The Cup That Agitates

Coffee has always been exciting. According to a Syrian legend, its use as a beverage began when the head of a Moslem monastery, who noticed that his goats got frisky after eating coffee berries, brewed some to keep his monks awake at evening prayers. Some Moslem fanatics objected violently to its use; it was outlawed and bootlegged in parts of the East.

On the other hand, Sultan Selim I is said to have liked coffee so much that he hanged two Persian doctors who said it was bad for the health--a fate that countless physicians since then have narrowly escaped. When the Turks raised the siege of Vienna, they left sacks of coffee behind, and an enterprising Polish defender of Christendom hastened to beat his sword into a percolator by grabbing the coffee and opening the first of hundreds of Viennese coffeehouses. Charles II of England called coffeehouses "seminaries of sedition," and in France they were just that. Rousseau, Voltaire, Robespierre, Marat and Danton all frequented coffeehouses, and from one of them, the attack on the Bastille was launched. William Penn loved the stuff so that he paid $4.68 a Ib. for it. Upton Sinclair, on the other hand, hated coffee SO deeply that when Harry (Tramping on Life) Kemp was about to move out with Sinclair's first wife, the aggrieved husband, according to Kemp, found her percolator and thrust it upon her lover, saying:"You can take this to your goddess, this poison machine, and lay it on her altar." Little wonder, then, that the U.S. public was in an uproar last week over coffee.

A Powder Train. A year ago, March coffee futures were selling at around 53-c- a Ib.; last week they touched 72-c-, and the retail price ranged from 89-c- to $1.10.

Coffee by the cup at lunch counters threatened to go to 15-c-.

Congressmen who didn't know what to say about the Bricker amendment were decisive and articulate--and undivided--on the coffee issue. The Senate started an investigation. The House thought it had better start one, too. The President of the U.S. (who drinks 2 1/2 cups a day, while Mrs. Eisenhower drinks five) announced that the Federal Trade Commission was trying to get to the bottom of the coffee price rise.

Iowa's Senator Guy Gillette, who doesn't touch the stuff himself, followed an old Iowa tradition by blaming it all on "gambling and speculation." Quick as the flash of a powder train, the uproar spread to South America. The Brazilian government, alarmed by the angry murmuring in America del Norte, hurriedly invited four U.S. housewives to travel south, all expenses paid, to see for themselves the real cause of the trouble--scarcity caused by drought, frost and underplanting by Brazilian farmers. A spokesman from Colombia talked darkly of a plot by the "tea interests," and one from El Salvador advised the U.S. to quit demanding nickel coffee until it resumed making $1,000 automobiles.

An Awesome Statistic. Between 1900, when the U.S. imported 7,000,000 132-lb.

bags of coffee, and last year, when it bought 20.5 million bags, the American thirst for coffee has grown tremendously.

In the years since 1940, during which millions of U.S. workers began taking morning and afternoon "coffee breaks" and millions of servicemen used coffee to kill the taste of chlorine, consumption has risen by 30%.

By last week it was almost impossible for Americans to talk about anything--even outrageous coffee prices--without having a cup of coffee.. They consumed coffee at such a rate (5$ billion gallons a year) that if all of a year's consumption were brewed in a Bunyanesque retort and decanted into the Niagara River, it would take 15 hours to tumble over the lip of Niagara Falls (American side). If the somnolent Moslem monks had known that awesome statistic, they would probably have stayed awake and prayed very hard, without the help of coffee.

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