Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (4 page)

Adolphus's one professional failure was his inability to turn back the rising tide of Prohibition, a fight that consumed his final years. He spent a fortune trying to promote beer in general—and Budweiser in particular—as a “beverage of moderation,” an antidote to the devil whiskey that so incensed the temperance movement. One of the company's pre-Prohibition ad campaigns even featured the tagline “Budweiser Spells Temperance.” In his effort to create a wholesome, healthy image for his product, and to differentiate it from that of the nation's distillers, Adolphus went so far as to host a party at his Pasadena estate for seven thousand members of the American Medical Association. He railed against the anti-alcohol movement as an attack on individual rights. One particularly florid newspaper ad for Budweiser invoked the name of his hero, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck:

“Bismarck, like all Germans, prized Personal Liberty as the breath of life—a
NATURAL RIGHT
to be guarded and defended at any cost. Among our millions of law-abiding German-American citizens there is not a man who does not consider it insolent tyranny of the most odious kind for any legislation to issue this command: ‘Thou shalt
NOT
eat this; Thou shall
NOT
drink that.' Germans know that there is no evil in the light wines and beers of their fathers. E
VIL IS ONLY IN THE MAN WHO MISUSES THEM
.”

Adolphus became the Prohibitionists' favorite poster boy when they figured out that he and the other major brewers owned or controlled a majority of the country's saloons, which sold most of the whiskey they believed was destroying American life. Author Ernest Barron Gordon, then the foremost chronicler of the anti-alcohol movement, denounced him as a “promoter of villainous dives.”

Adolphus took his case against prohibition directly to President William McKinley. Upon being introduced to the president at a political function, he launched into an impassioned thirty-minute lecture warning of the danger in outlawing the “light, happy” beverage that he claimed was “demanded” by 85 to 90 percent of the adult population.

“Mr. President, the demand I speak of is prompted by human nature itself,” he said, his voice rising. “And believe me, if the fanatics should ever succeed in preventing its being satisfied legitimately, the people will resort to narcotics or stimulants so injurious as to eventually undermine the health of the nation.”

On June 10, 1910, as Adolphus and Lilly were about to set sail from New York on their annual summer trip to Germany, he told reporters that, “if given full sway,” Prohibition would “ruin the whole world.”

Adolphus lived to see his vision of beer in America borne out. In 1911 the United States surpassed Germany as the No. 1 beer-producing country in the world, with an output of nearly 63 million barrels, 1.6 million of which were the product of Anheuser-Busch, Inc. of St. Louis, Mo. In 1912 the U.S. Census Bureau ranked brewing as the country's seventeenth-largest industry.

Adolphus did not live to see his worst nightmare come true. On October 10, 1913, after a day of hunting with his friend Carl Conrad in the woods near Villa Lilly, he fell ill, and several days later he died. His body was brought back to New York aboard his favorite steamer, the
Kronprinz Wilhelm
, and then carried home to St. Louis by a special five-car train that included the
Adolphus
. Back at his mansion, 30,000 people—more than 5,000 of them brewery workers—viewed his body before the funeral, and an estimated 100,000 lined the route to the cemetery. At the time, the cause of death was reported as heart failure. Years later, it was disclosed that the heart failure may have been caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

Adolphus left an estate worth a staggering $60 million. His stock was divided equally among his seven surviving children, with each receiving thirty-eight shares, except for the eldest son, August Anheuser Busch Sr., who received an additional three shares for serving as a trustee along with his mother, Lilly. In addition to the 116 shares she had inherited from her father, Eberhard Anheuser, Adolphus's Lilly held in trust the shares bequeathed to four of the children: Nellie, who Adolphus considered a spendthrift, Clara and Wilhelmina, who were married to German citizens, and Carl, who was disabled from a prenatal injury suffered when Lilly fell down the stairs the night her father died.

With an original par value of $500 per share, A-B stock paid huge annual dividends, usually between $3,000 and $5,000 per share, $8,000 in 1913. It was said that Adolphus once bought back a share from a member of the Anheuser family for $60,000, and that any bank in St. Louis would lend $25,000 against a share.

August Sr., referred to in the family as “August A.,” inherited his father's position as president of the company, which was valued at $40 million in property and equipment. He also inherited a series of interlocking problems that threatened to destroy everything his father had built.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Anti-Saloon League emerged as the leading organization in the fight to ban alcohol, lobbying for Prohibition on a state-by-state basis. But the ASL changed its tack in December 1913, when it staged a demonstration in Washington that featured five thousand anti-alcohol activists singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as they paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps, where they presented two “dry” congressmen with a petition for a constitutional amendment imposing
national
prohibition. Around the same time, the ASL's superintendent, a Methodist minister named Purley Baker, launched a well-financed “public information” campaign that demonized the producers of alcoholic beverages, particularly the nation's mostly German-American brewers, who, according to Baker, “eat like gluttons and drink like swine.” League posters referred to them as “Huns” and portrayed them as apelike Neanderthals who threatened the American way of life.

Making matters worse, in June 1914, eight months after Adolphus's death, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria set off World War I. The Busch family was summering at Villa Lilly when hostilities broke out. August A. and his wife and children quickly fled the continent, but his mother, Lilly, remained in Germany with her two married daughters. Even before America entered the war in 1917, anti-German sentiment swept the country when the Germans became the first to use mustard gas in combat and a German submarine sank the British ocean liner
Lusitania
, killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 passengers, including 128 Americans.

The Busch family's ties to the fatherland and their long-standing support for Kaiser Wilhelm were well known. Fearing a backlash against his family and the brewery, August A. did everything he could to show his patriotism. He wrote a $100,000 check to the Red Cross. He announced that he was buying $1.5 million worth of Liberty Bonds. He offered to produce submarine engines for the war effort through a company his father had established, the Busch-Sulzer Brothers Diesel Engine Company. He changed the label on all Budweiser products, eliminating the double eagle design that some people believed represented the Austrian coat of arms. He began wearing an American flag button on his lapel. He abolished German as the official language at the brewery and ordered busts and paintings of Chancellor Bismarck removed from the premises.

Despite these efforts, Budweiser sales dropped from nearly $18 million in 1913 to $12 million in 1917. Lilly Busch's continued presence in Germany became a public embarrassment to her son and the brewery when it was revealed that both of her daughters' husbands were involved in the German war effort. Lilly finally returned to the United States in 1918, but only after President Woodrow Wilson established the office of Alien Property Custodian, which was empowered to seize all American assets owned by people living in an enemy country. Upon her arrival in Key West, Florida, the ailing seventy-five-year-old widow of Adolphus Busch was detained for forty hours and subjected to a strip search that included “a very thorough examination of her vagina and womb,” according to her lawyer, who decried the treatment as “unexcelled in brutality, an examination not perpetrated on the poorest prostitute or female pick-pocket.”

Lilly's property was seized pending the results of an investigation by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee into the activities of Anheuser-Busch and other German-surnamed breweries in the United States, based on the flimsy suspicion that they might be secretly funding the German war machine. The Busches and the brewery were eventually given a clean bill of health and an apology from the U.S. attorney general, and Lilly's property was returned to her by order of President Wilson shortly after the Armistice was signed. But August A.'s problems were just beginning.

On December 8, 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages nationally. The amendment was to take effect one year after the ratification by the states. However, on September 16, 1918, with more than half a million U.S. troops fighting in France, President Wilson issued a ban on the production of beer in order to conserve grain for the war effort. The ban was short-lived, ending with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. But two months later, on January 16, 1919, the Nebraska legislature became the thirty-sixth to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment. Manufacturers of alcoholic beverages howled that the American people would have rejected Prohibition overwhelmingly if it had been put up to a popular vote, a claim that appears to have been borne out by the bootlegging success of Al Capone and his gangster cohorts during the bloody, booze-soaked Roaring Twenties that followed. August A. angrily dismissed the amendment's passage as “an attempt to substitute the authority of law for the virtue of man,” and he predicted that the experiment ultimately would fail. He vowed to keep his company operating, one way or another, until it did.

In the meantime, Anheuser-Busch sought to rally the public against the amendment with promotional pamphlets and ads that testified to the societal benefits of its product. “The temperate use of a temperate alcoholic beverage like beer makes for the advancement of individual progress; the evils incident to outlawing it make for demoralization,” proclaimed one. “Pure beer, such as Budweiser, is the nation's greatest aid to temperance, a home beverage which promotes both physical and moral well being.”

Another brochure quoted Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as saying that fermented beverages were “generally innocent, and often have a friendly influence upon health and life.” It cited records from the
Mayflower
indicating that beer was on the Pilgrims' minds when they put in at Plymouth Rock rather than push on to their intended destination in Virginia, “for we could not now take time for further search or consideration; our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” If that wasn't enough, a translation by George Smith of the British Museum of text on clay tablets found in Nineveh in 1872 purportedly proved that beer was part of the cargo on Noah's Ark: “with beer and brandy, oil and wine, I filled large jars.”

As the official start of Prohibition approached—midnight, January 18, 1920—August A. called his two sons into his office. They were grown men—Adolphus III was twenty-nine, Gussie, twenty-one—and their inheritance guaranteed that they would never need to work again if they didn't want to. “You can afford to ride this out and retire,” their father said, “but in my book Prohibition is a challenge and we owe it to our employees to keep going.”

Given that they had 6,500 employees and an annual payroll of more than $2 million, it was a challenge that even Adolphus would have found daunting. And there was some question as to whether August A. was up to the task. As a young man, he'd shown little interest in the family business, announcing at age nineteen that what he really wanted to do was be a cowboy. He even bought himself an outfit and a six-shooter and, much to his father's chagrin, embarked on a six-month sabbatical at a ranch in Montana. But the prodigal eventually returned to St. Louis and dutifully submitted to Adolphus's strict program for learning the business from the bottom up, starting as a brewer's apprentice and rising methodically through the ranks under the unwavering eye of his father, who ceaselessly bombarded him with letters of instruction, exhortation, criticism, and praise, some running as long as twenty pages. A typical passage reminded him, “Our whole welfare and happiness … depends solely and only on the success of our brewery; its earnings are sufficient to make us happy for all time to come.”

August A. was a gentler personality than Adolphus, shy and soft-spoken, adverse to publicity, and more attuned to the life of a country squire than that of a hard-driving industrialist. Unlike his father, he didn't enjoy travel. On a 281-acre parcel of land 8.5 miles from the brewery, he built a $300,000 French Renaissance Revival chateau that was easily the grandest residence in the state of Missouri. The estate featured a $250,000 stable for his prized horses, a private zoo that included what he boasted was “the world's tiniest elephant,” named Tessie, and a 175-acre “deer park” with a large pond and a clear, burbling stream that serviced his world-class collection of bison, antelope, elk, and deer from Japan, Siberia, India, Europe, Canada, and Virginia. Deer parks—enclosed hunting areas for royalty or the aristocracy—dated back to medieval times in Europe and were popular among the upper classes in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. August A. was especially proud of his herd of European roe deer, similar to the ones his father had hunted from the time he was a boy in Germany right up until a few days before his death.