Homeland

by John Jakes

  The second principle was accuracy. Accuracy was mandatory in brewing, where timing and temperatures were critical. But accuracy was also the keystone of any business that made money instead of losing it. The primary tool for achieving accuracy was mathematics. Joe Crown had a towering belief in the potency of correct information, and the absolute authority of numbers which provided it.

  In Germany, he’d learned his numbers before he learned to read. Though a mediocre student in most school subjects, at ciphering he was a prodigy. He could add a column of figures, or do calculations in his head, with astonishing speed. In Cincinnati, his first stop in America, he’d begged the owner of a Chinese laundry to teach him to use an abacus. One of these ancient counting devices could be found in his office, sitting on a low cabinet, within reach. Money measured success; counting measured money.

  Questions he asked of his employees often involved numbers. “What is the exact temperature?” “How large is the population in that market?” “How many barrels did we ship last week?” “What’s the cost, per square foot, of this expansion?”

  As for his third principle, modernity, he believed that, too, was crucial in business. Men who said the old ways were the best ways were fools, doomed to fall behind and fail. Joe was always searching for the newest methods to improve the brewery’s product, output, efficiency, cleanliness. He hadn’t hesitated to install expensive pasteurization equipment when he opened his first small brewery in Chicago. He’d been among the first to invest heavily in refrigerated freight cars. He insisted that modern machines be used in the office. From his desk he could hear the pleasing ratchet noise of a mechanical adding machine. This blended with the clicking keys and pinging bell on the black iron typewriter used for correspondence by his chief clerk, Stefan Zwick.

  Originally Stefan had resisted Joe’s suggestion that he learn to operate a typewriter. “Sir, I respectfully decline, a quill pen suits me perfectly.”

  “But Stefan,” Joe said to him in a friendly but firm way, “I’m afraid it doesn’t suit me, because it makes Crown’s look old-fashioned. However, I’ll respect your feelings. Please place a help wanted advertisement. We’ll hire one of those young women who specialize in using the machines. I believe they too are called typewriters.”

  Zwick blanched. “A woman? In my office?”

  “I’m sorry, Stefan, but you leave me no choice if you won’t learn to typewrite.”

  Stefan Zwick learned to typewrite.

  Every solid house or building was supported by a strong foundation; and so there was a foundation on which Joe Crown’s three principles rested. It was not unusual, or peculiar to him. It was the cheerful acceptance, not to say worship, of hard work. Among other artifacts, advertising sheets, flags and fading brown photographs of annual brewery picnics decorating his office there was a small framed motto which his wife had done colorfully in cross-stitch and put into a frame of gilded wood. Ohne Fleiss, kein Preis, it said. In rough translation, this reminded you that without industry there was no reward. From his desk Joe Crown couldn’t see the gold-framed motto; it hung on the wall behind him, slightly to his right. But he didn’t need to see it. Its truth was in him deeper than the marrow of his bones. He was a German.

  Joe Crown’s brewery occupied the entire 1000 block on the west side of North Larrabee Street. All the brewery buildings were of fine red brick with granite trim. The office, which faced Larrabee, resembled a brick fortress, with a square tower at each of the two front corners. From the towers flew the brewery’s flag with the gold crown emblem. On patriotic holidays the American flag was raised. Cut into the cornice were the words BRAUEREI CROWN. The German spelling of brewery was a token of pride and respect for the proprietor’s homeland.

  Joe Crown occupied a spacious corner office on the second floor of the main building. The front windows of the office overlooked Larrabee, the side ones Crown’s outdoor Biergarten. The garden had an elaborate gate on the street, and a doorway, directly below Joe’s office, leading inside to the Bierstube, which occupied most of the first floor. The taproom served beer and food from noon until late in the evening, as did the garden when the weather was fine. Large breweries commonly had such facilities.

  In one corner of the paneled office, the black, white, and red tricolor of Germany jutted up from a heavy walnut base. In the corner opposite, similarly displayed, stood an American flag, twice as large. Stuffed heads of an elk and a black bear further ornamented the walls. Joe had bought these, deeming them masculine decorations; he wasn’t a hunter.

  The morning was dark, the sky threatening. Through the open office windows came a steady background noise—the voices of laborers, the clang of heavy pipe being moved and hammered. New pipes were being installed between the second floor of the brewhouse and the bottling house across the alley to the west. National tax laws had once dictated that no beer could be bottled in the same building in which it was brewed. Recently, as a result of pressure and lobbying by major brewers, the laws had been rewritten. Although still continuing to move tax-stamped barrels across the alley by hand, Crown’s was racing to install connective piping to eliminate the practice. The numbers that would result from greater productivity were impressive.

  This morning Joe faced an unwelcome task at his noon meeting, and although he was prepared—the folder sat ready on one corner of the desk—he didn’t look forward to delivering bad news.

  Questions involving his family were bothering him too. Where was his nephew Pauli who was coming from Germany? The boy should have arrived by now. And when he did arrive, what of Joe’s own children? How would they treat the newcomer?

  He strove to put the worries aside and deal with some of the ever-present, ever-increasing work connected with the presidency of a successful and expanding brewery. Deciding he was now too warm, he hung his coat on a wall hook and worked in shirtsleeves after fixing sleeve garters just below each elbow. Distant thunder rumbled.

  He read and marked an article on advances in refrigeration equipment clipped from Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer, the paper of the U.S. Brewers’ Association. He corrected a draft letter to a real estate agent down in Terre Haute. The agent was negotiating on property near the main railway depot. Joe had distribution agencies in carefully chosen cities around the country, and he wanted to open one for southern Indiana. Expansion was mandatory if you wanted to be more than a local brewer.

  He approved a bill for next season’s box at games of the Chicago White Stockings; baseball was one of his guilty pleasures. He declined an invitation to join a new German singing society. He had a fine baritone, and loved to sing, but he had no time.

  Next he read a memorandum on yeast cultures from his brewmaster, Fred Schildkraut. He inked his pen and put a comment on the margin. He stepped to the door and asked Dolph Hix to come in.

  Hix was Joe’s senior sales agent, one of three men who roved Chicago and neighboring states to promote the consumption of the brewery’s products. They did this in a variety of ways, perhaps the most important being use of a generous expense account to buy customers free samples of Crown beer in saloons.

  Hix brought in a layout for a new advertisement to go in the city directory. He and Joe spent five minutes dissecting it. Joe’s requests were simple and terse. He expressed them in excellent English, still with a fairly heavy German accent. “This barley stalk illustration is a waste. Get rid of it, or at least reduce the size. I want the name of the brewery much larger. Crown’s is what we’re selling, Dolph, not barley stalks.”

  As soon as Hix left, Joe turned to study of a catalog sheet for a device which very much interested him—the latest basket-style pasteurizer for bottled beer. Crown’s produced both bottle and keg beer; several kinds of each. The best seller was Crown, a pale, light-bodied, effervescent Pilsen-style lager. Heimat Bier, old-fashioned, darker, with a heavier alcohol content, was a strong second in popularity. It was much favored among older Germans. Its slogan was Qualität “Superior.”

  For the
last twenty years, Americans had preferred lager over porter, ale, or any other stronger brew, English or German. Joe Crown was part of a small circle of brewers who had sensed that preference, and built fortunes upon it. The group included the Schaefer brothers of New York; Joe Schlitz and Valentin Blatz and Fred Miller in Milwaukee; Theo Hamm up in St. Paul; Michael Diversey, the successful and esteemed German Catholic whose earlier Chicago Brewery had been a model for Joe’s own; and perhaps the most audacious and formidable of them all, Adolphus Busch, who had taken over the struggling Bavarian Brewery in St. Louis in the 1850s, in partnership with his father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser. Of the lot, Joe liked Busch the least. He was a crude, ruthless man who served and drank expensive French wines at his own table and sneered at his brewery beer as “that slop.” He had come to America enjoying a handsome stipend from his father in the city of Kastel on the Rhine. He had never starved, never really struggled; his history was hardly the typical immigrant story, though he liked to boast that it was.

  Still, there was no avoiding a man such as Busch. In many cities and small towns he was a direct competitor. So were the other major brewers. And while they might hate one another as competitors, they also had a quiet pride in their membership in a small and elite fraternity. They were countrymen, they made beer—and they had one moral millstone around their collective necks. As Germans, they regarded beer as a food, a normal and healthy part of life. More puritanical Americans, people of other nationalities, thought differently. Beer wasn’t food, but a tool of the Devil. It was sinful to drink it anytime, but blasphemous to drink it on Sunday. That fundamental cultural difference created a problem for brewers that never went away.

  Eleven o’clock. Joe was marginally aware of a drop in the noise level outside. It was the hour of zweites Frühstück, the second breakfast. The brewery and construction workers were lounging about munching hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches of bacon or sliced wurst on black bread, cups of beer. Joe was studying the drawing of the pasteurizer when, jarring in the stillness, footsteps pounded on the stairs and along the outer hall. After a frantic knock the door burst open.

  “Mr. Crown, help. Benno is killing Emil Tagg.” The panting white-haired man was his chief clerk, Stefan Zwick.

  Joe jumped up and ran after Zwick without asking questions. Benno Strauss had caused trouble before, and Benno’s kind of trouble was always serious. Disputes between the men were handled by the front office, never the brewmaster.

  Joe ran down the back stairs past an open window. The noise level had risen again; men were yelling and egging on the participants in a fight. Going out the door, Joe dashed past Zwick, and crossed the alley to the forecourt of the bottling house. A ring of about twenty men surrounded the combatants. As he pushed through, Joe quickly looked away from one of them who was watching him for a reaction.

  Benno Strauss had both hands clamped on the throat of Emil Tagg, who was bent backward over a keg on a hand truck. The hand truck lay flat on the uneven bricks. Tagg was foreman of the bottling house. The machinery in his care clanked away beyond an open door.

  Though Joe Crown was about Emil’s size—much smaller than Benno—he rushed straight at the bigger man, hooking an arm around Benno’s neck, which was only possible because Benno was leaning over. “Get off of him, Benno. Get off this instant.” He tugged and yanked.

  The red drained from Benno’s face. Joe felt the tension leave Benno’s body. He let go; stepped back. Benno released his stranglehold on Emil after giving him a final furious shake. Emil eyed Benno and rubbed his throat.

  “The rest of you back to work,” Joe said. His eyes raked the circle of men. Most of them left immediately, with only some muttered comments.

  Joe dusted his shirt sleeves. “Now what’s this all about?”

  Emil and Benno continued to eye each other. Benno Strauss was huge. Because of his strangely oriental eyes, his shaved head and his bushy mustache, Benno always reminded Joe of some kind of genie. He was a “Man of ’48”—one of the exiles who fled Germany after the failed revolution. Benno had the distinction of actually having taken part in fighting. At age ten he’d carried water for a band of rebel students, all of whom had been shot down or arrested. Or so he said.

  Benno was chief of the Crown teamsters. A fifty-four-year-old bachelor, he was twice as strong as most men of twenty. He belonged to the National Union of Brewers, the organization of brewery engineers, firemen, maltsters, teamsters that was trying to strangle the industry with its exorbitant demands. In fact he was the only member on the premises. Joe Crown didn’t recognize the union.

  “Out with it, I want an explanation. It’s up to you, Benno, you’re the aggressor.” He was testy; the disruption irked him. Especially since the culprit was an avowed radical.

  Benno wiped his sweaty jaw with the sleeve of his smock. “This one called me a name.” Benno’s accent was heavy, his English poor.

  “What name? Out with it.”

  “It was filthy. About my mother. I ain’t going to repeat it. But I don’t allow nobody to say such a thing.”

  “Is this true, Emil?”

  “Yes, Mr. Crown. But, damn it, am I supposed to ignore it when he rags me? He never shuts up. He came at me preaching that same old stuff about an eight-hour day. The same stuff that got Spies and Parsons and the other Haymarket reds hung or jailed. You understand, don’t you?”

  Joe avoided the question. Tagg was a highly capable man, but Joe disliked his toadying. “Is that all?”

  “No. He started in on the pardon.”

  Ah, the pardon. Perhaps the hottest public issue of this or any recent year. Governor John Peter Altgeld, a stalwart German but disgracefully liberal, wanted to commute the sentences of Fielden, Neebe and Schwab, the three Haymarket conspirators still living. The other five who had been arrested after a bomb went off during an 1886 labor demonstration at Haymarket Square were dead.

  Governor Altgeld had always insisted that the trial of the eight accused conspirators, three of whom were German, had never proved their guilt. Indeed, it was conceded that the actual bomb thrower hadn’t been caught or even identified. Sentences had been handed down on the grounds that the defendants had caused a bomb to be thrown, by staging the demonstration and working the crowd to a frenzy with radical rhetoric.

  Benno wasn’t even slightly upset by Tagg’s accusation. “Sure, we want pardons for the Haymarket men. Want an eight-hour day here at Crown’s, no more ten and a half. To keep silent about these things is yellow. I am for propaganda of—”

  “Propaganda of the deed,” Joe finished. “I told you before, Benno, don’t spread your red doctrine on my time. And don’t disrupt work. One more fight—one—and you’ll be discharged.”

  “Okay, sir, I hear what you say.” The words were surprisingly meek. Joe wasn’t fooled.

  He brushed his sleeves again, unconsciously, then did a quick about-face and marched back in the direction of the administration building.

  What shall I do about him? Joe thought. Benno would continue to agitate, he was sure of that. In the wrong circumstances—any widespread labor dispute in the city, for instance—he would be a highly dangerous man to have around.

  But he’s a bull, he can do the work of three men when it’s necessary.

  He stopped abruptly. His way was blocked by a young man with arms folded. The young man was smiling. Joe reddened.

  “Didn’t you hear my instructions? Get back to work.”

  The young man let his arms drop. “Sure, Pop. You’re the boss here.”

  Here.

  Joe Crown pushed his son aside and walked on, grim-faced.

  In his office he continued to think about Benno Strauss. Benno was one of the thousands who’d arrived in Chicago during the second great wave of German immigration in the 1880s. He claimed he’d lived in half a dozen European countries after the revolution. That he’d been jailed more than once, but had also outwitted and eluded the police many times. It was hard to tell which of his stories abou
t past escapes and heroics in the socialist-anarchist cause were invention. Benno was ein Schaumschläger; a windbag; enthralled by the sound of his own voice, the expression of his own opinions. When he got going in German, he was a stirring speaker, Joe had to give him that.

  Benno belonged to the Lehr- und Wehr-Verein, the league of armed workingmen. They preached self-defense against capitalist enemies. Benno had carried a pistol to work until Joe saw it and banned it. That was the first issue that had arisen between them.

  Further, Benno refused to become a naturalized citizen, or even consider it. Joe held that against him, though he knew he shouldn’t. He employed at least a dozen men who had the same resistance, from either an excess of pride in the fatherland, or some feeling that they might pack up and go home if they didn’t do well in America.

  Benno was a fine worker when he felt like it. So, for the present, Joe decided to put up with his agitation, hoping it would get no worse. If it did, Benno would go. Joe’s tolerance was not infinite.

  He pulled out his gold pocket watch and found his hand shaking slightly. The confrontation had upset him, especially that moment with his son.

  With his nail he lifted the thin gold watch cover. The dial showed twenty-two minutes past eleven. His driver was due to arrive in precisely eight minutes, to take him first to the Palmer House, then to his club, the Union League, for the meeting with two other members. One was the traction magnate Charles Yerkes, a man of shady origins who had served time in Pennsylvania for stock fraud. The other was the former congressman from the Eighteenth District downstate, Joseph Gurney Cannon, commonly called Uncle Joe, or sometimes Foul Mouth Joe because of a tendency to lace his utterances with profanity; often when he rose to speak in Congress, women left the gallery. After long service, Cannon had been voted out in the Democratic sweep of 1890.

  Joe put on his coat and white felt homburg with a fancy ribbon edging the brim. He took his gold-knobbed cane and the meeting folder and went downstairs to the Stube. On the front counter stood the newest token of modernity, a gleaming golden cash register. It was the latest model from the National Cash Register Company of Dayton, incorporating a cash drawer, bell, indicators that popped up in the window, and a daily detail strip that provided an exact record of individual sales in chronological order. Ah, numbers!