Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (22 page)

That evening Adolphus mustered the strength to join his wife and guests at dinner, where the thirty-eight attendees sat in gilded chairs, their places at the table marked by solid gold engraved souvenir plates. He presented Lilly with a gold tiara studded with diamonds and pearls. Heaps of beribboned gifts covered forty feet of table space and spilled over onto the floor. Among the treasures were three solid gold “loving cups,” one each from Theodore Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm, and the citizens of Pasadena. Adolphus’s good friend William Howard Taft, president of the United States, sent one of the Saint-Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces pulled from circulation because they had been cast without the words “In God We Trust.”

That last item caught the attention of Mrs. Sue F. Armstrong of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who, like many Americans, read about the festivities in her local newspaper. She might have been able to swallow the notion of $200,000 tiaras and Americans accepting gifts from German emperors, but the idea of the nation’s president consorting with purveyors of evil was more than she could stand. Mrs. Armstrong demanded an explanation from the White House. “I . . . wish to know,” she wrote in a letter to Taft’s office, “if the statement in regard to the president is true. Here in Iowa where we are trying to put out the saloons we should be glad to say that this report is untrue.”

It’s not clear whether Taft replied to her letter, but Sue Armstrong was not the only American demanding answers from the White House. A few months after the Busch anniversary, President Taft’s agriculture secretary, James Wilson, accepted an invitation to serve as an honorary vice-president and speaker at the International Brewers’ Congress in Chicago. The Anti-Saloon League organized a protest, and hundreds of clubs and associations bombarded the White House and Department of Agriculture with letters and telegrams. Arthur B. Farwell, president of the Chicago Law and Order League, urged Christians to pray for Wilson’s misguided soul and begged the Agriculture Secretary not to “promote” the brewers’ “schemes” or “stoop” to their morally repugnant level.

Wilson ignored the request. “If Mr. Farwell will call upon me, I would be only too glad to give him a few instructions in the art of praying,” he told a reporter. “I have been a church member all my life and have been conscientious in everything I have done.” Moreover, he had no plans to allow “criticism” from “so-called reformer[s]” or anyone else to interfere with his job. True to his word, Wilson attended the Brewers’ Congress and delivered his speech. “[T]here was nothing else to do,” he told Taft. “The prohibitionists have been threatening that they will take away votes from you in the coming campaign. The brewing people assure me that they will make good everything of that kind . . . ”

Taft would need the support: As the 1912 presidential campaign kicked into gear, he backed away from what Anti-Saloon League leaders had interpreted as a commitment to their cause. One of the thorniest issues that the ASL faced was that of interstate transport of liquor. In 1911, it was legal for, say, a retailer in a dry city in Illinois to buy beer from a Wisconsin brewer, have it shipped to Illinois, and sell it there. This continent-sized loophole undermined local option laws and the League’s dreams of a dry America. Early in his presidency, Taft had promised that if Congress passed a bill banning interstate shipments of liquor into dry areas, he would sign it. The League wrote such legislation, and maneuvered it into the Judiciary committees of both houses, but by 1911 it had become clear that Taft valued his reelection more than his earlier promise, and valued the financial contributions garnered from brewers and distillers more than the support of the ASL.

Adolphus Busch favored Taft’s reelection bid, though Busch, like others of his ilk, would have voted Republican, the businessmen’s party, no matter who was running. He also scoffed at Taft’s opponent, Woodrow Wilson: “Well, they couldn’t have done anything more stupid than to nominate the Weakest Candidate of the Bunch.” “I have a kind of feeling,” he said a few months later, “that the fellow is a prohibitionist . . . for that he ought to get another knock with the stick.”

A
YEAR LATER
, at age seventy-four, Busch died at Villa Lilly, the family residence near Wiesbaden. Lilly Anheuser Busch and son August accompanied the body back to the United States, where a five-car train carried it and family and friends from New York to Missouri. Nagel and Missouri congressman Richard Bartholdt were on board, as was Carl Conrad, an old man himself now and bereft at the loss of his boon companion of some forty years. Kaiser Wilhelm telegrammed his condolences and ordered a representative of the German embassy to attend the funeral and lay a wreath.

At a private service at One Busch Place, Nagel eulogized his old friend as a “giant among men,” “a descendant of one of the great, vigorous and ancient gods.” A mass of floral arrangements covered the grounds outside the house, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets of St. Louis to bid farewell and watch brewery employees escort the hearse to the gravesite. There Bartholdt memorialized a life lived full: “Our song to-day is in praise of . . . that ornament of creation, the self-made man.” “Kings inherit their realms,” he said, “statesmen are entrusted with their power by others, but our departed friend . . . built his own world, an empire of possessions extending . . . to the farthest corners of the globe.”

Before Busch died, he saw his prediction fail. In November 1912, the “Temperance Crank,” as Busch had mocked him, won the election. Woodrow Wilson owed his victory to third-party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party, a group of renegade Republicans who feared the incumbent Taft would sell his presidency to corporate America rather than fight for a reform agenda that would promote the interests of ordinary people. Roosevelt’s exercise in political bravado siphoned votes from Taft and threw the election to Wilson.

Busch had been right to wonder where Wilson stood on the subject of prohibition. The new president entered the White House trailing a record of waffling and indecision. As a devoted Progressive, he favored cleaning up the saloons. As New Jersey governor, he supported local option, which he viewed as a tool that placed power in the hands of ordinary voters. As presidentelect, he urged Congress to close the interstate loophole before he arrived in Washington. Yet once in office, he performed an about-face and refused to endorse outright prohibition, even statewide prohibition.

Soon it no longer mattered what the occupant of the White House wanted, said, or did. In early 1913, the lame-duck Taft Congress (in those days, presidential terms began in March), many of whom had lost their own reelection bids and no longer had to please constituents, ratified the Sixteenth Amendment, which introduced the income tax. This was a deadly blow to the brewers’ cause: They assumed that as long as beer taxes poured into the treasury’s coffers, national prohibition would never come to pass. The new income tax replaced alcohol as the main source of the government’s revenue and whacked the legs out from under the wets’ most forceful argument against prohibition.

A few days later, the House of Representatives approved the Webb-Kenyon Act, the single most important piece of preprohibition legislation. Webb-Kenyon, written and bulldozed through committee and onto the House floor by Wayne Wheeler, closed the hated interstate loophole. Local option and even statewide prohibition suddenly gained a clout and force they had lacked before, and brewers in dry locations who had kept their businesses alive by selling beer out of state understood that their ledger books had just suffered a fatal wound that would turn black ink to red. Taft took a break from packing his bags to veto the act, but the House and Senate overrode his action. “Prohibition is no longer a local issue,” announced the editors of
American Brewers’ Review.
“Prohibition is a national danger.”

In December 1913, just two months after the death of Adolphus Busch, a procession marched through the streets of the nation’s capital; had Busch lived to witness it, he likely would have keeled over from apoplexy. One thousand members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and one thousand men affiliated with the Anti-Saloon League walked to the Capitol building, accompanied by another two thousand men, women, and children who serenaded passers-by with a boisterous rendition of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas and Representative Richmond P. Hobson of Alabama greeted them on the Capitol steps. As the thousands watched, two men stepped out of the ranks and handed the senator and congressman a draft of a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would ban the sale and manufacture of alcohol anywhere in the United States.

The moment that Howard Hyde Russell had envisioned back in 1893 had arrived. The push for constitutional prohibition had begun.

T
HE
L
EAGUE
had traveled far in a short time, but Americans in 1913 were no more interested in outlawing alcohol than they are today. Prohibition was and is an extreme measure that smacks of coercion and invasion of privacy; resistance to both is the bedrock of Americans’ DNA. Nor does the idea of amending the Constitution lay easy on the American mind. It is something we do rarely and with caution, and typically only to correct a perceived injustice: to outlaw slavery, or to define citizenship and voting rights.

So how did the League come to the Capitol steps so quickly? Part of the ASL’s success can be attributed to the times themselves: Drastic measures seemed necessary in a society battered by the speed and intensity with which the industrial economy had taken hold. As one dry put it, “You may exercise your personal liberty only in so far as you do not place additional burdens upon your neighbor, or upon the State.” Alcohol, many sensible people believed, did precisely that in terms of work hours lost, families harmed, wages wasted, health injured, and lives damaged beyond repair.

But the events of 1913 also stand as testimony to the tenacity, passion, and skill of the leaders of the nation’s first single-issue lobbying group, the progenitor of so many that would follow. Its members, zealous and dedicated, had persuaded Americans to ban booze locally; now they stood ready to ask them to take this next, more extreme, step.

Had the electorate been asked to vote directly on the measure, it likely would have failed, but the mechanism of ratification worked to the ASL’s advantage. The issue would never go before the voters themselves. Rather, ratification would fall to the members of state legislatures; only they would cast ballots yea or nay on the amendment.

The process would begin in Congress, where two-thirds of the House and Senate had to authorize submission of the amendment to the forty-eight states. Ernest Cherrington, the ASL official who devised the group’s strategy, planned a test vote in Congress in 1914. The ASL would then devote 1915 and 1916 to electoral warfare, mowing down wet congressmen and replacing them with drys. If the plan went as plotted, a dry Congress would approve the amendment in 1918 and send it on to the states, where the League, having by then filled legislatures with sympathetic drys—or the easily coerced—expected no trouble in garnering the needed thirty-six votes.

Simple, but not necessarily easy. The League’s near-impenetrable hide consisted of the rural Deep South, Far West, and Midwest. But its soft underbelly—and the wets’ armor—lay in the nation’s cities, where 45 percent of Americans lived. A mere nine heavily urban states commanded 196 votes in the House; wets needed only 146 to kill the amendment.

On paper, at any rate, the League’s final campaign seemed lost before it began. And in the hands of other organizers, it might have been. But the foot soldiers launched themselves into this final phase of the war with renewed passion. A League official said later that ASL headquarters knew “the progress of every fight at every village crossroads. We were at all times intimately in touch with the battle on all fronts.” Petitions, letters, and telegrams “rolled in by tens of thousands, burying Congress like an avalanche.” League spies sent daily updates to headquarters so that League officials knew every move that the wets made.

And the League continued to benefit from the mystifyingly hapless, seemingly indifferent brewers. Just as it had been hard to muster a good reason to support the saloon, so the antiamendment crowd was hard pressed to present a compelling case against constitutional prohibition. The one significant argument rested on what might be, on theory rather than fact. As one wet put it, a ban on booze would “breed deceit, hypocrisy, [and] disrespect of law, and encourage evasion, lying, trickery, and lawlessness.” Enforcement would “require an army of United States officials, paid spies and informers . . . ”

That of course turned out to be true, but in 1913, it was an argument that lacked teeth. The ASL made sure of that: Their newspapers, magazines, and press releases all touted the decrease in crime wherever local prohibition was already in effect. It was harder to broadcast the other side of the story: Local prohibition consistently gave rise to “blind pigs,” as illegal retail outlets were called, and to bootlegging.

And so the campaign for consitutional prohibition rolled on. By late 1914, five more states had gone dry. Fifty percent of the American people lived under total prohibition, and another seventy breweries had closed their doors.

The ASL picked that moment to test its strength. On December 22, 1914, Representative Hobson introduced the prohibition amendment on the House floor. An enormous banner adorned the south gallery: a petition containing the names of twelve thousand organizations representing six million Americans who wanted a dry nation. A set of easels in front of the Speaker’s rostrum held posters emblazoned with type large enough to be seen from the back of the hall: “Crime is caused by drink,” one read. “Liquor fills the asylum,” announced another. Floral arrangements decorated Richmond Hobson’s desk, tokens of favor from women in the galleries. Pages scurried back and forth delivering stacks of telegrams to members, pleas from constituents for votes for and against.