Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (21 page)

The rhetoric might sound to our ears like the overblown ranting of self-righteous crackpots. Alas, the nation’s saloonkeepers, brewers, and distillers provided material that bolstered the most outrageous anecdote and flimsy statistic. In 1912, an ASL agent (most likely Wayne Wheeler) infiltrated the annual meeting of the Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association of Ohio and heard a speaker urge the audience to “create the appetite for liquor in the growing boys.” “Men who drink . . . will die,” the speaker explained, “and if there is no new appetite created, our counters will be empty as well as our coffers. The open field for the creation of appetite is among the boys. Nickels expended in treats to boys now, will return in dollars to your tills after the appetite has been formed.” The remarks appeared in the next
American Issue.
There was no evidence that brewers deliberately targeted boys, but again, once planted, the notion was hard to refute.

By 1902, the ASL boasted two hundred full-time employees and a budget of $250,000, and maintained offices in thirty-nine states and territories. Bolstered by grass-roots support and ample funding, the League’s assault left a trail of battered victims. The ASL “is the most autocratic, the most dictatorial, as well as the most dangerous power ever known in the politics of this country,” charged one opponent. An Alabama politician who had been “run over” by the League’s “steam-roller” moaned that “[t]he good but gullible people of the churches permitted themselves to be humored and hoodwinked . . . ” Politicians who “surrendered, saved themselves from slaughter.” But he and others who resisted “were just swept aside to make room for the more susceptible.”

B
UT IF THE
Anti-Saloon League’s success rested on an underpinning of passionate support and Howard Hyde Russell’s understanding of organizational dynamics, its eventual victory could not have happened without one other factor: lack of opposition. The League’s natural opponents, the brewers and distillers, refused to acknowledge the enemy at the gates. Levies on liquor, beer, and wine constituted 20 to 40 percent of the nation’s tax revenues, and the manufacturers of alcoholic beverages assumed that neither Congress nor the people would derail the money train. Moreover, federal officials regarded alcohol manufacturers as friends of the government. Revenue commissioners often spoke at industry conventions and worked for liquor and beer manufacturers after leaving government. “Uncle Sam is our partner,” read the slogan on one liquor dealer’s letterhead.

And, too, the ASL’s initial successes came in the Far West and the Deep South. Big shipping brewers like Pabst and the Uihleins believed they could afford to lose a rural market here or there, as did the major northeastern beermakers—Jake Ruppert, the Schaefer brothers, and George Ehret—who shrugged at closures suffered by brother brewers in irrelevant Wyoming or Mississippi.

The distillers ignored the danger for another reason: They were not its main target. Since the 1850s, beer had outsold spirits by a wide margin, especially in the saloons that were the avowed target of the ASL’s troops. In 1840, Americans had drunk about 2.5 gallons of spirits per capita; by 1896, they drank only about a gallon. Beer consumption, in contrast, had soared during the same period, from about one gallon in 1840 to fifteen gallons per capita. Distilleries were also large corporate conglomerates run by anonymous managers on behalf of stockholders, so liquor makers never developed the public face and fame that brewers and beer did. Nor did liquor makers operate “tied” houses. Indeed, virtually all of them sold liquor to wholesalers who in turn sold it to retailers, whose bottles of bourbon and rye gathered dust even as beer kegs ran dry as soon as they were tapped. In this new war on drink, public enemy number one was not the distiller but the men who brewed and sold the saloon’s lifeblood: beer.

One of the few brewers who recognized that fact was the aging Adolphus Busch, who sensed the danger emanating from the “tyrrany [sic], idiocy, fanaticism and intolerance” that fed the ASL’s legions. “There is something . . . that I do not like in the American man,” not least his “hypocrisy,” he told his old friend Charles Nagel. “He recommends and speaks for Prohibition and [condemns] the manufactures of all liquor while, at the same time, he drinks like a fish and becomes as drunk as a fool.” Lunacy it might be, hypocritical, too, but Busch acknowledged the threat. “It is my aim to win the American people over to our side, to make them all lovers of beer and teach them to have respect for the brewing industry and the brewer . . . . It may cost us a million of dollars, and even more, but what of it if thereby we elevate our position?” he wrote to a business associate in 1905.

Busch did not expect to lose Missouri to the drys, but he feared that Texas might slip out of his hands. Since the 1870s, he’d invested considerable energy and money into building his Texas market. He sold much of his beer there and owned part or all of three other breweries in that state. But the ASL wanted Texas to go dry, and was busy funneling people, money, and time into the state.

Busch recognized that he and other brewers needed to mount their own campaign to promote the virtues of beer and the insanity of dry laws. But he knew, too, that Texans might eventually be asked to vote on statewide prohibition. Since the ASL supported dry politicians friendly to their cause, the beermakers had no choice but to use the same tactic, giving funds to ensure that wet politicians filled the Texas statehouse and that sympathetic judges, who might be asked to rule on election legalities, sat on court benches. He and the state’s major beermakers organized the Texas Brewers’ Association (TBA), which consisted of AnheuserBusch, William J. Lemp Brewing, and seven Texas breweries, and each company deposited twenty cents per barrel in the organization’s treasury. Even the United States Brewers’ Association, otherwise slow to acknowledge the threat posed by the ASL, recognized that Texas was in danger, and assessed its six hundred-plus members one cent per barrel for the Texans’ battle.

The money was not enough to wage war against the freshet of municipal and county elections spawned by the local option law. In August 1903, the president of a Houston brewery mailed a check for $250 to his dealer in Palestine, Texas, to fund an election campaign in Anderson County. “As you are aware,” he reminded the agent, “the breweries are taxed with three or four elections . . . every month, and have been for the past year, and it has eaten up all of the profits and more.” Still, the brewer knew that it was “impossible” to campaign without the money. “[H]ow it is spent,” he added, “we do not want to know as long as it is spent for a good cause.”

The TBA also bought votes when it could, slipping some of its precious funds into the hands of agreeable but indigent citizens so that they could pay the poll tax that stood between them and the voting booth. In the summer of 1903, a field agent spent a thousand dollars in just one county to pay the tax for fifteen hundred black men. Candidates cost even more. “We have about arranged with the ruling political party to allow us to name a Senator and Representative to the Legislature,” reported an operative working for the San Antonio Brewing Association. “We are trying to get Judge Dean to run as Senator, and I believe he will go if paid for his time while away from his business.” Dean’s services would cost the TBA “at least $3,000,” but the agent expected to offset the expense by acquiring another judge “without paying him anything.”

But as Busch and others were slowly learning, the ASL’s success rested on more than money. Americans were fed up with saloons. True, they had been prodded to that view by ASL propaganda, but there was no denying that beer joints poisoned civic harmony and order. The TBA’s election manager in Freestone County admitted as much as he struggled to reconcile his job and his conscience with the reality of daily life in a community plagued by saloons. He reported that voters in one town demanded a local option election as a way to eliminate a particularly foul beerhouse, a gathering spot for “the young, lawless element who make nights hideous and when weary of raising hades in the house go out and shoot up the town.” The marshal refused “to abate the trouble, and whenever there is any difficulty the new Sheriff always has a sick cow or calf down at his farm . . . Do you blame the people for calling a local option election?” asked the exasperated agent.

By 1907, the United States Brewers’ Association had finally begun, albeit slowly and sporadically, to organize against the danger posed by the ASL and local option laws. But its field operatives discovered that persuading brewers to abandon self-interest was like asking Howard Hyde Russell to have a friendly drink. W. F. Schad, a USBA employee, ran up against that fact when he tried to organize Utah brewers and beer salesmen. Every saloon in Salt Lake City, he noted, contained slot machines and 20 percent of them were “low dives, catering for their trade to women of ill repute and the lowest class of men.” The city’s beermakers and brewery agents knew that. They knew, too, that they ought to close the dives and combat the Mormon prohibitionists (most of whom, Schad noted, “use stimulants quietly”). But one local beermaker explained to Schad that he would close his dens of iniquity only if the rest of the city’s brewers did the same; until then, his tied houses would stay open. Worse yet, the manager of Salt Lake Brewing Company refused to have anything to do with any clean-up operation that involved Reilly, the local Lemp sales representative.

Schad hurried over to the Lemp office to investigate. It turned out that Reilly had handled Salt Lake Brewing’s beer until wooed away by Lemp, and now he supplied Lemp lager to saloons formerly in Salt Lake Brewing’s corral. Reilly assured Schad that he was willing to work with his former employer. Schad trotted back to Salt Lake Brewing, but his powers of persuasion crumbled in the face of its manager’s recalcitrance: He refused to join any organization that included Reilly and neither Schad nor anyone else could change his mind. “The Salt Lake Brewing Company, being the largest Brewery in the State,” Schad reported, “I of course failed to organize as contemplated.”

This shortsighted self-absorption frustrated Charles Nagel. He pleaded with Adolphus Busch and son August to board the bandwagon of reality and push harder to get out their side of the story. Beer had become “the object of severest criticism” and brewers could not even “get a hearing in the public prints,” he told August. And why? Because “the whole country is infested with disreputable saloons,” and it was those that fueled public outrage against drinking, and, by extension, the brewing industry. Forced to choose between the “disreputable” saloon on the one hand and prohibition on the other, Americans would come down on the side of the “greatest . . . good to the general public”—and so against the brewers.

Chastened or inspired, in late 1907, August Busch announced that he and his father would cooperate in “the suppression of lawless saloons.” “We do not expect great results in a day,” Busch said. But “[s]how us a saloon or a club in which crime is bred and fostered, and if it belongs to our custom our support shall be withdrawn.”

Fred J. Kern, the mayor of Belleville, Illinois, challenged Busch to make good on his words. Kern told a reporter that the town, which lay fifteen miles southeast of St. Louis, contained “110 saloons, of which 105 are decent.” But the town’s most indecent places were owned by Anheuser-Busch, and the manager of the Budweiser Garden, the most notorious of the lot, had paid numerous fines for admitting minors to the attached dance hall. “[I]t is the rankest kind of hypocrisy,” Kern charged, “for Gussie Busch to insist on law enforcement in the newspapers and then for his tenants and his agents . . . to denounce the public officials who demand some little respect for the decencies and the proprieties . . . of orderly society.”

“Gussie” wasted no time in responding. Twenty-four hours later, the manager turned out the lights and locked the doors; soon after, an Anheuser-Busch employee collected the keys.

But Charles Nagel was right: It was too little, too late. Few other brewers were willing to take the same step, and the Budweiser Garden was a mere drop in a gargantuan vat of saloons and dance halls. That puny effort could not divert the tide of public opinion from the channel dredged by the Anti-Saloon League. By late 1909, 46 million Americans—just over 50 percent of the total population—lived under some form of dry law. That included half of Chicago, long regarded as an impenetrable bulwark of booze. Voters in nine states had embraced outright prohibition, one of which, Oklahoma, had entered the Union two years earlier with a constitutional ban on liquor sales.

S
ALOONS WEREN'T
the League’s only targets in the march toward total prohibition. ASL operatives personalized the war by attacking the men behind the beer, easy enough to do at a time when muckraking journalists painted corporate magnates as sleazy crooks, and when tales of monied greed and scandal filled newspapers and magazines. Many brewers, especially the Uihleins, Jake Ruppert, and George Ehret, had become famous in large part because of their wealth. But no beermaker drew more fire than flamboyant Adolphus Busch. A prohibitionist newspaper announced in early 1910 that the brewer had recently paid the highest price ever recorded for a second residence in Pasadena, not far from his beloved Ivy Wall. “[H]ow many thousands of homes of the patrons of his business have been mortgaged in order that Mr. Busch might enjoy the luxury of having the most ‘palatial estate on the Pacific Coast,’ ” wondered the reporter.

Busch came in for another attack in early 1911 on the occasion of his fiftieth wedding anniversary. Lilly and Adolphus, he ill, frail, and wheelchair-bound, celebrated at Ivy Wall. Hundreds of bouquets and wreaths decorated the house, and two hundred strands of gold roses hung from the ceiling. On the morning of the great day, Adolphus opened the gift from his St. Louis employees, a solid gold block the size and shape of a telegram and engraved with sentiments of “devotion and love,” and promptly collapsed—overcome by emotion and, perhaps, the sheer weight of the thing.