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

on the Pilgrims’ minds when they put in at Plymouth Rock rather than push on to their intended destination in Virginia, “for we could not now take time for further search or consideration; our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.” If that wasn’t enough, a translation by George Smith of the British Museum of text on clay tablets found in Nineveh in 1872 purportedly proved that beer was part of the cargo on Noah’s Ark: “with beer and brandy, oil and wine, I filled large jars.”
    As the official start of Prohibition approached—midnight, January 18, 1920—August A. called his two sons into his office. They were grown men—Adolphus III was twenty-nine, Gussie, twenty-one—and their inheritance guaranteed that they would never need to work again if they didn’t want to. “You can afford to ride this out and retire,” their father said, “but in my book Prohibition is a challenge and we owe it to our employees to keep going.”
    Given that they had 6,500 employees and an annual payroll of more than $2 million, it was a challenge that even Adolphus would have found daunting. And there was some question as to whether August A. was up to the task. As a young man, he’d shown little interest in the family business, announcing at age nineteen that what he really wanted to do was be a cowboy. He even bought himself an outfit and a six-shooter and, much to his father’s chagrin, embarked on a six-month sabbatical at a ranch in Montana. But the prodigal eventually returned to St. Louis and dutifully submitted to Adolphus’s strict program for learning the business from the bottom up, starting as a brewer’s apprentice and rising methodically through the ranks under the unwavering eye of his father, who ceaselessly bombarded him with letters of instruction, exhortation, criticism, and praise, some running as long as twenty pages. A typical passage reminded him, “Our whole welfare and happiness … depends solely and only on the success of our brewery; its earnings are sufficient to make us happy for all time to come.”
    August A. was a gentler personality than Adolphus, shy and soft-spoken, adverse to publicity, and more attuned to the life of a country squire than that of a hard-driving industrialist. Unlike his father, he didn’t enjoy travel. On a 281-acre parcel of land 8.5 miles from the brewery, he built a $300,000 French Renaissance Revival chateau that was easily the grandest residence in the state of Missouri. The estate featured a $250,000 stable for his prized horses, a private zoo that included what he boasted was “the world’s tiniest elephant,” named Tessie, and a 175-acre “deer park” with a large pond and a clear, burbling stream that serviced his world-class collection of bison, antelope, elk, and deer from Japan, Siberia, India, Europe, Canada, and Virginia. Deer parks—enclosed hunting areas for royalty or the aristocracy—dated back to medieval times in Europe and were popular among the upper classes in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. August A. was especially proud of his herd of European roe deer, similar to the ones his father had hunted from the time he was a boy in Germany right up until a few days before his death.
    The property upon which August A. built his mansion was steeped in American history. A previous owner, Colonel Frederick Dent, acquired it in 1821 and used it as a country home, which he called White Haven. One of Dent’s sons roomed with Ulysses S. Grant at West Point, and when Grant was stationed at the nearby Jefferson Barracks, he became a frequent visitor and a suitor to Dent’s daughter Julia. The couple married in 1848 and lived at White Haven on and off for the next three decades. At one point right before the Civil War, Grant built a two-story log cabin on the property with the help of several of Dent’s slaves. He