0.3 Great war (part ii)  (Page 9/16)

By New Years Day, 1916, eighteen states had gone “dry.” Leading the anti-prohibition charge was August Busch, president of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. Busch wanted to make it a crime to drink to excess, and pledged to work aggressively with the federal and state governments to address the issues of the day. He even announced that his company was developing a nearly alcohol free beer (less than one-quarter of one percent of alcohol) and was spending $3,00,000 to build a new plant in St. Louis specifically to make and distribute this new product.

Shortly after the US officially entered the war but seven months before Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, Dr. Irving Fischer (professor of Public Economy at Yale and adviser to Woodrow Wilson) called for either the immediate end of the war or the immediate acceptance of prohibition. The world needed bread, the member of the Council of National Defense reported. He said the US was on the verge of a “food crisis” and taking into consideration all of the food stuffs, energy, and manpower used to make alcohol, the US could instead produce 11,000,000 one-pound loaves of bread daily. “We shall be wise to adopt [Prohibition] before we have food riots on our hands” and he curbed his argument with patriotism: “The nation demands that [anti-prohibitionists]put love of country above love of whisky.”

One month before Congress adopted the Eighteenth Amendment and sent it off to the states for ratification, the Anti-Saloon League reported that making, selling, and consuming alcohol only aided the German war effort and questioned the loyalty of Americans of German descent. According to Wayne Wheeler, counsel for the League, trafficking in alcohol was how anti-American groups finance their “promotion of German ideals and German Kultur.” “We cannot serve two masters,” he said. “America must come first if we are loyal.” Thus, alcohol becomes a symbol of your allegiance during the war. One hundred and forty-four years earlier, England slapped a tax on tea and thus tea became a symbol of your allegiance. Those who consumed the taxed good supported England, while those who switched to coffee (an untaxed beverage) were considered loyal to the cause of the American colonists.

Once Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment and sent it off to the states for ratification, the American Medical Association announced their support of Prohibition, likening alcohol to slavery and arguing that the future for the US if it continues to drink can be seen in Germany and likens that country “to a man suffering from the final stages of ‘a horrible disease, leading to insanity, with delusions of grandeur and magnificence.” Medical, social, and religious groups lined up in support of the Eighteenth Amendment.

In early January of 1919, Nebraska ratified the Eighteenth Amendment making it part of the Constitution. A small news item in the New York Times noted the passing of this nation’s oldest brewery, established in 1844. “The Pabst Brewing Company . . . passed out of existence today.” Near beer, or nearly alcohol-free beer, was produced and distributed in an early attempt to keep the brewery industry afloat. The report concluded, “Milwaukee does not take kindly to near beer.” Neither did the rest of this country.