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

established, the Busch-Sulzer Brothers Diesel Engine Company. He changed the label on all Budweiser products, eliminating the double eagle design that some people believed represented the Austrian coat of arms. He began wearing an American flag button on his lapel. He abolished German as the official language at the brewery and ordered busts and paintings of Chancellor Bismarck removed from the premises.
    Despite these efforts, Budweiser sales dropped from nearly $18 million in 1913 to $12 million in 1917. Lilly Busch’s continued presence in Germany became a public embarrassment to her son and the brewery when it was revealed that both of her daughters’ husbands were involved in the German war effort. Lilly finally returned to the United States in 1918, but only after President Woodrow Wilson established the office of Alien Property Custodian, which was empowered to seize all American assets owned by people living in an enemy country. Upon her arrival in Key West, Florida, the ailing seventy-five-year-old widow of Adolphus Busch was detained for forty hours and subjected to a strip search that included “a very thorough examination of her vagina and womb,” according to her lawyer, who decried the treatment as “unexcelled in brutality, an examination not perpetrated on the poorest prostitute or female pick-pocket.”
    Lilly’s property was seized pending the results of an investigation by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee into the activities of Anheuser-Busch and other German-surnamed breweries in the United States, based on the flimsy suspicion that they might be secretly funding the German war machine. The Busches and the brewery were eventually given a clean bill of health and an apology from the U.S. attorney general, and Lilly’s property was returned to her by order of President Wilson shortly after the Armistice was signed. But August A.’s problems were just beginning.
    On December 8, 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages nationally. The amendment was to take effect one year after the ratification by the states. However, on September 16, 1918, with more than half a million U.S. troops fighting in France, President Wilson issued a ban on the production of beer in order to conserve grain for the war effort. The ban was short-lived, ending with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. But two months later, on January 16, 1919, the Nebraska legislature became the thirty-sixth to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment. Manufacturers of alcoholic beverages howled that the American people would have rejected Prohibition overwhelmingly if it had been put up to a popular vote, a claim that appears to have been borne out by the bootlegging success of Al Capone and his gangster cohorts during the bloody, booze-soaked Roaring Twenties that followed. August A. angrily dismissed the amendment’s passage as “an attempt to substitute the authority of law for the virtue of man,” and he predicted that the experiment ultimately would fail. He vowed to keep his company operating, one way or another, until it did.
    In the meantime, Anheuser-Busch sought to rally the public against the amendment with promotional pamphlets and ads that testified to the societal benefits of its product. “The temperate use of a temperate alcoholic beverage like beer makes for the advancement of individual progress; the evils incident to outlawing it make for demoralization,” proclaimed one. “Pure beer, such as Budweiser, is the nation’s greatest aid to temperance, a home beverage which promotes both physical and moral well being.”
    Another brochure quoted Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as saying that fermented beverages were “generally innocent, and often have a friendly influence upon health and life.” It cited records from the Mayflower indicating that beer was