Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (5 page)

A few weeks later, it was Cincinnati’s turn. Violence erupted on an election day in April, as a mob attacked German voting stations and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Germans barricaded the bridge leading to the city’s “Over the Rhine” Germantown, but their opponents, armed with a cannon and muskets, stormed the defenses. The conflict dragged on for three days, leaving many dead and wounded on both sides.

During the “Bloody Monday” riots in Louisville in August 1855, Germans, Irish, and nativists armed with muskets, bayonets, and cannons roamed the streets firing on each other and passers-by. Nineteen men died in that rampage. Violence erupted even in Portland, Maine, where Neal Dow bragged that prohibition had eradicated crime: Rumors spread that Dow had purchased liquor and sold it to the state for medicinal purposes. A mob gathered outside the Portland liquor agency and Dow ordered a local militia group to the scene. When rioters broke into the building, Dow commanded the troops to fire. Their bullets killed one person and injured seven others.

The temperance campaign rent the fabric of Milwaukee. When the state legislature passed a bill that imposed new restrictions on alcohol sales, an angry crowd filled the streets in the town’s business district. Crowds of men and boys lit bonfires and fired rifles, blew horns and pounded on pans. Eventually a mob of about three hundred surrounded the house of John Smith, Milwaukee’s state representative and president of a local temperance society, and pelted it with rocks and bricks, smashing windows and terrifying the four children and two servants inside.

From Phillip Best’s perspective, this was bad news indeed. He had built both a thriving business and a reputation as a man of honor and an honest entrepreneur trusted by Germans and Americans alike. A mob scene like the one at Smith’s house damaged the reputation of all Germans, but it hurt the brewers most of all. The city’s moralists would be quick to charge the crowd with drunkenness, and if the crowd was mostly German, they would have been drunk on only one thing.

So it went around the country, as prohibition laws inadvertently and unexpectedly sparked the crime and chaos they had been designed to eliminate. This turn of events troubled many Americans, and by the mid-1850s, some who had once supported prohibition began to reject this extreme solution to the nation’s drinking problem. But even as the riots raged, the temperance crusaders found themselves under attack from another quarter.

In the 1850s, the most contentious issues facing the nation involved not drink but land and slavery. Politicians longed to open the nation’s vast western territories—nearly everything west of the Missouri River—to settlement and statehood. Every American thrilled to the prospect of all that land waiting to be plowed, planted, and built, but no hearts beat faster than those of southern slave owners. To the west, they realized, lay a magnificent opportunity to expand slavery beyond the Deep South. That same prospect terrified white northerners. Once slavery ensnared the West, would it conquer the North, too? Would slaves invade northern factories and farms, their free labor eliminating the need to pay a white man’s wages?

Those questions trumped the debate over drink. No one could see that more clearly than the leaders of the nation’s two major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Whigs hated slavery and immigrants but loved prohibition, a combination that repelled German and Irish voters. The Democrats welcomed immigrants and lager lovers alike. Unfortunately the party also supported slavery, and men like Phillip Best had not fled Europe’s oppression in order to join hands with politicians who ignored the distinction between free labor and slavery. Laborers and fields hands shied away, too, fearful that Democratic victories would deposit slavery on factory floors and northern farms.

In March 1854, a group of Wisconsin men frustrated with the Whigs’ anti-immigrant message and the Democrats’ pro-slavery stance organized a new political party devoted first and foremost to the end of slavery. Prohibitionists tried to clamber aboard the new bandwagon. Nothing doing. The Republicans, as the new party’s leaders called themselves, shoved them right back off: They planned to win elections, and to do so, they had to woo voters. They understood that prohibition, which alienated immigrants and urbanites, had become a political liability. There was no place in the new party’s agenda for a divisive crusade against drink.

And if the lesson was lost on some, a Milwaukee man hastened to set the record straight. “[N]early all the Germans of this city,” he announced in a letter published in a local newspaper, were prepared to cast their lot against slavery and with the new party, but they refused to bow to the dictates of “fanatic and zealous temperance men.” They would even support a “teetotaller” candidate, as long as he promised to stand against slavery. But Germans would not vote for prohibition or a prohibition man. “Can you expect of a brewer that he will tear down, with his own hands, his brewery?” he demanded. Or ask a laborer, after a “hard day’s work . . . paving your streets,” to “throw away” his “wholesome and nourishing Lagerbeer,” to “sacrifice his comfort for the sake of restricting slavery”? Go ahead, he added, punish the drunk. Close the beerhalls on election day. But if the Republicans wanted German support, they had to steer clear of the “fanaticism” of prohibition.

Lawmakers in Madison got the message. In early 1855, Wisconsin’s governor vetoed a flimsy prohibition law. Jacob Best, Jr., hung a “veto pen” in pride of place at the brothers’ beerhall, and Milwaukee’s young men celebrated the freedom to drink lager by marching from beerhall to beerhall, lighting bonfires and shooting fireworks.

C
AUGHT BETWEEN
the rock of slavery and the hard place of immigration, the temperance crusade collapsed. But this short-lived battle over drink produced an unintended, profound consequence that shaped brewing’s next fifty years. On one hand, even the zealots were forced to acknowledge that prohibition created more problems than it solved. On the other hand, most Americans sincerely believed that drink posed a genuine threat to the nation’s future. Where, many wondered, was the middle ground between the two?

The answer lay close at hand, and among the very people and beverage formerly accused of degrading American morals: Germans and their lager. Weary of the temperance movement and the conflict that it sparked, native-born Americans latched onto lager and the German model of sociable drinking as a compromise that allowed them to avoid the two extremes of prohibition and drunkenness.

The violence that accompanied the short-lived prohibition effort had drawn attention to the German lifestyle, to the beer gardens that welcomed families, and, of course, to lager itself. But the spotlight revealed what many Americans had been loath to admit: German-Americans lived respectably and moderately. They had prospered and assimilated into the American mainstream. They had built churches, and many owned their own businesses. Their homes were well kept and orderly. And they had accomplished this in spite of their lager.

The staff at the
St. Louis Republican
quantified the point. Between March and mid-September of 1854, they calculated, St. Louisians had consumed some eighteen million glasses of lager. “And yet,” they mused, Germans “contributed the smallest ratio to the sick list [and] the smallest number of convicts or criminals.” More to the point, the Germans “prosper[ed] in health, worldly goods and happiness.” The point was clear: Temperance crusaders insisted that alcohol led to degradation and crime, vice and decay, but Germans stood as living proof that it was possible to combine alcohol and respectability, pleasure and decency. A Buffalo newspaper editor chimed in with a possible explanation for the conundrum: American drinkers drank to get drunk and swilled “liver-eating gin, and stomach-destroying rum.” But Germans sipped lager as an accompaniment to other pleasures, such as singing and dancing and card-playing, and enjoyed lager’s yeasty heft as more of “a kindly sedative than a stimulus.”

Juries in several cities confirmed the growing belief that lager beer posed no threat to the nation’s future. In February 1858, one George Staats, a Brooklyn brewer and proprietor of a lager garden, went on trial on charges of violating the city’s Sunday drink law. Staats’s lawyer offered an ingenious defense: His client was innocent because lager beer was not intoxicating.

Men of science took the stand to explain that, at 3 percent alcohol content, lager could intoxicate only if consumed in extraordinary quantities. Or, as a reporter for the
New York Times
explained, “if it takes a pail-full of bier to make a person drunk, and the same person could get drunk on an eighth the quantity of rum, then lager is not an intoxicating drink, but may be a wholesome beverage.” Men of more practical experience agreed. Witness after witness testified to drinking excruciating quantities of lager—twenty to ninety pints a day—with no ill effects. The jury retired, debated the case for three hours (presumably without the benefit of lager to clear their minds), and returned to declare both Staats and lager not guilty.

Three months later, an identical case unfolded before a judge in Manhattan. Physicians took the stand to defend George Maurer against a charge of selling intoxicants on Sunday. One analyzed lager at three different New York breweries and concluded that, when consumed in moderate quantities, lager could not and did not intoxicate. Another reported that he had watched men imbibe as many as sixty glasses of lager without any evidence of intoxication. A third informed the jury that “he was in the habit of ordering [lager] for females after their confinements, and with good results.”

Professionals of another kind followed them to the stand, among them a portly German who volunteered the information that he regularly drank more than one hundred glasses of lager a day and never got drunk. In fact, he added, in case the jurors doubted his word, he had consumed twenty-two glasses that very morning before reporting to the courtroom. And so it went during four days of testimony. The jury retired, contemplated the facts for over seven hours, and reported they could not agree on a verdict. The judge, perhaps longing for a glass of lager, sent them and Mr. Maurer home.

The editors of
Harper’s Weekly
provided further evidence for lager’s benefits: “Good lager beer is pronounced by the [scientific] faculty to be a mild tonic, calculated, on the average, to be rather beneficial than injurious to the system.” The editor of the La Crosse, Wisconsin
Union
concurred: “There is no denying the fact,” he wrote, that under the regime of “total abstinence American women are sadly degenerating,” adding that one “good, rollicking fast-liver could clean out a regiment” of temperance types “in ten minutes.” Queen Victoria drank beer on a regular basis, he pointed out, as did German women, and they were “as robust as any women in the world.”

Even the editors of the
New York Times,
who groused that lager had become “a good deal too fashionable for . . . the morals of young citizens,” conceded that it was better than the alternative. When that state’s legislature passed a bill banning the sale of wine and spirits, Americans flocked to lager beer gardens. A reporter’s investigation revealed the truth: Many New Yorkers formerly “in the habit of drinking one or more glasses of rum, gin or brandy, every day” now consumed lager instead, evidence, he claimed, of people’s willingness to forgo “the stronger [alcoholic] beverages” in favor of the “very weakest.”

So it went around the country, as non-German Americans rendered their own verdict: Lager was both good and safe. By the late 1850s, “lager bier” saloons lined the streets of cities large and small, and a profusion of new summer gardens dotted leafy suburbs. There men and women danced to German bands, thrilled to the exquisite voices of German choral groups, enjoyed opera and dancers and comics, and relaxed over glasses of fresh lager. In Buffalo, families that once picnicked at Forest Lawn cemetery—the only green space in town—now thronged Westphal’s Garden to enjoy lager and music. Respectable businessmen and artisans learned that they need not endure the humiliation of slipping furtively into a grimy tavern for beer; they could stroll Westphal’s greenery with wife on arm and children straggling behind. Everyone—German, Irish, American—looked forward to that city’s St. John’s Day Festival. “A German festival is always full of life, spirit and fun,” commented one local newspaper editor.

So, too, in Cincinnati, where one man marveled at the change: Lager beer, he informed readers of his guide to that city, “forms refreshment to one-half of our native population . . . [and] is driving out the consumption of whiskey . . . ” A Richmond, Virginia, man agreed. “Lager has gone ahead of all other beverages,” he claimed, and Germans were that city’s “gayest citizens,” ones who knew how to “enjoy their hours of relaxation.” Thanks to the émigrés, American life had entered a “new and pleasant phase.”

An Englishman who spent the 1850s in the United States also testified to the change in tastes. “A dozen years ago,” he wrote in 1862, at the conclusion of his stay, “brandy and whiskey were the popular drinks; now they have, in a great measure, given place to this lager-bier, with its three per cent. of alcohol . . . [N]obody liked it at first,” but now “everybody . . . everywhere” drank it in “immense quantities.” Americans had embraced the pleasures of café life, and he advised the temperance crowd to come up with other “wholesome, palatable, and invigorating drinks, which people could drink and talk over . . . The use of lager-bier proves the practicability of this course.”

L
AGER'S NEW POPULARITY
among Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities spurred the growth of breweries nationwide, nearly all of them owned by Germans who hoped that lager mania would pave their way to wealth. Ten new breweries opened in Milwaukee alone during the 1850s.

Among the newcomers was Valentin Blatz. He had trained as a brewer in his native Bavaria before emigrating to Milwaukee in the 1840s, where he began his American life working for another beermaker, John (or Johann) Braun. But Blatz wanted more, and in 1851 he pitched the first yeast in his own brewing vat. He revealed the expanse of his ambition a few months later when Braun died in an accident: Blatz married the man’s widow and took control of his brewery. Like the Bests, he had devoted the 1850s to expansion, building a larger brewhouse and more extensive malthouse. Unlike the Bests, Blatz paid for the projects by pilfering the estates of the children of his now-deceased former employer. Blatz arranged for a lawyer friend to be appointed as legal guardian to the children and their inheritance; the friend opened the door to the money and Blatz helped himself.