by Maureen Ogle
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.
THAT 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 f
ounding 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.
A few weeks later, it was Cincinnati’s turn. Violence erupted on an election day in April, as a mob attacked German voting stations and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Germans barricaded the bridge leading to the city’s “Over the Rhine” Germantown, but their opponents, armed with a cannon and muskets, stormed the defenses. The conflict dragged on for three days, leaving many dead and wounded on both sides.
During the “Bloody Monday” riots in Louisville in August 1855, Germans, Irish, and nativists armed with muskets, bayonets, and cannons roamed the streets firing on each other and passers-by. Nineteen men died in that rampage. Violence erupted even in Portland, Maine, where Neal Dow bragged that prohibition had eradicated crime: Rumors spread that Dow had purchased liquor and sold it to the state for medicinal purposes. A mob gathered outside the Portland liquor agency and Dow ordered a local militia group to the scene. When rioters broke into the building, Dow commanded the troops to fire. Their bullets killed one person and injured seven others.
The temperance campaign rent the fabric of Milwaukee. When the state legislature passed a bill that imposed new restrictions on alcohol sales, an angry crowd filled the streets in the town’s business district. Crowds of men and boys lit bonfires and fired rifles, blew horns and pounded on pans. Eventually a mob of about three hundred surrounded the house of John Smith, Milwaukee’s state representative and president of a local temperance society, and pelted it with rocks and bricks, smashing windows and terrifying the four children and two servants inside.
From Phillip Best’s perspective, this was bad news indeed. He had built both a thriving business and a reputation as a man of honor and an honest entrepreneur trusted by Germans and Americans alike. A mob scene like the one at Smith’s house damaged the reputation of all Germans, but it hurt the brewers most of all. The city’s moralists would be quick to charge the crowd with drunkenness, and if the crowd was mostly German, they would have been drunk on only one thing.
So it went around the country, as prohibition laws inadvertently and unexpectedly sparked the crime and chaos they had been designed to eliminate. This turn of events troubled many Americans, and by the mid-1850s, some who had once supported prohibition began to reject this extreme solution to the nation’s drinking problem. But even as the riots raged, the temperance crusaders found themselves under attack from another quarter.
In the 1850s, the most contentious issues facing the nation involved not drink but land and slavery. Politicians longed to open the nation’s vast western territories—nearly everything west of the Missouri River—to settlement and statehood. Every American thrilled to the prospect of all that land waiting to be plowed, planted, and built, but no hearts beat faster than those of southern slave owners. To the west, they realized, lay a magnificent opportunity to expand slavery beyond the Deep South. That same prospect terrified white northerners. Once slavery ensnared the West, would it conquer the North, too? Would slaves invade northern factories and farms, their free labor eliminating the need to pay a white man’s wages?
Those questions trumped the debate over drink. No one could see that more clearly than the leaders of the nation’s two major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. The Whigs hated slavery and immigrants but loved prohibition, a combination that repelled German and Irish voters. The Democrats welcomed immigrants and lager lovers alike. Unfortunately the party also supported slavery, and men like Phillip Best had not fled Europe’s oppression in order to join hands with politicians who ignored the distinction between free labor and slavery. Laborers and fields hands shied away, too, fearful that Democratic victories would deposit slavery on factory floors and northern farms.
In March 1854, a group of Wisconsin men frustrated with the Whigs’ anti-immigrant message and the Democrats’ pro-slavery stance organized a new political party devoted first and foremost to the end of slavery. Prohibitionists tried to clamber aboard the new bandwagon. Nothing doing. The Republicans, as the new party’s leaders called themselves, shoved them right back off: They planned to win elections, and to do so, they had to woo voters. They understood that prohibition, which alienated immigrants and urbanites, had become a political liability. There was no place in the new party’s agenda for a divisive crusade against drink.
And if the lesson was lost on some, a Milwaukee man hastened to set the record straight. “[N]early all the Germans of this city,” he announced in a letter published in a local newspaper, were prepared to cast their lot against slavery and with the new party, but they refused to bow to the dictates of “fanatic and zealous temperance men.” They would even support a “teetotaller” candidate, as long as he promised to stand against slavery. But Germans would not vote for prohibition or a prohibition man. “Can you expect of a brewer that he will tear down, with his own hands, his brewery?” he demanded. Or ask a laborer, after a “hard day’s work . . . paving your streets,” to “throw away” his “wholesome and nourishing Lagerbeer,” to “sacrifice his comfort for the sake of restricting slavery”? Go ahead, he added, punish the drunk. Close the beerhalls on election day. But if the Republicans wanted German support, they had to steer clear of the “fanaticism” of prohibition.
Lawmakers in Mad
ison got the message. In early 1855, Wisconsin’s governor vetoed a flimsy prohibition law. Jacob Best, Jr., hung a “veto pen” in pride of place at the brothers’ beerhall, and Milwaukee’s young men celebrated the freedom to drink lager by marching from beerhall to beerhall, lighting bonfires and shooting fireworks.
CAUGHT BETWEEN the rock of slavery and the hard place of immigration, the temperance crusade collapsed. But this short-lived battle over drink produced an unintended, profound consequence that shaped brewing’s next fifty years. On one hand, even the zealots were forced to acknowledge that prohibition created more problems than it solved. On the other hand, most Americans sincerely believed that drink posed a genuine threat to the nation’s future. Where, many wondered, was the middle ground between the two?
The answer lay close at hand, and among the very people and beverage formerly accused of degrading American morals: Germans and their lager. Weary of the temperance movement and the conflict that it sparked, native-born Americans latched onto lager and the German model of sociable drinking as a compromise that allowed them to avoid the two extremes of prohibition and drunkenness.
The violence that accompanied the short-lived prohibition effort had drawn attention to the German lifestyle, to the beer gardens that welcomed families, and, of course, to lager itself. But the spotlight revealed what many Americans had been loath to admit: German-Americans lived respectably and moderately. They had prospered and assimilated into the American mainstream. They had built churches, and many owned their own businesses. Their homes were well kept and orderly. And they had accomplished this in spite of their lager.
