CHAPTER FOUR

The Enemy at the Gates

IN MAY 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.

 

RUSSELL 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.

Unfortunately, the NBH staff also reported that brewers added glucose to their mash as a cheap substitute for barley. It was true that some brewers did so, but their numbers were few and there was nothing harmful or dangerous about the beer they made. In one well-aimed fusillade, the NTS and WCTU grabbed this ammunition and charged brewers with selling dangerous beer laced with glucose and acid, a baseless accusation that any chemist could dismantle in the space of a minute, but one that rang alarm bells in the minds of a suspicious public.

The owner of a struggling Milwaukee newspaper in search of a scoop had used the moment to attack the city’s beermakers. “It is well known,” the investigating reporter informed readers, “that the brewers are a poor, struggling heaven-forsaken class” who, when faced with rising barley prices, turn to “cheaper substitutes.” As proof, the reporter listed the amounts of corn and rice purchased recently by several of the city’s brewers, starting with Phillip Best Brewing Company and ending with Fred Miller. Over the next few weeks, the newspaper blamed Milwaukee’s high infant mortality rate on “spurious beer” and pointed out that the “oriental races,” who subsisted on a diet of rice, were “dwarfed in features, body, morals and intellect.” A local physician informed readers that beer brewed from rice caused diarrhea, upset stomach, and brain damage.

A second local newspaper, not to be robbed of this episode of high drama, had chimed in with charges that rice and corn beer caused “temporary insanity,” presenting Emil Schandein as the main exhibit. According to the reporter who witnessed the event, during a night of drinking, Schandein (who had been arrested at least once on charges of being drunk and disorderly) had become violent while suffering the “temporary insanity” caused by “rice and corn beer.” The witness claimed that Schandein railed against temperance do-gooders and nosey newspaper reporters but remained silent on the subject of his brewery’s “secret drug store,” where a “French practical chemist” was paid a “fancy salary” to teach Schandein the secrets of chemical adulteration.

Among the city’s brewers, only Frederick Pabst had mounted a defense. “[W]e have constantly aimed,” he explained in an interview with a reporter, “to provide an article suitable to the demands of trade which shall at the same time be wholesome and free from all impure or harmful ingredients.” Pabst also dismissed the accusation that the city’s brewers had abandoned barley in favor of cheaper adjuncts. Rice, he explained, cost fifteen or twenty cents more per bushel than barley. At Best Brewing, he added, “[w]e are not aiming to make the cheapest beer in the market; we are trying to make the best beer.”

But the idea that beer made with anything other than barley constituted adulteration had taken hold of the public imagination. In the summer of 1881, the Business Men’s Moderation Society (BMMS) of New York City submitted a detailed questionnaire to that city’s brewers demanding to know if their lagers contained corn, rice, glucose, grape sugar, potato or corn starch, or molasses, and if so, why. The BMMS hounded New York brewers for more than a year, testing one beer after another until it finally found one that contained glucose. The New York Times dutifully printed the nasty exchange of letters that followed, as the brewers accused the BMMS of cheating, and the BMMS charged brewers with fraud. And nearly every article or letter that the Times published ran below a large-type headline that contained the words “brewers” and “adulteration.”

Plenty of Americans already doubted the wisdom of imbibing alcohol; easy enough, then, to take the next step and imagine brewers as corporate crooks more concerned with profit than with the public’s well-being, whose factories churned out millions of gallons of vile poison. Accusation spawned action. The New York State Board of Health authorized an investigation into that state’s brewers, and legislators in several states contemplated statutes that would require brewers to use nothing but malt, hops, and yeast. In 1888, Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, published a report on fermented beverages that claimed that American brewers used salicylic acid as a preservative, an additive that was cheaper than pasteurization but one that caused “mental disturbance” and “violent delirium.” Only a careful reader would notice that the study offered no proof of the presence of the acid in the samples tested. Why? Because the researchers had not found any. Still, the distorted results were widely reported in newspapers. “Acid in the Beer,” announced the headline above an article that informed readers that “beer is generally adulterated with acid poisonous and injurious to health.”

 

HOWARD HYDE RUSSELL watched, listened, and learned. Ohio provided an excellent training ground for the fledgling reformer: The state’s largest cities, heavily German in population, contained dozens of breweries and hundreds of saloons, providing ample opportunity for agitation. He fulfilled his seminary ministry in Brea, Ohio, where, combining his skills as preacher and attorney, he closed saloons with one hand and prosecuted drink-law violators with the other.

In late 1887, members of an Oberlin-based temperance group persuaded Russell to lead a campaign for a state local option law. Local option was fast becoming the temperance movement’s most powerful weapon. It enabled voters to stamp “wet” or “dry” on individual precincts, wards, townships, municipalities, and counties, and so close saloons or ban retail sales of liquor in grocery stores or drugstores. Since a local option vote affected only a tiny and specific segment of the electorate—only the residents of a single precinct or town—dry campaigners needed to capture far fewer votes than they would to pass, say, a referendum on statewide prohibition. Under Russell’s leadership, the campaign succeeded.

Upon graduating from Oberlin in 1888, the newly frocked Congregational minister headed west to Kansas City and service in an urban mission, then moved to Chicago and worked as director of the Armour Mission, a Christian-service foundation funded by the Armour meat family. There he became even more convinced that society’s evils would end only when drink had been eradicated from the land.

But for every victory that the WCTU or the NTS achieved, for every local option law or high license fee, there were a half dozen failures, and Russell’s experiences in the courtroom, pulpit, and statehouse led him to an uncomfortable conclusion: The American temperance movement was in trouble, crippled by in-fighting and fragmentation. One faction within the WCTU wanted to remain nonpartisan, but another wanted to fold the battle against drink into a larger crusade against prostitution, child labor, and insurance fraud. Some members of the Prohibition Party insisted on maintaining its independence; others longed to merge with the Republican Party. Russell concluded that power struggles and excessive democracy sapped the movement’s energy and confused and distracted its foot soldiers.

In a stroke of genius inspired in part by the corporate organizations that had drawn so much of the reformers’ fire, not least of them the giant breweries, Russell envisioned a new mode of fighting the liquid devil: an anti-drink organization structured like a modern corporation and operated as a dictatorship rather than a democracy, the former being more efficient than the latter. Full-time, paid directors would set policy and plan strategy; fulltime, paid managers would carry them out. The dictator-leaders would generate one product and one product only: a campaign against the saloon. No hand-wringing over the horrors of prostitution, no detours into campaigns against child labor or for woman suffrage. One leadership. One issue.

And one goal: to eradicate the saloon and every other liquor and beer retail outlet. Russell’s reasoning was elegant in its simplicity: As the number of places to buy liquor declined, so, too, would the number of Americans who imbibed. As customers vanished, so would distillers and brewers, and the nation would be freed of a terrible scourge.

Russell’s genius lies partly in his conceptualization of what we know today as the single-issue interest group, but he deserves credit as well for his recognition of the pitfalls of political machinations. The group he envisioned would be strictly nonpartisan and support any candidate from any political party as long as he promised to vote against the saloon.

But the key to Russell’s eventual success lay not so much in structural creativity as in his grasp of a single salient fact, one that had escaped other anti-drink crusaders: Americans were not ready for outright prohibition. The proof lay in the numbers: In the late 1870s and early 1880s, eighteen states considered prohibition amendments but only six had passed them, and one of those states, Rhode Island, had repealed the ban almost immediately. Perhaps the lessons of the 1850s were still fresh in some people’s minds; perhaps Americans feared such excessive intrusion into otherwise private lives.

Whatever the case, Russell intuited that Americans would have to be led to the holy grail by small steps and only after years of education had paved the way. Any organization that campaigned overtly and directly for constitutional prohibition would lose. So Russell conceived of his campaign as not for prohibition, but against saloons, an easy target given their association with crime and given Americans’ passion for cleaning up their cities. That limited and specific goal would satisfy the extremists, reassure the uncertain, guarantee a steady string of successes from the outset, and, most important, teach Americans to accept, eventually, Russell’s final goal: constitutional prohibition.

 

IN MAY 1893, the executive board of the Oberlin Temperance Alliance adopted Russell’s ideas and reorganized as the Ohio AntiSaloon League. It appointed him as its first superintendent at a salary of $2,000 a year, about $40,000 today and a stunningly optimistic figure for an organization that had no other employees, no specific plan of operation, and, at that moment, a grand total of $513 on hand.

Russell hired a recent Oberlin graduate named Wayne Wheeler to be his second-in-command, and the pair charged forth, laboring eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. They wrote and delivered anti-drink sermons and lectures to Ohio’s ministers, who spooned them out to their flocks on Sunday, which, persuaded of the League’s value, paid for the pleasure by handing over the donations needed to keep the OASL in business and its printing press running. On the other six days of the week, the temperance faithful gathered at League-sponsored rallies and picnics, where they handed over still more money in exchange for food, (non)alcoholic drink, and more temperance rhetoric. “In those first few years,” Wheeler later recalled, “we had all we could do to raise the money to pay actual expenses, railroad fare, rent, etc.” But the well-plowed field returned a rich harvest: In the organization’s first two years, Ohio voters ousted a wet state senator in a key legislative district and cast local option votes that closed four hundred saloons.

Anti-drink enthusiasts in other states sat up, astonished at the rapid transformation in Ohio, heretofore a bastion of lager and liquor. In December 1895, Russell traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with temperance faithful from church groups, the WCTU, and the Prohibition Party, all of them eager to copy his methods. He and they agreed: “The Saloon Must Go!,” and so was born the National Anti-Saloon League, later the Anti-Saloon League of America, and, to most Americans, simply the AntiSaloon League, or ASL. The national office functioned as a parent organization that spearheaded the creation of smaller Leagues in every state, each of them modeled after Russell’s “Ohio Plan,” each of them pointed toward the same task: electing sympathetic politicians who would support local option, so that voters could eliminate the saloon. The orders flowed from the top down, and the money from the bottom up—tiny donations for the most part, collected at thousands of churches from millions of disciples. Organizers elected Russell as the first national superintendent and charged him with the task of rallying the supporters needed to create the separate state leagues. There he stayed until 1903, managing the details on which the crusade depended.

Chief among them was the League’s printing plant, from which poured literature for the state leagues’ campaigns, picnics, and rallies at the rate of forty tons a month: pageant scripts, stories, and poems for children; ready-made sermons for the convenience of finger-pointing, fist-shaking ministers whose pulpits linked the League’s leaders to its foot soldiers and their money; and posters, pamphlets, and sheet music (crusaders marched to the cadence of “The Saloon Must Go”: “I stand for prohibition/The utter demolition/Of all this curse of misery and woe;/Complete extermination/Entire annihilation/The saloon must go”). The ASL also published several monthly magazines (including the New Republic) and the American Issue, a weekly compendium of news, essays, and exhortations mailed to dues-paying members and designed to inspire the troops and keep them on issue and on target.

“The Headquarters for Murderers,” screamed the headline above one article, which argued, “The saloon is the resort of the underworld [whose] inhabitants swarm like maggots.” Another essay linked the “twin evils” of saloon and brothel, and insisted that “every man who votes for the liquor traffic is indirectly voting to create conditions” that nurtured prostitution. “[W]hen the saloon comes to town,” warned another writer, “the children are forced to stay out of school to work in support of a drinking father.”

Statistics of dubious validity were sprinkled throughout the text to reinforce the anecdotes: Each year, alcohol killed 10 percent of the population, and saloons produced 80 percent of the nation’s criminals and led sixty thousand young women astray. Drinkers contracted tuberculosis at twice the rate of nondrinkers. “Liquor is responsible for 19 percent of the divorces, 25 percent of the poverty, 25 percent of the insanity, 37 percent of the pauperism, 45 percent of child desertion and 50 percent of the crime in this country. And this is a very conservative estimate.” The source of these “facts” was never given, and few of them had much connection to reality. But the constant barrage turned hyperbole into truth, at least in the minds of the men and women who grabbed the magazine from their mailboxes each week.

The rhetoric might sound to our ears like the overblown ranting of self-righteous crackpots. Alas, the nation’s saloonkeepers, brewers, and distillers provided material that bolstered the most outrageous anecdote and flimsy statistic. In 1912, an ASL agent (most likely Wayne Wheeler) infiltrated the annual meeting of the Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association of Ohio and heard a speaker urge the audience to “create the appetite for liquor in the growing boys.” “Men who drink . . . will die,” the speaker explained, “and if there is no new appetite created, our counters will be empty as well as our coffers. The open field for the creation of appetite is among the boys. Nickels expended in treats to boys now, will return in dollars to your tills after the appetite has been formed.” The remarks appeared in the next American Issue. There was no evidence that brewers deliberately targeted boys, but again, once planted, the notion was hard to refute.

By 1902, the ASL boasted two hundred full-time employees and a budget of $250,000, and maintained offices in thirty-nine states and territories. Bolstered by grass-roots support and ample funding, the League’s assault left a trail of battered victims. The ASL “is the most autocratic, the most dictatorial, as well as the most dangerous power ever known in the politics of this country,” charged one opponent. An Alabama politician who had been “run over” by the League’s “steam-roller” moaned that “[t]he good but gullible people of the churches permitted themselves to be humored and hoodwinked . . . ” Politicians who “surrendered, saved themselves from slaughter.” But he and others who resisted “were just swept aside to make room for the more susceptible.”

 

BUT IF THE Anti-Saloon League’s success rested on an underpinning of passionate support and Howard Hyde Russell’s understanding of organizational dynamics, its eventual victory could not have happened without one other factor: lack of opposition. The League’s natural opponents, the brewers and distillers, refused to acknowledge the enemy at the gates. Levies on liquor, beer, and wine constituted 20 to 40 percent of the nation’s tax revenues, and the manufacturers of alcoholic beverages assumed that neither Congress nor the people would derail the money train. Moreover, federal officials regarded alcohol manufacturers as friends of the government. Revenue commissioners often spoke at industry conventions and worked for liquor and beer manufacturers after leaving government. “Uncle Sam is our partner,” read the slogan on one liquor dealer’s letterhead.

And, too, the ASL’s initial successes came in the Far West and the Deep South. Big shipping brewers like Pabst and the Uihleins believed they could afford to lose a rural market here or there, as did the major northeastern beermakers—Jake Ruppert, the Schaefer brothers, and George Ehret—who shrugged at closures suffered by brother brewers in irrelevant Wyoming or Mississippi.

The distillers ignored the danger for another reason: They were not its main target. Since the 1850s, beer had outsold spirits by a wide margin, especially in the saloons that were the avowed target of the ASL’s troops. In 1840, Americans had drunk about 2.5 gallons of spirits per capita; by 1896, they drank only about a gallon. Beer consumption, in contrast, had soared during the same period, from about one gallon in 1840 to fifteen gallons per capita. Distilleries were also large corporate conglomerates run by anonymous managers on behalf of stockholders, so liquor makers never developed the public face and fame that brewers and beer did. Nor did liquor makers operate “tied” houses. Indeed, virtually all of them sold liquor to wholesalers who in turn sold it to retailers, whose bottles of bourbon and rye gathered dust even as beer kegs ran dry as soon as they were tapped. In this new war on drink, public enemy number one was not the distiller but the men who brewed and sold the saloon’s lifeblood: beer.

One of the few brewers who recognized that fact was the aging Adolphus Busch, who sensed the danger emanating from the “tyrrany [sic], idiocy, fanaticism and intolerance” that fed the ASL’s legions. “There is something . . . that I do not like in the American man,” not least his “hypocrisy,” he told his old friend Charles Nagel. “He recommends and speaks for Prohibition and [condemns] the manufactures of all liquor while, at the same time, he drinks like a fish and becomes as drunk as a fool.” Lunacy it might be, hypocritical, too, but Busch acknowledged the threat. “It is my aim to win the American people over to our side, to make them all lovers of beer and teach them to have respect for the brewing industry and the brewer . . . .  It may cost us a million of dollars, and even more, but what of it if thereby we elevate our position?” he wrote to a business associate in 1905.

Busch did not expect to lose Missouri to the drys, but he feared that Texas might slip out of his hands. Since the 1870s, he’d invested considerable energy and money into building his Texas market. He sold much of his beer there and owned part or all of three other breweries in that state. But the ASL wanted Texas to go dry, and was busy funneling people, money, and time into the state.

Busch recognized that he and other brewers needed to mount their own campaign to promote the virtues of beer and the insanity of dry laws. But he knew, too, that Texans might eventually be asked to vote on statewide prohibition. Since the ASL supported dry politicians friendly to their cause, the beermakers had no choice but to use the same tactic, giving funds to ensure that wet politicians filled the Texas statehouse and that sympathetic judges, who might be asked to rule on election legalities, sat on court benches. He and the state’s major beermakers organized the Texas Brewers’ Association (TBA), which consisted of AnheuserBusch, William J. Lemp Brewing, and seven Texas breweries, and each company deposited twenty cents per barrel in the organization’s treasury. Even the United States Brewers’ Association, otherwise slow to acknowledge the threat posed by the ASL, recognized that Texas was in danger, and assessed its six hundred-plus members one cent per barrel for the Texans’ battle.

The money was not enough to wage war against the freshet of municipal and county elections spawned by the local option law. In August 1903, the president of a Houston brewery mailed a check for $250 to his dealer in Palestine, Texas, to fund an election campaign in Anderson County. “As you are aware,” he reminded the agent, “the breweries are taxed with three or four elections . . . every month, and have been for the past year, and it has eaten up all of the profits and more.” Still, the brewer knew that it was “impossible” to campaign without the money. “[H]ow it is spent,” he added, “we do not want to know as long as it is spent for a good cause.”

The TBA also bought votes when it could, slipping some of its precious funds into the hands of agreeable but indigent citizens so that they could pay the poll tax that stood between them and the voting booth. In the summer of 1903, a field agent spent a thousand dollars in just one county to pay the tax for fifteen hundred black men. Candidates cost even more. “We have about arranged with the ruling political party to allow us to name a Senator and Representative to the Legislature,” reported an operative working for the San Antonio Brewing Association. “We are trying to get Judge Dean to run as Senator, and I believe he will go if paid for his time while away from his business.” Dean’s services would cost the TBA “at least $3,000,” but the agent expected to offset the expense by acquiring another judge “without paying him anything.”

But as Busch and others were slowly learning, the ASL’s success rested on more than money. Americans were fed up with saloons. True, they had been prodded to that view by ASL propaganda, but there was no denying that beer joints poisoned civic harmony and order. The TBA’s election manager in Freestone County admitted as much as he struggled to reconcile his job and his conscience with the reality of daily life in a community plagued by saloons. He reported that voters in one town demanded a local option election as a way to eliminate a particularly foul beerhouse, a gathering spot for “the young, lawless element who make nights hideous and when weary of raising hades in the house go out and shoot up the town.” The marshal refused “to abate the trouble, and whenever there is any difficulty the new Sheriff always has a sick cow or calf down at his farm . . . Do you blame the people for calling a local option election?” asked the exasperated agent.

By 1907, the United States Brewers’ Association had finally begun, albeit slowly and sporadically, to organize against the danger posed by the ASL and local option laws. But its field operatives discovered that persuading brewers to abandon self-interest was like asking Howard Hyde Russell to have a friendly drink. W. F. Schad, a USBA employee, ran up against that fact when he tried to organize Utah brewers and beer salesmen. Every saloon in Salt Lake City, he noted, contained slot machines and 20 percent of them were “low dives, catering for their trade to women of ill repute and the lowest class of men.” The city’s beermakers and brewery agents knew that. They knew, too, that they ought to close the dives and combat the Mormon prohibitionists (most of whom, Schad noted, “use stimulants quietly”). But one local beermaker explained to Schad that he would close his dens of iniquity only if the rest of the city’s brewers did the same; until then, his tied houses would stay open. Worse yet, the manager of Salt Lake Brewing Company refused to have anything to do with any clean-up operation that involved Reilly, the local Lemp sales representative.

Schad hurried over to the Lemp office to investigate. It turned out that Reilly had handled Salt Lake Brewing’s beer until wooed away by Lemp, and now he supplied Lemp lager to saloons formerly in Salt Lake Brewing’s corral. Reilly assured Schad that he was willing to work with his former employer. Schad trotted back to Salt Lake Brewing, but his powers of persuasion crumbled in the face of its manager’s recalcitrance: He refused to join any organization that included Reilly and neither Schad nor anyone else could change his mind. “The Salt Lake Brewing Company, being the largest Brewery in the State,” Schad reported, “I of course failed to organize as contemplated.”

This shortsighted self-absorption frustrated Charles Nagel. He pleaded with Adolphus Busch and son August to board the bandwagon of reality and push harder to get out their side of the story. Beer had become “the object of severest criticism” and brewers could not even “get a hearing in the public prints,” he told August. And why? Because “the whole country is infested with disreputable saloons,” and it was those that fueled public outrage against drinking, and, by extension, the brewing industry. Forced to choose between the “disreputable” saloon on the one hand and prohibition on the other, Americans would come down on the side of the “greatest . . . good to the general public”—and so against the brewers.

Chastened or inspired, in late 1907, August Busch announced that he and his father would cooperate in “the suppression of lawless saloons.” “We do not expect great results in a day,” Busch said. But “[s]how us a saloon or a club in which crime is bred and fostered, and if it belongs to our custom our support shall be withdrawn.”

Fred J. Kern, the mayor of Belleville, Illinois, challenged Busch to make good on his words. Kern told a reporter that the town, which lay fifteen miles southeast of St. Louis, contained “110 saloons, of which 105 are decent.” But the town’s most indecent places were owned by Anheuser-Busch, and the manager of the Budweiser Garden, the most notorious of the lot, had paid numerous fines for admitting minors to the attached dance hall. “[I]t is the rankest kind of hypocrisy,” Kern charged, “for Gussie Busch to insist on law enforcement in the newspapers and then for his tenants and his agents . . . to denounce the public officials who demand some little respect for the decencies and the proprieties . . . of orderly society.”

“Gussie” wasted no time in responding. Twenty-four hours later, the manager turned out the lights and locked the doors; soon after, an Anheuser-Busch employee collected the keys.

But Charles Nagel was right: It was too little, too late. Few other brewers were willing to take the same step, and the Budweiser Garden was a mere drop in a gargantuan vat of saloons and dance halls. That puny effort could not divert the tide of public opinion from the channel dredged by the Anti-Saloon League. By late 1909, 46 million Americans—just over 50 percent of the total population—lived under some form of dry law. That included half of Chicago, long regarded as an impenetrable bulwark of booze. Voters in nine states had embraced outright prohibition, one of which, Oklahoma, had entered the Union two years earlier with a constitutional ban on liquor sales.

 

SALOONS WEREN’T the League’s only targets in the march toward total prohibition. ASL operatives personalized the war by attacking the men behind the beer, easy enough to do at a time when muckraking journalists painted corporate magnates as sleazy crooks, and when tales of monied greed and scandal filled newspapers and magazines. Many brewers, especially the Uihleins, Jake Ruppert, and George Ehret, had become famous in large part because of their wealth. But no beermaker drew more fire than flamboyant Adolphus Busch. A prohibitionist newspaper announced in early 1910 that the brewer had recently paid the highest price ever recorded for a second residence in Pasadena, not far from his beloved Ivy Wall. “[H]ow many thousands of homes of the patrons of his business have been mortgaged in order that Mr. Busch might enjoy the luxury of having the most ‘palatial estate on the Pacific Coast,’” wondered the reporter.

Busch came in for another attack in early 1911 on the occasion of his fiftieth wedding anniversary. Lilly and Adolphus, he ill, frail, and wheelchair-bound, celebrated at Ivy Wall. Hundreds of bouquets and wreaths decorated the house, and two hundred strands of gold roses hung from the ceiling. On the morning of the great day, Adolphus opened the gift from his St. Louis employees, a solid gold block the size and shape of a telegram and engraved with sentiments of “devotion and love,” and promptly collapsed—overcome by emotion and, perhaps, the sheer weight of the thing.

That evening Adolphus mustered the strength to join his wife and guests at dinner, where the thirty-eight attendees sat in gilded chairs, their places at the table marked by solid gold engraved souvenir plates. He presented Lilly with a gold tiara studded with diamonds and pearls. Heaps of beribboned gifts covered forty feet of table space and spilled over onto the floor. Among the treasures were three solid gold “loving cups,” one each from Theodore Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm, and the citizens of Pasadena. Adolphus’s good friend William Howard Taft, president of the United States, sent one of the Saint-Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces pulled from circulation because they had been cast without the words “In God We Trust.”

That last item caught the attention of Mrs. Sue F. Armstrong of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who, like many Americans, read about the festivities in her local newspaper. She might have been able to swallow the notion of $200,000 tiaras and Americans accepting gifts from German emperors, but the idea of the nation’s president consorting with purveyors of evil was more than she could stand. Mrs. Armstrong demanded an explanation from the White House. “I . . . wish to know,” she wrote in a letter to Taft’s office, “if the statement in regard to the president is true. Here in Iowa where we are trying to put out the saloons we should be glad to say that this report is untrue.”

It’s not clear whether Taft replied to her letter, but Sue Armstrong was not the only American demanding answers from the White House. A few months after the Busch anniversary, President Taft’s agriculture secretary, James Wilson, accepted an invitation to serve as an honorary vice-president and speaker at the International Brewers’ Congress in Chicago. The Anti-Saloon League organized a protest, and hundreds of clubs and associations bombarded the White House and Department of Agriculture with letters and telegrams. Arthur B. Farwell, president of the Chicago Law and Order League, urged Christians to pray for Wilson’s misguided soul and begged the Agriculture Secretary not to “promote” the brewers’ “schemes” or “stoop” to their morally repugnant level.

Wilson ignored the request. “If Mr. Farwell will call upon me, I would be only too glad to give him a few instructions in the art of praying,” he told a reporter. “I have been a church member all my life and have been conscientious in everything I have done.” Moreover, he had no plans to allow “criticism” from “so-called reformer[s]” or anyone else to interfere with his job. True to his word, Wilson attended the Brewers’ Congress and delivered his speech. “[T]here was nothing else to do,” he told Taft. “The prohibitionists have been threatening that they will take away votes from you in the coming campaign. The brewing people assure me that they will make good everything of that kind . . . ”

Taft would need the support: As the 1912 presidential campaign kicked into gear, he backed away from what Anti-Saloon League leaders had interpreted as a commitment to their cause. One of the thorniest issues that the ASL faced was that of interstate transport of liquor. In 1911, it was legal for, say, a retailer in a dry city in Illinois to buy beer from a Wisconsin brewer, have it shipped to Illinois, and sell it there. This continent-sized loophole undermined local option laws and the League’s dreams of a dry America. Early in his presidency, Taft had promised that if Congress passed a bill banning interstate shipments of liquor into dry areas, he would sign it. The League wrote such legislation, and maneuvered it into the Judiciary committees of both houses, but by 1911 it had become clear that Taft valued his reelection more than his earlier promise, and valued the financial contributions garnered from brewers and distillers more than the support of the ASL.

Adolphus Busch favored Taft’s reelection bid, though Busch, like others of his ilk, would have voted Republican, the businessmen’s party, no matter who was running. He also scoffed at Taft’s opponent, Woodrow Wilson: “Well, they couldn’t have done anything more stupid than to nominate the Weakest Candidate of the Bunch.” “I have a kind of feeling,” he said a few months later, “that the fellow is a prohibitionist . . . for that he ought to get another knock with the stick.”

 

A YEAR LATER, at age seventy-four, Busch died at Villa Lilly, the family residence near Wiesbaden. Lilly Anheuser-Busch and son August accompanied the body back to the United States, where a five-car train carried it and family and friends from New York to Missouri. Nagel and Missouri congressman Richard Bartholdt were on board, as was Carl Conrad, an old man himself now and bereft at the loss of his boon companion of some forty years. Kaiser Wilhelm telegrammed his condolences and ordered a representative of the German embassy to attend the funeral and lay a wreath.

At a private service at One Busch Place, Nagel eulogized his old friend as a “giant among men,” “a descendant of one of the great, vigorous and ancient gods.” A mass of floral arrangements covered the grounds outside the house, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets of St. Louis to bid farewell and watch brewery employees escort the hearse to the gravesite. There Bartholdt memorialized a life lived full: “Our song to-day is in praise of . . . that ornament of creation, the self-made man.” “Kings inherit their realms,” he said, “statesmen are entrusted with their power by others, but our departed friend . . . built his own world, an empire of possessions extending . . . to the farthest corners of the globe.”

Before Busch died, he saw his prediction fail. In November 1912, the “Temperance Crank,” as Busch had mocked him, won the election. Woodrow Wilson owed his victory to third-party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party, a group of renegade Republicans who feared the incumbent Taft would sell his presidency to corporate America rather than fight for a reform agenda that would promote the interests of ordinary people. Roosevelt’s exercise in political bravado siphoned votes from Taft and threw the election to Wilson.

Busch had been right to wonder where Wilson stood on the subject of prohibition. The new president entered the White House trailing a record of waffling and indecision. As a devoted Progressive, he favored cleaning up the saloons. As New Jersey governor, he supported local option, which he viewed as a tool that placed power in the hands of ordinary voters. As presidentelect, he urged Congress to close the interstate loophole before he arrived in Washington. Yet once in office, he performed an about-face and refused to endorse outright prohibition, even statewide prohibition.

Soon it no longer mattered what the occupant of the White House wanted, said, or did. In early 1913, the lame-duck Taft Congress (in those days, presidential terms began in March), many of whom had lost their own reelection bids and no longer had to please constituents, ratified the Sixteenth Amendment, which introduced the income tax. This was a deadly blow to the brewers’ cause: They assumed that as long as beer taxes poured into the treasury’s coffers, national prohibition would never come to pass. The new income tax replaced alcohol as the main source of the government’s revenue and whacked the legs out from under the wets’ most forceful argument against prohibition.

A few days later, the House of Representatives approved the Webb-Kenyon Act, the single most important piece of preprohibition legislation. Webb-Kenyon, written and bulldozed through committee and onto the House floor by Wayne Wheeler, closed the hated interstate loophole. Local option and even statewide prohibition suddenly gained a clout and force they had lacked before, and brewers in dry locations who had kept their businesses alive by selling beer out of state understood that their ledger books had just suffered a fatal wound that would turn black ink to red. Taft took a break from packing his bags to veto the act, but the House and Senate overrode his action. “Prohibition is no longer a local issue,” announced the editors of American Brewers’ Review. “Prohibition is a national danger.”

In December 1913, just two months after the death of Adolphus Busch, a procession marched through the streets of the nation’s capital; had Busch lived to witness it, he likely would have keeled over from apoplexy. One thousand members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and one thousand men affiliated with the Anti-Saloon League walked to the Capitol building, accompanied by another two thousand men, women, and children who serenaded passers-by with a boisterous rendition of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas and Representative Richmond P. Hobson of Alabama greeted them on the Capitol steps. As the thousands watched, two men stepped out of the ranks and handed the senator and congressman a draft of a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would ban the sale and manufacture of alcohol anywhere in the United States.

The moment that Howard Hyde Russell had envisioned back in 1893 had arrived. The push for constitutional prohibition had begun.

 

THE LEAGUE had traveled far in a short time, but Americans in 1913 were no more interested in outlawing alcohol than they are today. Prohibition was and is an extreme measure that smacks of coercion and invasion of privacy; resistance to both is the bedrock of Americans’ DNA. Nor does the idea of amending the Constitution lay easy on the American mind. It is something we do rarely and with caution, and typically only to correct a perceived injustice: to outlaw slavery, or to define citizenship and voting rights.

So how did the League come to the Capitol steps so quickly? Part of the ASL’s success can be attributed to the times themselves: Drastic measures seemed necessary in a society battered by the speed and intensity with which the industrial economy had taken hold. As one dry put it, “You may exercise your personal liberty only in so far as you do not place additional burdens upon your neighbor, or upon the State.” Alcohol, many sensible people believed, did precisely that in terms of work hours lost, families harmed, wages wasted, health injured, and lives damaged beyond repair.

But the events of 1913 also stand as testimony to the tenacity, passion, and skill of the leaders of the nation’s first single-issue lobbying group, the progenitor of so many that would follow. Its members, zealous and dedicated, had persuaded Americans to ban booze locally; now they stood ready to ask them to take this next, more extreme, step.

Had the electorate been asked to vote directly on the measure, it likely would have failed, but the mechanism of ratification worked to the ASL’s advantage. The issue would never go before the voters themselves. Rather, ratification would fall to the members of state legislatures; only they would cast ballots yea or nay on the amendment.

The process would begin in Congress, where two-thirds of the House and Senate had to authorize submission of the amendment to the forty-eight states. Ernest Cherrington, the ASL official who devised the group’s strategy, planned a test vote in Congress in 1914. The ASL would then devote 1915 and 1916 to electoral warfare, mowing down wet congressmen and replacing them with drys. If the plan went as plotted, a dry Congress would approve the amendment in 1918 and send it on to the states, where the League, having by then filled legislatures with sympathetic drys—or the easily coerced—expected no trouble in garnering the needed thirty-six votes.

Simple, but not necessarily easy. The League’s near-impenetrable hide consisted of the rural Deep South, Far West, and Midwest. But its soft underbelly—and the wets’ armor—lay in the nation’s cities, where 45 percent of Americans lived. A mere nine heavily urban states commanded 196 votes in the House; wets needed only 146 to kill the amendment.

On paper, at any rate, the League’s final campaign seemed lost before it began. And in the hands of other organizers, it might have been. But the foot soldiers launched themselves into this final phase of the war with renewed passion. A League official said later that ASL headquarters knew “the progress of every fight at every village crossroads. We were at all times intimately in touch with the battle on all fronts.” Petitions, letters, and telegrams “rolled in by tens of thousands, burying Congress like an avalanche.” League spies sent daily updates to headquarters so that League officials knew every move that the wets made.

And the League continued to benefit from the mystifyingly hapless, seemingly indifferent brewers. Just as it had been hard to muster a good reason to support the saloon, so the antiamendment crowd was hard pressed to present a compelling case against constitutional prohibition. The one significant argument rested on what might be, on theory rather than fact. As one wet put it, a ban on booze would “breed deceit, hypocrisy, [and] disrespect of law, and encourage evasion, lying, trickery, and lawlessness.” Enforcement would “require an army of United States officials, paid spies and informers . . . ”

That of course turned out to be true, but in 1913, it was an argument that lacked teeth. The ASL made sure of that: Their newspapers, magazines, and press releases all touted the decrease in crime wherever local prohibition was already in effect. It was harder to broadcast the other side of the story: Local prohibition consistently gave rise to “blind pigs,” as illegal retail outlets were called, and to bootlegging.

And so the campaign for consitutional prohibition rolled on. By late 1914, five more states had gone dry. Fifty percent of the American people lived under total prohibition, and another seventy breweries had closed their doors.

The ASL picked that moment to test its strength. On December 22, 1914, Representative Hobson introduced the prohibition amendment on the House floor. An enormous banner adorned the south gallery: a petition containing the names of twelve thousand organizations representing six million Americans who wanted a dry nation. A set of easels in front of the Speaker’s rostrum held posters emblazoned with type large enough to be seen from the back of the hall: “Crime is caused by drink,” one read. “Liquor fills the asylum,” announced another. Floral arrangements decorated Richmond Hobson’s desk, tokens of favor from women in the galleries. Pages scurried back and forth delivering stacks of telegrams to members, pleas from constituents for votes for and against.

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.

 

ITS 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.

 

WAYNE WHEELER 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.

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.

 

BUT PALMER 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.

Outside the hearing room, war alone had become sufficient reason to shut the brewers’ doors. On September 6, President Wilson announced that in order to preserve precious supplies of grain and fuel, breweries would close at midnight, December first. A few days later, the Food Administration cut brewers off from corn, rice, or barley. They could use their stock on hand; they could purchase any malt they could find. But when those supplies were depleted, well . . . that was that.

New York beermakers huddled in emergency session to discuss the bomb. “Nobody at the meeting had any suggestion to make as to what can be done with our properties,” Jacob Ruppert said afterward. “I haven’t the remotest idea as to what we can do with ours.”

Ruppert could always fall back on the income from his stud farm or from his New York Yankees, which he had purchased three years earlier. August Busch was less blasé. He had already converted his Busch-Sulzer Diesel Engine Company into a submarine engine manufactory for the navy. Now he offered the brewery to the United States government for use as a munitions factory and set off for Washington to seal the deal. “Give me a chance,” he promised, “and I’ll make the cartridge manufacturers look like pikers.” As for prohibition? asked a reporter. “I am not now interested in the prohibition question,” Busch replied. “I am only concerned now in doing what I can to help the Government, and, secondly, to take care of my employes [sic] in St. Louis.”

His New York colleagues scoffed at the idea. It was unlikely, said one of them, that the federal government wanted or needed yet another munitions factory. And, he added, “our men, brewers and malsters [sic] and the like, who have done nothing but the work they are engaged in all their lives, would make a poor fist at learning the munition-making trade or any other. None of them is young and it is difficult to teach old dogs new tricks.” His attitude may explain why August Busch survived Prohibition and many of the New York brewers did not.

Busch forged ahead, determined to save his family’s investment and his reputation. He ran a full-page advertisement in St. Louis newspapers announcing that he would hand over the entire seventy-five city blocks and $60 million worth of Anheuser-Busch facilities to federal officials if they wanted it, announcing, “We consider it a privilege to co-operate with the Government in making its war program effective.”

Busch devoted most of the ad to refuting the “false reports and statements” being “circulated with reckless disregard for truth.” Anheuser-Busch was “an American institution, founded by Americans more than 60 years ago, and continuously owned and operated by Americans” since then. (That, by the way, is true: Eberhard Anheuser became a citizen in 1848; Adolphus Busch in 1867.) He reminded readers that the company paid more than $3 million in taxes every year and employed nearly seven thousand men and women. The Busch family had contributed a half million dollars to the Red Cross and purchased $3 million worth of Liberty bonds. It was true that he and his mother had bought German bonds, but they’d done so eighteen months before the United States entered the war. “Anheuser-Busch was founded upon the solid rock of Americanism,” Busch concluded, “and grew to be a great institution under the protection of American democracy.” Now the company stood “ready to sacrifice everything except loyalty to country, and its own honor, to serve the Government in bringing this war to a victorious conclusion.”

Government officials decided against converting the brewery to munitions production, but leased a large chunk of one Anheuser-Busch building for the storage of weapons and ammunition. The lease proved to be short-term: The war ended on November 11. On December 1, the nation’s breweries turned out their lights, as per President Wilson’s order of the previous September.

None of it mattered. While Wayne Wheeler and A. Mitchell Palmer hatched their plots; while August Busch struggled to save his name and his livelihood; while the Senate subcommittee muddled through an embarrassing waste of taxpayer money; while a generation’s finest—American and German, English and French—fought and died in the trenches of Europe, one state legislature after another had ratified the prohibition amendment. On January 16, 1919, Nebraska legislators voted aye. Theirs was the necessary thirty-sixth nod of approval. Prohibition had become the law of the land.