Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (28 page)

Yet at the time, reports of bootleggers and speakeasies, high-jackings and gangland murders, convinced most Americans that their society had gone mad. Then, as now, the
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of Prohibition belied the reality. And because headlines of gang murders trumped rarely reported tales of obedience to law, the Wickersham Report fueled an anti-Prohibition movement that had been gaining strength since the mid-1920s.

Organizations like the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform garnered their support in part from the apparent crime wave, but they also got a boost from the ASL itself. The League had drifted through the first few dry years as its leadership dithered over the group’s future. One faction favored a focus on continued education about the evils of alcohol and the benefits of Prohibition; another, headed by Wayne Wheeler, favored an emphasis on enforcement. Wheeler won out, but his victory backfired: In the public’s mind, the ASL became the quasi-official, extralegal body responsible for the corruption and incompetence of the federal agents who raided speakeasies and demolished illegal stills. In 1927, the year that Wheeler died, Congress reorganized the Prohibition Bureau and placed its many employees under the Civil Service Act and beyond the reach of the ASL.

The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment capitalized on that moment. The group, which incorporated in late 1920, limped through its first few years, crippled by a shortage of funds and most Americans’ belief that a constitutional amendment was impossible to repeal. But as reports of alcohol-related crime filled newspaper front pages and the ASL’s influence dwindled, the AAPA regrouped under new leadership. Among the organization’s members were Marshall Field, the department store owner; the president of a major railroad; publisher Charles Scribner; several senators and federal judges; and a former mayor of New York City. Many of them had originally supported the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition.

Among them was Henry Bourne Joy, the retired president of Packard Motor. Joy had donated to the ASL and favored the Eighteenth Amendment. But in the mid-1920s, horrified by the lawlessness rampant in the region near his home in northern Michigan, he threw his weight, and his money, behind the AAPA. So did the three Du Pont brothers, Pierre, Irénée, and Lammot. Irénée was particularly vocal about the evils associated with Prohibition: He was shocked by the amount of money earned by bootleggers, money that was not taxed and so did not contribute to the national treasury or the nation’s well-being. He was appalled, too, by the extent to which a taste for hard liquor had taken hold among young people. Pierre supported the AAPA for different reasons: He was outraged that private property in the form of breweries and distilleries had been shut down, and through no fault of the owners. He also abhorred the intrusion of federal power into private lives, a clear violation, he believed, of the treasured American concept of states’ rights. All of it—the amendment itself, the shoddy and usually corrupt enforcement, and the increase in crime and invasions of privacy—constituted “an outrage to American institutions.”

These ideas resonated with a nation weary of arguing, weary of crime, and by the time the Wickersham Report appeared, already weary of an economic disaster that had barely begun. As the depression deepened, more critics called for repeal in the name of taxation. They reminded Americans that for decades, brewers, distillers, and vintners had paid heavy taxes, monies that had dried up when the Eighteenth became law. Bring alcohol back, and jobs, paychecks, and tax revenues would return, too.

A vast throng of people made that point in May 1932, on a sunny spring Saturday morning, when the mayor of New York, James John Walker—known affectionately as “Jimmie”—hosted a beer parade in his fair city. He led tens of thousands of New Yorkers in a march to tell Congress and the president that they wanted “Beer for Taxation.” One police officer estimated that the marchers passed by at the rate of two thousand souls per hour: former Olympic champions, German-Americans dressed in costume, and a “Negro” contingent from Harlem; Tammany politicians who tipped shiny top hats and unemployed stockbrokers from Wall Street. The Lambs Club and the Friars marched, and so did the National Vaudeville Artists. Thousands lined the sidewalks or sat picnicking and watching on the lawn of Central Park.

Nor were New Yorkers alone. Walker, who originated the idea of the Beer Parade, had urged Americans in other cities to join New Yorkers in marching that day. They did—from Boston to Detroit, from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Daytona Beach, Florida. East and west, north and south, Americans marched for beer and for the tax dollars it would bring to an impoverished, frightened nation.

It was not clear—yet—if Congress got the message, but the Democratic Party did: Its 1932 platform called for repeal of the Eighteenth and for modification of Volstead to allow for legal beer while the states voted on a repeal amendment. Senator Gilbert Hitchcock’s reading of the plank at the party convention unleashed a cacophony of cheers, whistles, and applause that lasted for twenty-five minutes. Nominee Franklin Roosevelt swept away any doubts as to his party’s sincerity: Prohibition, he told a New Jersey audience in late August, had provided the “enemies of society” with money that would otherwise flow into the people’s treasury. It was time, he announced, for Americans to reclaim those “unaccounted millions.” Time to correct the “stupendous blunder” that was Prohibition.

S
O THE SUMMER
of 1932 drowsed to a close. One out of every four adults was out of work. Nearly fourteen hundred banks closed that year, hundreds during the summer alone. Farm foreclosures and bankruptcies numbered in the tens of thousands. And there seemed no end in sight, unless Washington came up with a plan, something Hoover had proved unwilling or unable to do. August Busch, Frank Yuengling, Alvin Griesedieck and dozens of other brewers, many of them lifelong Republicans, prayed for a Democratic victory, willing voters to send Hoover back to Iowa.

On the evening of November 8, Roosevelt carried just over 57 percent of the popular vote. Beer was on the way. “Beer,” Walter Lippman told the readers of his nationally syndicated column, “would be a great help in fighting off the mental depression” inflicted upon the “great multitudes” by winter weather, bank failures, and unemployment. “Beer is nourishing, consoling, and warming, and it should be made available as soon as possible.”August Busch weighed in, too. “I want it,” he told a Kansas City reporter, “so a man can go into a decent place again, open and aboveboard, and get a 5-cent glass of beer.” Every family, he insisted, ought to be “able to order bottled beer from the grocer, the same as they do milk and bread,” and not be forced to buy the “poisonous stuff from an alley rat.”

Babe Ruth wanted beer, too, although for less noble reasons. “Ho, ho,” the Yankee star shouted to reporters after a workout. “Just give Colonel Jake Ruppert the right to make good beer again and I’ll have no trouble signing any contract with the Yankees for 1933.” Boss Ruppert, the team’s owner, would be “so tickled” by the return of beer, explained The Babe, that he’d “be a real soft touch . . . ”

The lame-duck Congress was not about to let anyone down, and certainly not Babe Ruth. Ratification of a Twenty-first Amendment would take some months—there was no way around that—but modification of the Volstead Act would provide immediate revenue from sales of legal beer. Volstead defined as “non-intoxicating” any beverage that contained less than half a percent alcohol. All Congress had to do was increase that percentage and legal beer would flow out of the breweries, and tax dollars into the treasury. Simple enough—once the House and Senate had arrived at a new definition of “non-intoxicating.”

The brewers knew the answer: 3.2 percent. At congressional hearings convened to discuss the issue, Alfred Schedler, a chemist employed by Pabst Brewing, explained the science behind the superiority of this number. In simple language, the more alcohol the better the beer, because the chemical reactions that generated alcohol also produced acids and esters that contributed to the beer’s “character” and “palatability.” There “can not be any doubt,” he argued, that “preference must be given to the [beer] with the higher alcoholic content.”

But was 3.2 percent beer intoxicating? The Honorable William E. Hull, a congressman from Illinois and a man devoted to amending Volstead, shouldered the burden of proof. He had traveled to Sweden to investigate that nation’s “Bratt system,” by which the Swedish government classified beer and wine as nonintoxicating. To test this claim, Hull skipped breakfast one morning and traveled directly to a brewery laboratory. As a company chemist monitored the event, Hull downed four bottles of beer (he stopped at four, he explained to the committee, because his stomach “would not hold any more”). “I am a man who does not drink,” Hull explained, “and therefore would be susceptible to intoxication probably equal to any adult.” The chemist then tested the congressman’s faculties and prepared an affidavit affirming that the beer “had not affected [Hull] mentally or physically and that every symptom showed that four pints of beer on an empty stomach had not in any way intoxicated” him. “You can laugh,” Hull added, “but there is no better way of testing out a problem . . . than to test it out on yourself . . . ” Committee member Allen Treadway asked an obvious question: “Do you think the Supreme Court would be likely to hear that kind of evidence?” “I don’t see why the Supreme Court wouldn’t take my word for it as well as that of any chemist,” Hull replied. “I certainly have a reputation for telling only the truth, as you know.” “Absolutely,” Treadway assured him.

R. A. Huber, vice-president of both Anheuser-Busch and the USBA, devoted most of his testimony to sketching the economic benefits of legal but nonintoxicating lager. He told the committee that USBA members expected to spend $360 million to modernize and renovate their plants. “In addition to that,” he added, “there would be a vast amount of money spent in the retail distribution, for equipment, ice boxes, glassware, and the Lord knows whatever else goes into that.” All told, the government could expect brewers, distributors, and retailers to hire some 300,000 men. “That does not include,” Huber added, “the vast number of men that would be employed in cooperage works and the bottle manufacturing plants,” on farms and in coal mines, on railroads and in factories making the new equipment for the breweries. The record does not indicate whether the congressmen salivated during Huber’s testimony, but they surely recognized that the legalization of beer would provide the kind of pump-priming for which Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal were about to become famous.

The drys showed up at the hearing, too, in order to denounce the “parasitic” brewers and their lies. But they would not win this time. On Wednesday, March 22, just before two p.m. Eastern time, FDR hoisted himself from his chair in the Oval Office and walked down the hall to the cabinet room, already crowded with journalists and cameramen. (Or so reporters said; it’s not clear how the partially paralyzed and image-conscious president negotiated the few feet from his office to the signing room.) There a staff member handed him the precious six pages of text that legalized 3.2 percent beer. Roosevelt picked up one of the four pens lying in wait, flipped to the last page, and began signing. He laid the last flourish to the last “t” at 2:02 p.m. At midnight on April 7, beer would flow once more.

T
HE NEWS ZIPPED
through telegraph and telephone wires to cities around the country. Impromptu celebrations erupted everywhere, but most especially in Milwaukee, St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and other beer cities. In Milwaukee, tugboat captains opened their sirens, and employees at factories and fire departments responded with every whistle, siren, and bell they could find. A snarled maze of people, cars, and horses filled downtown streets as motorists braked to a halt and laid on their horns. Workers streamed out of offices and shops and onto the sidewalks and streets, cheering, singing, and clapping. Some stayed put and tossed a blizzard of confetti on the celebration below. The unemployed standing in line at a relief station on the city’s northwest side applauded and cheered. Local radio stations interrupted their regular programming to carry impromptu speeches and songs. The 250 women playing cards at the Eagles club abandoned their tables to clap and sing.

Most of the city’s brewers had 3.2 percent lager on hand, laid in weeks or months earlier as the basis for near beer. But they expected to ship all or most of it out in the first minutes after midnight on April 7, so they needed to brew more—and fast. “We have a large volume of orders from all over the country,” said Sol Abrams, the treasurer at Schlitz, “and every one seems to want the first car.” The day after President Roosevelt signed the bill, Abrams’s clerks spent eight hours opening and processing new orders. Inside the plant, employees bottled existing stock and others mixed new batches of malt and water. Outside the main office, thousands of men lined up to apply for hundreds of positions.

The economic tonic extended beyond the breweries. The president of a Milwaukee bottling-equipment company scrambled to keep up with $1.2 million in new orders, and to hire three hundred new workers. The manager at Cream City Bottle Company could spare little time to answer questions. “[O]rders are piling up, all hands are busy, smiles are too numerous to count, and we are viewing the future with the rosiest of expectations,” he told reporters. Froedtert Malt and Grain Company, one of the nation’s largest malt suppliers, operated twenty-four hours a day, and had been for several weeks in anticipation of the beer bill. Every day, fifteen rail cars of barley arrived at the plant, and ten to twelve carloads of malt rolled out.

In New York, Jake Ruppert hauled one of his old beer wagons out of storage, loaded it up with (presumably empty) barrels, decorated it with banners bearing his name, rounded up two horses, and trotted the advertisement around town. Over in Brooklyn, the vice-president of Piel Brothers Brewing told reporters that his plant was booked beyond its capacity. “It is quite possible,” he warned, “that there may be a shortage of beer at first.” But he hastened to reassure his regular customers, those who’d purchased his soft drinks and near beer during the dry years, that they would get first dibs on the available lager. Nearby Trommers Brothers was making no such promises. “We have been swamped,” said a spokesman. “We are going to have to serve every customer . . . on a ration basis.”