Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (24 page)

John Strange, a former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, had given a speech in which he warned against “German enemies across the water.” But, he added, “We have German enemies in this country, too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller. They are the worst Germans who ever afflicted themselves on a long-suffering people. No Germans in the war are conspiring against the peace and happiness of the United States more than Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, Miller and others of their kind.”

A former governor of Indiana joined Strange in his denunciation, writing in a national magazine that the nation had never faced an “organization of power so brutal, so domineering, so corrupt . . . as the brewers of America.” He urged state legislators to dispatch “firing squads” to destroy the enemy. A writer for
American Issue
accused the “German breweries in America” of abetting the enemy. “Every bushel of grain that is destroyed” in the Busch or Pabst or Ruppert brewhouse “serves the Kaiser just as well as a bushel sunk by a submarine at sea.” A Methodist bishop denounced beer as “the most brutalizing” drink available. “The unthinkable barbarism of the German armies in this present war,” he wrote, “is, in all reasonableness, to be accounted for largely by their centuries of beer-drinking, which has deadened their moral sense and coarsened their moral fiber.”

A congenial atmosphere indeed for the prohibitionists, and one particularly suited for the work of A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer had been appointed Custodian of Alien Property, a position created in late 1917 when Congress passed the Trading With the Enemy Act, legislation which, among other things, forbid Americans from conducting business with enemies during time of war. The Custodian was charged with seizing and administering properties in the United States that were owned by enemy nationals. In World War I, that consisted of a collection of forty thousand holdings worth millions of dollars.

Palmer had no particular qualifications for the job other than party loyalty. He’d served in the House of Representatives some years earlier, but had lost a bid for the Senate in 1914. Since then he’d occupied his time practicing law, serving on the Democratic National Committee, and helping Woodrow Wilson get reelected in 1916. Wilson offered Palmer the post of Secretary of War, but the Pennsylvanian declined because of his Quaker upbringing. He was happy, however, to take the Custodian’s post. The original legislation authorized the Custodian to hold enemy-owned property for the duration of the war, but Palmer, no stranger to wheeling and dealing, convinced Congress to allow him to sell it, too. Alien property and investments, he explained, were “part of the deliberate plan of Germany to conquer the world by trade.”

In Palmer’s mind, it was but a short step from enemy-owned property to property owned by Americans of German descent. In early December 1917, he had launched an investigation into the financial affairs of Clara Busch von Gontard and Wilhelmina Busch Scharrer, the German-wed daughters of Adolphus Busch. Thanks to the war and their marriage and residence in Germany, they were classified as enemies of the United States. Palmer wanted to know if, when, and how brother August was funneling money to them. Busch sent Charles Nagel to Washington to explain that, since April and the declaration of war, the family had been investing the sisters’ portion of the estate in United States liberty bonds.

Next Palmer had turned to the affairs of Lilly Busch. Mrs. Busch and son August and his family were vacationing in Germany when war broke out in 1914. August and his brood returned to the United States; Lilly, who turned seventy a few weeks before the conflict began, stayed on. “Believing with many others that the war would not last long,” she explained later, “feeling a deep concern for my daughters married in Germany, and being a wretched traveler at sea, I concluded not to return at that time,” hoping and believing that the fighting would end soon and that she would be able to make the trip “under more favorable conditions.”

The favorable conditions never developed, and in late 1917 she was still in Europe, working for the Red Cross far from the front lines but in enemy territory nonetheless—evidence of disloyalty as far as Palmer was concerned. He informed the Busch family that he planned to commandeer her entire estate—stocks, bonds, bank accounts, houses, real estate, and all—on the grounds that her residence in Germany made her an alien. Never mind that she had lived in the United States for all but six months of her seventy-four years, the daughter of naturalized parents. Nagel managed to prevent Palmer from seizing the estate outright, but only because Palmer conceded that Lilly Busch’s precise legal status was not clear. As a compromise, Nagel gave all of Lilly’s titles and deeds to the Union Trust Company of St. Louis, which agreed to hold them until the matter could be settled.

In early May, Palmer helped himself to George Ehret’s forty-million-dollar estate, claiming ownership of his brewery, his real estate, his mansion at Ninety-fourth and Park Avenue, and the art collection inside. Ehret had been an American citizen for forty years, but he, too, had been in Germany when the war broke out and, at age eighty-three, had found it difficult to leave. That was good enough for Palmer. “If Mr. Ehret, Sr., should return to America and thus lose his enemy character,” Palmer told reporters, “the Department of Justice would entertain any claim which he might make . . . to have his property returned.”

Wayne Wheeler recognized opportunity when he saw it. With news of war filling the daily papers, and with everything German discredited and vilified, this was an auspicious moment in which to move in for the kill. He dispatched a polite letter to Palmer. “I am informed,” he wrote, “that there are a number of breweries in this country which are owned in part by alien enemies. It is reported to me that the Annhauser [sic] Busch Company and some of the Milwaukee Companies are largely controlled by alien Germans . . . Have you made any investigation? If not would you be willing to do so if we could give you any clue that would justify your taking such action?”

Whether by coincidence or intention, Wheeler queried Palmer at the same moment that another piece of news had arrived in the United States: Lilly Busch was on her way home. Son August, desperate to remove his mother from harm’s way, had persuaded Harry Hawes, his attorney and a trusted family friend, to venture across the Atlantic and help Mrs. Busch travel home. Lilly made her way out of Germany to neutral Switzerland, where she met Hawes in mid-January. He explained that she could stay there, but the old woman, now seventy-four years old, announced that she preferred to undertake the six-thousand-mile trek to the United States. In preparation, she rested for two months, tended by a physician, Hawes, and two traveling companions: her maid and Ruby Baumann, a St. Louis woman who recently had divorced her German army officer husband. The doctor declared her fit to travel and in March 1918, the party set off for Spain and passage home.

That news inspired a flurry of activity, rumor, and advice back in the United States. A New York newspaper eager to discredit anything Busch described her—falsely—as “prominent in German court circles”; claimed—falsely—that the Kaiser and Crown Prince paid regular visits to her “castle on the Rhine”; and reported—falsely—that she had given a million dollars to a German hospital. A concerned St. Louis citizen wrote to Attorney General Thomas Gregory urging him to search Mrs. Busch and the rest of her party when they landed in the States. “Mrs Bush [sic] has relatives and son-in-laws in the German army,” explained the patriot, and “its [sic] best to be sure than sorry, and see that they dont [sic] slip one over on us by sending some secret code or other information to agents here.”

It was just as well that Lilly Busch knew nothing of the roiling clouds back home; she needed all of her strength to negotiate the ravaged European landscape, which confronted the travelers with closed borders and railroad strikes, an air raid in Paris, canceled sailings, and submarine scares. Finally, on June 17, 1918, the party reached Key West and American soil.

There began the brief but well-publicized nightmare of Lilly Busch, suspected German sympathizer and spy. Four days earlier, unbeknownst to her or anyone else in the family, the director of Naval Intelligence had ordered Lieutenant J. Vining Harris to “Question, Search, and report Destination” of the Busch party. Harris turned the task over to A. E. Gregory, an employee of the Justice Department. Gregory boarded the travelers’ steamer and took custody of Lilly Busch, Harry Hawes, Mrs. Baumann, Busch’s maid, and all of their luggage and papers.

Out on the dock stood August Busch, Mrs. Hawes, and a small swarm of other Busches and friends, all of them expecting the party to appear. Journalists hovered nearby, pencils at ready. Two hours later, a reporter trotted up from town with breaking news: Mitchell Palmer had just seized Lilly Busch’s property. The “entire estate [had] reverted to the Government” and was now “subject to such disposition” as Palmer saw fit.

No sooner had August Busch heard that news than his mother appeared at the gangway with a U.S. marshal guarding her party. Lilly Busch burst into tears and tottered toward her son. A marine darted forward and restrained her. “August,” she sobbed, “they won’t let me see you tonight.” Mother and son were allowed an embrace before the marshal led her into the nearby Customs House. Eventually the entire party, minus their baggage, boarded cars and cabs and motored through downtown Key West—speaking only English, as instructed by Gregory—to the Oversea Hotel on Fleming Street. The marines positioned themselves outside Lilly Busch’s room; the marshal’s wife deposited herself inside; and the distraught Mrs. Busch collapsed in a heap of fear and exhaustion.

The next morning Gregory permitted August and Mrs. Hawes to visit Lilly—in the company of Justice Department agents, and speaking English only. Just after lunch, however, Gregory and Lieutenant Harris returned to the hotel, closeted themselves with Mrs. Busch, and interrogated her for two hours. What she and they said is not known, but it failed to satisfy the apparently insatiable Gregory, who informed Harris that he intended to search “the person and effects” of Mrs. Busch, Mrs. Baumann, and the maid. A doctor and the marshal’s wife escorted Mrs. Busch into her room, where he “laid the old lady on a bed and examined her private parts, making a very thorough examination of her vagina and womb.” When he had finished with Mrs. Busch, he set to work on Mrs. Baumann and the maid. Lilly Busch spent the rest of what was surely one of the worst days of her life in the company of a federal agent and the marshal’s wife, speaking to her son in English only.

At least the affair was nearly over. The next morning, Lieutenant Harris returned to the hotel and quizzed Mrs. Busch one more time. “No person in the world could doubt that woman’s sincerity,” he announced an hour later, and promised August Busch that he would recommend a public statement that “absolutely vindicated” her of any crime or improper activity. The guards left. Lilly Busch was finally free to go.

B
UT
P
ALMER
had not finished with the brewers. Just days after Lilly Busch’s arrival in Key West, he found evidence that a group of prominent beermakers, including Gustav Pabst, Jacob Ruppert, Joseph Uihlein, and George Ehret, had loaned Arthur Brisbane the money to buy the
Washington [D.C.] Times.
(Brisbane, one of the nation’s most respected newspaper editors, was an outspoken critic of prohibition.) At the time, Palmer was also arranging for the arrest of Edward A. Rumely, the owner of the
New York Evening Mail,
because Rumely had bought that newspaper with money from German sources. A month later, Justice Department agents arrested Rumely for perjury. A. Mitchell Palmer told reporters that German cash paid for the purchase of the
Mail;
that Kurt Reisinger, a grandson of Adolphus Busch, had invested in the newspaper; and that Lilly Busch had been questioned in Key West in part because federal officials believed she had supplied Rumely with money (she had not).

In the time it took to say “German brewers,” Palmer and Wayne Wheeler strung together these otherwise unconnected facts—the brewers’ loan to Brisbane and Rumely’s use of German money to purchase an American newspaper—and concluded that American brewers were financing and organizing enemy propaganda in a nation at war. By September 1918, Palmer and Wheeler had engineered Senate hearings to investigate charges that German-American brewers were using newspapers and illegal campaign contributions to control the outcome of elections and spread pro-German propaganda.

The hearings began on September 27. Over the next few weeks, five senators quizzed Brisbane, USBA director Hugh Fox, and three officers of the USBA. They wasted their time. Arthur Brisbane sliced the accusations against him into tiny bits, undermining Palmer’s credibility and the entire purpose of the hearings. “From the day I owned the Times,” he told the senators, “I wrote as vigorously, as savagely and as earnestly . . . against the German side and in favor of America as I have ever done on any subject in my life.” As to the brewers’ alleged “German” connection? “The only brewers I know,” said Brisbane, “are men who were born in America . . . ”

The senators got even less from Hugh Fox, whom they questioned for two days. He denied having organized a boycott against men or companies that supported prohibition. He denied that the USBA owned any newspapers, and denied that he or the USBA had received money from the German government or promoted German propaganda.

And so it went. Mostly the senators made fools of themselves. It was clear that they could not—or would not—distinguish the USBA from the NACL, or the GAA from either one. But the only way the average American could know that was by sitting in the hearing room itself, because the nation’s press tried the brewers and found them guilty.
“Enemy Propaganda Backed By Brewers,”
read a headline in the nation’s newspaper of record. Only someone willing to read past the incendiary headline and the article’s first few inaccurate sentences would learn that the evidence linked nobody to anything; that the “evidence” consisted of a speech that Charles Hexamer wrote in 1915, two years before the United States entered the war; that Hexamer protested the sale of munitions to the Allies, as did millions of other Americans; and that Hexamer’s text urged German-Americans to remain loyal to the United States.