* * *
Pilgrims brought more beer than water to the New World on the Mayflower in 1620, it’s true. And it’s true that the first cobblestone road in New Amsterdam, later called New York, was laid so a Dutch brewer near Wall Street could have a smooth path from his brewery to the taverns. And it’s also true that George Washington was an amateur brewer and Thomas Jefferson fancied himself one, and that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were good and lit much of the time.
But no American city had sprouted up around beer quite like St. Louis. To understand why is to understand the city. As the nineteenth century dawned and the vast area between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains opened to settlement with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis was a hopping trading post on the western bank of the Mississippi River, and fresh drinking water wasn’t readily available. To partake from the Mighty Mississippi, citizens of St. Louis had to let water stand for a while. And when all the sediment had finally settled, it would fill a full quarter of the container. So they collected rainwater in cisterns, but frequent droughts meant long spells without enough clean water to drink. The alternatives were cider, distilled spirits, and beer. The colonists had always swilled, drinking some thirty-four gallons of beer and cider, five gallons of distilled spirits, and one gallon of wine per person in 1790.
In the beginning, everyone drank local beer because the only beer was local. In St. Louis, as early as 1810, brewers began beckoning trappers, traders, and transplants in the Louisiana Gazette, the newspaper that covered the new territory:
Those who wish to be supplied with table beer and porter will please direct their orders to the Brewery, or to Edward Hempstead, Esq. St. Louis who will always have a quantity in his cellar ready for sale.
The opening of canals and railroads gave brewers shipping options, but transporting beer any distance was a problem because of the style of beer settlers preferred. Ale, stout, and porter were all made with a strain of yeast that rose during fermentation, making it prone to bad bacteria and spoiling if the beer wasn’t consumed almost immediately. There was an exception, and this is where St. Louis came into the picture. Bavarians had long been brewing beer with a yeast that sank, making a clear and lighter beer, called lagerbier. And in the middle of the nineteenth century, waves of thirsty German immigrants had begun to come ashore and head west in search of opportunity in the unsettled lands on the other side of the Mississippi River. Many of them stopped in the French city of St. Louis, and wrote home telling kinfolk of the grand life in the Midwestern United States.
The German Emigrant Aid Society of St. Louis was there to welcome them. The city exploded, by 1850 swelling to four times its population in 1840, the year lagerbier debuted. Breweries sprang up in German neighborhoods all over the city, and by 1853 there were thirty-six in operation, making 216,000 barrels of beer a year. Half were lager.
In 1852, as Franklin Pierce and Winfield Scott duked it out for the presidency and Americans debated the controversy of slavery, a German brewer named George Schneider opened a small brewery on a little hill in St. Louis between Lynch and Dorcas Streets. Schneider found such success with his lager that he expanded by building the Bavarian Brewery nearby. But loans came due and bills went unpaid, so he sold his brewery to the Hammer brothers, who tried to make a go of it but wound up in bankruptcy.
The fellow who had a significant lien on the bankrupt brewery happened to be a successful soap and candle maker named Eberhard Anheuser. He took over the brewery and soon partnered with his new son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, who had arrived in St. Louis in 1857 and showed a knack for business working as a mud clerk with the steamboats along Commission Row.
Looking to expand, Busch, who by then had taken over operations, fixed his father-in-law’s brew, which one magazine had described as “so inferior [that] St. Louis rowdies were known to project mouthfuls of it back over the bar.” He began employing new techniques developed in the 1870s by the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who had figured out that applying heat killed bacteria and extended shelf life. Busch also started to brew a pilsner from a recipe he’d found in a Bohemian town called Budweis. He called his production Budweiser. In the 1880s, the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association went from being the thirty-second-largest brewery in the country to the second-largest, behind only the Pabst Brewing Co. of Milwaukee. As Busch’s reach grew, he planted new mechanical refrigeration machines in branches in Brooklyn, Kansas City, Dallas, and Sherman, Texas. The invention of the crown bottle cap in 1892 allowed Busch to think even bigger. His single small brewery in St. Louis had grown into an industrial plant that employed 2,200 men and sprawled over forty acres like a city. It was fast on its way to becoming the largest brewery works in the world.
The temperance movement of the late nineteenth century was of little concern to most brewers, many of whom contributed to the coffers of politicians who enjoyed a drink, whether they said so or not. But a new adversary was organizing, and by late 1895 the Anti-Saloon League began to wage an ingenious strategic campaign to infiltrate and pressure major political parties. They first attacked the saloons, rather than going after the alcohol industry as a whole, and found some success passing laws that cut the number of direct-to-customer suppliers of beer. The prohibitionists were helped along by a series of national magazine exposés on commercialized vice and the corrupt alliances between brewers and politicians. Southern states were the first to dry up between 1907 and 1909—Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina.
In some ways, the complaints of the prohibitionists were legitimate. Competition among breweries had outfitted cities with a slew of saloons, and for every family-friendly drinking establishment there were four or five blood buckets. If a brewer opened a saloon at a vacant intersection, immediately three others would plant their saloons on the remaining corners, and employ attractions like sexy women or gambling to beat the competition. And because of competition, they almost never closed. By 1909, there was one saloon for every three hundred St. Louis residents.
Brewers tried to fight the Anti-Saloon League by encouraging regulation of the liquor traffic, the licensing of saloons, and penalties against the disorderly establishments, thereby quelling the League’s most successful propaganda. In 1909 Anheuser-Busch began to set aside a chunk of money for an educational campaign, to show Americans the temperate side of consumption and booze’s benefits to society, the virtues of beer. The company partnered with the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. to publish two-column probeer articles on the front page of many newspapers in the United States. But it wasn’t much help against the wave of prohibition. Five states went dry in 1914, four in 1915. Sales fell. When war broke out, many Americans were hostile toward Germany and, by extension, anything that sounded German, including good German-American beer. This put the beer industry, and Anheuser-Busch, on its heels.
The prohibitionists capitalized on the sentiment after the German sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania, and on the idea that banning alcohol and shutting down breweries would cough up laborers who could be diverted to help build boats, make artillery, or fight the war. The Anti-Saloon League went so far as to link drinking beer with rooting for Germany to win the war, declaring in a pamphlet: “Everything in the country that is pro-German is anti-American. Everything that is pro-German must go.”
Cards fell left and right. Moral outrage boiled. Fear of immigration bubbled.
Brewing stopped at Anheuser-Busch in 1918 when President Wilson, dealing with crop failure and labor supply, forbade the wartime use of grain to make malt liquor. But by then Anheuser-Busch had become such an integral part of the fabric of St. Louis that businessmen and journalists across the city called on the president to allow the brewery to produce nonalcoholic beverages and other products. Busch had so diversified operations that he was all but prepared for the coming ban on the manufacture of beer. In late 1918, a Post-Dispatch reporter asked August Busch about his prospects should the states ratify the Eighteenth Amendment,
which had already cleared the House and Senate. “If they do ratify it, I am ready,” he said. “All I can say is that I am looking ahead and planning on the theory that the country will have prohibition.”
By January 1920 it did. Signs went up in St. Louis saying:
BONE DRY FOREVER
BUY NOW FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
The number of breweries in the US making full-strength beer fell from 1,300 in 1916 to none in 1926. Distilleries dropped by 85 percent. Wineries fell from 318 in 1914 to 27 in 1925. Tax revenues from distilled spirits dropped from $365 million to $13 million.
Only those that diversified could weather the change. The others faded away. One pioneer of St. Louis brewing, William J. Lemp II, shot himself to death in the brewery office in 1923. Friends blamed Prohibition and a closed production plant for his troubles.
The year Plennie arrived, Anheuser-Busch was holding strong. The valued local company covering seventy city blocks ran an advertisement in the St. Louis Star, spelling out its sustaining operation:
Originally in the brewing business, the company was compelled in 1919 to readjust its entire business structure and today it is actively engaged in the production of barley, Budweiser malt syrup, ginger ale, Budweiser Brew, yeast, refrigerator truck bodies, ice cream cabinets, corn products and Diesel engines.
Almost immediately behind Prohibition came new and inventive and bloody enterprises organized to keep Americans as drunk as they wanted to be. The thirst for liberty could not be quenched.
* * *
As Plennie stood agape on the St. Louis sidewalk, the cop proceeded to handcuff his charitable, dull-eyed donor and place him in the squad car. The sound of the man’s exasperated protests filled the city street. Plennie looked at the five-dollar bill in his hand.
That was the way it was, the way it had been for a decade. The ban made criminals of everyone, and their mothers weren’t far behind. The law rushed the smallest infractions.
Plennie thought he was next when another police car pulled to the curb. He hadn’t even made it all the way into the city and already he was in trouble, he thought. Alas, the police officer just wanted to escort him across the busy intersections. The year before, 156 people had been killed in car crashes in St. Louis, and 117 of them were pedestrians. “As far as the pedestrian is concerned, the situation grows steadily worse,” read an editorial in the St. Louis Star, titled THE DANGERS OF WALKING. “Human life still is one of the cheapest things of our so-called modern civilization.” Traffic enforcement had grown so lax the police chief was fuming. He accused his officers of lying down on the job and issued an order for stronger enforcement, or they’d be brought before the disciplinary board. The car ruled the road. There were no protected lanes or walk signals. The city lacked the infrastructure to protect regular-walking pedestrians, much less those going backward.
Plennie thanked the officers and told them he appreciated their interest. The driver grinned. “Oh, it’s not you we’re interested in,” he said. “We just don’t want to clean you off the streets after the traffic gets through with you.”
The cops tooled along in front of him until he reached the Western Union. When he emerged walking forward, the same cop spoke up. “We just wanted to see if you could walk forward,” he said. “I think you do better backward.” Then they sped away—probably to bust a drunk.
The enforcement of the Prohibition laws had taken on a new seriousness. If the law was to work, it had to be enforced. In 1931, more liquor cases were brought—56,938—than any other year. Shockingly, the cat-and-mouse game had grown deadlier. In the previous fiscal year, five lawmen and seven civilians were killed during enforcement of the liquor law. But so far in 1931, deaths had shot up, with 70 agents and 162 civilians dead in the first six months.
In St. Louis, there seemed to be a new arrest every day. “My men,” the police chief told reporters, “will make a practice of arresting patrons of cafés and restaurants when the patrons are found to be in possession of liquor.”
The West End cafés were a favorite target. One in particular. Just past midnight on January 19, 1922, an undercover officer thought he smelled pre-Prohibition juice being served to customers and called in the raiders, who carted off twelve men, twelve women, and the proprietor, Silvio Mazza. Just two days later, twenty police officers and Prohibition enforcement agents kicked open the doors of Mazza’s café again. Couples who had been dancing and drinking scrambled to flee. “We’re pinched!” someone shouted. The jazz band quit playing as men and women smashed bottles of booze on the floor. Police arrested fifty-five people that night. They hauled off fourteen women, the African-American jazz band, and the three Mazza brothers, Silvio, Tony, and Pete.
* * *
Every Joe in St. Louis seemed to be selling something. The polished lobby of the eighteen-story Mayflower Hotel was filled with salesmen. Plennie met F. M. Stambaugh of Stambaugh & Sons selling tools and dies, and Fred G. Benson selling real estate and insurance and Joe Wolf from Wolf’s Department Store, who wanted to outfit you and your entire family. In a strange twist of fate, Plennie even bumped into Dr. Geiber, the man who’d invented the rear-vision glasses he wore.
Most of them had read about him in the newspapers. He felt like a big deal, and they were enthusiastic about his venture but disappointed to hear he hadn’t gotten a full sponsor for the trip. Several of them offered advice, as salesmen are wont to do.
“I think I know the reason you’re having trouble,” one told Plennie that night. “Right now, in the Depression, the whole world is going backward. Everybody’s business is going backward. So why should they advertise it by employing someone like you, who is going backward, too?”
It made sense, but that was the whole gimmick. If he turned around and walked forward he was just a guy.
He desperately needed a sponsor, some way to liquidate this adventure so he wouldn’t have to worry about expenses and so he could send some money back to his people in Abilene. Things had gotten so bad that his father and brothers were forced to resort to picking cotton again, which was a hell of a hard way to make a living. One of Plennie’s earliest childhood memories was set in a cotton field, the sun white-hot and the air dry as jerky, with his brothers and dad hunched over, all. And while the memory wasn’t happy, it was not sad, either. It was just a memory of togetherness and the hardest kind of work.
Also of concern were Della’s letters, which were growing increasingly mysterious. Plennie tried to convince her to abide, to have patience. He promised his fortune would come, and every newspaper clipping he sent home was evidence of wide general interest in what he was doing. Had she not seen his photographs in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the daily newspaper in the seventh-largest city in the country, with a population of 822,000 people? In any event, having a benefactor might fix shut the wounds he’d left open in Texas. And St. Louis, Missouri, happened to be the shoe manufacturing center of the world.
Making shoes was a northeastern trade at first, based mostly in Lynn, Massachusetts. But a series of inventions—the sewing machine in 1848, the heeling and welting machines in the 1860s, the lasting machine in 1883—reduced the need for skilled craftsmen, and shoe production plants began to spring up in places where labor was cheap. On the backs of the Brown brothers, transplants from New York, the railroad, and the cheap labor of women and children, St. Louis had twenty-four shoe manufacturers in 1880. By the turn of the century, the city had emerged as a major shoe center, with factories staffed by German immigrants. By 1905, it was the third-largest shoe manufacturing city in the country. By 1913, St. Louis shoe houses produced and sold nearly twenty-eight million pairs of shoes in sixty-one factories for $70 million.
With the help of the salesmen, Plennie began to cobble together a list of companies he could approach, here and elsewhere, about sponsorship. Before long he had twenty-four names, including the Jarman Shoe Co., Johnston & Murphy Shoe Co., Commonwealth Shoe Company, and Stacy Adams Co. He decided to start at the top. But he
left each meeting dejected, unable to sell anyone on the idea. The last shoe company on his list was the biggest and best, the leader of the shoe industry, which ran advertisements in newspapers and magazines across America: the Brown Shoe Company, makers of Buster Brown Blue Ribbon Shoes for boys and girls. Plennie remembered Buster Brown from his boyhood in West Texas. A representative came to town once or twice a year on a horse-drawn wagon decorated with advertisements. And riding along with the shoe salesman was a little person dressed in a cute little red suit—Buster Brown himself, accompanied by his bulldog, Tige.
Plennie arrived at company headquarters full of vim and vigor, ready to pitch himself as a real-world backward-walking advertisement for Brown shoes. He prepared himself on the sidewalk, then pulled open the door and stepped inside the office. What he saw stole his breath. Sitting around the office were twenty Buster Browns, and twenty Tiges.
He told the lady behind the front desk that he thought the Buster Brown who came to West Texas was the Buster Brown, the only Buster Brown in the world. She just laughed and told Plennie that they actually employed forty-two little people for their advertising. And she shocked him again by casually mentioning that this was the only form of advertising the firm employed. He bowed his head, turned, and walked forward out of the office.
* * *
Plennie fished a business card out of his journal. Pete Mazza. He found a phone and dialed the number. Pete Mazza seemed happy to receive the call. He told Plennie he’d pick him up, and before long, Plennie was riding shotgun in Mazza’s snazzy automobile toward his home in University City, a streetcar suburb west of downtown. Mazza lived in the most beautiful mansion Plennie had ever seen, with ten or twelve rooms, polished floors and cabinets, and ornate fixtures. He employed a staff of three to maintain his home and serve him meals. Mazza and Plennie made small talk as they ate lunch alone. Plennie wondered about Mazza’s family when he saw no wife or children, but he swallowed his questions. He also swallowed a stiff drink. Alcohol seemed to be plentiful at Mazza’s house.
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 11