to do about it.
Between 1850 and 1914, world trade increased by 1,000 percent—“the world had never seen such a dizzying creation of wealth.”32 Yet the income gap between people who lived in regions with temperate climates and industrial economies and those who lived in regions with tropical climates and agricultural economies widened in step with increasing global connection.
The division of the world into rich and poor paralleled the division of the world into coffee drinkers, overwhelmingly concentrated in the industrialized global north, and coffee workers, even more concentrated in the predominantly agricultural and perpetually “developing” global south.
Coffee is not just one of the most important commodities in the history of global capitalism, as is commonly claimed—it is one of the most important commodities in the history of global inequality.
What does it mean to be connected to faraway people and places through everyday things?
In 1554, two Syrians went into business together in their adopted hometown of Constantinople. Schems had come from Damascus, Hekim from Aleppo. Amid the stalls of the busy market district near the Bosporus, they opened a coffee shop, the city’s first. The shop was furnished “with very neat Couches and Carpets,” and it became known as an upstanding social place, “very proper to make acquaintances in.” Many of the patrons were students and other “studious Persons,” unemployed professionals searching for jobs, “Lovers of Chess,” and professors. 1At that point, coffee had entered the written historical record about fifty years earlier.
Coffee is native to Ethiopia, where the first commercial harvests were gathered from wild plants in the fifteenth century. Early cultivation took place on terraced hillsides in sixteenth-century Yemen, while consumption spread across the Arabian Peninsula and around the Mediterranean through trade and war. A coffeehouse was often one of the first things Ottoman emperors built upon conquering a new city, “to demonstrate the civility of their rule.”
According to many etymologies, the word “coffee” derives from the Arabic qahwah, meaning wine: coffee was “the wine of Islam,”
Viewed across this symbolic distance, the European discovery of coffee was also an encounter with a foreign body, and many early depictions of coffee drinking were inflected with suspicion and disgust.
The “Turkes berry drinke” became English, and then European, by way of the coffeehouse.
The first coffeehouse in London opened in the early 1650s, bankrolled by agents of the Levant Company who had acquired the taste for coffee while trading spices, wool, tin, and gunpowder in the East.
Nevertheless, coffee was catching on in London, and many of the new coffee shops opening around the city were more than market stalls. Offering ample seating and reading material, they became “penny universities,” open forums for the discussion of news and ideas.
Visiting London coffeehouses in 1660, diarist Samuel Pepys recorded talk of the weather, the sex lives of insects, and the proper distribution of wealth.
In June 1699, John Houghton, a druggist and commodity trader, gave a “Discourse of Coffee” before England’s most distinguished learned society, whose members often gathered in a coffeehouse called the Grecian.
Houghton dared not put forward an answer to the question of coffee’s effects on health and wakefulness, for he did not have what he judged to be a sound “Theory of Sleep.” But he did note that coffee had made “all sorts of People sociable” and so “improved useful knowledge very much.”
The species name of the plant Coffea arabica, native to Ethiopia, derives from the fact that Arab traders in Yemen, across the Red Sea from Ethiopia, dominated commercial coffee production during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the age in which Europeans gave plants Latin names.
The British were cultivating coffee in Jamaica by 1730, and the Spanish, whose preferences ran to cacao, established coffee in Cuba by 1748.
Coffee came to Latin America through empire and slavery, but it spread and flourished there through liberalism.
This overlap brought those who had the most hope for coffee into conflict with those who had long relied on the land to survive. Through this conflict, the problem of economic development was recast as a racial problem. Indians were labeled “backward” and blamed for the “evils” that had resulted in commercial stagnation.
and in the same period average world coffee prices climbed 50 percent. It was an open door for anyone who could make other people work coffee by any means other than slavery in any place other than Asia.
The Hills brothers called their new venture Hills Bros. Arabian Coffee & Spice Mills. Like most other American coffee businesses of the day, it was based on lies. The lies were built into the very name, and they were useful because they helped to fit an appealing version of coffee’s history with an appealing version of American history.
The coffee commerce with France was especially important. “It will be a strong link of connection,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “with the only nation on earth on whom we can solidly rely for assistance till we stand on our own legs.”
the upper reaches of American society, especially in coastal cities, where coffeehouse culture mirrored Europe’s, coffee drinking became notably common, perhaps even more so than in France itself. “Our supper was rather scanty, but our breakfast the next morning was better,” wrote a French traveler to Virginia in 1787. “We are perfectly reconciled to this American custom of drinking coffee.”7 Yet outside the elite, coffee was still too expensive to be an “American custom.”
The imperial aspirations of the young United States pushed the borders of the country across the continent and beyond. Unable to compete with richer and more powerful European empires for access to overseas markets and resources in Asia and Africa, the U.S. found a geographical advantage in the Western Hemisphere.
The first rations of George Washington’s Continental Army included no coffee—instead the troops drank cider or spruce beer. In contrast, during the Civil War, the average Union soldier consumed about thirty-six pounds of coffee beans each year, enough for perhaps five cups a day.13 The word “coffee” appears in Union diaries more often than “rifle” or “bullets.”14 After the Civil War, American coffee consumption continued to increase,
when the Hills brothers advertised on the front of the coffee bin in their store near the Embarcadero that their “Arabian Coffee” was “The Best in the World,” they could be fairly confident that they would get away with it. As the Chronicle pointed out, “The thousands of people who will only drink Java coffee and wish to purchase it as cheaply as that from other countries are considerately duped by the dealers, who know that not one coffee drinker in a hundred can tell the difference between Java, Costa Rica, Salvador, or East Indian brands.”
This simplicity complicated the mozo’s relation to the planter and his work plans. Because he could “find enough work to keep him alive almost anywhere,” the mozo moved incessantly from plantation to plantation, one week here, two weeks there, and gone again. Because he had so little to lose or gain, the mozo was “a ‘devil-may-care’ fellow” who would “laugh and talk instead of attending strictly to” the work in front of him, spend his wages getting drunk and gambling, take his losses out on his family, and make up the difference by stealing and lying about it.
if the bankers had therefore known something of Hill’s checkered reputation, they could also have known that he was at the same time considered “one of the hardest workers and most energetic men” in Santa Ana.16
If everything had been done well, after four or five years of cultivation, the first harvest would announce itself in the blooming of the coffee tree’s “beautiful, ‘tube-rose-like’ white flower,” glowing “against the dark, lustrous green of the leaf.” Soon afterward the petals would drop off and give way to the green berry, warming first to “a delicate pink, changing by degrees to a dark cherry red, when it is ripe and ready to be gathered.” And only then could a hopeful planter pause to “complacently contemplate” the years of work that had been invested in the plantation, and that seemed about to pay off.
“The grand agents of nature are, by the Creator’s fiat, indestructible . . . wherever mechanic force is expended, an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained.”16 In this “exact equivalent,” Joule established by experiment what Mayer had theorized: the convertibility of seemingly distinct forces, implying the existence of a single, unitary force.
Victorians glorified work as a “supreme virtue,” even the meaning of life.20 It made good sense to this work-obsessed people that the law of energy conservation demonstrated, “in a mathematically rigorous way, that you cannot get something for nothing.”
From there the seed—still encased in a sticky mucilage called honey and, under that, a thin fibrous wrapping called parchment—sluiced on toward fermentation tanks. After a day or two of curing in the tanks, the honey sagged off and the two halves of the seed split apart—except in the case of peaberry, the roundish variety often passed off as “Mocha,” which was one seed to one bean.
The inspection therefore bore the financial weight of the entire milling business—and when the mill owner was also a planter, as James Hill was, it bore the weight of the plantations, too. This weight was placed on women in part because traditional patriarchic conceptions of male and female roles propped up the power of the boss to direct the work.
the early years of the Exchange, these grading standards applied across three distinct scales: Brazilian coffee from Rio and other ports, where beans tended to be harshly flavored; Brazilian coffee solely from the port of Santos, where the beans tended to be comparatively mellow; and “other.” The emphasis on Brazilian coffee in the standardization of grading scales reflected the fact that the largest crops came from Brazil, and the largest crops could most easily crash the market, and so were the most important to hedge.
The New York Coffee Exchange was the first incorporated international coffee exchange, though not by a decisive margin. The world’s second coffee exchange also opened in 1882, in Le Havre, France, the port that warehoused the greatest part of the world’s coffee crop. London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg, all of which had much longer histories as capitals of coffee financing, trading, and shipping, also opened coffee exchanges of their own shortly after New York. Yet ultimately New York was one thing the world’s other coffee ports were not: the commercial capital of the world’s leading coffee-drinking country.
He saw the boy bootblacks who inhabited the crowded dormitories of the Newsboys’ Lodging House on Duane Street spending six cents on a bunk for the night and six cents on bread and coffee for breakfast.
He noticed men and boys of all ages crowded around one-cent coffee stalls on the street.
He met one young and pretty Broadway seamstress, whose case he took to be representative of many more, who, without a spare cent, took a cup of coffee at breakfast, no lunch, and her one meal of the day for dinner.
The first crisis was a price collapse. It originated, ironically, in the same conditions that had helped to lift the price initially—for the same circumstances that increased demand for coffee in the United States also increased the supply of coffee in Brazil.
Nearly a million Italians, fleeing rural poverty in Southern Italy especially, arrived in Brazil between the passage of the Golden Law in 1888 and the turn of the twentieth century, more than arrived in the United States during the same period.
Through its defeat of Spain, the United States, the largest market for coffee in the world, and the world’s only major coffee market without an import duty, had also become a colonial coffee producer. Ambitious American officials in the Philippines even had visions of the island of Mindanao supplying the world’s coffee needs.
The day’s program featured a speech by President William McKinley. McKinley had run for the presidency in 1896 as a war hero, and his campaign highlighted an unusual act of courage. During the Battle of Antietam, his Ohio regiment near exhaustion from fighting all day, the nineteen-year-old McKinley piloted a supply wagon past Confederate sentries to deliver vats of hot coffee, “the soldier’s chiefest bodily consolation,” to Union troops.10 After the Spanish-American War, an analogy suggested itself. The man nicknamed “Coffee Bill” had done it again: penetrated enemy lines to deliver coffee to his side, this time in the form of island colonies.
and its glorious flag, to remain in so dreadful a condition.”15 For Puerto Rican coffee planters raised under Spanish rule, empire meant protection.
This revolution was also, in a sense, a result of the Spanish-American War, and at first it might have appeared to be a third, compounding crisis. It took hold just when Hill could have reasonably concluded that he had a silver medal to prove that he knew good coffee, and it meant, in the short run, that the standards by which his coffee had done so well would no longer apply. But instead, far from a crisis, this revolution in values would prove to be a rich opportunity for Salvadoran coffee planters, and especially for James Hill.
Once they started vacuum-packing butter, the Hills brothers began to think about doing the same with coffee, which was similar to butter in one significant way. “There is no item which enters into the supply of our tables, with which I am acquainted, unless it be butter, which is so easily injured in flavor as coffee,” wrote New York merchant Francis Beatty Thurber in 1881.
Evaluating coffee by its appearance saved importers time and money.
producing good coffee, producing the best coffee, was not just a question of medals, prizes, ribbons, and awards. It was not just a question of pride. Hill owed more than $100,000 to the Banco Salvadoreño, which had taken over the accounts of the London Bank of Central America. He was paying off the debt in coffee, at the rate of 1,000 bags a year, and with prices at historically low levels, it was a much bigger debt than it had been when he first borrowed the money.12 In these circumstances, the quality of his coffee was a question of his personal success or failure—and not only his. It seemed to those who saw him at work at Las Tres Puertas during these years that James Hill was doing absolutely everything he could to get ahead for his family’s sake—including some unusual things.
In Vinter’s long experience in Central America, this eagerness to learn was not only rare, but it also marked Hill as a promising bet. It was the “Dr. Know All’s,” Vinter had seen, who always got into the most trouble.
As word of the São Paulo plan got out, the coffee buyers roaming Central America began to fear that prices were about to shoot up. Because James Hill was the only one who had been buying all through what had been a bad season, as if he had known that a price increase was coming, he soon found himself in a very strong position.
It was in keeping with their experience as grocers that the Hills brothers began, at the end of the nineteenth century, to judge coffee by its invisible qualities. Working backward from coffee drinking, they began to evaluate coffee beans in terms of the coffee they made: its aroma, its flavor, its properties “in the cup.”
“Brazils” versus “milds.” At first “mild” coffee simply meant coffee from anywhere other than Brazil, which had a reputation for producing coffees that were “quite the reverse of mild.”28 But over time, as it was necessary to define the category for the purposes of trading contracts, “mild coffee” was formalized and capitalized, “Mild coffee,” and took on a more specific meaning: coffees that were definitively “sweet in the cup.”29 These coffees were known for having “more body, more acidity, and a much finer aroma” than Brazils, as well as more “distinctive individual characteristics,” being produced under more diverse conditions than Brazilian coffees.30 Brazilian coffees came to be considered “price” coffees, while mild coffees were increasingly known for “quality.”
What the Pure Food and Drug Act did not outlaw was the coloring of coffee. On the contrary, it specifically allowed for the use of “harmless colorants.” Yet with Java and Mocha now largely off the table, and a new standard of quality based on “sweetness in the cup,” the color and size of the beans were no longer so important. Unlike size or color, “sweetness in the cup” came from sugars developed in the coffee cherries as they ripened, and from the care taken in the mills. It came from specific types of work done in the process of cultivating, harvesting, and milling coffee, under particular conditions, in certain parts of the world—for example, Hill’s dry fermentation process.
The development of Montezuma men was based on a strict regimen of health and discipline (no coffee or any other stimulants were permitted, and regular chores were required), active self-governance (students made the rules and enforced them), and a course of education in ethics designed to prepare the sons of the elite to lead.
Coffee was not native to California. Yet that hardly discouraged Californians from trying to grow it.
El Salvador, a strain of Arabica known as común, or typica. The foreign seedlings were a cultivar of Arabica called Borbón, or Bourbon, after the island (now Réunion) off the coast of Madagascar where the French had introduced coffee by fiat two centuries earlier. Bourbon coffee, which had been brought to Guatemala by Jesuit priests, was also grown in Brazil. Historically its market value derived in part from the fact that its seeds did a passable imitation of Mocha, and in part from the fact that it gave unusually high yields. Bockler had planted a corner of his plantation with Bourbon, and he told Hill that he expected to get two or three times as much coffee from those trees as from the standard Arabica.
The hardiness of Bourbon trees opened up more and more of El Salvador’s land to coffee. Hill began to buy old, unprofitable, unproductive plantations and convert them to Bourbon. On this new land, the new trees produced larger crops. Raising trees known for quantity in a district known for quality, Hill was, in a sense, Brazilianizing Salvadoran coffee—mass-producing mild coffee.
In his 1939 book Factories in the Field, McWilliams described how, beginning around 1870, after the California gold rush had slowed down, a new class of “industrial agriculturalists” took over California’s land and economy. They made water flow backward, conjured gardens from wastelands, and in the process became as rich as sheikhs. The source of their extraordinary power and wealth was a “miserable . . . intimidated . . . starving, destitute” army of migrant laborers, the latest group of new arrivals always pitted against the previous. Chasing grueling work and barely adequate food and shelter across the state’s wide valleys, this “agricultural proletariat” made up “a more motley crew” than any ever “assembled in this country by a great industry.”
When the Board of Special Inquiry on Angel Island asked young Federico Hill in the late summer of 1917 what he planned to do after his schooling in California was complete, the thirteen-year-old had answered confidently: “I will return again to Santa Ana.”28 He had a boy’s belief in his father’s power to make a place for him in the world.
This is what the San Francisco merchants trolling the Santa Ana Volcano were looking for: the signs of a sweet crop coming, the markers of wealth, diligence, and industry—order on the landscape and in the mills.
ON MONDAY, MARCH 29, at the ceremonial hour of eight a.m.—work usually began at six—Hill went with two of his best men to take title of Deneke’s plantation.
Pedro Bolaños was different—he was active, he took the initiative, he was thoughtful, careful, and precise.
Hill believed in family trees. When he found a manager he liked—a man who could read and write, who was honest and willing to learn—he wanted to know if the man had brothers he could employ as well.
The possibility of using a small breakfast to compel people to show up for work on time underscores the significance of the ration in the plantation districts.
was probably the country's leading authority on instant coffee. Soluble coffee manufactured on the model of Japanese soluble tea had made its public debut at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition in 1901,
Free coffee paid in a way that was difficult even for Disbro, the corporate treasurer, to quantify. He had not been able to figure out in dollars and cents what rate they are getting on their investment. Nor did he believe that serving coffee had led to a direct increase in gross output. Instead, coffee had paid in maintaining a standard of perfection in the product, helping the company to avoid the problem of the declining mental and physical powers of the workman over the course of the working
You'll never keep up the standard of production on cheap or adulterated coffee, Disbro warned plant managers thinking of following Tyler's example. Just as a question of mechanics, I can't overestimate the necessity of maintaining quality in the coffee served. To my notion, it is just as foolish to supply the men with a poor coffee as it would be to buy a poor grade of oil for a very delicate machine.
With the federal government acting as a guarantor, American banks fronted money to bolster Latin American governments favorable to the U.S. In return, Latin Americans were compelled to accept conditions and contingencies ”including the supervision of their economies by State Department “appointed advisors and, in many cases, far-reaching economic reforms. The unstated implication was that defaulting on the loan payments would open the door for U.S. military intervention.
The architect of these controlled loans, marrying the wealth of Wall Street with the power and authority of Washington, was Edwin Kemmerer, a Princeton University economist known as the money doctor.
began to take classes in economics, a new discipline rooted in ideas that would have encouraged a student with interests in finance and politics to see the calorimeter as a perfect world.
Strunsky, a Russian-born critic of the Bolshevik Revolution, wasn't entirely convinced by the analogy: To speak of white ˜imperialism' and ˜exploitation,' he wrote, is to fall into a soap-box rhetoric. The problem is more complicated than that.
MartÃ's jailers were masters of a world too small to encompass two sides of an issue. Their idea of politics was a perpetual purge.
people who were accustomed to taking one another's needs into account as a matter of daily survival. People who worked coffee lived by a communal ethic ”sharing food, water, shelter; looking after children; watching each other's backs at work ”that land privatization planters' rules had not broken.
The mild-coffee congress also proposed advertising Central American coffee in the United States and Europe, and hiring experts who would analyze coffee plantations and mills according to the principles Frederick Winslow Taylor had applied in factories in the United States.5 Yet this congress had no power to do anything more substantial than make recommendations, and no saving cartel took form.
On January 10, Martà convened an emergency meeting in the capital to debate the possibility of revolution. Miguel Mármol was also pushing for an uprising, given the ripeness of the revolutionary situation. Martà consulted a French translation of Marx's Capital. More and more, he feared that the people he aspired to lead would charge ahead toward revolution by themselves and be slaughtered.
The following year, both coauthors chronically short on money, Engels returned full-time to his family's mill in Manchester to work as a bookkeeper. He regularly sent half of his substantial income, in addition to painstakingly detailed information about how factories actually operated, to Marx, who had settled in London and immersed himself in the question that interested both men, the connection between poverty and wealth.
In capitalist society, progress in science and technology means progress in the art of sweating. 49 Revolution, Lenin predicted, would come when capitalism's opponents took the same aggressive approach ”when a few professionals, as highly trained and experienced as the imperial security police, were allowed to organize it.
There is not one Indian who is not affiliated with the communist movement, wrote one planter in the Santa Ana newspaper on the first of February. Good mozos whom I considered loyal and whom we had treated as part of the family were among the first to join up and to lend their contribution to the evil cause. . . . Now that they see themselves vanquished by the actions of the government, which has served to annihilate them . . . they want to evade the danger. But that is the penalty they have imposed on themselves.
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN a point of speculation among historians that General MartÃnez's Theosophical beliefs empowered the genocide he commanded, that his belief in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls led him to conclude that it was a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, since a man would return to earth in a new body.22 Whether or not MartÃnez believed in the reality of such magical things, he was keenly aware of the moment's political and economic context. He knew that the United States ”wary of Bolshevism in the hemisphere, still fighting to suppress a nationalist rebellion in Nicaragua, and above all a creditor ”was watching closely.
Then as now, a cup of coffee was not what the poor and the hungry needed most, but it was something they thought they might get. At soup kitchens and in breadlines, hours of waiting would produce a bowl of mush, often without milk or sugar, and a tin cup of coffee.