Coffee's Janus Faces in the United States and Brazil

Steven Topik. University of California, Irvine. “Coffee’s Janus Faces  in  the United States and Brazil.”
Coffee is the world’s most popular beverage because of its drug properties. Yet it has mostly been celebrated as an antidote to inebriation rather than as a drug food. This paper will explore the reasons for coffee’s growing popularity in the United States, the world’s largest consumer of coffee since the middle of the nineteenth century. It will show that coffee’s adoption in the U.S. was because of  commercial ties to Brazil, rather than a manifestation of U.S. Anglophobia and an assertion of  freedom, as has been usually argued. Coffee also found favor in the newly independent ex-British colonies because of the influx of Northern European immigrants for whom coffee was initially an aristocratic taste and a Europeanized luxury and, quite distinctly, it was a cure for the enormous drunkenness that plagued the new republic. The temperance movement saw coffee as a “Great Soberer” or an “anti-Bacchus.”
Coffee’s respectable face in the U.S. clashed sharply with its appearance in the main coffee growing country, Brazil. There it was grown on some of the largest slave-run plantations the world had known. Since many of the people in the U.S. temperance movement were also abolitionists, this presented a potential marketing  problem. That problem was in part overcome by the use of advertising to Americanize and assert brand personalities that suppressed its Brazilian origin. The hands of the slaves, (and after 1888 abolition, the hands of immigrants) as well as the fruit of the Brazilian soil disappeared.  Coffee, grown in Catholic Brazil by Brazilian slaves became a Protestant prohibitionist American drink that simply appeared in grocery store cans through the magic of the commodity chain.