Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (13 page)

So it went around the country. In New York City, rich and poor danced and drank at the Tivoli and the Bowery, the Teutonia and the Pacific—beer halls that accommodated fifteen hundred or more people. At one of the city’s finest venues, Atlantic Garden, guests entered a vestibule lined on two sides by bars stocked with lager and wine, and food counters bulging with pretzels, cheese, sausage, and crackers. From there, they passed into a cavernous space filled with tables and benches. Massive chandeliers illuminated a vaulted ceiling decorated with painted panels and frescoes. Gothic windows lined two walls; a parade of faux columns and arches marched across another, the niches adorned with plaster scallops and fleur-de-lis. There customers danced and drank lager and Rhine wines; played at cards and dominoes, billiards and bowling.

Warm weather drew New Yorkers to outdoor venues—Bellevue or Jones’ Woods, or the East River Gardens—where sunlight replaced chandeliers, and lush groves and arbors the beerhalls’ frescoes and fleur-de-lis. In the mid-1880s, George Ehret spent $220,000 on an enormous estate in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and created there a public beer garden complete with ferry service from the city. Not to be outdone, rival Jacob Ruppert built his own posh garden on South Brother Island, a tiny chip of land nestled between the northern tip of Queens and the southern edge of the Bronx.

A
T THE OTHER END
of the drinking spectrum lay the saloons, most of them dimly lit holes-in-the-wall where the air sagged in layers of smoke and grease, and spittoons and sawdust littered the floors; where the beer cost a nickel and the lunch, cigars, and companionship were free. For every Atlantic Garden or Schlitz Park, there were a hundred saloons, 150,000 in 1880 and nearly 300,000 by 1900—and that was not counting the illegal unlicensed joints. Americans could not walk more than a half block in any business district in any city without passing a saloon. In the early 1880s, Milwaukee’s 120,000 residents could chose from nine hundred saloons, one for every 130 people, and more than that per capita for their mostly adult male clientele. A single block of Howard Street in San Francisco contained twenty-one saloons, thirteen on one side of the street, eight on the other. In 1899, Chicago police estimated that half the city’s population entered at least one saloon a day.

The era spawned the saloon. The new steel mills, textile factories, and machine shops devoured the labor of millions who fashioned lives out of twelve-hour days tending mechanical devices and too-short nights endured in sordid tenements and hovels. The rackety pace of factory and city fueled a desire to re-create some measure of comfort and community from rural lives and European homelands left behind. Just as New Yorkers and Parisians today congregate at cafés because they lack the space to entertain at home, so men fled the tedium of the factory and the cramped squalor of home for the warmth of the saloon. Male working-class camaraderie rested on a cornerstone of neighborhood beer joints, each one a quasi-public club presided over by the keeper and his bartenders. There, men convened meetings of clubs organized around bicycling, card-playing, rowing, politics, unions, and baseball. Political candidates wooed voters by shaking hands, slapping backs, and buying rounds for the house. Ward bosses conducted nominating conventions, harangued the undecided, and bestowed jobs on the loyal.

Industrialism affected women, too. For the most part they gathered in warm weather on tenement stoops, sending a child down the street with an empty pail to fetch a “growler” of lager. But many women left home each day to toil in sweatshops and factories, and the grind of labor eroded their ideas about propriety and the barriers between the sexes. Young Dorothy Richardson discovered that near the turn of the century, when she worked twelve hours a day, six days a week at a commercial laundry in Manhattan. One day a co-worker collapsed from “nausea and exhaustion.” As the younger women helped her to her feet, Mrs. Mooney, older and more worldly, scolded them, blaming the young woman’s faint on “them rotten cold lunches you girls eat.”

When the noon bell rang the next day, Mooney hauled the lot of them down the street to Devlin’s saloon, where she ushered them through the “ladies entrance.” In most saloons, this was a side or back entrance that opened off an alley directly into the back room. This was not, as it might seem, an indication of inferiority. Rather, this sheltered entry afforded women more privacy than the front door and, more important, enabled them to avoid the sometimes rowdy male horde congregated around the mahogany bar that dominated the saloon’s main room. Unlike the front, the back room was quiet and relatively free of both smoke and the spittle that decorated the saw-dust strewn floor out front.

“Six beers with the trimmin’s,” Mooney demanded from the waiter, the “trimmin’s” being the saloon’s salty but hearty free lunch. “I who never before could endure the si ght or smell of beer, found myself draining my ‘schooner’ as eagerly as Mrs. Mooney herself,” Richardson recalled. Energized by the hefty meal, she vowed to return; by week’s end she proudly identified herself as a Devlin’s “regular” and a convert to beer.

Saloons devoured most of the breweries’ output and provoked the brewers’ worst headaches. At a time when spirits and bottled beer were expensive, the typical saloonkeeper earned most of his profit from lager on tap, and served the product of only one brewery. This “tied” system, as it was called, began emerging in the 1870s, as brewers, needing to pay for their remodeling projects, for the new and larger brewvats, for steam engines, malt hoppers, and icehouses, sought the security of guaranteed retail outlets for their beer.

At first the system consisted of gentlemen’s agreements: A local tavern owner agreed to carry a favored brewer’s brand and only his. That worked well enough in lager’s early days, when saloonkeepers and brewers had stood as equals in the world of small-time entrepreneurship. But as men like Pabst and the Uihleins razed their relatives’ comfortable brewhouses and replaced them with factories, a chasm opened between beermaker and beerseller. That became painfully obvious during a confrontation in Milwaukee in early 1874, when inflation and recession roiled the economy and drought sent crop prices sailing skyward. The city’s brewers announced plans to raise prices by two dollars a barrel.

Saloonkeepers rebelled and convened a series of meetings to discuss the matter, but the ensuing “wailing and gnashing of teeth” among the “knights of the spigot” brigade had less to do with the price hike than with their resentment toward—and fear of—the changes roiling their world, thanks to the “bloated monopolists perched upon the hillsides of the city.”

One old-timer recalled the days when “Papa Best set up his little brew-kettle and by dint of careful toil brewed the first lager for the pioneer” and turned a profit, too. Now that “little beginning” of Papa’s was “worth a million of dollars,” and his successors’ pockets bulged with their profits, thanks to mechanization and brewing methods of a sort that Papa Best would not even recognize. Another speaker recounted the history of a local beer king who inherited a “business worth $23,000.” Now the brewery’s profits equaled those of a “diamond mine,” and the owner’s wealth belied his “lamentations” of poverty.

Ranting was about all the saloonkeepers could manage. The barkeeper who chaired the meetings detailed the results of his confrontation with Valentin Blatz, who owned his saloon. The white-aproned knight dispatched a letter to the Broadway brewing castle, announcing that he would pay ten dollars per barrel for Blatz’s beer until May 1, and then just one dollar more. King Blatz rejected his subject’s offer, whereupon the tavernkeeper removed the Blatz sign from his front door, offered a last free round on the house, and wrote to a Fond du Lac brewer asking for more lager. No doubt the upstate beermaker would oblige, but who knew at what price? The saloonkeepers, unable to hold out against warriors armed with better weapons and deeper pockets, finally agreed to a compromise: a price hike of one dollar until May 1, at which time the brewers would get their full two-dollar increase in the barrel price.

As competition accelerated and brewing’s stakes—all that machinery to pay for—grew, brewers longed to keep their retailers on a tighter leash. In the 1880s, many began buying the saloons outright and leasing them to saloonkeepers, who, having become what amounted to company employees, had no choice about the beer they carried. As Frederick Pabst told one of his branch managers in the early 1880s, “[i]t strikes me that the right way to do a Thing of that Kind would be for us to take the Lease for a Number of years put in Tables Chairs Counter & Shelves. The Man who runs it should buy Glasses and
all
the fixtures which is necessary to run a No. 1 Place . . . Then we should have a Contract that at anytime when the Man don’t attend to his Business or keeps the Place up he must get out at short Notice.” Most important, Pabst added, “who ever runs the Place must . . . invest some Money. He should also pay interest for the Money invested by us.”

The Uihleins worked the tied system as well as anyone, snapping up every street corner they could lay hands on. August Uihlein “was away from home every night,” his son Erwin later recalled, “ . . . out judging property and he became one of the best real estate judges in the country.” The brothers funneled large chunks of their cash into saloons and hotels in Chicago and Milwaukee. By the turn of the century, Schlitz Brewing owned well over fifty saloons in Milwaukee and another sixty in Chicago. “In this manner,” explained Edward Uihlein, “we not only reached higher sales figures, but we also insured our clients against competition . . . . When we rented to a merchant who handled our products exclusively we were very sure of his reputation and his compliance with all laws and ordinances . . . [O]ur policies,” he added, “were not highly regarded by the competition.”

Or by the saloonkeepers themselves. They expected brewers’ salesmen to pay regular visits and buy rounds for the house. They expected free signs, coasters, and wall hangings. They expected free kegs at Christmas and New Year, and deep discounts when business was slow. Moreover, they rarely missed a chance to play one brewer off another, buying beer from Pabst in October and switching to Schlitz in December when that company’s agent sidled through the back door with a better deal. A saloonkeeper need only hint that he might switch to another brand, and “Presto!” complained the editor of
Western Brewer.
“As if by magic, the wily saloon keeper has struck a bonanza. His place becomes the resort of a score of brewery ‘agents.’ Money is lavished upon him, wine flows in rivers, and the keen publican waxes fat.” The exchange of pleasantries, money, and booze would drag on for a few weeks, perhaps a month, and then, “Presto!” again: “the badly fooled brewers and their ‘agents’ are informed by the sleek Boniface, that at present he will make no change in his brewer or his beer.”

Every once in awhile the game backfired. Best Brewing’s Chicago manager confronted a saloonkeeper who offered to provide the brewery with several more saloons in exchange for a 10 percent discount on the keg price. “I laughed at him,” the manager wrote to the home office. The saloonkeeper told the Best agent that Schlitz’s man had already agreed to the terms. Fine, Best’s man told the saloonkeeper, go to Schlitz. To his surprise, the chagrined barkeeper stuck with Best. “It was no doubt a bulldozing operation,” reported the manager. “I do not feel like complaining of our business here,” he added, “but it is hell on earth as usual.”

Then there was the bad-beer-refusal-to-pay trick. Brewers lured saloonkeepers into their company’s pen by loaning them start-up funds or fronting them kegs of beer on credit. The barkeepers then refused to pay up on grounds that the beer had gone sour. The practice confounded Charles Nagel, a St. Louis attorney who managed the legal affairs of Anheuser-Busch. He pleaded with his friend Adolphus Busch to read the fine print in the contract that bound brewer and saloonkeeper.

“[Y]ou will notice,” Nagel explained to Busch, “that you are compelled to furnish merchantable beer in sufficient quantities . . . All the parties have to do therefore, is to keep your money, and to assert that your beer is not merchantable for one reason or another,” refuse payment, and then turn around and make a similar deal with Schlitz or Pabst. The strategem enabled the saloonkeeper to float on free beer for several weeks, leaving the Anheuser-Busch collector holding an empty money bag. “You would not think of giving this amount of money to any reputable man without security,” added the exasperated Nagel. “Why would you give it to strangers who in asking it have to admit that they have not the necessary funds to carry on the business . . . . [T]his kind of loan system is the weakest spot in your whole business and subjects you to more losses, and to more expense and unsatisfactory litigation, than all your other business put together.”

Nagel was right, although brewers couldn’t see any way around the saloons, which had become indispensable components of their empires. Indispensable and problematic: These real-estate holdings, vast in the case of the largest breweries and intended to eliminate the aggravations of retailing, instead exacerbated them—and eventually would serve as a lightning rod for a new generation of temperance and prohibition crusaders.

It’s easy to see why. Trying to squeeze profits out of their penny-ante saloons tied the brewers to a treadmill of woe. They wanted to lease saloons to reliable men who were willing to invest some of their own funds; wanted clean, honest saloons where the keeper banned prostitution, gambling, and sloppy drunks. More often than not, however, they settled for ne’er-do-wells, thieves, or dolts. The result was a string of sleazy saloons with the breweries’ names plastered across them in large letters. August A. Busch, Sr., Adolphus’s son and, by the 1890s, second vice-president of Anheuser-Busch, hated the whole mess. “[Brewers] were so anxious to sell their products,” he complained some years later, “that if a brewery put a saloon on one corner, immediately three other brewers would buy the other three corners and put saloons there, and they would have to put in all sorts of disreputable devices and attractions, ‘wild women,’ and the like to draw trade.”