THE SEARCH FOR
GOD AND
GUINNESS
A BIOGRAPHY OF THE BEER
THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
STEPHEN MANSFIELD
© 2009 by Stephen Mansfield
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ISBN: 978-1-59555-269-3
Printed in the United States of America
09 10 11 12 13 QW 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Brian Wade:
Semper Fidelis
ALSO BY STEPHEN MANSFIELD:
Never Give In:
The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill
Then Darkness Fled:
The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington
Forgotten Founding Father:
The Heroic Legacy of George Whitefield
The Faith of George W. Bush
The Faith of the American Soldier
Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission
The Faith of Barack Obama
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Introduction
Some Guinness Facts
1 Before There Was Guinness
2 The Rise of Arthur
3 At the Same Place By Their Ancestors
4 The Good That Wealth Can Do
5 The Guinnesses for God
6 Twentieth-Century Guinness
Epilogue: The Guinness Way
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
PROLOGUE
I was sitting on a bench outside the Guinness Archives at the St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin when I heard the question. It came from a blonde American teenager who sat with her boyfriend on the bench next to me.
“So, like, what does Guinness do?” she asked as the two conversed.
It was hard not to laugh. After all, at that very moment we were seated inside of a seven-story structure shaped like a glass of beer.
Still, the boyfriend was patient. “Well, baby,” he said gently, trying to drain every sarcastic tone out of his voice, “they make beer. Lots of it. And they are known for it all over the world.” You could tell he had answered questions like this before.
“But all kinds of people make beer,” the blonde replied, her voice a slightly grating whine. “What’s so big about this beer?”
Now at a loss, the boyfriend looked at me. Since I had an appointment at the Archives, I was wearing a sport coat and had a briefcase and must have looked like I could help. Besides, I was twice their age and for all they knew I worked for Guinness.
Turning to me with a pleading expression, the boyfriend said, “Sir, can you tell my girlfriend why Guinness is so famous?”
Now, I confess that my first impulse was to say, “No, and I doubt anyone could.” But I knew this was just the irritation of the moment and, what is more, I remembered something I had just discussed with friends the night before: the Guinness story is largely unknown in the United States. Most of the books on the subject aren’t available there and the story of the dark stout usually takes a back seat to the rise of American brewing empires like Busch and Coors. I realized these kids could hardly be blamed for not knowing the Guinness tale. So I gentled up.
“Yes, I can,” I replied, and then I launched into a brief, informal survey of Arthur Guinness, his descendants, and the amazing thing that Guinness has become. But I kept the focus on the beer, and this, I quickly realized, was a mistake.
The two listened politely and then mumbled their thanks as they turned away. I knew I had not captured them. Refusing to let go of an audience, though, I said, “But what I think is really cool is how the Guinnesses used their wealth to help so many people.” The couple immediately shifted back in my direction and said, “What do you mean?”
It was the kind of moment that a lover of the past lives for: two eager young faces and an interesting tale to tell. So I gave it my all. I told them how the Guinnesses were people of faith and how this faith moved them to do good in society. I recounted the deeds of Arthur Guinness—the righteous use of wealth and the Sunday schools and the antidueling association and his stand against extravagant living. I spoke also of the later generations and the high wages they paid their workers and the restoration of Ireland’s historic landmarks and the huge gifts to build housing for the poor.
I was on a roll and the girl gestured to some of her friends who then turned off iPods and leaned in to hear. I could have kissed her.
Then I told them more of what I will tell you in this book, how a Guinness doctor surveyed the desperate needs of his day and asked the Guinness board to let him help. And I told them how one of the Guinness heirs took his new bride and moved into the slums to call attention to the blight of poverty in his land. And I told them how nothing they have read about Microsoft or Google compares with the way an Irish beer company cared for people when their grandparents were still young.
What a moment it was, with half a dozen American kids listening closely and nothing else in the world seeming to matter for those few minutes at St. James’s Gate.
When I finished, the blonde girl stood up, her boyfriend in tow. “Well, then, let’s go,” she ordered. I chuckled a bit and, gently mocking her intensity, I asked, “So where are you going?” She half turned in my direction but spoke mainly to her friends as she said, “These people did something.” Then, jabbing her finger fiercely toward the floor, she finished, “And I want to learn all about it.”
Now, I am unbelievably sentimental about the young and I could not let this go. “Yeah,” I said, “go learn about them and then do something even bigger of your own.”
Author in the Guinness storehouse archive room
I thought they might laugh me off, but I saw in their eyes a spark of gratitude that I thought they could have such possibilities in them. “Thank you,” one of them said, and then I watched them drift into the next room, with all the flip-flops and bare midriffs and tattoos and piercings that mark their tribe.
And they seemed wonderful to me.
Just then, Eibhlin Roche, the Guinness archivist, stepped through her door: “Mr. Mansfield, are you ready to begin?”
Man, was I ever.
INTRODUCTION
This book was conceived in a myth, inspired by a weariness, and commissioned by a hope. First, the myth.
It was a warm September Sunday morning when I joined a friend at his Presbyterian church and watched a black-robed minister mount his pulpit to begin the lesson for the day. What followed was a fine sermon, evidence both of the pastor’s great learning and of his love for the people before him. Then, as he leaned into his conclusion, the pastor told a story. It was the tale of Arthur Guinness, founder of the famous brewing family, and of how in the mid-1700s he had walked the streets of Dublin pleading with God to do something about the drunkenness on the streets of Ireland. It seems that whiskey and gin were the rage in his day and the resulting devastation to his nation was more than young Arthur could stand. It was then, as he held this scourge of alcohol aloft in prayer, that Arthur heard his God speak: Make a drink that men will drink that will be good for them. And so, according to the learned
Presbyterian parson, Guinness beer became God’s answer for the moral blight of that time and all because Arthur Guinness was willing to listen and obey.
The sermon was a tour de force, yet when I heard the minister’s tale of God and Arthur Guinness I knew it just wasn’t true. It was a fiction spun from the precious few facts we know about the founder of the Guinness clan— and I knew as much because I had been studying the life of Arthur for quite some time.
In visiting with the minister after the service, I learned that he had come across the story on the Internet and was so touched by it that he decided to share it with his congregation as evidence that God can use mundane things for his purposes. And he can—and he has likely even used beer, as we shall see—but still the story isn’t true. It is evidence of Mark Twain’s insistence that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its pants on, a maxim more true in an Internet age than at any time in history. Clearly, as this bit of misinformation makes its way from Web site to Web site, it is proof of our modern tendency to embellish the already miraculous, to help God out by putting a faster spin on his great works of old.
But this is to our generation’s loss, for the truth of Arthur Guinness is as noble a tale and as much about devotion to God as anything the myth pretends. This genuine story is both thrilling and tender, too, even without dramatic myths about voices from heaven and beer brewed in answer to the moral crisis of an age. It is also inspiring, and all the more so because it involves, as the old creeds have said, God’s use of “means,” of secondary causes and what appear to be natural events. This makes the Guinness saga something of human scale, something we can relate to and emulate, while the myths merely conceal the truth through exaggeration and thus rob us of what we might gain from the story rightly told.
The fact is Arthur Guinness was indeed a great man of faith. Born on the estate of an archbishop and raised a loyal son of the Irish church, Arthur lived by the words that were his family motto: Spes mea in deo (My hope is in God). He was influenced by the revivalist John Wesley, who inspired him to use his wealth and talents to care for the hurting of mankind. Taking Scripture as his guide, Arthur did indeed serve the needy of his time and did indeed try to use his gifts in honor of his God.
Yet it is here that the story of Arthur is a departure from what the modern world is used to. We are used to preachers and to great noisy works for God. We are used to religion that is sometimes an escape from daily life and to faith as fixation on life in another world. What Arthur Guinness founded was a venture propelled by faith, yes—but by a kind of faith that inspires men to make their work in this world an offering to God, to understand craft and discipline, love of labor and skills transferred from father to son as sacred things. It was a venture of faith that took the fruit of the earth and, through study and strain, made of it something of greater value. Indeed, much of the great 250-year history of Guinness beer is a story in which wealth is gained through faith-inspired excellence and then used to serve others for the glory of God. This is what Arthur Guinness founded and this is the legacy Guinness beer still symbolizes to this day.
So as I shook that Presbyterian preacher’s hand and made my way out into the September sun, I sensed that our age is poorer for not knowing the truth, for not having a chance to understand how the dramatic is not always evidence of the divine, and how the daily and the small are often how righteousness works its way through time. This is what the tale of Arthur Guinness and the generations that came after him had come to mean to me. And this is the story I started yearning to tell as I pondered the Arthur-myth and the damage done to a more noble truth.
Thus, the myth.
Now, the weariness.
In the months that led up to the presidential conventions of 2008, I had written a book called The Faith of Barack
Obama. It was less a labor of love for Obama, whom I admired but could not support, than it was an attempt to use his life to identify religious trends in American culture. So heated was that 2008 election and so religiously charged were the forces behind each man, Obama and McCain, that I found myself in the middle of a low-intensity civil war. My life was threatened. I was told I would surely rot in hell. Speeches were cancelled and friends even called to find out why I had decided to deny Christ. It was an angry, roiling season and it put me in a front-row seat to observe American politics at the time.
When it was all over, I found that I had grown weary— and not just from book tours and interviews. I was wearied by the emptiness of politics misplaced, politics as the meaning of life rather than as the art of protecting genuine life. I was fed up with mere party strife conducted like a war between gods. I yearned for the simple and the human, for the traditional and the rooted. I reveled in a favorite quote by G. K. Chesterton: “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” And I longed to know the magic of the ordinary again.
It was then that I heard that Presbyterian sermon and I began to wonder what humanity and heritage and connection to real life might be found in the authentic Guinness story. When I began to read the books and I began to sit with the experts and then, in time, when I went to the brewery in Dublin, I started to understand.
I should be careful to say that it was not the Guinness of today that first captured my imagination, as shiny and high-tech and massive as it is. No, my historical imagination took flight and I could see this pure and beloved profession of brewing passing down through the successions of time. I could see barley and water and hops and yeast worked by masters into a drink that kept men from drunken insanity while it refreshed them and made them whole. I could see horses, well tended and loved, hauling casks of brew and I could see cask makers teaching their trade to clumsy young men. I could see ships on the seas carrying decks full of stout and I could see men on docks eagerly unloading what they hoped they would soon have a chance to taste. I could see workmen gathering after a day of sweat and lifting a glass of the national brew. And I could hear men at pubs laughing with relief at the day that was done and families raising a Guinness to toast the goodness of God in their lives.
I knew I had found it: that earthy, human, holy tale of a people honing a craft over time and of a family seeking to do good in the world as an offering to God. This was what my weary soul needed—a story thick like the smell of barley at the St. James’s Gate Brewery and as filled with the bitter and the sweet as any generational tale is likely to be.
And so my weariness brought me to Guinness.
But so did my hope.
During the months in which I researched and wrote this book, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression began unfolding. It started with an implosion of the housing market in the United States and spread to Wall Street, where predatory lending practices, unwise loans, and side bets on those loans—“swaps,” they called them—exacerbated an already dire situation. Soon after, some of America’s premier financial houses folded and most of those that survived did so only with federal aid.
It grew worse and greed seemed to permeate it all.
Suffocated by the gluttony and the grief that daily played themselves out on my office television, I turned with gratitude to the Guinness story. There I found an antidote—a drink from the spirit of an earlier age—that refreshed and gave me hope.
From the beginning of their corporate and family history, the Guinnesses had embraced their obligation to the needy of the world. This began at home, with their own employees. Edward Cecil Guinness, great-grandson of founder, Arthur, expressed a foundational company conviction when he said, “You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you.” Accordingly, the Guinness brewery routinely paid wages that were 10 to 20 percent higher than average, had a reputation as the best place to work in Ireland, and, as important to many employees, allowed workers two pints a day of their famous dark stout.
Moreover, the benefits the company gave its employees surpass those eve
n envisioned by modern companies like Google and Microsoft. Consider the snapshot provided by a Guinness company report in 1928, not an exceptionally enlightened time for corporate treatment of employees. Guinness workers at the brewery in Dublin enjoyed the attention of two fully qualified doctors who staffed an on-site clinic where any employee, wife, or child could receive treatment. These privileges extended to widows and pensioners, as well. The doctors were available night or day, made house calls, and would consult specialists on their patients’ behalf if necessary.
There were also two dentists available to employees, two pharmacists, two nurses, a “lady visitor” who assured healthy conditions in workers’ homes, and a masseuse. Hospital beds were provided both at the Guinness plant and at a “sanatoria” in the country, intended for patients recovering from tuberculosis.
This was only the beginning. Retirees received pensions “at the pleasure of the board,” without having to make contributions of their own. This benefit extended to widows as well. If an employee or an employee’s family member died, the company paid the majority of the funeral expenses.
To improve the lives of their employees, the company provided a savings bank on site and contributed to a fund from which workers could borrow to purchase houses. To make sure that life in these homes was all it could be, the company also sponsored competitions to encourage domestic skills, with cash awards for sewing, cooking, decorating, gardening, and hat making. Concerts and lectures were provided for the wives of workers, in the belief that the moral and intellectual level of a home would rise only to that of the mother or wife who lived there.
This same philosophy led to the company’s sponsorship of guilds and associations of every kind. There was an association for the keeping and breeding of “Dogs, Poultry, Pigeons and Cage birds,” for the cultivation of vegetables and flowers, and for the “encouragement of Home Industries.” An athletic union was founded that sponsored competitions in Gaelic football, cricket, cycling, boxing, swimming, hurling, and tug-of-war. Beyond this, hardly a skill essential to brewing was not represented by a guild or professional development society, all sponsored by the company.
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