Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (19 page)

Two years later, in January 1904, Frederick Pabst died at home in Milwaukee, surrounded by his family, succumbing to the diabetes, emphysema, and heart disease that gnawed at his health during the last years of his life. The entire city mourned a man much loved, not just for his kind heart and fine character, but for the thousands of jobs he had provided, for his countless acts of charity, for his spirit, and yes, his ambition. “I can truly say,” remarked one of Pabst’s old friends, “that I never met a man of who so many good things can be said, and who will be more genuinely regretted by every one in the city, rich or poor.”

Adolphus Busch outlived his friend and competitor, although he, like Pabst, suffered from poor health in the last years of his life. From 1890 until his death in 1913, Busch spent little time in St. Louis. Most summers, he and various children, grandchildren, brothers, cousins, and assorted in-laws and hangers-on sailed to Europe to enjoy the majestic grounds at Villa Lilly, ten miles from the Rhine River at Langenschwalbach near Wiesbaden. Sometimes he loaded the family onto his private rail car, the
Adolphus,
for a sojourn at his residence on Otsego Lake near Cooperstown in upstate New York. “Let us meet in Cooperstown,” Busch cabled Nagel in 1910. “We will go fishing and sailing, we will sing. Who does not love wine, woman, a fine dinner, a good cigar, cheerful company and song, shall not live a life long.”

No surprise, Busch, like Pabst, wanted the best of both worlds. As he traded the working life for leisurely travel, he longed to enjoy his children’s company even as he dictated to those children how to manage the brewery. In a 1903 letter, Busch demanded to know when son August would join him in Europe for hunting and horse-buying. “[Y]ou are such a daisy hunter and companion. I wish you could have arranged to come over if only for a couple of weeks . . . . I really would enjoy a [visit] from you if you can be spared from business, which I hope you can when everything is running smoothly.” Given that the rest of the long missive consisted of demands for details about the brewery as well as a lengthy to-do list, August might well have wondered how he was supposed to maintain the “world wide fame” of Anheuser-Busch and live the gentleman’s life, too.

But the brewery was not the only aggravation wrinkling the brow of Adolphus Busch during the last decade of his life. Frail and wheelchair-bound though he was, he was not too ill, nor too weary, to fret over the enemy massing at his empire's borders.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Enemy at the Gates

I
N
M
AY
1893, the American stock market collapsed and launched the first great depression in American history. Before the year ended, five hundred banks and some sixteen thousand businesses had shut their doors.

In May 1893, the gates opened at the World’s Columbian Exposition and brewers girded their brewvats for the contest over nonexistent prizes.

In May 1893, Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company, having sold about seven of the fourteen million bottles of Budweiser that customers would drink that year and anxious to protect its golden egg from cheap imitators, filed suit against Miller Brewing Company.

And in May 1893, Howard Hyde Russell launched the organization whose anti-drink campaign would end the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States—and American brewing’s first golden age.

R
USSELL WAS BORN
in 1855 to missionary parents. He spent his twenties working as a lawyer, drinking socially, and thinking of alcohol, if at all, only insofar as the making, selling, or drinking of it collided with the law. But in 1883, he attended a church revival and experienced a religious awakening. The Almighty guided him to divinity school at Oberlin College, an Ohio institution noted for its dedication to free thinking (as early as the 1830s, its faculty welcomed women, Native Americans, and African Americans) and, in the 1880s, a prime breeding ground for Christian activism. There Russell developed a passion for social reform in general and temperance and prohibition in particular.

He was not alone. In the 1880s and 1890s, an entire generation of Americans turned their attention toward remedying society’s ills, of which, it seemed, there were entirely too many and mostly urban in nature. The number of cities and their size soared in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the combination of immigration—there were ten million newcomers between 1870 and 1900—and rapid industrialization. The nation’s municipalities also served as the great laboratories of the age, where Americans first encountered electricity, mass transit, centralized water supply, and sewer systems.

The task of building the power plants, laying the trolley tracks and water and sewer pipes, and digging the tunnels for subway systems fell to immigrant laborers, who, along with factory and sweatshop workers, all of them underpaid and undernourished, crowded into tenements where disease and hunger made them old before their time and where one-quarter of babies died before their first birthdays. At the other end of the urban spectrum were the (mostly) men who designed the tenement buildings, sewer systems, and trolley cars, college-educated professionals for the most part, the offspring of a growing number of colleges that adjusted their curricula to meet the needs of the industrial age. New graduate and professional programs generated cadres of credentialed specialists—engineers, sanitarians, social workers, sociologists, and urban planners—to analyze, plan, and build industrial America. The job of dispensing the contracts for the work, however, landed in the hands of local politicians, who seized on the millions of dollars in fees and the thousands of jobs as means for lining their pockets and building armies of voters who expressed their gratitude on election day.

The result was an ugly collision of ambitions, agendas, poverty, pollution, and crime that inspired a new generation of reformers. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889; dozens more “settlement” houses opened in other cities. There, middle-class men and women struggled to bring order to the chaotic neighborhoods around them. The morass of municipal corruption and cronyism inspired campaigns for “good government.” The “goo-goos,” as the skeptical called them, wanted to bring professional management to city hall; wanted to separate city governance from politics (in the nineteenth century, city officials ran on party tickets); and wanted a secret ballot, which would sever the link between the ward boss and the immigrant grateful for work. They wanted, in short, to make the city as efficient as the corporations that managed the nation’s railroads and steel mills.

But the factories and railroads generated their own brand of activism. In 1881, workers challenged the tyranny of corporate overlords and the six-day workweek by organizing the American Federation of Labor, an association of unions of skilled workers in various trades who banded together in order to meet their employers as equals. They used strikes, walkouts, and slowdowns to achieve what they called “collective bargaining.” The tactics sometimes worked, but the AFL’s first two decades were marked by violence, as men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller refused to bargain, collectively or otherwise, and dispatched local police or armed company guards who battled the workers in combat that often turned deadly.

While workers struggled, a new breed of muckraking journalists detailed the crimes of corporate America. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil became the poster child for growth gone wild. He persuaded, if that word can be used for the promise of destruction to those who refused to oblige, his competitors to surrender their company stock and independence for shares of a larger “trust,” Standard Oil, of which—no surprise—Rockefeller held the largest chunk. By 1880, the trust controlled 95 percent of the nation’s refining capacity. Its legal structure was more stable and inviolable than that of a pool, and so giants in other industries followed suit, and by the late 1890s, a host of industries were controlled by companies that held an oligopoly or monopoly over production.

Much good came from the reformers’ welter of exposés, organizing, and agitation: the secret ballot and the eight-hour workday; statutes outlawing child labor and insurance fraud; city parks and potable water; railroad crossing signals and lower infant mortality rates; unemployment compensation and the minimum wage. Civil service laws replaced patronage positions with jobs earned by testing and merit.

These successes were not hard to understand: Like their counterparts fifty years earlier, the late-century middle class was sincerely concerned about the nation’s future. Mostly educated, white, and Protestant, they believed that it was their duty as citizens to eradicate the ills that had beset a nation enduring the tumult of industrialization.

Not surprisingly, one group of reformers turned its attention to alcohol. Saloons and drink, they believed, plagued the nation, and like prostitution, urban poverty, and lynching, drink and its bedfellows were particularly overt and thus identifiable evils. By the early 1880s, the anti-alcohol movement, badly wounded by party politics before and during the Civil War, had regained its health and two groups of activists had emerged to carry the flag for a dry America.

The older of the pair was the National Temperance Society (NTS), an amalgam of church organizations and what was left of antebellum temperance groups. Determined to avoid the political morass that had injured dry efforts before the war, NTS members focused on education rather than direct political engagement, publishing two monthly magazines as well as a plethora of pamphlets and books. Thanks to hefty donations from J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and other wealthy benefactors who loathed the effects of drinking on the nation’s workers, the NTS distributed the materials for free to any person or group who wanted them. Much of the literature ended up in churches, and especially Sunday school classrooms.

The second, and more powerful, group, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), also emerged from Christian activism. In December 1873, a group of Hillsboro, Ohio, women, inspired by a speaker who had visited their town, decided to march against drink. One hundred or so women gathered at a church to pray and brace themselves for their work, then paraded into the streets and marched to the city’s eight liquor retail outlets. At each stop, the women demanded that the male owners abandon their devilish business and prayed for their redemption. Over the next year, women in more than nine hundred towns in thirty-one (out of thirty-seven) states and the District of Columbia closed hundreds of saloons, persuaded thousands of people to sign pledges of abstinence, and then founded the WTCU.

By the early 1880s, the organization boasted more than 73,000 dues-paying members, with local units and paid staffs in nearly every state and territory. The WCTU, like the NTS, served up a hefty dose of anti-alcohol education, but coupled that with agitation for legal action that promoted a dry America. The women could not vote—except in a few school districts in a few states—but they persuaded nearly every state legislature to require public schools to provide pupils with “scientific temperance instruction.” According to a standard textbook, “[t]he constant use of beer is found to produce a species of degeneration of most of the organism,” causing “fatty deposits,” poor circulation, and congestion. Many school districts ignored the law or adhered to it using textbooks that offered a neutral view of alcohol, but the WCTU’s persistence kept the issues of temperance and prohibition in the public eye and on politicians’ minds.

The combined efforts of the WCTU and the NTS produced results. In the 1870s and 1880s, eighteen states pondered the passage of prohibition amendments, and six approved them. In thousands of cities and counties, voters, boards of supervisors, and city councils refused to renew licenses for saloons and drugstores that sold alcohol. Municipal officials and police departments cracked down on long-ignored Sunday closing laws. In hundreds of locales, the “high license” movement raised the cost of operating a saloon from $50 to $500 or even $1,000, thereby running many saloonkeepers out of business—or, more typically, into the arms of beermakers who agreed to pay the license in exchange for “tying” the saloon to that brewer’s beer.

The crusaders also used the “pure food” craze as a means of attacking brewers. As more and more food came from factories rather than local farms or backyard gardens, Americans had become increasingly unnerved by the possibility that giant food processors were more concerned about profits than about purity. A federal pure food and drug act, and
The Jungle,
Upton Sinclair’s novel that spurred passage of the law, were still several decades away, but as early as the 1870s alarms were sounded over tainted oleomargarine, foul milk, and contaminated canned goods. Then George T. Angell, a Massachusetts lawyer and reform enthusiast whose interests ranged from preventing cruelty to animals to exposing the dangers of deleterious foods, added fuel to the fire by publishing his “reports” about the state of the nation’s food supply. He purported to have studied the matter in depth, but his conclusions consisted of an amalgam of exaggeration, half-truth, and outright lies about maggotty meat, copper-tainted pickles, dyed pepper, and butter and cheese concocted from “the filthiest fats of diseased animals.”

The nation’s press, always delighted to regurgitate the sensational and provocative, printed his reports with gleeful abandon. Physicians, university chemists, and public health officials denounced Angell’s research and pleaded for calm. But lurid and shocking trumped reasoned and measured, especially at a moment when the pace of change in the United States seemed to have ratcheted out of control. If John Rockefeller could control oil supplies, and if railroad magnates could sell watered stock to a gullible public, why not assume the worst about food manufacturers?

One of Angell’s favorite bugaboos was glucose, a corn-based sweetener that had been widely used for decades to make candy, honey, and syrup. Manufacturers soaked corn, separated its starch, and then employed sulfuric acid to convert the starch into sugar. Angell claimed that glucose makers dumped filthy rags, floor sweepings, and acids into their vats, and the ghastly mixture was bottled as syrup or honey and passed on to consumers. Spurred by his nattering attacks, researchers at the National Board of Health, a short-lived federal agency, studied the stuff in minute detail. The analysts concluded there was nothing inherently dangerous about glucose, except, perhaps, to those with an insatiable sweet tooth.