Chapter 2: The Rising of Liquid Bread

FbF Book Club - Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Okrent, 2010)

Previous Entry - Prologue and Chapter 1: Thunderous Drums and Protestant Nuns

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Pabst, Schlitz, Budweiser……..these names were so familiar to me growing up that I never thought to think that they were all German in origin. That’s just how truly American these brands were by the time I was born, and well before then too. To me, they were as American as apple pie and baseball, completely foreign to my grandfather and his German co-workers who would drink Doppelbock, Paulaner, or Kölsch during lunch on various construction sites throughout what was then known as “West Germany”. This Americanization of the product exemplified the complete and successful assimilation of the five million Germans who emigrated to the USA between 1820 and 1900.

I had initially thought that beer was just as popular in the New World prior to the arrival of Germans as it became afterward, but Okrent informs us that distilled spirits were king when the early USA was largely British in ethnic composition. One simple fact summarizes this for us perfectly: “In 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of the stuff; by 1890 annual consumption had exploded to 855 million gallons. During that four-decade span, while the population tripled, that population’s capacity for beer had increased twenty-four-fold.” Why? Okrent explains:

There was nothing mysterious about this change. Immigration was responsible, of course, at first from Ireland and Germany. The Germans brought not only beer itself but a generation of men who knew how to make it, how to market it, and how to pretend it was something it was not. The four-year-old United States Brewers’ Association declared in 1866 that hard liquor caused “domestic misery, pauperism, disease and crime.” On the other hand, the brewers maintained, beer was “liquid bread.”*

To German brewers, their beer was a harmless soft drink when compared to distilled spirits that caused misery and social ruin. It would be unfair to them to be lumped in with the distillers, a group that they viewed dismissively at best.

The arrival of German brewers and their beers also ushered in a proliferation of saloons across America, especially the Midwest where Germans were settling in major numbers, especially in the so-called “German Triangle” formed by St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati:

That the proliferation of saloons was abetted by immigrants (usually German or Bohemian), largely for immigrants (members of those nationalities, but also Irish, Slavs, Scandinavians, and many, many others), was not lost on the moralists of the WCTU and other temperance organizations. As early as 1876 Frances Willard had referred in a speech to “the infidel foreign population of our country.” Near the end of her career, Willard called on Congress to pass immigration restrictions to keep out “the scum of the Old World.” In the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges of northern Minnesota, congressional investigators counted 256 saloons in fifteen mining towns, their owners representing eighteen distinct immigrant nationalities. “If a new colony of foreigners appears” in Chicago, the muckraker George Kibbe Turner wrote in 1909, “some compatriot is set at once to selling them liquor. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Poles—all the rough and hairy tribes which have been drawn to Chicago—have their trade exploited to the utmost.” U.S. census figures indicated that 80 percent of licensed saloons were owned by first-generation Americans. Among the rapidly proliferating unlicensed operations, the percentage could only have been higher.

As the Temperance Movement gained ground in the second half of of the 19th century, it had to contend not just with the established alcohol industry, but also with these new arrivals who were very different to them ethnically and culturally. Naturally, anti-immigrant sentiment was common among prohibitionists of that era, as these new immigrants brought their beer-drinking ways with them to their new country.

Benjamin Franklin is famous for many good reasons, but he was also notorious for being inherently anti-Germanic. His thoughts on Germans (and others) and how he felt that they were too alien to integrate into the America of his time as preserved in an essay and a letter that he wrote.

From “Observations Concerning the Increasing of Mankind, Peopling of Countries” (1755):

Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People: America is chiefly occupied by Indians, who subsist mostly by Hunting. But as the Hunter, of all Men, requires the greatest Quantity of Land from whence to draw his Subsistence, (the Husbandman subsisting on much less, the Gardner on still less, and the Manufacturer requiring the least of all), The Europeans found America as fully settled as it well could bee by Hunters; yet these having large Tracks, were easily prevail’d on to part with Portions of Territory to the new Comers, who did not much interfere with the Natives in Hunting, and furnish’d them with many Things they wanted.

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.

….There are suppos’d to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America, (tho’ ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over Sea) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather more, on Account of the Employment the Colonies afford to Manufacturers at Home. This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water. What an Accession of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! What Number of Ships and Seamen! We have been here but little more than 100 Years, and yet the Force of our Privateers in the late War, united, was greater, both in Men and Guns, than that of the whole British Navy in Queen Elizabeth’s Time….

And since Detachments of English from Britain sent to America, will have their Places at Home so soon supply’d and increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

Franklin not only feared a Germanization of Colonial America (this essay was written well before the American Revolution), but went as far as to claim that Germans were “swarthy” and therefore “black”, with the exception being the Saxons due to them being one of the two key elements that fused together to form the Anglo-Saxon race!