Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Read Online Free Page A

thirty-five acres of surrounding flora, which cost $500,000 to plant and required fifty gardeners to maintain. The estate was the envy of his fellow tycoons Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, who hurried to build their own mansions nearby, creating Pasadena’s famed “millionaire’s row.”
    Adolphus traveled between his American estates in a private rail car, immodestly named the Adolphus and outfitted sumptuously enough to earn its description as “a palace on wheels.” He built his own rail spur so the Adolphus could roll right up to the back door of the family’s principal home at 1 Busch Place, located in the middle of a large park dotted with ponds and fountains on the grounds of the brewery. Everything he did was in the grandest style; some would say over-the-top or gauche. Indeed, the French-descended, blue-blooded banking class in St. Louis so disdained his showiness that they coined an adjective to describe it—“Buschy.” But Adolphus didn’t much care what they thought. He didn’t need their money; he did all his own financing. And he didn’t need their social acceptance; he numbered among his friends Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The latter called him “Prince Adolphus.”
    Among the general population in St. Louis, Adolphus was viewed as a benevolent monarch whose carriage whooshing past would cause common folk to catch their breath and cry out, “Oh, look!” And he played the part with flair. Always resplendent in the latest European tailoring, his flowing gray hair, twirled mustache, and elaborately long goatee trimmed daily by his personal servant barber, he greeted passersby in a booming, heavily accented voice and had a habit of handing out silver coins to the children who, understandably, came running whenever he appeared on the street. It wasn’t so much affection he inspired among the populace as it was awe. He exuded power and privilege; he personified the American possibility. When he and Lilly celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, more than 13,000 people showed up at the St. Louis Coliseum for a party in their honor. The fact that the couple was 1,400 miles away at their Pasadena estate was more than made up for by the fact that the beer was free and unlimited. The crowd managed to consume 40,000 bottles in a few hours.
    For all his Old World–liness, Adolphus had a genuine feel for his adopted country, and he exhibited a keen understanding of America’s symbols and myths. In 1896, for example, he conceived a brilliant advertising campaign based on an epic painting of the Battle of Little Bighorn that he saw hanging on the wall behind the bar in a St. Louis saloon. Titled Custer’s Last Fight , the eye-grabbing nine-by-sixteen-foot oil on canvas was the work of a local artist named Cassilly Adams, a descendant of Founding Father John Adams. The painting depicted General Custer with his long hair flying, saber in hand, fighting desperately in the last few minutes before he and his men were overwhelmed by thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. The saloon was about to go into bankruptcy, and Adolphus was among the major creditors, so he acquired the painting along with its reproduction rights for a reported $35,000. He commissioned another artist to paint a smaller, modified version of Adams’s work, instructing him to add more blood and scalpings. Then he distributed 150,000 lithographic prints of the painting to taverns, restaurants, hotels, and anywhere else that Budweiser was sold. There was no product mentioned or beer bottle pictured, just the legend “Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association” emblazoned at the bottom.
    In a masterstroke of associative advertising, Adolphus had branded a piece of American history and made both the painting and the brewery part of the nation’s popular culture. The campaign proved so successful that fifty years and an estimated million