Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (29 page)

And so it went from East Coast to West. On March 30, the Commerce Department reported that the beer bill had already generated millions of dollars in ancillary sales. Brewers expected to order thousands of new delivery trucks and $3.5 million worth of tires. A bottle maker reported that one brewer had placed a boggling request for thirty million bottles. Workers at a Massachusetts box factory chipped away at a request for 125,000 wooden beer crates.

The leadership of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union reminded Americans that “no nation ever drank itself out of a depression.” But the brewers and their employees were too busy to listen, and Americans weary of racketeering, hijackings, bad booze, and bankruptcy were beyond caring.

By the evening of April 6, the cavalcade of trucks and cars lined up outside Anheuser-Busch stretched for a full mile down Arsenal Street. A special police detail monitored a crowd that swelled to twenty-five thousand. Up in Milwaukee, ten thousand people milled about streets surrounding the Schlitz plant, forcing the drivers of hundreds of delivery trucks to approach the loading docks at a pace that made snails look like racing roadsters. Three thousand souls braved a light snow and trudged up the hill to the Pabst plant, where every employee and every member of the Pabst family was busy sorting through orders and trying to answer telephones that refused to stop ringing. On State Street, a smaller throng monitored the proceedings at the Miller plant. That company’s train of vehicles included forty with Indiana license plates and one from Montana.

At one minute past midnight, horns and sirens blared, factory whistles howled, and the thirsty masses hooted, hollered, danced, and sang. In St. Louis, six hundred people jammed the dining room at the Hotel Jefferson to enjoy food and drink. When a photographer asked to take a shot, one woman hopped up on a table and hoisted her mug high, as did the two dozen men and women who surrounded her.

Alvin Griesedieck was too busy to celebrate what he later described as one of the most important, and happiest, days of his life. His loading dock was nearly obscured by a honking, gassy maze of trucks, a special security detail, police, and the curious hoping for free samples. The brothers Busch were just as busy. Their ailing father celebrated at home, where he listened as August Junior commemorated the moment on the air, thanks to the Columbia Broadcasting System, which provided listeners at its seventy-five affiliates with live coverage from Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. At twelve precisely, Gussie took the microphone and urged Americans to honor “personal liberty” by repealing the Eighteenth as quickly as possible and promising that brewing would never again become entangled in politics. “Happy days,” he announced in closing, “are here again.”

Indeed. In rainy Washington, D.C., a brand-new beer truck bearing a sign announcing “Mr. President, the first real beer is yours!” rolled to a halt on a street between the White House and the State Department at 12:04 a.m. Eight hundred delighted souls cheered as a squad of motorcycle police escorted the vehicle the rest of the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Cheering erupted, too, in restaurants and bars in downtown Baltimore as delivery trucks rolled to various front doors and waiters and bartenders distributed the precious nectar. In San Francisco, where three breweries were up and running, cars, trucks, and tens of thousands of celebrants jammed streets in every direction, impeding the progress of delivery wagons headed to the airport, to Los Angeles, and to a host of smaller, brewerless burgs.

Down in Hollywood, Gary Cooper and Mae West settled a bet: She wagered that when the great moment came, she could outdrink Mr. Cooper. He produced two oversized steins, and the pair began guzzling. Their appointed judge declared the match a draw. Miss West took a moment to catch her breath and then turned to the reporters who recorded the event. “Now that beer is really back and we will all be drinking it why not wage a campaign for the return of the woman’s natural figure?” she asked. “We haven’t had any perfectly natural figures since the war took beer away from us.”

At City Hall in Milwaukee, a mob cheered as a man from Blatz Brewing hopped out of a limousine clutching a carton of Old Heidelberg beer, which he deposited in one of two birchwood crates situated nearby. He told a reporter that he’d made the short run from the brewery in thirty seconds. A minute later, another car pulled up: the Schlitz man this time. At 12:04, a third car arrived from Independent Milwaukee Brewery. “You jumped the gun,” one by-stander shouted, certain that the Independent representative and his prize could not have made the trip from South Thirteenth Street in three minutes. “No, no,” gasped the courier, still trying to catch his breath from what had obviously been a harrowing trip. “I had a police escort and we came the back way.” The traffic jam in downtown Milwaukee slowed the arrival of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which arrived at 12:10; Cream City Pilsner (12:20); Miller High Life (12:22); and finally, at 12:29, Fred Gettelman and seven bottles of Gettelman’s $1,000 Beer.

A city official nailed both crates shut, loaded them into a waiting vehicle, and the entire convoy—limo, coupe, taxi, and all—headed for the Milwaukee County airport. There waited a special Midwest Airways plane, the “Spirit of 3.2.” The city’s delivery man climbed into the cabin as workers hoisted the crates onto the plane. Each box carried a simple message: “To President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Beer 3.2 percent. From—The Nation’s Beer Capital, Milwaukee. In Gratitude.”

Poor New Yorkers. Jacob Ruppert, USBA president, had insisted that the city’s brewers refrain from making midnight deliveries in order to avoid a “carnival” atmosphere. As a result, the city that never sleeps drowsed through the celebration that brightened the night elsewhere. Things picked up at daylight, when drivers began delivering the real thing. Crowds lined up ten or twelve deep at bars, waiting for a stein of foamy. Restaurants posted “standing room only” signs on the sidewalks out front. Thousands braved the chilly weather and descended upon Coney Island to pretend it was summer and that Prohibition had never happened.

At mid-afternoon, an unusual sight greeted shoppers and revelers on Thirty-fourth Street: six Clydesdales, their manes dressed in red and white roses and tails braided with red, white, and green ribbons. They pulled a shiny red Anheuser-Busch wagon loaded with three hundred wooden cases stamped “Budweiser.” Only one case actually contained any beer, but who cared about details when the Clydesdales came to town?

A cheering and cheerful mass of New Yorkers followed the animals to their destination: the Empire State Building. The wagon driver, one Billy Wales, formerly of the Buffalo Bill Show, clucked his team to a stop and handed down the one real case to its new owner, former New York governor Al Smith, he adorned with his trademark black derby and cigar. As onlookers bellowed their approval, Smith faced a bank of waiting cameras. “I have seen many amusing, interesting and imposing sights on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street,” he said, “but nothing has thrilled me as much as the sight of these six big horses . . . My only regret is that the wagonload is not all mine.”

And nothing thrilled American brewers as much as beer mania during the spring and summer of 1933. Forty-eight hours into legality, brewers had deposited $10 million worth of taxes into federal, state, and municipal treasuries. Brewers in Los Angeles had already run out of beer and those in Chicago and Louisville operated twenty-four-hour shifts trying to keep up with demand. “We are begging people to hold back their orders,” August Junior told a St. Louis reporter. In two days, he and brother Adolphus had sold 75,000 cases and seven thousand half barrels of beer, and his staff was wading through orders for another five million cases. When the brothers hosted a celebratory party at the company’s offices on Saturday, April 8, they served near beer because there wasn’t any 3.2 percent on hand.

By August, federal beer receipts had risen to a whopping $54.1 million and beer had become Washington’s third-largest revenue producer. Only income taxes and cigarettes generated more money. In December, the same month that Utah became the magic thirty-sixth state to embrace the Twenty-first Amendment, the nation’s brewers (who, thanks to newcomers, now numbered more than five hundred) tallied their efforts and announced that since April 7, they’d rolled out twenty-one million barrels of beer. That was a far cry from the sixty million they’d made during the peak pre-Volstead year of 1914, but it was a good start.

Gus Busch had been right: Happy days had arrived at last.

T
HE EFFECTS
of more than a decade of Prohibition did not evaporate overnight. Racketeers and mobsters who had invested—and earned—millions in beer during Prohibition dug in their heels and refused to exit the scene. Why should they? The brewing equipment was in place. All they had to do was find outlets for their beer, and that was easy enough: Just hire a few “distributors” to visit neighborhood taverns and “suggest” that the owners serve a particular beer. When a Brooklyn woman refused one such hint, a man named Bugsie and his pals smashed her tavern’s furniture and fixtures. They finally left, but phoned an hour later to warn her that if she called the police she’d end up in a funeral home.

Then there were the “Wall Street” brewers, as critics called them by way of distinguishing these opportunists from more experienced beermakers. They were perhaps the worst of the lot, because they
looked
respectable. The combination of a devastating economic depression, a thirteen-year thirst, and a low entry fee in the form of hundreds of empty breweries for sale at near-theft prices proved irresistible to anyone with a pocketful of change and a smooth line. They dived nose-first into a beer vat and found plenty of investors willing to join them. The New York Stock Exchange warned people to avoid the get-rich-quick brewery schemes outlined in glossy prospectuses touted by men of often dubious reputation. But a desperate public handed over its money anyway. Who could blame them? At a time when soup kitchens and tarpaper shacks were more plentiful than jobs, brewing shone like a beacon of salvation. Was not beer the national drink? Had not beer made the brewers of yore rich beyond measure?

The result was a parade of disastrous publicity and even worse beer. Many of the brewers-come-lately ignored—or knew nothing about—such necessities as pasteurization and sterile conditions. When some Los Angeles residents became ill after drinking bottled beer, the county Health Department seized and quarantined the suspect products. Tests revealed that much of the brew had been bottled right out of the keg, without being pasteurized or treated with preservatives. The same thing happened in Dallas, where a city health inspector traced an outbreak of food poisoning to tainted brew. He confiscated 26,000 cases of beer that had been siphoned into filthy bottles. A mixture of disgust and selfpreservation drove many Americans back to homebrew.

Comfort lay in the fact that dodgy dealers eventually fell by the wayside. At the end of the day, an unscrupulous racketeer or a Wall Streeter was an inexperienced brewer who never learned rule number one of brewing: Fine beer sells, while bad beer does not. By late 1934, most had vanished.

But the troubles that plagued brewing ranged beyond shoddy brew and mobsters. On the first anniversary of repeal, the nation’s brewing capacity stood at 80 million barrels, but consumption at less than half of that. An industry analyst calculated that 85 percent of all breweries had run aground on the shoals of financial problems. Ten percent were in receivership, and dozens had already gone bankrupt. It was “a foregone conclusion,” he added, in case anyone had missed the point, “that a great number of the present breweries will disappear from the roster before very long.”

Part of the problem, of course, was the overall economy, whose problems ran so deep that beer alone could not begin to fix them. People standing in line at soup kitchens or living under bridges had no change to spare for beer. But even those lucky few with incomes and jobs were not returning to beer in preProhibition numbers, and brewers were learning a hard truth: The world had changed. Beermakers could not own or lease taverns; could not hold mortgages on properties where alcohol was sold; could not loan tavern owners or other retailers money or provide them with fixtures, glassware, or furniture. The old beer gardens were gone and they would never come back. Nor would the “tied” houses and ten saloons per block. Both were part of an older, slower time when most people used their legs as transportation and the beer joint as an escape from a cramped apartment. Years of Anti-Saloon League rants had persuaded millions of Americans that saloons were dens of iniquity into which no respectable person would venture. Even the word “saloon” had fallen out of fashion and been replaced by the less threatening “tavern.”

On the flip side of restrictions stood opportunities: The legislators who constructed repeal encouraged citizens to scorn saloon and tavern in favor of convivial drinking ’round the family hearth. They passed a spate of laws that legalized the sale of beer in grocery and department stores. Brewing’s future lay not in barrels of beer rolled behind mahogany bars, but in the cool, well-lighted interiors of the nation’s refrigerators. If brewers could learn how to market, distribute, and advertise beer to the “home market,” as it was known, they could regain lost ground.

But even assuming brewers figured out how to negotiate this new landscape, would Americans still want what they had to offer? While brewers slumbered, factories had unleashed an unprecedented quantity and variety of consumer goods: automobiles and radios, lipstick and rouge, mouthwashes and shampoos, cloche hats and silk stockings. Advertising dollars ballooned as Madison Avenue blanketed the nation with slogans, jingles, and images designed to persuade the citizenry to buy things they didn’t know they needed—to spend money on something other than beer.

One of those things was the automobile. When the Volstead Act went into effect in 1920, there were some nine million cars and trucks in the United States; by the end of the decade, nearly twenty-seven million vehicles clogged the roads. Back in the old days, one observer lamented, “boys and girls stayed at home evenings.” No more. Now young folks stepped out every night to “dance halls [and] cabarets,” where they indulged in “[g]in parties and other ‘wild doings’”—habits cultivated, of course, during the dry years.