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Beer Became More Popular

As whiskey and cocktails climbed the social ladder, beer descended it. Frank Norris had his poor brute McTeague, in the novel of that name, make the point at his own wedding when a guest proposes a champagne toast: “The guests rose and drank. Hardly one of them had ever tasted champagne before. The moment’s silence after the toast was broken by McTeague’s exclaiming with a long breath of satisfaction: ‘That’s the best beer I ever drank.’”

But there was a flip side to the association of beer, saloons, and workingmen—a view, so to speak, from below. And this bottom-up perspective has done more than anything else to shape what beer means in America. If the saloon was a place of sin to middle-class reformers, to working people and immigrants it was a place of refuge. For the five cents a glass of beer cost, the saloon offered cards and billiards, information, food, and, most of all, company. “The saloon exists in our town,” a Westerner wrote in 1912, “because … it offers a common meeting place. It dispenses good cheer. It ministers to the craving for fellowship. To the exhausted, worn-out body, to the strained nerves, the relaxation brings rest.” In cities, workers transferred their traditional social drinking and bonding to the saloon from the factory, where industrialization and rigid timetables made it both unacceptable and dangerous. In a saloon, over a beer, where the ritual of treating your neighbor to a drink made every man equal, there was a kind of virtual democracy, a haven from the economic pressures of the workplace and the aspirational pressures of home.

Beer acquired a new attitude from the working-class culture of the saloon, a kind of macho bohemianism that potently combined bravado, rebelliousness, masculine sentimentality, self-deprecating humor, and a large dose of skepticism about American middle-class success. Jack London, appropriately, was probably the first writer to capture it in print. His 1913 memoir John Barleycorn, ostensibly a temperance tract, is rather more an ode to beer, male bonding, and a devil-may-care attitude toward work and money: ” ‘Come on and have a beer,’ I invited. Again we stood at the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I who paid—ten cents! A whole hour of my labor at a machine. … Money no longer counted. It was comradeship that counted.… There was a stage when the beer didn’t count at all, but just the spirit of comradeship of drinking together.” Beer, for the first but hardly the last time in our literature, is part of the workingman’s rite of passage: “Ay, even the barkeeper was giving me commendation as a man. ‘He’s been sousin’ here with Nelson all afternoon.’ Magic words! The accolade delivered by a barkeeper with a beer glass! … And so I won my manhood’s spurs.”

London understood something else as well. This new culture of beer contained more than the low comedy of rebelliousness and the sentimentality of male friendship. It also held the romance of adventure and the elegy of a lost era of freedom, of heroism and power, when those now humble were kings: “The more beer Captain Nelson and I drank the better we got acquainted. … So he drifted back to his wild young days, and spun many a rare yarn for me, while we downed beer, treat by treat, all through a blessed summer afternoon. And it was only John Barleycorn that made possible that long afternoon with the old sea dog.” All this was part of the working-class retort to the reformers and evangelists, and in one form or another it would resonate in the American popular imagination long after Crane’s beer demon had become period melodrama.

By the early twentieth century, beer—the drink of moderation, of fun, of sports, most of all of workingmen—was poised to assume its place as national drink and national symbol when it ran into a weird detour. American beer had not yet entirely shed its links with Germany and Germans, associations wealthy beer barons like Adolphus Busch, with his estates in America and Germany, his backing of the Tyrolean Alps beer concession at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and his support of Germany’s exhibit there (which won him the Order of the Crown from the Kaiser), did nothing to discourage.

As America’s entry into World War I neared, these associations became, to say the least, a liability. The brewers’ support of German-American cultural groups, and their lobbying of the federal government to fend off politically well-organized prohibitionists, suddenly looked like a secret plot to undermine the war effort. Antialcohol feeling merged with nationalism and xenophobia, and suddenly beer was under attack. “We have German enemies in this country too,” declared one leading Wisconsin prohibitionist in 1918, “and the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.”

When Prohibition came, beer was banned along with more potent beverages. Some companies tried to market “near beers” with most of the alcohol removed, under brand names like Bevo, Yip, Ona, Chrismo, Famo, Luxo, Quizz, Vivo, and Hoppy. Drinkers, not surprisingly, weren’t having any. (The food authority Waverley Root called near beer “such a wishywashy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a Puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever.”) Most brewers, unable to compete with bootleg beer and whiskey, went broke. Home-brewing supply stores mushroomed, but the quality of home brew was awful and the effect unpredictable. “After I’ve had a couple of glasses I’m terribly sleepy,” one drinker reported. “Sometimes my eyes don’t seem to focus and my head aches. I’m not intoxicated, understand, merely feel as if I’ve been drawn through a knothole.”

The irony was that Prohibition torpedoed a century of temperance campaigning. Since the Civil War the consumption of spirits had declined as beer became more popular. Prohibition changed that, driving people away from beer and toward spirits, which carried a higher profit margin for bootleggers. Samuel Eliot Morison recalled that “college students who before Prohibition would have a keg of beer and sit around singing the ‘Dartmouth Stein Song’ and “Under the Anheuser Busch,’ now got drunk quickly on bathtub gin, and could manage no lyric more complicated than ‘How Dry Am I!’” Heywood Broun dubbed the Volstead Act “a bill to discourage the drinking of good beer in favor of indifferent gin.” Worse, there were dangerous grumblings. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor fumed that Prohibition was a class law directed against the beer of the workingman, since wealthy people had laid in supplies of wine before the ban and were the only ones who could afford to drink in speakeasies.

Repeal was an act of sanity as well as of political expediency, and it established a legal distinction between beer and spirits that remains to this day. Government was back in the business of promoting beer, allowing it to be sold in grocery stores and supermarkets alongside its new competition, soft drinks. Prohibition had killed the old saloon, which had offered beverages of all kinds both for drinking on the premises and for carrying out. New laws restricted public drinking and encouraged package sales of beer for home consumption, which grew steadily through the thirties and forties, fueled by the introduction in 1935 of the beer can. Anyway, beer drinkers had gotten out of the tavern habit during Prohibition, and new refrigerators made it easier to keep beer at home.

World War II showed how far Americanization had come. This time there was no talk of prohibition for the sake of the war effort, nor was there a whisper of anti-German sentiment directed against brewers. Instead, brewing was designated an essential national industry, and the largest beer companies were asked to set aside 15 percent of their production for servicemen. Grateful returning soldiers would help make beer an inextricable part of postwar American life and would contribute to the dominance of a few powerful national chain breweries.

The story of beer in America since World War II, apart from skyrocketing consumption, is about the shift in power from sales to marketing. By the 1960s the big brewers were in every market, and the battle had become one for market share. Advertising spending increased exponentially, brand image became all important, and new products—lite, low-alcohol, no-alcohol, “draft,” malt liquor, ice beer—proliferated as the giant brewers fought among themselves and tried to fend off flanking moves, first from imported beers and then from the micros.

But the symbols and emotions with which these battles were (and continue to be) fought were already familiar, and the marketing blitz simply confirmed their continued power in the American imagination. Or, in one case, continued implausibility. Beer and temperance, for example, a theme that went back to the Puritans and the Founders, was the centerpiece of a fifties advertising campaign, “Beer and Ale—America’s Beverages of Moderation.” Family picnics, fishing trips, and boating jaunts all were used to suggest that beer was just a normal part of middle-class life, or, as an early Pabst television commercial put it, “It’s beer, Mama, and TV … three ingredients of a recipe for successful living.” Mad, with its unfailing nose for hype, quickly parodied the ads, depicting pie-eyed, Bermuda-shorted suburbanites stumbling around at their backyard barbecues.

Beer as fun has had slightly more staying power, but it is closelv tied to faddishness and can easilv eet out of hand. As it did in the late eighties, when Bud and Miller resorted to spring-break promotions and wet-T-shirt contests to carry their message to college students, roughly half of whom were under the new federally mandated 21-year-old drinking age. A bizarre-looking female bull terrier named Honey Tree Evil Eye, better known as Spuds MacKenzie, party animal, was the last straw. Lawmakers were convinced that brewers were intentionally targeting children. The industry, under threat of an advertising ban, had to accept warning labels in 1988, and two years later the federal beer excise tax was doubled.

Ever since the days of the Beer and Whiskey League, beer has had a powerful connection to sports. (Just as you would never serve beer at an art opening, you’d never bring wine to a Super Bowl party.) And it’s no wonder, considering the aura of men-at-work-andplay they share. It was in the 1920s that New York brewer Jacob Ruppert, co-owner of the Yankees from 1915 and sole owner soon thereafter, raided the Boston Red Sox for Babe Ruth, and then built him a stadium. Thirty years later Gussie Busch bought the St. Louis Cardinals, acquiring the right to sell his beer to thousands of fans and also to place Budweiser signs all over a stadium seen by millions of television viewers. But this would turn out to be child’s play compared with the marketing wars of the 1970s, when Miller and then Bud would between them buy up every available minute of ad time during sporting events, using jock spokesmen to make the point that the new “lite” beer was just as macho as the fullcalorie kind.

But most enduring, and most powerful, is beer’s connection to the culture of American workingmen, a connection that’s grown only stronger as the idea of the working class has morphed over the past century into the idea of the average Joe, Joe Six-pack. With all of beer’s obvious success in all social strata, it still carries overtones of nose-thumbing at class pretension and high culture. A classic example is the Marx Brothers’ 1935 A Night at the Opera. When the highbrow singer Lasparri is knocked cold by his dresser (Harpo), bystanders Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho) and Fiorello (Chico) each plant a foot on his body as if stepping up to the bar. “Two beers, bartender,” says Groucho, and Chico pipes in, “I’ll have two beers too.” It’s a straight shot from there to the wild, beer-soakedantiauthoritarianism of the 1978 Animal House, with Bluto (John Belushi), the symbolic center of the movie’s anarchy, crushing beer cans and smashing beer bottles aeainst his head.

In another and subtler guise, this is the macho bohemian side of beer culture, a line that stretches from Jack London’s waterfront dives to the Beats, all variations on working-class skepticism. The person who may have understood this strain best was John Steinbeck, whose 1945 novel Cannery Row gave us the nonconformist scientist Doc and the ne’er-do-wells of Monterey’s sardine district. “‘There,’” Doc says of them, “‘are your true philosophers. … In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.’ This speech so dried out Doc’s throat that he drained his beer glass. He waved two fingers in the air and smiled. ‘There’s nothing like that first taste of beer,’ he said.”

The deepest layer of all, though, lies in the ties between beer, work, and the saloon and the connection of all of these to a working-class vision of democracy that has seduced the whole culture. Somehow, by the middle of the twentieth century, the bar where men shared beer had picked up resonances of both the colonial tavern, mythical birthplace of patriotism and democracy, and the pre-Prohibition saloon, refuge from the competitive marketplace, from confining domesticity, from the coldness of modern life, from the pressure to rise and “better” oneself. The Miller brand discovered the power of the image when, in the late sixties, marketers changed the advertising approach. “The Champagne of Bottled Beers,” with its implicit appeal to class, became “It’s Miller Time,” an ode to the workingman, and Miller found itself shooting up from seventh place in beer sales to second.

If wine was about class aspiration, and cocktails were connected with the compulsive striving for success, beer, in this deepest layer, was about accepting who you are and trying to get by. It was about effacing, for a time, the bruising society outside the bar with the joy and dignity, the original democracy, of the community inside. And it was about holding on, in a harsh world, to your sanity and your sense of humor.

This is beer’s stoic poetry, a song that carries memories of the generations of struggling new Americans it has soothed and restored—first Germans and Irish, later Poles and Czechs and Russians and others in their turn. The writer Joseph Mitchell understood its quiet music. In 1940 he described an old saloon almost as if it were a secular church —a sacred refuge, out of time. “It is a drowsy place,” he wrote, in a passage that goes to the heart of the matter. “The bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the wall have not been in agreement for many years. The clientele is motley. … In the summer they sit in the back room, which is as cool as a cellar. In the winter they grab chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for home, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old and alone, ‘God be wit’ yez,’ Kelly says as they go out the door.”

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