The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  VON DER AHE’S RISE TO BASEBALL GLORY STARTED WITH THE immigrant’s dream of getting rich in America. By the late 1870s, as the proprietor of a thriving grocery store, saloon, and boardinghouse in St. Louis’s West End, half a block from Grand Avenue Park, he was well on his way to his goal. He operated a beer garden on the property, and, after games, baseball fanatics flocked into his place for a tall mug of lager and a bite to eat. They might enjoy sprightly polkas and popular tunes, played by a small band, before heading home after dusk on the horse-drawn streetcars. On the city’s sweltering summer afternoons, the lush green leaves overhead formed a cooling canopy that rustled in the breeze, helping to capture some of St. Louis’s intense dust and heat. It was “one of the peculiarities of German customs” that parents readily brought their young ones to such drinking places, noted the 1878 book A Tour of St. Louis. “It is often the case that a family consisting of husband and wife and half a dozen children may be observed seated at a table, sipping fresh, foaming beer, and eating pretzels.”

  Germans had poured into the Midwest from the 1830s through the 1880s as part of a mass exodus from their homeland. They were fleeing hard times, bad harvests, bullying bureaucrats, and the brutality of war for a better, freer life. The crackdown that followed the revolutions of 1848, in particular, drove many German liberals to America, where some became distinguished leaders in the antislavery and workers’ rights movements. By 1880, some 54,901 of the 350,518 people in St. Louis—more than 15 percent—were German-born. They had nourished their dreams on books of advice like The Germans in America (1851), by a Boston pastor named F. W. Bogen. “A great blessing meets the German emigrant the moment he steps upon these shores,” Bogen promised. “He comes into a free country; free from the oppression of despotism, free from privileged orders and monopolies, free from the pressure of intolerable taxes and imposts, free from constraint in matters of belief and conscience.” Many Germans were drawn to the idea of a young, dynamic country where their talent and strenuous work mattered more than the whims of government bureaucrats or the accident of birth.

  The Germans brought with them something called gemutlichkeit—a compound of “conviviality, camaraderie and good fellowship, love of celebrations, card-playing, praise of [the] German way of life, and all these washed over by flowing kegs of good lager beer.” Lippincott’s Magazine explained to its readers in April 1883: “Beer and wine the German looks upon as gifts of God, to be enjoyed in moderation for lightening the cares of life and adding to its pleasures; and Sunday afternoon is devoted, by all who do not belong to the stricter Protestant sects, to recreation.”

  Many native-born Americans frowned on such ideas. The New York Times, the voice of the eastern Protestant establishment, with its affection for blue laws and prohibition, hoped these aliens would soon outgrow their Old World habits: “In the old countries, where freedom is smothered, drinking may be necessary to drown the depressing influences of despotism; but here, where freedom woos the mind to culture, no such beastly compensation is called for, and we believe we have said sufficient to prove that our German fellow-citizens are born for higher and nobler uses than for schnapps and lager-bier.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, in contrast, insisted that German beer actually helped to civilize America. “Formerly Americans drank scarcely anything else than whisky, frequently very bad whisky, and the consequence was quarreling, strife and fights. Now Americans drink almost as much beer as the Germans do, and whereas Americans used to pour everything down their throats standing, they now sit down good naturedly and chat over a good glass of beer, without flying into one another’s hair.”

  It wasn’t long before the number of beer gardens operating on Sundays in St. Louis became something of a national scandal, as easterners complained of a steady assault on the sanctity of the Lord’s Day. Though St. Louis was predominantly Christian, “it cannot be claimed that its inhabitants are pious, in the sense of the word as understood in Boston,” admitted the authors of A Tour of St. Louis. St. Louis residents—some descended from French Catholics, who shared the German attitude toward Sundays—burst from their homes on the Lord’s Day, filling the streets with laughter and chatter as they made their way to such “umbrageous enclosures” as beer gardens. “Music, dancing, ball games, and other amusements are indulged in with a zest which shows the intensity of pleasure realized from them by the participants.” For them, such pleasures were “soul-feasts.”

  In St. Louis, immigrants encountered a thriving but rough city at the cultural crossroads of America—one part southern in its charm, gentility, and large black population; one part northern in its relentless jockeying for money; and one part cowboy outpost, the traditional departure point for those intrepid souls making the journey for the Wild West on Conestoga wagons. By the 1880s, few of the city’s 300 miles of roadway had been paved, leaving St. Louis to be plagued by wind-whipped dust in dry weather and slimy mud during the wet season. The sewer system was poor, and polluted wells were a source of deadly diarrhea and fever. Strangers had great difficulty finding their way around, since the city did not bestir itself to install street signs until it hosted the 1896 Republican National Convention. People made their way about the city on bob-tail cars—small, 15-foot-long streetcars drawn along rails, pulled by one horse or two donkeys, and typically overflowing with passengers, some precariously clinging to the outside.

  Before the Civil War, St. Louis had been a major steamboat hub, and those magnificent, brightly colored “floating palaces” formed “a forest of smokestacks along the banks,” one German immigrant recalled. But, in ever-changing America, that gaudy world vanished almost overnight. By the 1880s, railroads, which could move people and goods much faster and cheaper than steamboats, had stolen much of the boats’ business.

  Von der Ahe’s St. Louis was a booming place, the sixth largest city in America as of 1880. Thick coal smoke hung over the city, making the morning light seem feeble and gray long after dawn. “These Western cities exhale a tainted breath, stifle themselves in the fumes of their own prosperity,” wrote a visiting writer for Harper’s Magazine. On brutally hot summer days, St. Louis residents strolled across the great Eads Bridge, or found relief in sidewalk cafés that made the Harper’s reporter think of Paris boulevards: “Little tables are put out in the front of the principal restaurants,” he wrote, “and the guests chatter and sip refreshments at them, under the glowing gas-lights, till a late hour.”

  VON DER AHE HAD FOUND HIS WAY HERE FROM 4,000 MILES AWAY. He was born on October 2, 1848, in Hille, a fastidious farming village in the green region of Westphalia in Prussia. Christened Christian Frederick Wilhelm Von der Ahe, he took his name from his father, who had been named, like his father, after Frederick the Great. Chris was the oldest of nine children, several of whom died in childhood. He was baptized in the Evangelist Church, signifying he was Protestant, probably Lutheran. The elder Von der Ahe was an ambitious and successful grain dealer and merchant, but death struck him down early, in 1864, when he was only forty. Chris was sixteen. Three years later, he faced compulsory service in the Prussian military, with its harsh discipline and officers in spiked helmets. Fearing dismemberment or death in the wars of German unification, the young man dodged it all by emigrating in 1867. To get out of Germany, he may have lied to officials, telling them he was born in 1851, and thus too young to serve, a fictional birthdate he maintained throughout his life, presumably to avoid arrest should he ever return to his native land. The fib is preserved on his gravestone and in various official documents. In any case, he found his way to a ship, most likely in Hamburg or Bremen, that was bound for New York City.

  The voyage across took about seventeen days by steamer, the form of transportation used by most immigrants by the late 1860s. Stacked atop each other in berths, sometimes four rows high, the immigrants were crammed into a dark hold that reeked of vomit, rancid food, and unbathed humanity—a Petrie dish for lice, infectious disease, and death. Saltwater seeped into the steerage through ventilation
holes, adding dampness and cold to the misery. Their troubles did not end in New York. The moment the travelers stepped off the boat and tried to regain their land legs, swarms of money-grubbing Americans were poised to fleece them. Immigrants knew that they could seek help at the German Immigration Society, a charitable institution established to assist those coming to America. But con artists went to the trouble of setting up fake German societies; some newcomers went to them, to be parted from whatever little money they had brought.

  Soon after landing in New York, Von der Ahe set out for the Midwest. He arrived as the city’s economy was staggering into a postwar slump. Day and night, hungry, haggard men thronged the St. Louis headquarters of the German Immigration Society, in the basement of Tivoli Hall on Elm Street, desperate for work. But Von der Ahe, bright and ambitious, landed a job as a grocery clerk in the city’s West End. Within a few years of his arrival, he was co-owner of a combination grocery store and saloon on the corner of Sullivan and Spring. In those times, “any grocery store worth its salt was attached directly through a swinging door to a saloon,” one St. Louis resident recalled.

  On March 3, 1870, when he was twenty-one, Von der Ahe married twenty-year-old Emma Hoffmann, a Missouri-born daughter of German immigrants. Nine months later, their only son, Edward, was born. In 1872, Chris boldly bought out his business partner, staking his life’s savings of $1,125, and when one of his debtors died, Von der Ahe moved his business into a two-and-a-half-story boardinghouse a block south, at the corner of Grand and St. Louis. He delved into ward politics, working on behalf of the pro-immigrant, antiprohibition Democratic Party, and befriended a rising state representative named John Joseph O’Neill, soon to be elected to Congress. In short, Von der Ahe had acquired a family, a growing business, a place in the community, and political connections. In time, he had a feed and flour store and butcher shop, three horses, three delivery wagons, a stable, nine rooms over the store, and an office on the first floor. He could boast of $75,000 in annual sales. The business he had built was a testament to the American dream. But Von der Ahe craved more money, fame, and respect.

  He intended to win them through, of all things, an odd American obsession that was then called base ball—two words. One of his neighbors, a Swiss immigrant named Augustus Solari, ran an enclosed baseball grounds right down the street named Grand Avenue Park. Solari had overseen its erection on what was then a cornfield on the outskirts of town. He then rented it out to a series of teams, most notably the superb St. Louis Brown Stockings, a major-league club from 1875 through 1877. Intrigued, Von der Ahe began contemplating how his saloon business could exploit its proximity to the ballpark, “as he might have become interested in pretzels, peanuts or any other incitant to thirst and beer drinking,” according to one reporter.

  To get inside the business, he angled for a leadership role in the Grand Avenue Base Ball Club, a team that played on days when the Brown Stockings did not need the park. Von der Ahe obtained a place on its board of directors in 1876, when he was twenty-seven, possibly with the help of the club’s president, Eleventh Ward City Councilman J. B. Woestman, a fellow Prussian immigrant, former grocer, and rising flour manufacturer who lived near Von der Ahe on Grand Avenue. (When Woestman was implicated in a bribery scandal that spring, Von der Ahe provided security for his $2,000 bond.) The directors pledged to put a good team on the field, promising that “none but the best amateur players would be engaged, and that honesty would outweigh skill.” Von der Ahe immersed himself in the operation, and before the start of the second season, he was elected vice president. From that post, he secured the concession at Grand Avenue Park for selling beer by the mug and whiskey by the shot, including during National League games played there.

  But Von der Ahe had to wonder how much longer that concession would be worth anything. All over the country, it had become an open question whether professional baseball could even survive. Spectators were abandoning the sport, which seemed destined to wilt away, another American fad on its way to oblivion. If he wanted to make more money, Von der Ahe would have to find a way to make baseball popular again.

  AMERICA WAS IN THE GRIP OF A TERRIBLE DEPRESSION FOR MUCH of the 1870s, and professional baseball was barely surviving as the decade drew to a close. The sport’s reputation had been blackened by dishonest and drunken players whose dubious performances on the field led many paying customers to quit wasting their money on the game. The first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, founded in 1871, had staggered through five seasons, damaged not only by its crooks and boozers, but also by uncompetitive and poorly financed teams from minor markets as well as the boring dominance of one club, the Boston Red Stockings. The National Association could hardly be called a league—it was more a loose structure designed to award a pennant—since there was no fixed schedule, and any club could enter by paying a $10 membership fee, paltry even then. By the summer of 1875, William Ambrose Hulbert, the resolute president of the Chicago White Stockings (today’s Cubs), had endured enough of such nonsense. He staged a coup, drawing the richest clubs of the West out of the National Association and compelling the best teams of the East to join them in a smaller, more exclusive new circuit, the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, with the emphasis on giving club management control over players. It survives to this day as the National League.

  From the owners’ standpoint, Hulbert’s league—with a fixed schedule and solid teams in baseball’s biggest markets—was a decided improvement over the chaotic National Association. Even so, gamblers still swarmed over ballparks, and betting fueled much of the public’s interest in the game. The huge amounts of money at stake inevitably spurred attempts to fix games. Sure enough, in late 1877, four members of the first-place Louisville Grays—including their superb pitcher, Jim Devlin—were implicated in throwing the National League pennant, blowing games to let Boston capture the flag. And since some of the players, including Devlin, had already signed to play for the St. Louis Brown Stockings in 1878, that team, too, got coated with the slime of their corruption.

  The Brown Stockings could hardly afford this latest stain. They had already been soiled by a long series of gambling scandals. There was strong, if not quite actionable, evidence, for instance, that at least two St. Louis players were working for the notorious Chicago gambler Mike McDonald to throw games. Moreover, an explosive newspaper exposé charged that Brown Stockings manager George “Burtie” McManus, in cahoots with his captain, the shady Mike McGeary, attempted to buy Louisville-based umpire Daniel Devinney for $250 to shade calls in St. Louis’s favor. Disgusted with these developments, much of St. Louis simply gave up on baseball. The civic leaders who ran the Brown Stockings, having lost the services of Devlin and other stars who might have helped erase the organization’s debt, dropped their plans to build a new park downtown and instead folded the club. After years of top-drawer professional baseball, St. Louis had no major-league team for 1878.

  This was grim news for two brothers who were sportswriters at competing St. Louis newspapers, Alfred H. Spink of the Missouri Republican and William Spink of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Recognizing that their jobs were not long for this world without baseball, they helped cobble together a semipro team, gave it the old name of Brown Stockings, and scheduled a series of games. “But the baseball-loving public, disgusted at the way they had lost the splendid team they had hoped for, would have none of it,” Alfred recounted. The new club played to mostly empty stands at Grand Avenue Park and the smaller Compton Avenue Grounds. When the Spink brothers lured the National League’s celebrated Indianapolis Browns to visit St. Louis in 1878, the home club failed to collect enough gate money even to fund the visitors’ trip back to the hotel down on the bob-tail horsecars.

  By mid-1879, St. Louis seemed to have sworn off baseball. Even a heavily advertised game in June drew only a smattering of spectators, who, in the words of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “gazed at the beggarly array of empty be
nches, and thought of the olden time when ‘standing room only’ was the general rule.” The Brown Stockings limped on into 1879 and 1880 under their intrepid player-manager Ned Cuthbert, a former and future major leaguer. He and his players divided up the receipts after each game, giving about one-quarter of the take to the man who ran the grounds, Solari. The money was pitiful, though, and the neglected park was rapidly becoming shabby.

  Into this situation stepped Von der Ahe. Cuthbert, who knew the German from his beer sales at Grand Avenue Park, recognized that this prosperous neighborhood burgher and rising civic leader was an ideal candidate to bankroll St. Louis’s return to the big time, which meant in the National League. At first, Von der Ahe was reluctant to risk his money on the scheme. “It was ‘Eddie’ who talked me into baseball,” Von der Ahe revealed late in life. “He picked me out, and, for months, he talked league baseball, until he convinced me that there was something in it.” By late 1880, Von der Ahe had come around to seeing what many American investors could not—that the business of baseball did not have to die; indeed, it might merely be in its infancy. American-born men who knew the game well had repeatedly tried to make a go of St. Louis baseball and failed, but the German immigrant formed the conviction that he could earn a fortune. He had a vision of making a day at the park a more exciting experience than ever before, with cheap tickets, booming beer sales, and big crowds adorned by beautiful women. What’s more, he saw a revitalized ballpark as the centerpiece of West End development and believed it would boost his business and his real-estate investments.