Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (20 page)

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.”

H
OWARD
H
YDE
R
USSELL
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.

I
N
M
AY
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.