Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (23 page)

The result stunned supporters and opponents alike. A majority of the House—197 to 190—voted aye on Hobson’s measure, an “exceedingly gratifying” result. Though well short of the two-thirds needed, it was far more than anyone had expected. More than enough to hearten the crusade’s soldiers.

I
TS MEMBERSHIP
distracted and dwindling, the leadership of the United States Brewers’ Association finally got serious about the enemy. In the spring of 1913, just a few weeks after Congress approved the Webb-Kenyon Act, the group’s executive officers voted to fund an organization specifically aimed at fighting the ASL on its own turf. To lead it, they hired Percy Andreae, an Ohio brewery executive who had mounted a successful counteroffensive on the ASL in its birth state.

The result was the National Association of Commerce and Labor (NACL), an alliance of brewers, glass and bottle-cap manufacturers, corn and rice processors, wholesalers and retailers, and saloonkeepers and hotel workers. Andreae used members’ dues to hire a full-time staff of researchers and writers who studied congressional and state legislative contests and analyzed candidates and issues. He also contracted with writers who planted articles in rural and foreign-language newspapers and national magazines. These essays lambasted the coercive nature of the proposed amendment, reminded readers of beer’s virtue as a “temperance” drink of moderation, and touted its value as a nutritious foodstuff. A stable of sympathetic experts toured a lecture circuit that included trade and professional conventions, men’s and women’s clubs, and any church group willing to give them a listen. The group published two “wet” magazines and funded an acting troupe that produced “The Passing of Hans Dippel,” the tale of a respectable German-American saloonkeeper brought to destruction by the drys.

Andreae knew, however, that no matter what he did or how fast he moved, the brewers lagged far behind their opponents. In order to catch up, he needed to move men, raise money, and implement his ideas quickly and efficiently. Scouting about for a mechanism to help him compete with the ASL behemoth, he latched onto the National German-American Alliance.

The GAA had been founded in 1899 by Charles Hexamer, a Philadelphia civil engineer born in the United States to German emigré parents, as a way to celebrate and preserve German heritage, history, and culture in the United States. The Alliance lobbied against immigration restriction and for German-language instruction in public schools; supported German-language newspapers; and funded historical studies. But as the ASL’s tentacles burrowed into the fabric of national life, the GAA’s leadership had diverted its energy and funds to defending drink.

On its own, the GAA could not match the League’s organizational superiority. More to the point, the Alliance’s cultural arrogance hobbled its effectiveness as an opponent: The educated middle-class men who made up the group’s ranks regarded German culture as superior to American and themselves as the spokesmen for a unified and homogeneous German-America. That eventually proved to be a fatal mistake, and it also explains the GAA’s relatively limited membership. Most German-Americans, who numbered 8.2 million in 1910, longed to assimilate and regarded themselves as Americans first and only incidentally as Americans of German descent. Many of them supported prohibition and thousands more disdained the GAA’s crusade to celebrate all things German. And non-German Americans who opposed prohibition could see no reason to ally themselves with an ethnic-based organization.

Still, as far as Andreae was concerned, the GAA boasted an impressive array of gears and cogs: a membership devoted to the wet cause, a printing press, and access to thousands of German-American social, political, religious, and labor organizations as well as connections to the nation’s foreign-language press. In the late summer of 1913, Andreae offered Hexamer a cut of the NACL’s brewery money in exchange for access to the GAA’s network.

Hexamer needed the funds, but he resisted the idea of mixing beer’s unsavory reputation and tainted money with the Alliance’s good name. Andreae assauged Hexamer’s fears by devising a way to pay the GAA under the table. Joseph Keller, another GAA officer, distributed Andreae’s laundered money to GAA field agents and placed anti-prohibition articles in national magazines and newspapers. Everyone benefited: The German-American Alliance received a steady supply of cash, and the brewers enjoyed access to a well-organized political action group with no apparent connection to the liquor industry.

But no matter what Andreae did, his efforts were a sponge swabbing an ocean of superior Anti-Saloon League organization and propaganda. In January 1915, Andreae strolled into the Chicago Athletic Club for a meeting of the NACL and the USBA, now led by Gustav Pabst, whose influence had mushroomed since the death of Adolphus Busch. By the time Andreae left a few hours later, he had been stripped of his authority. He couldn’t have been entirely surprised. He had spent over a half million dollars of the USBA’s money, and yet the House of Representatives had edged perilously close to approving a prohibition amendment. Meanwhile, every town and county that voted dry led more brewers to close their doors. Since 1904, nearly five hundred had gone out of business.

The extent to which Andreae and the brewers had failed to make their case became clear when, in April 1917, the United States entered the world war that had been raging for almost three years. Congress banned alcohol from a five-mile “dry zone” around military installations and imposed abstinence on the armed services. No alcohol for troops or officers in uniform. Not on base, not on leave, not even in private homes. As spring turned to summer, senators and representatives turned to the task of rationing food and supplies. The ASL seized the opportunity and turned the debate over bread into a prohibition revival.

“Just think,” mused Mississippi senator James Vardaman, “of the absurdity” of rationing bread to the “laboring man” and “starving babe” while permitting the liquor interests the privilege of using those grains to make “a beverage that kills the body and damns the soul.” Close the distilleries and breweries, urged William Thompson of Kansas, and save the equivalent of eleven million loaves of bread a day. There is “no patriotism among the liquor interests of the country,” he warned, arguing that brewers and distillers would just as soon “sell liquor under the Government of the Kaiser as under that of the President, and the chances are they would prefer to do so.”

The great flock of the sober flooded the House and Senate with petitions, from the Christians of Senatobia, Mississippi, and the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church South to the faculty and students at the Wooster Summer School, the students of Bates College, and the Drexel Biddle Bible Class of Portland, Maine. All were “praying” for “the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of all intoxicating beverages during the period of war . . . ”

Hallelujah and amen. The congregation ended the service in a chorus of “ayes.” Congress banned the sale of grain to distillers for the duration of the war, a move that effectively closed that industry’s doors.

The USBA still had enough clout to succeed in keeping beer out of the bill, but as a compromise, Congress empowered the president to ration brewers’ supplies whenever he deemed it necessary. Wilson did just that in early December 1917, when he ordered the alcohol level in beer reduced to 2.75 percent and slashed the industry’s grain allotment by 30 percent.

August Busch came out swinging: “We cannot tell just how the public will take the change in taste,” he told reporters. “It may be that it will be readily accepted, but a falling off in consumption is a possibility . . . ” But, he pointed out, the new rules would free up 999,000 bushels of corn, rice, and barley in St. Louis alone, and some 20 million nationwide. Otto Stifel, who presided over the city’s Union Brewery, offered a less optimistic assessment of the situation. “I do not think the expected saving of food products will be brought about,” he groused, “but the food value of beer will be decreased.” As far as he, a diehard of the old school, was concerned, beer was food, and one that provided as much nutritional value as milk.

Alas, poor Stifel, the worst was yet to come. The Senate had already approved the prohibition amendment resolution. The House wrangled over the wording for several months, but on December 18, four years after the amendment’s first appearance in Congress, the House voted 282 to 128 to send it to the state legislatures.

The ASL’s leadership believed that it had lined up sufficient support in statehouses around the country to ensure ratification. But nothing is certain in war, so the League marshaled its forces for one last barrage of firepower, this one aimed at rallying the public’s support for the momentous step of amending the Constitution. The task? Discrediting what was left of the brewing industry. The weapon of choice? Wayne Wheeler.

W
AYNE
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HEELER
had begun his anti-drink career in 1893, when Howard Hyde Russell had hired him to help launch the antisaloon crusade. He had managed League affairs in Ohio but spent nearly as much time in Washington, D.C., where he strongarmed recalcitrant lawmakers and helped plan the League’s political strategy. In 1915, he had moved to the nation’s capital to work as the ASL’s general counsel, chief lobbyist, and manager of legislative affairs.

To a casual observer, Wheeler appeared to be the soul of middle-class respectability: Tidy pince-nez straddled an acceptably straight nose perched above a meticulous mustache. A stiff, snowy white collar, a perfectly knotted tie, and immaculate lapels completed the uniform of the proper man. Only his lips—curled in a prissy sneer or, more often, curved into a self-satisfied smirk—belied the zealot lurking within, for Wheeler was a natural crusader, one of those high-energy, single-minded souls who are prepared to labor day and night for their chosen cause. The reform-mad 1890s offered a host of crusades for people of his ilk—civil rights, woman suffrage, child labor, the eradication of prostitution. It was unfortunate for the nation’s brewers that Wheeler chose booze.

Admirers and enemies alike described him as “indefatigable and shrewd,” a man who combined “the zeal of a Savonarola and the craft of a Machiavelli.” Wheeler regarded morality as a flexible concept and believed that the end determined the means. Convinced of the sanctity of both himself and his cause, and incapable of compromise, he bullied the recalcitrant and steamrollered the undecided. One critic complained that the man would “cohabit with the devil himself to win.”

During his years as superintendent of the Ohio League, Wheeler routinely weaseled his way into meetings of brewers, distillers, and liquor retailers. On one occasion he boarded a train for Youngstown, where he hoped to gain entry to a liquor convention being held there. Luck smiled on the teetotaling Savonarola, who discovered that he’d taken a seat next to a convention delegate. Wheeler struck up a conversation and the unsuspecting dupe confided that he was scheduled to make a speech, a terrifying prospect because he had no experience writing or delivering public talks. Wheeler offered to write the speech in exchange for the man’s convention badge.

Wheeler boasted later to a friend that he had put pen to paper and written “a red-hot Personal Liberty tirade” denouncing “prohibition and its fanaticism.” At Youngstown, he traded the speech for the liquor man’s badge and strolled into the convention hall. All went well until a convention official announced that spies from the Anti-Saloon League had infiltrated the gathering. Wheeler froze in his seat—and sighed a prayer of relief as convention marshals escorted two other men from the hall. Wheeler, a performer to the core, joined the rest of the audience in the applause that accompanied the men’s departure.

And now, in early 1918, he had the brewers cornered. Two years earlier, a Pennsylvania grand jury had indicted most of that state’s brewers and the officers of the United States Brewers’ Association on charges of violating corporate tax law and the federal corrupt practices act, a case that had been pushed to fruition by a Democratic U.S. district attorney and by A. Mitchell Palmer, the state’s Democratic party boss. The defendants had pleaded nolo contendere before the case could go to trial, but the biggest payoff had been the confiscation by the district attorney of two trunks and one suitcase full of brewers’ records.

Wheeler was friendly with the men who pressed the case, and so gained access to the records. There he had found evidence of Percy Andreae’s payments to the GAA. Wheeler persuaded William King, a senator from Utah, to introduce a bill to repeal the GAA’s congressional charter—on the grounds that the organization had violated said charter when it lobbied against prohibition, an issue with no direct connection to German heritage, and therefore an activity outside the bounds of the GAA’s stated aims. Wheeler also persuaded King to hold hearings on the matter.

King agreed, but charged Wheeler with the task of providing witnesses who would make the effort worthwhile.

No problem. On February 23, 1918, the senator opened a hearing into the GAA’s activities. For two days, a handful of witnesses dissected and maligned the Alliance. “We could not have secured for $25,000 the publicity against the German Alliance which we got through the Sunday papers,” Wheeler bragged.

The best was yet to come. On day six, Percy Andreae showed up. “Was the National Association of Commerce and Labor organized in reality by the United States Brewers’ Association?” one senator asked. “Yes,” Andreae replied. And the GAA’s money came from the USBA as well? “Oh, yes,” said Andreae. How much money did the NACL have on hand? Andreae guessed perhaps as much as a half million dollars. “It may have been a million?” queried another senator. “No; I do not think it was a million,” said Andreae, adding that he was sorry it had not been.

So was Wayne Wheeler. Still, Wheeler had gotten what he’d come for: a public dissection of the GAA and the link between German treachery and American brewers. He picked the right tactic at the right moment. The war had sparked outbursts of inflammatory rhetoric and violence toward German-Americans. A mob in Collinsville, Illinois, had lynched a German-American believed—wrongly—to be a spy. In Milwaukee, a gang of patriots positioned a machine gun in front of a theater, a way of warning patrons to stay away from a performance of
Wilhelm Tell.
A Lutheran minister in Texas received a public whipping for preaching in German. All over the country, mobs tarred and feathered suspicious persons, dragged them through the streets, and forced them to kiss flags. Doused houses and churches of German-Americans with yellow paint. Flogged anyone foolish enough to speak German. Burned German books and changed the German names of newspapers, streets, and food.