Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Behr, Edward

  Cincinnati benefited enormously from the German-American presence: they were energetic, industrious, entrepreneurial, and, above all, civic-minded. Cincinnati’s red-brick “Theatrum,” said to have the finest acoustics in the world, and now the site of the town’s opera company, is but one of their still extant landmarks. German-Americans funded hospitals, old people’s homes, cultural centers, gymnasiums, and charities of all types. In that successive immigration, waves were triggered not only by poverty and the hope of a better life but by political opposition. The town’s rich cultural life reflected the diversity and intellectualism of its German-American element, including teachers, lawyers, artists, soldiers, artisans, and laborers. Tolerance prevailed: there was little or no anti-Semitism in Cincinnati — at least among its German-American element. In 1914—1915, the Mayor of Cincinnati was Frederick S. Spiegel, a Prussian-born Jew.

  The German influx after 1832 made America beer-conscious. In Cincinnati especially (where beer consumption was four times the national average), beer drinking was part of the German-American way of life. There was little drunkenness; it was a social phenomenon, part of the cultural scene, on a par with oom-pah-pah brass bands, Strauss music, and choir-singing. Parties, birthdays, and commemorations of all types would have been unthinkable without the true natural tonic, the “teutonic” stein of beer. There were German-Americans all over the city, but part of Cincinnati was so German it was known as “Across the Rhine” — the “Rhine” being the old Florida-Erie Canal, since filled in. “Across the Rhine” had over a hundred cafés, Bierstuben, restaurants, and beer gardens with German brass bands and string orchestras. It was famous all over America: in the early 1900s, Cincinnati rivaled Niagara Falls as America’s favorite honeymoon destination.

  Beer-making was still a relatively small-scale business then, but in the Cincinnati area alone, in the early 1900s, there were as many breweries — all of them German-American owned — as there were German newspapers. All thrived, and all were major contributors to the local German-American League, which supported schools and charities of all kinds. They also funded their own causes. John Caspar Bruckmann had been a carpenter in his native Thuringen before coming to America in 1847, where he worked for a time as a barrel maker before establishing Bruck’s, a well-known local brewery. Even as a successful entrepreneur, Bruckmann remained a farmer, growing hops in a field adjoining the Ohio-Erie Canal. On their farm, his wife Maria, herself the daughter of an inn-keeping family in Thuringen, sold homemade beer to tourists on Sundays from their front porch. Kristian Moerlein had been a blacksmith before founding Moerlein’s Brewery, soon to become the biggest in Ohio. Some German-Americans also branched out into the hard liquor business: the founder of Jim Bearne whiskey was Jacob Boehm.

  With its beer-drinking German-Americans and its profusion of brewers on one hand, and its Prohibitionist militants on the other, Ohio became a microcosm of America as a whole: nowhere was the struggle for and against Prohibition more dramatic, and nowhere would the consequences be more tragic. Until 1914, Cincinnati’s inhabitants had been a perfect illustration of melting pot virtues: though “Across the Rhine” was almost all German, there were other parts of the town in which German-Americans and Irish-Americans lived cheek-by-jowl, and if mixed marriages were rare and frowned on by both communities, altercations were even rarer. The First World War — and the growing pressures of the Prohibitionists — put an end to this halcyon period of prosperity, mutual esteem, and tolerance.

  The German-American community cannot be entirely absolved from blame for what happened from 1914 onward. For all its admirable civic-mindedness, it was also deeply imbued with the notion that German cultural traditions had to be carefully preserved, that “language saves faith,” and its leaders sometimes went too far, provoking charges of nationalism. Some of the decisions of the Ohio section of the German-American League, or Stadtsverband — such as choosing the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Sedan (1871) to commemorate Germany Day in 1896 — were injudicious, to say the least. It was a prickly, conservative community, highly conscious of what it regarded as particular German virtues — thrift, hard work, and godliness. It voted heavily Republican. From the moment Britain and France went to war against Germany, it also became a beleaguered minority group, preoccupied by the fate of its former compatriots (German-Americans from Cincinnati raised over $140,000 in 1914-1915 for German war victims), its loyalties to the homeland reinforced or resurrected. Early German victories were openly celebrated, both in private homes and in the columns of Cincinnati’s German-language papers, the Volksblatt and Freie Presse. Ohio’s German-language press constantly berated the “pro-English bias” of the New york Times and the Cincinnati Times-Star published by Charles P. Taft, a member of Ohio’s most prominent family (and son of President Taft) and called for more “objective” reporting of the war. There were huge “peace demonstrations” in August of 1914 attended by Cincinnati’s mayor, Frederick Spiegel. Although he did not speak at these meetings, he had no quarrel with the Cincinnati Enquirer’s description of him as a “loyal German” or with gatherings of this type [the language used, of course, was German, and often ended with the singing of “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”) to the fury of Cincinnatians of English descent]. “A war with Germany,” Volksblatt wrote in 1916, would be “a crime against civilization and be condemned by all fair-minded people in America.” So sure were its readers of an eventual German victory that the newspaper suggested a debate on the spoils of war, also proposing both the formation of a corps of German-American volunteers to fight alongside Germany and the conquest of Canada.

  Needless to say, this gave not only the xenophobic “nativists” but the drys ample anti-German ammunition. The ASL by 1914 had a hugely powerful public relations operation going (with millions of brochures distributed all over America every week), and Wheeler and his assistants lost no time reminding Americans that the brewing interests were almost all in German hands, and that at some brewers’ meetings the very language used was German.

  The malaise worsened with the increasing likelihood of American entry into the war. Overwhelmingly, the German-American community voted against Woodrow Wilson in the 1916 presidential election, and in turn the newly elected president stigmatized “hyphenism” — an oblique way of attacking German-Americans for their disloyalty. The German-Americans, overwhelmingly anti-Prohibitionist (though some German Methodist churches were not), also entered the fray. As early as 1914, Judge John Schwaab, president of the Ohio section of the German-American Alliance (Stadtsverband), had expressed the feelings of his community with rage bordering on paranoia: “The drink question,” he thundered, “is forced upon us by the same hypocritical puritans as over there (i.e., in Europe) are endeavoring to exterminate the German nation.” He was ready to fight the ASL “and the equally obnoxious advocates of female suffrage.”

  To their credit, when America actually entered the war (April 6, 1917) German-Americans, with very few exceptions, rallied behind the flag (Schwaab pledged his loyalty to Wilson), though there were demands (not confined to German-Americans) that conscription and the deployment of troops overseas should be determined by referendum. “Henceforth all discussion of the war and its justification must stop,” said Christliche Apologete, the organ of the German Methodist Church in America. “Every American owes his government loyalty and obedience.” A few irrepressibly vocal German-Americans who had not yet taken out U.S. citizenship returned to Germany (including the conductor of Cincinnati’s symphonic orchestra); others were interned.

  In Cincinnati itself, immediately after America’s 1917 entry into the war, the statue of Germania, with a few minor alterations, became the statue of Columbia; Bismarck Street became Montreal Street; Frankfurt Avenue, Connecticut Avenue; Schumann Street, Meredith Street; and, significantly, German Street was changed to English Street. German was banned from schools (“Dropped! Hun language barred!” headlined the Cincinnati Enquirer on December 12, 19
18), and books considered pro-German were removed from libraries. Vicious anti-German rumors — such as the canard that German-American meat-packing companies were deliberately putting ground glass in their hamburger — were current. The German-American Alliance was dissolved by Congress.

  The German-American brewers had naively believed that even if the Prohibitionists succeeded in banning hard liquor, they themselves would remain in business. As state after state passed dry legislation, they realized they had been overly optimistic and belatedly increased their lobbying in Washington. Wheeler was quick to ride the wave of anti-German hysteria by calling attention to such “unpatriotic” practices. The United States Brewers Association, a year before America’s entry into the war, came under heavy judicial scrutiny all over the country.

  In Pittsburgh, a federal grand jury began investigating their political activity, and as a result scores of brewers were fined. Texas brewers were fined $281,000. Rather than have their files scrutinized and revealed to the press, the Brewers Association in New York pleaded guilty and was fined $100,000.

  Without any evidence to back his charges, Wheeler claimed that not only the brewers’ money but German government funds had been used to “subvert” the administration. It was Wheeler again, behind the scenes, who initiated the setting up of a Senate investigative committee, which began examining the activities of the German-American Alliance in February of 1918. In a note to the ASL, he cynically admitted that “we could not have bought for $50,000 what we have gotten on this investigation thus far, and it will continue. . . . We are not willing it to be known at present that we started the investigation.” Later he wrote:

  It is a conservative statement to say that we have secured more than a million dollars worth of free advertising against the liquor traffic, through the investigation and the material that we have secured and used. There is not a week passes now but that some magazine or paper has in it a special article relating to the Alliance.

  The German Alliance and its financial backers, the Brewers Association, were the “enemy in the home camp.” Shortly afterward, the Alliance decided to disband, its charter was revoked, and Wayne Wheeler announced that “an active, organized opposition to Prohibition was silenced.”

  But as far as Wheeler was concerned, this was not sufficient. He wrote to A. Mitchell Palmer, who had been appointed Custodian of Alien Property.

  I am informed that there are a number of breweries around the country which are owned in part by alien enemies. It is reported to me that the Anheuser-Busch Company and some of the Milwaukee companies are largely controlled by alien Germans. . . . Have you made an investigation?

  Palmer subsequently attacked the United States Brewers publicly for “subsidizing the press, dominating politics, being unpatriotic and preventing youth of German descent from becoming Americanized.” There were “sensational” disclosures in the media. Like all good lobbyists, Wheeler never forgot a favor. In due course, he would use his influence with the Wilson Administration to get Palmer appointed attorney general.

  Palmer’s disclosures also enabled Wheeler to press for the first Senate investigation of the Brewers Association, and the findings, though lacking the sensational quality Wheeler had hoped for, further exacerbated ill public opinion. The fact that Arthur Brisbane — owner-publisher of the Washington Times, which mildly opposed total Prohibition and argued that beer should be exempt — had been loaned $500,000 by the brewers to take control of the paper was a further triumph for the extreme drys. It was all grist to the ASL’s propaganda department, by now working overtime — its printing operations working in shifts around the clock.

  Wheeler also made headlines on his own. As the éminence grise of the Senate committee investigating the German-American Alliance, he had access to seized confidential papers. While he was on a train to Chicago to make one of his innumerable speeches to a church audience, a page fell to the floor. It was part of a compromising German-Alliance document, inciting some Germans in America to stick together and aid the Kaiser in winning the war. The alert train attendant who picked it up believed he had laid hands on an important German spy, and alerted the police. On arrival at Elizabeth, the next stop, Wheeler was arrested. As his biographer noted, “he made capital at once of the arrest by citing it as evidence of the alertness of America and the popular hatred of the Germans, especially those connected with the brewing industry.”

  Wheeler also used America’s entry into the war to push through dry measures for the armed forces. The passing of the agricultural appropriations bill banning the sale of grain to distillers was largely his doing (to their consternation, it would remain in force after the end of the war). The measure did not, however, extend to either beer or wine, and the ASL, in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, made its disappointment clear — adding, with surprising arrogance, that “It will be our purpose to urge the passage of the legislation prohibiting the waste of foodstuffs in the manufacture of beer and wines at the earliest date.” This in turn provoked an angry editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer: “for brazen effrontery, unmitigated gall, superegoism, transcendent authority, supreme impudence, commend us to the legislative committee of the Prohibition lobby. . . . Here we have the President of the United States under orders to an officious and offensive lobby.”

  Wheeler was delighted by attacks of this type, and pressed on. He wrote Newton D. Baker, Wilson’s secretary of war, reminding him that 65 percent of the country was already dry.

  I hope you will use the weight of your influence to protect the boys in the army from the ruinous effect of liquor during the war. . . . The parents and friends of the boys from these places especially are vitally interested in having a safe environment for them at a time when they are homesick and lonesome in the training camps. Why would it not be a good thing to establish the mobilization camps in the dry states? Several measures have already been taken in Congress to prevent the sale of liquor in or near the training camps and also the sale of liquor to persons in uniform. A bill has been introduced also to prohibit anyone from using grain in making the liquor during the war. I am sure that the people of the nation would sustain you in any effort you may make along the lines of protecting the soldiers and the resources of our nation in this hour of peril.

  He even tried, but without success, to “protect the soldiers from the evils of the liquor traffic in France.” In a further letter to Baker, he urged him “inasmuch as this government cannot prohibit the sale of liquor to the soldiers in France as they do in this country” to promulgate an Army order to that effect, reminding him that “this has already been done with reference to spirituous liquors.” But the Army proved uncooperative, the Navy even more so. The monitoring vigilance of the ASL was such that it quickly reacted to an anti-Prohibition remark made in England by a senior U.S. Navy admiral, who had publicly referred to England’s “traditions of personal liberty, where I know I could get a drink of any kind I wanted if I came to England fifty years from now.” There were limits to Baker’s docility, as far as the ASL was concerned: he told Wheeler that “the department is not responsible for the individual utterances of the men in the Navy.”

  Wheeler had discovered a rich propaganda lode and was intent on exploiting it to fullest advantage. During the war, the Prohibition cause advanced hand-in-hand with the growing wave of anti-German sentiment, and largely because of the ASL propaganda machine, anti-German hysteria did not come to an end with the Armistice but persisted in one form or another until the very end of Prohibition. In 1923, five years after the end of the war, an ASL-inspired Senate Judiciary Committee would begin hearings on “brewing and liquor interests and German and Bolshevik propaganda.” It prefigured McCarthyism in action: nothing in its findings justified its title, for the only evidence Senate investigators could produce was that most breweries had contributed to various German-American associations throughout the country. There was absolutely no evidence they had financed anti-American propaganda in wartime, and the very idea that
the overwhelmingly Protestant, conservative German-American brewery-owning families might be Bolshevik dupes or stalking-horses was so ridiculous that the subject was not even brought up during the proceedings.

  The ASL’s finest hour, in the pre-Prohibition period, came with the Worldwide Prohibition Congress, held in Columbus, Ohio, in November of 1918, only a few days after the Armistice. By this time it was clear to all that nationwide Prohibition was unstoppable. The only point at issue was when it would finally be voted in by a three-fourths majority of state votes — some observers convinced that this would happen within a year and others that the states’ response would be unanimously favorable.

  Representatives from all over the world attended, though, reflecting the moral as well as imperial colonialism of the times, the Indian and Chinese delegations to the Congress supposed to represent their countries consisted exclusively of American missionaries. The ASL literature distributed to delegates made somewhat inflated claims: among countries “with Prohibition” figured “300 million people, or one sixth of the world’s population.” These included not only Canada and Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes (the latter not really sovereign countries), but Rumania and even Russia (with the cautionary asterisk: prior to 1914). “It is significant,” the ASL report added, “that they are all Christian nations.” Countries with “partial prohibition” included Denmark, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland, and a special mention was made of France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, “which outlawed absinthe.” Despite the bias in favor of Christianity, countries “under the influence of so-called Prohibition religions” were China, Manchuria, Japan, India, Persia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Arabia, and some parts of North Africa and Asia, whereas there was “nominal prohibition” in Africa. Liquor was “regulated” (and taxed) “in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal and their colonial possessions.”