Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (5 page)

The property upon which August A. built his mansion was steeped in American history. A previous owner, Colonel Frederick Dent, acquired it in 1821 and used it as a country home, which he called White Haven. One of Dent's sons roomed with Ulysses S. Grant at West Point, and when Grant was stationed at the nearby Jefferson Barracks, he became a frequent visitor and a suitor to Dent's daughter Julia. The couple married in 1848 and lived at White Haven on and off for the next three decades. At one point right before the Civil War, Grant built a two-story log cabin on the property with the help of several of Dent's slaves. He called the handcrafted residence Hardscrabble. During his years in the White House, he managed the farm from afar and planned to one day retire there. But after a financial swindle left him bankrupt, he mortgaged the property to William Vanderbilt, along with many of his Civil War trophies. When Grant was dying of throat cancer, Vanderbilt offered to forgive the debt, but Grant refused.

August A. Busch bought the property in 1903, by which time it had become known simply as Grant's Farm. Four years later he bought Hardscrabble Cabin, which had been sold, disassembled, and moved elsewhere, and had it reconstructed on the southern edge of the property, bordered by a fence made from 2,563 rifle barrels he purchased from a local armory that was shutting down.

Grant's Farm became the wild frontier refuge that August A. had sought as a young man out West. It was here, away from the unceasing sound and odor of the factory, that he engaged in his favorite pastimes—hunting, breeding livestock, and spoiling his five children.

Over the years, however, as three of his brothers died (Edward, Peter, and Adolphus Jr.) and the fourth was born profoundly handicapped, August A. shouldered more and more of the burden of leading the company. When his father passed away and he assumed the presidency at age forty-eight, he was as schooled and experienced in the art and business of brewing as any man could hope to be. Unfortunately, four years into his stewardship, the American brewing industry was in effect legislated out of existence.

As they sat in their father's office in January 1919 discussing their uncertain future, both Adolphus III and Gussie agreed to join him in the fight to keep the company operating, even if they had no idea how he was going to manage it. In the end, he did it by diversifying. Over the next thirteen years, Anheuser-Busch survived by making products that were spin-offs of its brewing business: rail cars, truck bodies, refrigeration cabinets, ice cream, a nonalcoholic form of Budweiser, a malt-based soft drink called Bevo, barley malt syrup, and baker's yeast. The latter two products—branded with the Budweiser name—proved the most successful, not coincidentally because they were the key ingredients in the nation's booming illegal home-brew trade. As Gussie would admit years later, “We ended up as the biggest bootlegging supply house in the United States.”

Anheuser-Busch lost $2.5 million in 1919, $1.6 million in 1920, and $1.3 million in 1921. Before the company returned to profitability, August A. had been forced to borrow $6.5 million from family members and banks and to sell off most of the animals at Grant's Farm, including his beloved Tessie, who was purchased by the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus. He saw Tessie one last time some years later when the circus came to St. Louis. According to a story told by his grandson Dolph Orthwein, as Tessie led a parade of elephants into the ring, August A. rose from his seat and called out her name. At the sound of his voice, she raised her head, broke ranks, and trotted around the ring to where he stood in the third row, reduced to tears. After the performance, he tried to buy her back, but the circus refused to sell.

Prohibition took a terrible toll on St. Louis, wiping out an estimated 40,000 brewing-related jobs as dozens of breweries shut down. But even when the unemployment level reached 30 percent in the city during the Depression—80 percent among blacks—August A. managed to keep the Anheuser-Busch brewery operating, with 2,000 workers still on the payroll. For that, his employees and the city loved him.

August A. never stopped fighting against Prohibition. For the entire thirteen years, he argued indefatigably that beer should never have been banned because, unlike distilled liquor (which he did not drink), beer wasn't intoxicating. Rather, it was a “wholesome” and “mildly invigorating stimulant.” He once told reporters, in all seriousness, “I have always believed that in making a pure, light beer, I was contributing to the temperance progress of the nation.” In May 1921, when a congressional committee was considering a proposal to authorize the limited sale of beer “for medicinal purposes,” he sent members a letter opposing the idea as elitist. Saying he was speaking “on behalf of the great mass of men, those with the dinner pail but not the prescription price,” he urged the committee to push instead for full legalization: “Beer for all, or beer for none.”

He peppered two presidents—Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge—with letters complaining about inequity and hypocrisy in the enforcement of Prohibition. In June 1922 he informed Harding that he had learned through associates that the chairman of the shipping board had obtained presidential approval to allow the sale of all alcoholic beverages—including beer, wine, and hard liquor—on U.S. cruise ships. On one ship alone, he said, the United States was operating five saloons. His charges caused a sensation when he sent copies of the letter to all members of Congress and the Washington press corps. The U.S. attorney general quickly declared that all U.S. ships were prohibited from serving alcohol and that foreign ships could not enter American waters with alcohol on board.

To President Coolidge, August A. sent a nearly book-size missive alleging, among many things, that “quite recently there appeared in the newspapers of the country a series of syndicated articles under the name of Roy A. Haynes, Prohibition Commissioner of the United States. The articles bore evidence that they were written from official information gathered at great expense to the taxpayers. It is within our knowledge that they were offered to certain newspapers at $1,500 for the publication rights. It is a matter of current knowledge that the Prohibition Commissioner received a large sum of money for the articles.”

His most effective broadside came in the summer of 1930, when he issued a pamphlet titled
An Open Letter to the American People
, which argued that the relegalization of beer was the perfect antidote to the nation's economic woes because it would return 1.2 million Americans to work in the brewing industry, put money in the pockets of farmers, coal miners, and railroad workers, save the government the $50 million it was spending each year on enforcement, and recoup nearly $500 million in lost taxes. He sent the pamphlet to every senator and congressman, and reprinted it in full-page ads in national magazines. Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was among the politicians who took his argument to heart. Running on a platform that included the total repeal of Prohibition and supported by former Republican August A., Roosevelt swept to victory over Herbert Hoover in 1932. Nine days after his inauguration, he recommended that Congress sanction the renewed sale of beer immediately, saying, “I deem action at this time to be of highest importance.” Congress quickly approved a law authorizing the sale of beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content.

On February 20, 1933, Congress proposed the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Eight months later, on December 5, Utah became the thirty-sixth state to vote for ratification. Prohibition was dead, and Anheuser-Busch was very much alive.

In one way, Prohibition had benefited the company, wiping out most of its competition, including St. Louis's Union Brewery, whose owner, Otto Stifel, shot himself to death in 1920, and the William J. Lemp Brewing Company, the maker of the popular Falstaff brand, which shut down in 1922 and was sold to the International Shoe Company for $588,000, less than 10 percent of its pre-Prohibition value. Several months later, the brewery's president, William J. Lemp Jr., committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the heart. Nationally, of the more than 1,300 U.S. breweries operating in 1914, only 164 survived to celebrate the repeal, and a mere handful of those were in any kind of position to challenge A-B for market share.

But the end of Prohibition did not end hard times for the company. After an initial surge, Budweiser sales slumped badly; American consumers had grown accustomed to mixing their bootleg alcohol with ginger ale and other sweeteners. As a result, many former Budweiser drinkers now complained that it tasted bitter. Some among the sales staff argued in favor of changing the formula to make the beer sweeter. August A. wouldn't hear of it. “No one will tinker with the Budweiser taste or the Budweiser process as long as I am president of Anheuser-Busch,” he declared, predicting that consumers eventually would come around and the brand would rebound. He also predicted that before that happened, “somebody is going to suggest that we can sell more Budweiser and make more money if we produce it faster. This we will
never
do,” he said, recalling his father's insistence that Budweiser had to be aged for at least two and a half months, or it was not Budweiser.

He was proven right about the customers eventually coming back, but it brought him little joy. By then, it was too late; the triple whammy of the war, Prohibition, and the Depression had worn him out. At age sixty-eight, he was in rapidly failing health, suffering from heart disease, gout, claustrophobia, and edema, which caused his legs to swell painfully with fluid. On the morning of February 13, 1934, following a night spent doubled up in pain and crying out, “I can't stand this any longer; please do something,” he went to his bedroom, wrote a note that said, “Goodbye precious mama and adorable children,” and shot himself in the chest with a pearl-handled .32-caliber pistol he kept in a drawer by his bed. The bullet just missed its intended target, his heart, so he lay on the bed in agony for about fifteen minutes as his wife and other members of the household watched him die.

In his will, August A. requested that his funeral services be conducted “with the utmost simplicity,” and so they were, at least by Busch standards. More than ten thousand people paid their respects during an open-casket viewing in the living room of the mansion at Grant's Farm, and members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra played for the funeral service while 2,000 spectators gathered outside listened. He was buried on a grassy hilltop in a nearby cemetery, in a pine-shaded plot he had picked because it afforded a view of his mansion. “I can see my home from here,” he had said. “This is where I want to be buried.” His gravestone served to further differentiate him from his father, whose final resting place is a quintessentially “Buschy” pink granite and marble Gothic mausoleum, built at a cost of $250,000, festooned with gargoyles and vaingloriously inscribed with the quote from Julius Caesar—“Veni, Vidi, Vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). In stark contrast, August A.'s grave is marked by a small slab of red Missouri granite inscribed, in utmost simplicity, “Busch.”

August A.'s estate was valued at $3.4 million, a huge fortune by most standards of the day, but a small fraction of what Adolphus had left behind. The bulk of it consisted of 23,889 shares of Anheuser-Busch stock, which made him a minority shareholder. At the time of his death, there were 180,000 shares outstanding, all but 4,000 owned by descendants of the two original partners, Adolphus and his father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser. August A. had maintained voting control over 167,000 shares, and before his death he established a trust that transferred the voting power of the stock to his two sons, Adolphus III and Gussie. He also left “the boys” joint ownership of his beloved Belleau Farm, a 1,500-acre duck-hunting retreat that the family always referred to as “the Shooting Grounds.” As the firstborn son, Adolphus III inherited his father's position as president of the company, while Gussie had to settle for the title of first vice president and general manager.

Still, no one who really knew Gussie doubted that he would one day take control of everything. And when that happened, the company, the family, and the brewing industry would never be the same.

August A. “Gussie” Busch Jr. first entered the public consciousness on April 27, 1918, the day he married Marie Christy Church. The event had all the earmarks of an arranged marriage, a union of old class and (relatively) new money. Gussie was nineteen years old; Marie was twenty-two. Beautiful, refined, and polished, the product of a young women's finishing school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she could trace her ancestry to General William Clark, one of the leaders of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and to Rene Auguste Chouteau, along with French fur trader Pierre Laclede, one of the founders of St. Louis in 1764, nearly a century before Adolphus Busch stepped off the boat. St. Louis blood didn't get much bluer than hers. The couple first met at a Junior League charity event. He spotted her in the dance lineup, liked what he saw, and introduced himself.

No one ever called Gussie Busch refined or educated. He'd grown up in almost feral bliss in the mansion at Grant's Farm, where his father's indulgences included letting him skip school whenever he wanted, which after the fourth grade was most of the time. “I never graduated from anything,” he boasted later in life. Instead, he spent much of his boyhood as a stable rat, homeschooling himself in horsemanship, becoming a championship rider and carriage driver by the time he was a teenager. He was coarse, blunt, and brash, a young man of unbridled appetites and a reputation as an incorrigible carouser, habitual barroom brawler, and insatiable lothario known for romancing women of varying age, social station, and marital status. He bragged that while he was still in grade school he snuck out of the house late at night to visit a brothel. One of his cousins once walked in on him in a bedroom at Grant's Farm, locked in a passionate embrace with the wife of another cousin.