Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (4 page)

One need only watch the nation at table to discover the people’s priorities: Americans hunched over their plates and gobbled their food. No time to waste on idle chitchat. No time to savor flavors and textures; just gorge and run. Sometimes they did not even bother to sit, choosing instead to stand and feed “like an animal,” as one shocked German traveler put it, racing through meals as if they were endurance tests or some form of gastronomic torture (and, given the quality of most American food—heavily salted meats, undercooked pastries, breads fried in pools of fat—perhaps theirs was a wise strategy).

Americans drank furtively, greedily, and with no thought of pleasure. A typical American tavern, complained another German, contained “neither bench nor chair, just drink your schnaps and then go.” Who wanted to linger? Dingy and devoid of sunlight, floors decorated with spit and cigar butts, the air laced with ribbons of thick smoke and the nose-wrinkling perfume of stale whiskey, the tavern was not a place to relax, and definitely no place to take women and children. Even when Americans sat to drink, they were less interested in enjoying the company or the moment than in testing one another’s generosity and capacity for booze. Germans recoiled from the national practice of “treating” or “buying rounds.” Once a fellow bought you a drink, common courtesy and good sense dictated that you stick around until it was your turn to buy, but you could be topsy by the time your round came—especially if the group was tossing back shots of hard liquor.

German émigrés concluded that they would have to create their own pleasure. The artistically inclined organized orchestras, singing societies, opera clubs, and theater groups. Others introduced the old country tradition of sharpshooting, and Phillip Best supported one group by setting up a shooting gallery out back of the brewery. Club members took turns displaying their marksmanship and sipping Best’s fine lager. Young men organized
Turnvereine,
clubs aimed at promoting both physical fitness and intellectual well-being, where they practiced the accoutrements of German manhood: gymnastics, shooting, debate, and singing.

The Turners wore their military-inspired uniforms to outings at the city’s new German beerhalls, many of which had been opened and were operated by brewers like the Bests. Jacob and Phillip served cheese and German wine, and of course their lager, which, they informed readers of the town’s several German newspapers, “bubbles as fresh and clear as ever—for our benefit and the good and refreshment of thirsty mankind.”The Bests’ advertising also included a snappy jingle (probably written by Jacob, who was a bit of a wit): “When the glasses loudly ring,/All the waiters quickly spring,/Serving promptly all the guests/With the ‘bestest’ of the Bests.” But theirs was a German-inspired house of amusement, and felt more like the old country than the new one. Light poured through large windows. In the evening, young couples and families congregated for music, dancing, food, and the house lager. Men met there each morning for gatherings devoted to chess or cards, literature and politics.

In warm weather, the city’s Germans migrated to “pleasure gardens.” In the evenings, and on Sunday, the week’s one day of rest, crowds thronged the grassy lawns at Bielfeld’s and Kemper’s; Leudemann Park, perched on the bluff overlooking the lake; and the Ludwigsthal nestled on a small rise just north of Cherry Street. Proprietors wooed customers with flower beds, twinkling lanterns, and gravel paths that wound through leafy arcades. Visitors wandered the manicured grounds or claimed tables and chairs near the music. Waiters trooped through the crowds bearing trays laden with sausage and cheese, ice cream, lemonade, and wine, and, of course, mugs dripping with lager. The young flirted, the old danced, and the pungent aroma of lager nosed its way from table to table. Young and old alike waltzed and polkaed the evening away. Musicians strolled through the crowd, and patrons burst into song or rose to their feet in impromptu dance, their hearts filled with the exquisite pleasure of being a German in free America.

The beer gardens and halls allowed Phillip Best and other German immigrants to infuse their new homeland with old-world pleasure, but in so doing, the brewers and their fellow emigres collided head-on with an incontrovertible fact of life in the United States: A multitude of Americans scorned those who made and drank alcohol, and stood ready to prevent both.

T
HAT HAD NOT ALWAYS
been the case. The men and women who first settled the colonies shared the view of Increase Mather, who described alcohol as “a good creature of God” and treated drink as a necessary component of daily life—in moderation and so long as its use did not interfere with God’s other creatures: worship, work, and the pursuit of wealth.

But the colonists who carried beer from England to North America in the early seventeenth century promptly abandoned it, early evidence of the new world’s uncanny ability to inspire new modes of behavior. Settlers devoted every waking minute to the demands of survival: They girdled and burned trees, scratched furrows in the thin, rocky soil, and cultivated meager crops of wheat and corn. Given the amount of labor needed to produce a season’s worth of food, only a fool wasted time fiddling with luxuries like barley or hops. Southern settlers could grow just about anything, but their steamy climate worked a weird magic that turned ale to swill. Far easier, colonists decided, to plant apple and pear trees, which demanded minimal attention and produced plenty of fruit for cider and brandy.

Rum took care of the rest. In the late seventeenth century, West Indian and Caribbean plantation owners flooded the North American colonies with molasses and rum, the waste byproducts of their sugar cane mills. Mainland colonists developed a passion (more like an addiction, critics sniffed) for rum’s intoxicating allure. They drank it straight or mixed it with water, fruit juice, or milk to create slings, sloes, punches, and toddies. They drank it hot; they drank it cold; they drank it morning, noon, and night.

The age of rum ended when the colonies rebelled against England and the price of molasses soared. No matter. Rum represented royalty and repression. In the wake of independence, the citizenry streamed west, up into and beyond the Alleghenies and Appalachians, buying cheap land whose rich soil yielded more grain than a farm family could consume or ship overland to the urban coast. Farmers cobbled together crude stills, converted their grain surpluses into hard liquor, and doused the nation with cheap, potent whiskey.

Like rum, whiskey warmed body and soul; eased digestion of the piles of greasy food that dominated mealtimes; and tempered the frantic pace of life in young America. Every occasion, from breakfast to dinner, birthings to funerals, weddings to barn-raisings, unfolded to the accompaniment of copious amounts of whiskey. Americans’ appetite for spirits stupefied and astounded foreigners. “I am sure,” wrote an English visitor, “the American can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet you drink; if you part you drink; if you make an acquaintance you drink. They quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink.” And woe be to those who resisted. A Methodist minister riding the Ohio River valley circuit found that it was he who had to pay the price of conversion. One of his would-be followers stated the terms of the bargain with the powerful simplicity of a biblical verse: “[I]f I did not drink with him,” the cleric reported, “I was no friend of his, or his family, and he would never hear me preach again.”

By the early nineteenth century, fourteen thousand distillers were producing some twenty-five million gallons of whiskey each year, or, in more digestible terms, some seven or eight gallons per adult per capita. Compared to the seduction of a tot of whiskey, beer had all the allure of an aging maiden aunt. A mere two hundred or so breweries produced English-style ale.

But starting in the 1820s, the passion for drink collided with a moment of national doubt and self-reflection. The rambunctious half century that followed the Revolution had produced independence—meaning a free market and plenty of it; selfgovernance, and damned little of that—that proved as intoxicating as cheap whiskey. But the burgeoning economy also prompted an orgy of speculation and consumption. Bidding wars for western land created fortunes overnight. A new breed of chap, the “confidence man”—con man for short—spun outrageous schemes from thin air, each one designed to part fools and their money. A host of “capitalists,” as men with money termed themselves, harvested a cornucopia of objects and ideas, each one a seed sown in hopes of reaping a crop of cash. Those who weren’t selling were buying. Americans reveled in
things,
glorious
things,
the less useful the better.

Eventually, the niggling ghosts of the Puritan forefathers interrupted the lunatic frenzy of free-market self-indulgence. In the 1820s, as if awakening from a bad hangover, millions of Americans turned their gaze on themselves and each other, and cringed at the sight. Was getting rich truly the mission for which the founding fathers had sacrificed? Was money the be-all and end-all of this great experiment in human liberty? Had Mammon become the god to which Americans prayed?

Self-doubt and self-examination inspired action. In the 1820s and 1830s, hordes of well-meaning crusaders launched a multiarmed effort to reform and perfect the American character, to woo it away from self-indulgence and toward rectitude, and thereby ensure the nation’s future. Campaigners railed against every conceivable national ill, from dueling and spitting to bad architecture and masturbation. Others campaigned for exercise and well-chewed food, cold baths and better ventilation. While the crackpots and fanatics jostled for attention, the high-minded crusaded for abolition, female suffrage, and free education.

But the jewel in reform’s thorny crown was temperance. Nothing before or since has matched the passion with which ordinary folk waged war on wicked whiskey, which they regarded as the devil’s spawn and the root of the nation’s ills. The temperance crusade began in earnest in the 1820s as an army of antiliquor zealots preached, prayed, and sang the evils of whiskey and rum, all in the name of converting their countrymen away from excess and toward moderation, sobriety, and good citizenship.

“Intemperance,” thundered Lyman Beecher, the Billy Graham of his day, “is a national sin carrying destruction from the centre [sic] to every extremity of the empire . . . ” An enormous crosssection of Americans agreed, and campaigned against drinking and drunkenness, which they regarded as a “gangerous [sic] excrescence, poisoning and eating away the life of the community.” Their logic was simple: Alcohol and its partner intoxication hindered the progress of “Capital,—Enterprise,—Industry,—Morals,—and Religion.”Alcohol wasted mind and body, destroyed ambition, and laid asunder marriages and families. It spawned murder, prostitution, and gambling; deprived the poor man’s family of food; and led young men into degeneracy. Allowed to flow unchecked, the liquid terrors threatened the future of the republic itself. Eliminate drink and most of the nation’s ills would vanish as well.

The crusade against alcohol has erupted with predictable regularity since that time, although each subsequent generation has stamped the effort with its own rationale. The early-nineteenth-century campaigners took seriously then, as we perhaps do not now, the mission to make tangible the founding fathers’ dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They took as a personal charge the need to prove to skeptics that ordinary people possessed the wisdom necessary to make democracy live. The momentary pleasures of intoxication interfered with the demands of this great moment in human history. Between 1820 and 1850, millions of Americans pledged to abstain from drink, and among people age fifteen or older, alcohol consumption fell from seven gallons per capita in 1830 to three gallons in 1840. By the time Phillip Best arrived in the United States, Americans downed less than two gallons per year.

More important, that first generation of anti-drink crusaders infused the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol with a stain of disrepute that has never gone away. God’s good creature had become the devil’s handmaid, and respectable folk were, by definition, ones who abstained. The flip side of that equation was obvious: Those who trafficked in alcohol, whether by making, selling, or drinking it, were people of dubious repute. In the 1840s, taverns were dark and dreary because most Americans regarded them as houses of shame.

No surprise, the casual embrace of alcohol by German and Irish immigrants clashed with the American disdain for drink and drink-makers. A temperance leader in Cincinnati denounced the Irish and German “liquor power” as “unquestionably the mightiest power in the Republic,” one that must be destroyed. Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, Maine, argued that the only people who drank to the point of danger were “working people” like the Irish. Remove alcohol, he argued, and the poor would have more money to spend on their basic needs; “they [would] earn more, enjoy more, and save more than they ever did before” and so become good citizens.

Dow’s words inspired his state’s legislators to pass the nation’s first prohibition act. The Maine law, as it was called, banned the sale, manufacture, and consumption of alcohol. Maine’s legislation electrified the temperance movement and a prohibition crusade fifty years before the better-known eruption. Between 1850 and 1855, legislators in two territories and eleven of the thirty-one states followed Maine’s lead.

But where prohibition prevailed, violence erupted as mobs challenged the alcohol bans, or exacted revenge on the “pestilent . . . foreign swarms” whom they blamed for inspiring the laws. Such was the case in Chicago after voters filled city hall with pro-temperance, anti-immigrant officials and the new mayor ordered a ban on Sunday drinking. The mostly native-born police force closed the city’s foreign-owned beer gardens, beerhalls, and taverns but turned a blind eye to “American” taverns that stayed open in violation of the law. As the accused, most of them German, went on trial, six hundred men and boys, also mostly German, stormed the courthouse and battled police in the streets. The Lager Beer Riot ended when both sides fired shots; one man died, many were injured, and scores were arrested.