All About Coffee by William H. Ukers (best new books to read .TXT) 📕

War, and remained at Mariahalden until he died in 1917. Sielcken never would believe that war was possible until it had actually started. Up to the last moment in July, 1914, he was cabling his New York partner that there would probably be no hostilities. He lost a bet of a thousand pounds made with a visiting Brazilian friend a few days before war was declared. The guest believed war inevitable and won. A few days before Sielcken's death the old firm was dissolved under the Trading with the Enemy Act, being succeeded by the firm of Sorenson & Nielsen. The former had been with the business thirty-four years, and the latter thirty-two years. The alien property custodian took over Sielcken's interest for the duration of the war.

Rumors in 1915 that the German government was extorting large sums of money from Sielcken brought denials from his associates here. After the war, it was confirmed that no such extortions took place.

Sielcken always claimed American citizenship. There was a widely circulated story, never proved, that he tore up his citizenship papers in 1912 when the United States government began its suit to force the sale of coffee stocks held here under the valorization agreement. The Supreme Court of California in 1921 decided that he was a citizen, and his interests and those of his widow, amounting to $4,000,000, held by the alien property custodian, were thereupon released to his heirs. It appeared in evidence that he took out his citizenship papers in San Francisco in 1873–74, but lost them in a shipwreck off the coast of Brazil in 1876. The San Francisco fire destroyed the other records; but under act of legislature re-establishing them, the citizenship claim was declared valid.

Hermann Sielcken never liked the title of "coffee king." He was once asked about this appellation, and turned smartly upon the interviewer.

"Nonsense," he said. "I am no king. I don't like the term, because I never heard of a 'king' who did not fail."

Sielcken had no use for titles. T.S.B. Nielsen says that at a dinner party in Germany in 1915 he heard Sielcken explain to a large number of guests that the United States was the best country because there a man was appraised at his real value. What he did, and how he lived, counted—not birth or titles.

While his greatest achievement was, of course, the valorization enterprise, he played a not unimportant rôle in the Havemeyer-Arbuckle sugar-trust fight. He aided the late Henry O. Havemeyer to secure control of the Woolson Spice Co. of Toledo in 1896, so as to enable the Havemeyer's to retaliate with Lion brand coffee for the Arbuckles' entrance into the sugar business. The Woolson Spice Co. sold the Lion brand in the middle west, and the American Coffee Co. sold it in the east. That was the beginning of a losing price-war that lasted ten years. At the end, Sielcken took over the Woolson property at a price considerably lower than originally paid for it. In 1919, the Woolson Spice Co. brought suit against the Sielcken estate, alleging a loss of $932,000 on valorization coffee sold to it by Sielcken just after the federal government began its suit in 1912 to break up the valorization pool in the United States. The Woolson Spice Co. paid the "market price", as did the rest of the buyers of valorization coffee; but it was charged that Sielcken, as managing partner of Crossman & Sielcken, sold the coffee to the Woolson Spice Co., of which he was president, "at artificially enhanced prices and in quantities far in excess of its legitimate needs, concealing his knowledge that before the plaintiff could use the coffee, the price would decline." Sielcken collected for the coffee sold $3,218,666.

When the United States government crossed lances with Sielcken in 1912 over the valorization scheme, it looked for a time as if he would be unhorsed. But men and governments were all the same to Sielcken; and at the end of the fight it was discovered that not only was he undefeated—for the government never pressed its suit to conclusion—but that his prestige as king and master mind of the coffee trade had gained immeasurably by the adventure.

Hermann Sielcken typified German efficiency raised to the nth power. He was a colossus of commerce with the military alertness of a Bismarck. His mental processes were profound, and his vision was far-reaching. He was a resourceful trader, an austere friend, a shrewd and uncompromising foe. Physically, he was a big man with a bull neck and black, piercing eyes. His policy in coffee was one of blood and iron. He brooked no interference with his plans, and he was ruthless in his methods of dealing with men and governments. Usually silent and uncommunicative, occasionally he exploded under stress; and when he did so, there was no mincing of words. He knew no fear. Newspaper criticism annoyed him but little; and he had a kind of contempt for the fourth estate as a whole, although he knew how to use it when it suited his purpose. He avoided the limelight, and never courted publicity for himself. Socially he was a princely host; but few knew him intimately, except perhaps in his native Germany.

Sielcken's widow was married in New York, February 11, 1922, to Joseph M. Schwartz, the Russian baritone of the Chicago Opera Company.

The Story of John Arbuckle

John Arbuckle, for nearly fifty years the honored dean of the American coffee trade, pioneer package-coffee man, some time coffee king, sugar merchant, philanthropist, and typical American, came from fine, rugged Scotch stock. He was the son of a well-to-do Scottish woolen-mill owner in Allegheny, Pa., where he was born, July 11, 1839. He often said he was raised on skim milk. He received a common school education in Pittsburgh and Allegheny. He and Henry Phipps, the coke and steel head, are said to have occupied adjoining desks in one of the public schools, Andrew Carnegie being at that time in another grade of the same school. He had a strong bent for science and machinery; and, although he chose the coffee instead of the steel business for his career, the basis of his success was invention. He also attended Washington and Jefferson College at Washington, Pennsylvania.[348]

The Arbuckle business was founded at Pittsburg, in 1859, when Charles Arbuckle, his uncle Duncan McDonald, and their friend William Roseburg, organized the wholesale grocery firm of McDonald & Arbuckle. One year later John Arbuckle, the younger brother of Charles Arbuckle, was admitted to the firm, and the firm name was changed to McDonald & Arbuckles. McDonald and Roseburg retired from the firm a few years later, leaving the business in the hands of the two youthful, hopeful, and energetic brothers, who under the firm name of Arbuckles & Co., soon made their firm one of the important wholesale grocery houses in Pennsylvania. Although little thinking at the time that their greatest success was to be achieved in coffee, and that a new idea of one of the partners—that of marketing roasted coffee in original packages—would make their name familiar in every hamlet in the country, yet the first two entries in the original day-book of McDonald & Arbuckles record purchases of coffee.

Prior to the sixties, coffee was not generally sold roasted or ground, ready for the coffee pot. Except in the big cities, most housewives bought their coffee green, and roasted it in their kitchen stoves as needed. John Arbuckle, having become impressed with the wasteful methods and unsatisfactory results of this kitchen roasting, had already begun his studies of roasting and packaging problems, studies that he never gave up. How, first to roast coffee scientifically, and then to preserve its freshness in the interval between the roaster and the coffee pot, continued to be an absorbing study until his death. The range of his work may be illustrated by reference to his first and his last patents. In 1868, he patented a process of glazing coffee, which had for its object the preservation of the flavor and aroma of coffee by sealing the pores of the coffee bean. Thirty-five years later, he patented a huge coffee roaster in which, more closely than in any other roaster, he felt he could approach his ideal of roasting coffee—that ideal being to hold the coffee beans in suspension in superheated air during the entire roasting process, and not to allow them to come in contact with a heated iron surface.

By 1865, John Arbuckle had satisfied himself that a carefully roasted coffee, packed while still warm in small individual containers, would measurably overcome the objections to selling loose coffee in a roasted state. So in that year (1865), although not without the misgivings of his elder brother, and even in the face of the ridicule of competitors, who derided the plan of selling roasted coffee "in little paper bags like peanuts", Arbuckles & Co. introduced the new idea, namely, roasted coffee in original packages. The story of the development of that simple idea, which soon spread from coast to coast, and of how it laid the foundations of a great fortune, is one of the romances of American business.

Although Osborn's Celebrated Prepared Java Coffee, a ground-coffee package, first put on the New York market by Lewis A. Osborn, and later exploited by Thomas Reid in the early sixties, appears to have been the original package coffee, much of the fame attached to the name of Arbuckle comes from its association with the Ariosa coffee package, which was the first successful national brand of package coffee. It was launched in 1873. The Ariosa premium list (premiums have been a feature of the Arbuckle business since 1895) includes a hundred articles. Almost anything from a pair of suspenders or a toothbrush, to clocks, wringers, and corsets may be obtained in exchange for Ariosa coupons.

The common belief that the name Ariosa was made up from the words Rio and Santos (said to be the component parts of the original blend) is erroneous. It was arbitrarily coined, though it is not known what considerations prompted it. One story has it that the "A" stands for Arbuckle, the "rio" for Rio, and the "sa" for South America.

Early in the seventies, the great business opportunities of New York City had attracted the two brothers, and a branch was established in New York in charge of John Arbuckle, the main business in Pittsburg being left in the care of his brother Charles. The growth of the New York branch soon made it necessary for Charles Arbuckle to leave the Pittsburg business in charge of trusted employees, and to come to New York. In time, the coffee business of the New York house overshadowed the grocery lines; and the latter were abandoned there, so that the entire energy of the firm in New York might be devoted to the coffee business, which thenceforth was operated under the firm name of Arbuckle Bros. The Arbuckle coffee business, which began with a single roaster in 1865, had eighty-five machines running in Pittsburg and New York in 1881.

Charles Arbuckle died in 1891, and John Arbuckle admitted as partners his nephew, William Arbuckle Jamison, and two employees, William V.R. Smith and James N. Jarvie, the business continuing under the former name of Arbuckle Bros. The most important step taken by the firm while thus constituted was its entrance into the sugar refining business in 1896. That entrance had to be forced against the bitterest opposition of a so-called sugar trust, and brought on a "war" signalized by the most ruthless cutting of prices of both coffee and sugar. This war was costly to both sides; but when it had ended, Arbuckle Bros. remained unshaken in the preeminence of their package-coffee business and had acquired also great publicity and a fine trade in refined sugar.