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who kept a menagerie of zoo animals in his mansion and created a minor scandal when his baboon scaled a fence and ate $60 out of a woman’s purse.) The only one of his sons who showed any promise was Howard, who followed him into the company. But while Howard showed aptitude in the technical side of the soda business, he lacked his father’s vision and management skill.
    Candler’s disappointments came to a head in 1913, when he suffered a nervous breakdown and took a prolonged tour of Europe to “steady his nerves.” As much as anything, the cause of his breakdown was financial. Over the years, Candler had treated Coca-Cola as his personal piggybank, intertwining his finances with the company’s. Progressive changes in tax laws in 1913, however, prevented businesses from holding on to large cash reserves, requiring that they distribute dividends to shareholders instead. Candler bitterly resented parting with any of it. Fine with allowing the government to protect his profits against would-be competitors, he wasn’t about to let Uncle Sam tell him how he had to distribute those same profits to investors.
    After this “forced liquidation,” wrote his son Howard, “he was ready to quit trying to make money and entirely willing to relinquish to others the task of conducting the affairs of the corporation.” At the same time, he tossed out vast sums to philanthropic causes, assuaging his conscience, increasing his stature in Atlanta, and earning a healthy tax write-off in the bargain. In 1914, he made a contribution of $1 million to Emory University, where his brother Warren Candler was president, the first of an eventual $8 million in largesse. The same year, he earned the undying affection of Georgians when he mortgaged his own fortune to shore up the price of cotton in the wake of a market crash during World War I.
    By 1916, he was ready to give up his company, but not his legacy, shocking his board by slighting his natural successor, Dobbs, and making Howard president instead. A year later, he gave away nearly all his stock to his wife and children as a Christmas present. As Asa Candler left Coke, he turned wholeheartedly to public service, running for mayor of Atlanta and winning a two-year term from 1917 to 1919. If voters hoped he would use his personal fortune to relieve the city’s debts, though, they were disappointed. Instead, his administration proposed raising water rates, which would fall disproportionately on the poor, and urged rich citizens to voluntarily overvalue their property to pay more taxes (few did).
    In fact, Candler was deeply ambivalent about the power of altruism—happy to give his money away for the greater good when he was in control of who received it, but resentful of sharing the spoils of capitalism with those he felt hadn’t built the system. Meanwhile, the company foundered in his absence. Howard was a lackluster president, struggling to keep Coca-Cola afloat during the sugar rationing of World War I. Meanwhile, in 1919, in the wake of Candler’s slight, Dobbs became head of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, where he got to meet many members of the city’s business elite. Just as Robinson had persuaded Candler to buy up the company decades earlier, Dobbs would persuade one of them, Trust Company president Ernest Woodruff, to take over the company now.
     
     
     
    As a business tycoon , Ernest Woodruff was almost a caricature—a cross between Gordon Gekko and the Monopoly Man. His occupation was to make money, mostly through the takeover, restructuring, and sale of real estate and transportation companies. He had a reputation for playing dirty, not above breaking into a rival’s office late at night to steal files. And he was even more of a skinflint than Candler, once supposedly strapping $2 million in bonds to himself and his secretary on a train from Cleveland in order to save $200 in shipping costs. This was the man to whom Dobbs turned to buy the Coca-Cola Company,