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

His body was brought back to New York aboard his favorite steamer, the Kronprinz Wilhelm , and then carried home to St. Louis by a special five-car train that included the Adolphus . Back at his mansion, 30,000 people—more than 5,000 of them brewery workers—viewed his body before the funeral, and an estimated 100,000 lined the route to the cemetery. At the time, the cause of death was reported as heart failure. Years later, it was disclosed that the heart failure may have been caused by cirrhosis of the liver.
    Adolphus left an estate worth a staggering $60 million. His stock was divided equally among his seven surviving children, with each receiving thirty-eight shares, except for the eldest son, August Anheuser Busch Sr., who received an additional three shares for serving as a trustee along with his mother, Lilly. In addition to the 116 shares she had inherited from her father, Eberhard Anheuser, Adolphus’s Lilly held in trust the shares bequeathed to four of the children: Nellie, who Adolphus considered a spendthrift, Clara and Wilhelmina, who were married to German citizens, and Carl, who was disabled from a prenatal injury suffered when Lilly fell down the stairs the night her father died.
    With an original par value of $500 per share, A-B stock paid huge annual dividends, usually between $3,000 and $5,000 per share, $8,000 in 1913. It was said that Adolphus once bought back a share from a member of the Anheuser family for $60,000, and that any bank in St. Louis would lend $25,000 against a share.
    August Sr., referred to in the family as “August A.,” inherited his father’s position as president of the company, which was valued at $40 million in property and equipment. He also inherited a series of interlocking problems that threatened to destroy everything his father had built.
    In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Anti-Saloon League emerged as the leading organization in the fight to ban alcohol, lobbying for Prohibition on a state-by-state basis. But the ASL changed its tack in December 1913, when it staged a demonstration in Washington that featured five thousand anti-alcohol activists singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as they paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps, where they presented two “dry” congressmen with a petition for a constitutional amendment imposing national prohibition. Around the same time, the ASL’s superintendent, a Methodist minister named Purley Baker, launched a well-financed “public information” campaign that demonized the producers of alcoholic beverages, particularly the nation’s mostly German-American brewers, who, according to Baker, “eat like gluttons and drink like swine.” League posters referred to them as “Huns” and portrayed them as apelike Neanderthals who threatened the American way of life.
    Making matters worse, in June 1914, eight months after Adolphus’s death, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria set off World War I. The Busch family was summering at Villa Lilly when hostilities broke out. August A. and his wife and children quickly fled the continent, but his mother, Lilly, remained in Germany with her two married daughters. Even before America entered the war in 1917, anti-German sentiment swept the country when the Germans became the first to use mustard gas in combat and a German submarine sank the British ocean liner Lusitania , killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 passengers, including 128 Americans.
    The Busch family’s ties to the fatherland and their long-standing support for Kaiser Wilhelm were well known. Fearing a backlash against his family and the brewery, August A. did everything he could to show his patriotism. He wrote a $100,000 check to the Red Cross. He announced that he was buying $1.5 million worth of Liberty Bonds. He offered to produce submarine engines for the war effort through a company his father had