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

prints later, customers still crowded around a framed copy of Custer’s Last Fight that hung on the wall in one small-town Missouri tavern. According to an article published in 1945 by the Kansas Historical Society, “It is probably safe to say that [ Custer’s Last Fight ] has been viewed by a greater number of the lower-browed members of society—and by fewer art critics—than any other picture in American history.” More to the point, untold millions of those lowbrow barflies became loyal Budweiser drinkers, and Adolphus’s promotional genius became part of his company’s DNA.
    Adolphus’s one professional failure was his inability to turn back the rising tide of Prohibition, a fight that consumed his final years. He spent a fortune trying to promote beer in general—and Budweiser in particular—as a “beverage of moderation,” an antidote to the devil whiskey that so incensed the temperance movement. One of the company’s pre-Prohibition ad campaigns even featured the tagline “Budweiser Spells Temperance.” In his effort to create a wholesome, healthy image for his product, and to differentiate it from that of the nation’s distillers, Adolphus went so far as to host a party at his Pasadena estate for seven thousand members of the American Medical Association. He railed against the anti-alcohol movement as an attack on individual rights. One particularly florid newspaper ad for Budweiser invoked the name of his hero, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck:
    â€œBismarck, like all Germans, prized Personal Liberty as the breath of life—a NATURAL RIGHT to be guarded and defended at any cost. Among our millions of law-abiding German-American citizens there is not a man who does not consider it insolent tyranny of the most odious kind for any legislation to issue this command: ‘Thou shalt NOT eat this; Thou shall NOT drink that.’ Germans know that there is no evil in the light wines and beers of their fathers. E VIL IS ONLY IN THE MAN WHO MISUSES THEM .”
    Adolphus became the Prohibitionists’ favorite poster boy when they figured out that he and the other major brewers owned or controlled a majority of the country’s saloons, which sold most of the whiskey they believed was destroying American life. Author Ernest Barron Gordon, then the foremost chronicler of the anti-alcohol movement, denounced him as a “promoter of villainous dives.”
    Adolphus took his case against prohibition directly to President William McKinley. Upon being introduced to the president at a political function, he launched into an impassioned thirty-minute lecture warning of the danger in outlawing the “light, happy” beverage that he claimed was “demanded” by 85 to 90 percent of the adult population.
    â€œMr. President, the demand I speak of is prompted by human nature itself,” he said, his voice rising. “And believe me, if the fanatics should ever succeed in preventing its being satisfied legitimately, the people will resort to narcotics or stimulants so injurious as to eventually undermine the health of the nation.”
    On June 10, 1910, as Adolphus and Lilly were about to set sail from New York on their annual summer trip to Germany, he told reporters that, “if given full sway,” Prohibition would “ruin the whole world.”
    Adolphus lived to see his vision of beer in America borne out. In 1911 the United States surpassed Germany as the No. 1 beer-producing country in the world, with an output of nearly 63 million barrels, 1.6 million of which were the product of Anheuser-Busch, Inc. of St. Louis, Mo. In 1912 the U.S. Census Bureau ranked brewing as the country’s seventeenth-largest industry.
    Adolphus did not live to see his worst nightmare come true. On October 10, 1913, after a day of hunting with his friend Carl Conrad in the woods near Villa Lilly, he fell ill, and several days later he died.