Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (17 page)

“I made up my mind to go,” he told Charles Best, “
it was not
necesary for me to go
[sic]. But I wanted to know wether [sic] they could get along without me.” The gamble paid off. “Now they do better without me . . . . It shows what men are made out of when you make them shoulder Responsibility, and I have long ago made up my mind the Business can be run without me . . . . I can begin to take it a little easier and still she goes.” Time proved him right. “Everything is lovely,” he observed a year later, “& the Goose hangs high,” in part because of his beloved sons. “Gustav is out on the Road a great deal, I want him to get aquainted [sic] with the Trade. He seems to take hold very well and gives good Satisfaction. Fred. is in New York at Schwarzes [brewing school] and is doing very well.”

Frederick Pabst was wise to confront head-on the occupational hazard of the self-made man: prodding sons raised in privileged ease to shoulder the burdens of the workingman’s life. August Uihlein avoided the issue entirely: He amassed a fortune, but he required his children to work for their spending money. They reached adulthood well schooled in the relationship between work, money, and leisure. His brothers’ sons chose nonbrewing careers, but August’s three—Joseph, Robert, and Erwin—trained early for beer, studying beermaking at the Wahl-Henius Institute in Chicago and Carlsberg Laboratories in Denmark. Erwin topped off his formal education with a law degree, but that was not enough: August dispatched him and brother Robert on a study tour of breweries, sixty-eight of them in Europe and 134 in the United States. Each week the travelers cranked out a five-thousand-word report, an exercise that forced them to pay heed to even the smallest details of the firms they visited.

Adolphus Busch, in contrast, suffered excess of his own making: the love of his children. The Busch siblings grew up in unabated luxury, educated erratically by tutors or at posh private schools and vacationing in opulent surroundings. Of his three possible heirs, only one, Adolphus Junior, showed any inclination to follow his father’s path. August A., the oldest surviving son (the eldest brother died young), was not above dirtying his hands and family name in an occasional barroom brawl, and in 1884, at age nineteen, unnerved his father by announcing his intention to abandon beermaking for the cowboy’s life. Adolphus indulged that whim, and six months in the Southwest cured August of his passion. The young man returned to St. Louis to cast his lot with Anheuser-Busch; in 1889, both he and his brother Adolphus joined the board of directors.

Peter, the fourth born, preferred baseball, gambling, and drinking to work. At his father’s prodding, the young man traveled the country checking on the company’s distributors and dealers, but work played second to pleasure that too often spilled over into scandal. In 1898, Adolphus Senior cut him off, charging Charles Nagel with the mission of delivering the bad news. “Your father,” the lawyer informed Peter, “declines to enter into further direction [sic] communication with you . . . He declines to be made responsible for you in any manner whatsoever. He denies any and all liability on account of anything that you may have done or may in the future do. He will not hesitate . . . to say this publicly.” Busch softened the blow with a $25 weekly allowance, but, Nagel warned, “[h]e does not promise to continue this . . . [and] he will under no circumstances do more.”

The St. Louis rumor mill claimed that Busch pinned his hopes for succession on Adolphus Junior. It was not to be: The old man’s namesake died in the spring of 1898. That left August to carry the mantle, but the father struggled to corral this willful son. He demanded that August and family move into the Busch mansion next to the brewery, hoping, perhaps, to weave an umbilical cord of the plant’s smells and sounds. August refused and settled his family several miles away at an acreage once owned by Ulysses S. Grant. There he built a palatial home that rivaled the minor castles of Europe and transformed its meadows and timber into a luxuriant landscape complete with swan pond and deer park.

The decision—and the expense—irked the old man. “I must repeat,” Adolphus wrote, “that I am not at all pleased about it and feel sure it is going to divert your mind from business again, which is bad, because the brewery needs your whole attention and time.” He pointed out that “everyone” who had purchased land on the fringe of St. Louis had “met with absolute failure,” adding, “And I will tell you why; when anyone can afford to go away for the summer, they are not going to the outskirts of the city” to be “annoyed” by bad roads, “tramps, thieves and loiterers,” “very bad neighbors” and “flies and mosquitoes.” He concluded, “I do not want you to put any money in foolish improvements on this place. I am totally against it, and do not want it.”

But August persisted. “Be moderate and sensible,” his father pleaded. “It only hurts you to do this sort of thing. We have too big a business to take care of, and must keep our forces . . . together. We do not want to have it said that our brewery lost because the proprietors no longer gave it the attention it required, which they say of the Pabst and Lemp boys.”

August Busch knew quite well that the Pabst “boys” were managing. (The Lemps were another story: William Lemp sired several sons, but none showed much inclination for the hard work needed to stay on top.) Still, Adolphus Busch had a point. Between them, the Busch and Pabst families owned the two largest breweries in the world (and elbowed each other in and out of first place every other year). They had arrived at that exalted status by marching a steep road lined with decades of ten- and twelve-hour days. They would only stay on top with more of the same. In that respect, the “boys” needed to be their fathers’ sons—and more.

A
S THE SONS
began managing their families’ empires, the fathers turned to well-earned leisure and rest. August Uihlein devoted his time to travel and to horses. He owned one of the largest breeding operations in the United States, with stock farms at five locations scattered around the Milwaukee hinterland.

Frederick Pabst, too, feasted on the fruits of his labor. In 1892, he moved his family out of the old house that stood in the brewery’s shadow and into a custom-built mansion on stylish Grand Avenue (now Wisconsin Avenue). Pabst spent nearly five million of today’s dollars on the house and its furnishings, including linen and silk wall coverings, marble hearths, and oak and mahogany paneling. Pabst’s cozy study included a built-in humidor, a faux-inlay ceiling decorated with German proverbs, and oak-paneled walls that concealed fourteen secret compartments.

The Pabsts also invested in livestock, which they kept at a 225-acre farm west of town. “It is grand out there,” Pabst told Charles Best, “and I wish I could spend more time there.” He and son Fred raised Percherons and Hackneys. Gustav devoted his leisure to hunting, which in turn fueled an interest in breeding and showing pointers and setters. Fred Junior developed a passion for scientific agriculture, and he bought fourteen hundred acres thirty miles west of the family farm in order to raise horses and Holsteins.

But as always, Busch outdid them all. His stable, surely one of the world’s most ornate—it featured Tiffany stained-glass windows—housed a collection of Percherons and Mexican mules. The Busches exhibited the animals and their accessories—gold-plated harnesses and shiny red Anheuser-Busch beer wagons—at fairs around the country.

Adolphus and wife Lilly transformed Busch Place One, as they named the Victorian pile adjacent to the brewery, into “the most aristocratic” house in St. Louis. The family entertained presidents, senators, cabinet officers, and visiting royalty in the forty-foot-long Green or Rose rooms, each stuffed with velvet drapes and Aubusson carpets, ivory knicknacks and oil paintings, gilded tables and chairs, and ceilings slathered with angels and chariots. Palms and miniature orange trees filled the conservatory; cloisonné and oversized vases the Chinese Room; pianos, stools, and mirrors the Music Room.

Busch’s favorite residence, Ivy Wall, which he purchased in the early 1880s, sat amidst thirty acres of formal gardens in Pasadena, California. There he and Lilly entertained Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft, steel king Andrew Carnegie, and tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton. Fourteen miles of paths wound through luxuriant grounds dotted with eucalyptus, willows, and oaks. Rare birds swooped through the trees. Busch spent well over a million dollars transforming the acreage into a child’s playground imbued with myth and magic. Elves and gnomes stood sentry amongst the shrubs, and the parklands included a half-million-dollar replica of the Banbury Cross described in a nursery rhyme, complete with stream, waterfalls, waterwheel, and grinding stones.

Granddaughter Alice cherished “Rosy Wall,” a three-room playhouse outfitted with upholstered wicker furniture, a kitchen and dining room, and a child-sized four-poster bed heaped with dolls. The “gnome house” delighted children and grownups alike. Busch would lead visitors through wooded paths, past a pond thick with water hyacinth and lilies, to a tiny round house nestled in fragrant shrubs. Guests knocked on the solid oak door and a voice called, “Come in.” A collection of chairs circled the room within. “Little men,” Busch would call, “send the table with the candy and cakes for my grand-child.” Eyes widened as the floor rose up and out of the way, replaced by a table laden with sweets.

Most of the brewers had arrived from Germany as young men; as old ones, they renewed their ties with the homeland, returning in splendor to a land many had left penniless. Some purchased estates there and socialized with royalty. George Ehret’s daughter, Anna, married a German baron, as did Helene Schmidt, daughter of Edward Schmidt, a Philadelphia brewer. Schmidt hosted the $100,000 nuptials at his country estate, the aptly named “Baronial Hall.”

Busch, too, reveled in the pleasures of European life and enjoyed first-name friendships with emperors, princes, and dukes. Three of his daughters married Germans. Clara Busch’s union with Baron Paul von Gontard elevated her into the German aristocracy—she served as lady-in-waiting to the Empress Augusta Victoria—and strengthened Busch’s relations with the royal family. That was as close as Prince Adolphus, as he was often called, ever got to becoming a real noble, but on formal occasions he adorned his chest with medals presented to him by German royalty: Kaiser Wilhelm granted him the Order of the Red Eagle and the Order of Philip the Good, while the Duke of Hesse bestowed the Order of Commercial Councilor.

E
VEN AS THEY
luxuriated in the leisure and splendor their wealth afforded them, the barons never lost sight of the main goal: to best each other, a task for which they still possessed plenty of fight. Pabst and Busch demonstrated their prowess in war at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the last major engagement between the two grand old men of nineteenth-century brewing.

The Exposition, which commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s encounter with the new world, was the last and greatest of the nineteenth-century world fairs. During its run, from May 1 to October 31, twenty-seven million people visited the White City, as admirers called the array of buildings, pavilions, and plazas that housed an exhaustive and exhausting collection of exhibits demonstrating the latest advancements in industry and art: Caskets and toys; trains, plows, and cattle; George Ferris’s wheel; zippers and cereal; an electric chair and Edison’s kinescope all drew gawkers when the fair opened in May 1893.

Inside Agriculture Hall stood the “fermented beverages” exhibit, where the nation’s brewers had installed displays such as the one constructed by Bartholomay Brewing Company of Buffalo: a four-foot-square mechanical model of the brewery’s interior, complete with an eighteen-inch-tall ice machine and a twelve-inch-tall copper mash tub. “It is a working model in all respects,” a journalist reported to his readers, “although owing to internal revenue regulations it is simply in motion at the Fair, and not brewing.” Christian Moerlein of Cincinnati presented a pavilion that housed twelve life-sized figures, four representing the seasons, two each for the four major continents (Columbia and Pocahontas symbolized North America, Cleopatra and a servant, Africa). A full-sized statue of a horse bearing a life-sized image of “the standard bearer of the famous Bismarck regiment” reared up from the roof. Pocahontas, Cleopatra, and the rest of the figures, as well as pyramids of bottles, rotated, thanks to a two-horsepower engine hidden beneath the works. The more dignified horse and rider remained stationary.

But these were positively puny compared to the offerings from Pabst and Anheuser-Busch (the Uihleins set up a display, too, but in their usual modest fashion, made it so understated that it drew little attention). Adolphus Busch, who spent $15,000 on his installation, started with a twenty-five-foot-tall, gold-flecked iron and steel pavilion. Its soaring buttressed ceiling and arched open sides were lined with bottles of Anheuser-Busch beer and illuminated by light filtering through panes of glass positioned between steel ribs. Another row of bottles girdled the dome roof, and oversized winged nudes hoisting tankards of lager straddled a smaller arch at each corner. Inside the pavilion was a twenty-five-square-foot model of the brewery built by the company’s architect, Edmund Jungenfeld. The model was “correct to the minutest detail,” marveled a reporter from
Western Brewer.
It contained every building, brick, window, stack, and turret, as well as tiny horses and wagons; the Busch family’s residence; the stable; the rail tracks complete with locomotive, freight, and refrigerator cars; and the streetcar system that ran alongside the plant.

Sadly, one feature of the Anheuser-Busch display can never be reconstructed: the look on Adolphus’s face when he laid eyes on the Pabst exhibit. Frederick Pabst spent $20,000 on a terra-cotta pavilion that featured granite steps, tile floor, and gold-leaf decoration. A stained-glass dome rested on columns decorated with carved hop vines and topped with mythological figures supporting a frieze painted with scenes depicting the history of brewing. Enormous cherubim and other vaguely religious-mystical-medieval figures perched atop the roof, their various arms, legs, and wings dangling over the sides.