Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 2

He closed with a sign-off that would be made famous some years later by newsman Edward R. Murrow, "Good night and good luck," then walked over to a VIP table and announced, "Beer is now being served."

Indeed it was. Over the next eight hours, America's beer cities went on a bender unlike anything ever seen before, not even after the Armistice in 1918. Back at Kyum Brothers Cafe, a local politician named Larry McDaniel squeezed his ample belly behind the bar, raised a ten-cent gla.s.s of golden liquid, and hollered to the cheering crowd, "This is Democratic beer." At 2:30 a.m., four apparently democratically inclined beer lovers attempted to hijack an Anheuser-Busch truck but were interrupted by the police. By breakfast time, Anheuser-Busch had moved the equivalent of 3,588 barrels out of its plant, and the citizens of St. Louis had literally drunk the town dry; there wasn't a drop of beer left anywhere outside the brewery.

The situation was the same in all the big brewing towns, as demand outstripped all capacity for supply, prompting Gussie Busch to make a public plea for moderation. "We are asking people to hold back their orders," he said. "I believe they are for not less than five million cases. Our Pacific Coast division has ordered 74,000 cases, and a man in Seattle has asked us to send him a seventy-five-car trainload as soon as we can." In what would become a recurring theme in the decades to come, he explained, "The reason the supply is so limited is that beer must be thoroughly aged. This process takes more than three months, and cannot be hurried even under present exceptional conditions."

In New York on the morning of April 8, thousands gathered to watch as the Clydesdales clopped through the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan and down Fifth Avenue to the Empire State Building, where Al Smith was waiting with a live radio microphone. In Washington, the White House was inundated with shipments from breweries all over the country, but Anheuser-Busch's huge bay horses with their white-feathered hooves caused a sensation when they pranced proudly along Pennsylvania Avenue with their package for the president.

The Clydesdales were featured prominently in the company's full-page newspaper ads the following day, along with heroically rendered images of American male archetypes-the Farmer, the Laborer, the Hunter, the Athlete. "Beer is Back!" the ads proclaimed, expounding on the same patriotic, Depression-busting theme as Gussie's radio address the night before:

Beer is back. But is that all? No. To cheer, to quicken American life with hospitality of old, the friendly gla.s.s of good fellowship is back. Sociability and good living return to their own, once more to mingle with memories and sentiments of yesterday. America looks forward, and feels better.

No one felt better than the Busches, of course, because no one had more to gain-or regain-from the repeal. Before Prohibition, they had been to beer what Rockefeller was to oil and Carnegie to steel, and the story of their rise in America rivaled that of the most famous robber barons of the Gilded Age.

Adolphus Busch, the second youngest of twenty-two children born to a well-to-do wine merchant in Kastel, Germany, arrived in the United States in 1857 at the age of eighteen, in the midst of a ma.s.sive influx of German immigrants. More than a million of them had arrived in the previous decade, a "Teutonic tide," in the words of one historian. Unlike the Irish, who were pouring into the country desperately impoverished, the German emigres tended to be middle-cla.s.s liberals seeking social and economic freedom following the failure of a political revolution in 1848. They came to America with money to spend and migrated inland, with huge numbers of them settling in an area of the Mississippi River valley that became known as the German triangle, the points of which were Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.

Adolphus landed in New Orleans and traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where the German-born population had swelled from a mere sixteen families in 1833 to fully one quarter of the city's 161,000 residents the day he stepped off a steamboat. A June 1857 editorial in the newspaper the Republican described how the city had been transformed by his countrymen: "A sudden and almost unexpected wave of emigration swept over us, and we found the town inundated with breweries, beer houses, sausage shops, Apollo Gardens, Sunday concerts, Swiss cheese and Holland herrings. We found it almost necessary to learn the German language before we could ride in an omnibus, or buy a pair of breeches, and absolutely necessary to drink beer at a Sunday concert."

St. Louis even had a German-language newspaper. The Mississippi Hansel-Zeitung reported in detail on the operations of the city's thirty to forty breweries, which were producing more than 60,000 barrels a year, or about 18 million five-cent gla.s.ses of beer, all of which were consumed locally.

Adolphus worked for two years as a clerk on a riverboat. When his father died in 1859, he used his inheritance to buy into a brewery supply business, forming Wattenberg, Busch & Company. One of his early customers was Eberhard Anheuser, a prosperous soap manufacturer who had come into ownership of the failed Bavarian Brewery through a defaulted $90,000 loan, and was trying to make it profitable.

On March 7, 1861, three days after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, Adolphus married Anheuser's daughter Lilly in St. Louis's Holy Ghost German Evangelical Lutheran Church. It's unlikely that Anheuser's beer was served at the wedding reception; it was so foul tasting that tavern owners were accustomed to patrons spitting it back across the bar at them. Anheuser, struggling to sell 4,000 barrels a year, soon ran up a sizable debt to his son-in-law's supply house. In 1865, after a four-month stint in the Union Army, Adolphus went to work for his father-in-law, and by 1873 the E. Anheuser & Co. brewery was profitably producing 27,000 barrels a year. Eberhard rewarded Adolphus in 1879 by making him a partner in the rechristened Anheuser-Busch Brewing a.s.sociation and allowed him to purchase a minority stake in the company, amounting to 238 of the 480 shares of stock. When Eberhard died in 1880, he divided his stock among his five adult children. With Lilly's 116 shares added to his own 238, Adolphus controlled a majority, and his own destiny.

One of the first things he did as president of his own brewery was to acquire, through a close friend and local restaurant owner named Carl Conrad, the recipe for a beer that for years had been produced by monks in a small Bohemian village named Budweis. The crisp, pale lager was known in the region as Budweiser. Adolphus adopted the name along with Conrad's refined recipe and, now armed with a compet.i.tive product, set about revolutionizing the brewing industry.

Adolphus was the first brewer in the United States to pasteurize his product, which enabled him to bottle Budweiser and store it longer without fear of spoilage. He built a system of rail-side icehouses and became the first brewer to distribute his beer far beyond the local market. The icehouses morphed into a national distribution network when he pioneered the use of artificial (non-ice) refrigeration, first in his plant and then in a fleet of 250 railroad cars that transported his beer throughout the country. A proponent of vertical integration before there was even a name for it, he bought a controlling interest in the company that built the rail cars he used, as well as the company that made the gla.s.s bottles his brewery consumed in huge quant.i.ties. He bought two coal mines on the Illinois side of the river and built his own railroad connecting them to the brewery.

And he extended his control of the process all the way to the other end of the supply line by acquiring an interest in countless taverns, often paying for a new proprietor's liquor license, permits, and sometimes even rent, and providing promotional light fixtures and gla.s.sware, all in exchange for a signed agreement that the establishment would sell only Anheuser-Busch products.

As other brewers scrambled to compete by buying into their own saloons, abuses abounded, with proprietor-partners dabbling in prost.i.tution and gambling on the side, bribing local police and politicians to look the other way. Those corrupt practices would come back to bite the brewing industry, but not before Adolphus Busch had built Budweiser into the first national brand of beer.

Of course, Adolphus got an a.s.sist from the U.S. population, which more than doubled between 1820 and 1870 with the arrival of 7.5 million immigrants, two-thirds of whom came from the beer-drinking countries of Germany and Ireland. He saw the dramatic population growth in St. Louis's German neighborhoods of Carondelet and Soulard and in the Irish section of the city known as the Kerry Patch, and he concluded that beer was on its way to becoming America's national drink. So he plowed profits back into the company, building more and more production capacity. Sure enough, between 1870 and 1900 per capita consumption of beer in the United States quadrupled, rising from four gallons a year to sixteen, and Anheuser-Busch became the largest brewer in the country, pumping out more than a million barrels of beer annually by the turn of the century.

Adolphus turned that river of beer into a mountain of money that he lavished on himself and his large family (Lilly gave birth to thirteen children, nine of whom survived to adulthood). With a personal income of an estimated $2 million a year at a time when there was no income tax, he maintained baronial mansions in St. Louis; Cooperstown, New York; Pasadena, California; and Bad Schwalbach, Germany, on the banks of the Rhine River. He called the Pasadena estate Ivy Wall, but it became known to the public as Busch's Garden due to the thirty-five acres of surrounding flora, which cost $500,000 to plant and required fifty gardeners to maintain. The estate was the envy of his fellow tyc.o.o.ns Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, who hurried to build their own mansions nearby, creating Pasadena's famed "millionaire's row."

Adolphus traveled between his American estates in a private rail car, immodestly named the Adolphus and outfitted sumptuously enough to earn its description as "a palace on wheels." He built his own rail spur so the Adolphus could roll right up to the back door of the family's princ.i.p.al home at 1 Busch Place, located in the middle of a large park dotted with ponds and fountains on the grounds of the brewery. Everything he did was in the grandest style; some would say over-the-top or gauche. Indeed, the French-descended, blue-blooded banking cla.s.s in St. Louis so disdained his showiness that they coined an adjective to describe it-"Buschy." But Adolphus didn't much care what they thought. He didn't need their money; he did all his own financing. And he didn't need their social acceptance; he numbered among his friends Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The latter called him "Prince Adolphus."

Among the general population in St. Louis, Adolphus was viewed as a benevolent monarch whose carriage whooshing past would cause common folk to catch their breath and cry out, "Oh, look!" And he played the part with flair. Always resplendent in the latest European tailoring, his flowing gray hair, twirled mustache, and elaborately long goatee trimmed daily by his personal servant barber, he greeted pa.s.sersby in a booming, heavily accented voice and had a habit of handing out silver coins to the children who, understandably, came running whenever he appeared on the street. It wasn't so much affection he inspired among the populace as it was awe. He exuded power and privilege; he personified the American possibility. When he and Lilly celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, more than 13,000 people showed up at the St. Louis Coliseum for a party in their honor. The fact that the couple was 1,400 miles away at their Pasadena estate was more than made up for by the fact that the beer was free and unlimited. The crowd managed to consume 40,000 bottles in a few hours.

For all his Old Worldliness, Adolphus had a genuine feel for his adopted country, and he exhibited a keen understanding of America's symbols and myths. In 1896, for example, he conceived a brilliant advertising campaign based on an epic painting of the Battle of Little Bighorn that he saw hanging on the wall behind the bar in a St. Louis saloon. t.i.tled Custer's Last Fight, the eye-grabbing nine-by-sixteen-foot oil on canvas was the work of a local artist named Ca.s.silly Adams, a descendant of Founding Father John Adams. The painting depicted General Custer with his long hair flying, saber in hand, fighting desperately in the last few minutes before he and his men were overwhelmed by thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. The saloon was about to go into bankruptcy, and Adolphus was among the major creditors, so he acquired the painting along with its reproduction rights for a reported $35,000. He commissioned another artist to paint a smaller, modified version of Adams's work, instructing him to add more blood and scalpings. Then he distributed 150,000 lithographic prints of the painting to taverns, restaurants, hotels, and anywhere else that Budweiser was sold. There was no product mentioned or beer bottle pictured, just the legend "Anheuser-Busch Brewing a.s.sociation" emblazoned at the bottom.

In a masterstroke of a.s.sociative advertising, Adolphus had branded a piece of American history and made both the painting and the brewery part of the nation's popular culture. The campaign proved so successful that fifty years and an estimated million prints later, customers still crowded around a framed copy of Custer's Last Fight that hung on the wall in one small-town Missouri tavern. According to an article published in 1945 by the Kansas Historical Society, "It is probably safe to say that [Custer's Last Fight] has been viewed by a greater number of the lower-browed members of society-and by fewer art critics-than any other picture in American history." More to the point, untold millions of those lowbrow barflies became loyal Budweiser drinkers, and Adolphus's promotional genius became part of his company's DNA.

Adolphus's one professional failure was his inability to turn back the rising tide of Prohibition, a fight that consumed his final years. He spent a fortune trying to promote beer in general-and Budweiser in particular-as a "beverage of moderation," an antidote to the devil whiskey that so incensed the temperance movement. One of the company's pre-Prohibition ad campaigns even featured the tagline "Budweiser Spells Temperance." In his effort to create a wholesome, healthy image for his product, and to differentiate it from that of the nation's distillers, Adolphus went so far as to host a party at his Pasadena estate for seven thousand members of the American Medical a.s.sociation. He railed against the anti-alcohol movement as an attack on individual rights. One particularly florid newspaper ad for Budweiser invoked the name of his hero, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck:

"Bismarck, like all Germans, prized Personal Liberty as the breath of life-a NATURAL RIGHT to be guarded and defended at any cost. Among our millions of law-abiding German-American citizens there is not a man who does not consider it insolent tyranny of the most odious kind for any legislation to issue this command: 'Thou shalt NOT eat this; Thou shall NOT drink that.' Germans know that there is no evil in the light wines and beers of their fathers. EVIL IS ONLY IN THE MAN WHO MISUSES THEM."

Adolphus became the Prohibitionists' favorite poster boy when they figured out that he and the other major brewers owned or controlled a majority of the country's saloons, which sold most of the whiskey they believed was destroying American life. Author Ernest Barron Gordon, then the foremost chronicler of the anti-alcohol movement, denounced him as a "promoter of villainous dives."

Adolphus took his case against prohibition directly to President William McKinley. Upon being introduced to the president at a political function, he launched into an impa.s.sioned thirty-minute lecture warning of the danger in outlawing the "light, happy" beverage that he claimed was "demanded" by 85 to 90 percent of the adult population.

"Mr. President, the demand I speak of is prompted by human nature itself," he said, his voice rising. "And believe me, if the fanatics should ever succeed in preventing its being satisfied legitimately, the people will resort to narcotics or stimulants so injurious as to eventually undermine the health of the nation."

On June 10, 1910, as Adolphus and Lilly were about to set sail from New York on their annual summer trip to Germany, he told reporters that, "if given full sway," Prohibition would "ruin the whole world."

Adolphus lived to see his vision of beer in America borne out. In 1911 the United States surpa.s.sed Germany as the No. 1 beer-producing country in the world, with an output of nearly 63 million barrels, 1.6 million of which were the product of Anheuser-Busch, Inc. of St. Louis, Mo. In 1912 the U.S. Census Bureau ranked brewing as the country's seventeenth-largest industry.

Adolphus did not live to see his worst nightmare come true. On October 10, 1913, after a day of hunting with his friend Carl Conrad in the woods near Villa Lilly, he fell ill, and several days later he died. His body was brought back to New York aboard his favorite steamer, the Kronprinz Wilhelm, and then carried home to St. Louis by a special five-car train that included the Adolphus. Back at his mansion, 30,000 people-more than 5,000 of them brewery workers-viewed his body before the funeral, and an estimated 100,000 lined the route to the cemetery. At the time, the cause of death was reported as heart failure. Years later, it was disclosed that the heart failure may have been caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

Adolphus left an estate worth a staggering $60 million. His stock was divided equally among his seven surviving children, with each receiving thirty-eight shares, except for the eldest son, August Anheuser Busch Sr., who received an additional three shares for serving as a trustee along with his mother, Lilly. In addition to the 116 shares she had inherited from her father, Eberhard Anheuser, Adolphus's Lilly held in trust the shares bequeathed to four of the children: Nellie, who Adolphus considered a spendthrift, Clara and Wilhelmina, who were married to German citizens, and Carl, who was disabled from a prenatal injury suffered when Lilly fell down the stairs the night her father died.

With an original par value of $500 per share, A-B stock paid huge annual dividends, usually between $3,000 and $5,000 per share, $8,000 in 1913. It was said that Adolphus once bought back a share from a member of the Anheuser family for $60,000, and that any bank in St. Louis would lend $25,000 against a share.

August Sr., referred to in the family as "August A.," inherited his father's position as president of the company, which was valued at $40 million in property and equipment. He also inherited a series of interlocking problems that threatened to destroy everything his father had built.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Anti-Saloon League emerged as the leading organization in the fight to ban alcohol, lobbying for Prohibition on a state-by-state basis. But the ASL changed its tack in December 1913, when it staged a demonstration in Washington that featured five thousand anti-alcohol activists singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" as they paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps, where they presented two "dry" congressmen with a pet.i.tion for a const.i.tutional amendment imposing national prohibition. Around the same time, the ASL's superintendent, a Methodist minister named Purley Baker, launched a well-financed "public information" campaign that demonized the producers of alcoholic beverages, particularly the nation's mostly German-American brewers, who, according to Baker, "eat like gluttons and drink like swine." League posters referred to them as "Huns" and portrayed them as apelike Neanderthals who threatened the American way of life.

Making matters worse, in June 1914, eight months after Adolphus's death, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria set off World War I. The Busch family was summering at Villa Lilly when hostilities broke out. August A. and his wife and children quickly fled the continent, but his mother, Lilly, remained in Germany with her two married daughters. Even before America entered the war in 1917, anti-German sentiment swept the country when the Germans became the first to use mustard gas in combat and a German submarine sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 pa.s.sengers, including 128 Americans.

The Busch family's ties to the fatherland and their long-standing support for Kaiser Wilhelm were well known. Fearing a backlash against his family and the brewery, August A. did everything he could to show his patriotism. He wrote a $100,000 check to the Red Cross. He announced that he was buying $1.5 million worth of Liberty Bonds. He offered to produce submarine engines for the war effort through a company his father had established, the Busch-Sulzer Brothers Diesel Engine Company. He changed the label on all Budweiser products, eliminating the double eagle design that some people believed represented the Austrian coat of arms. He began wearing an American flag b.u.t.ton on his lapel. He abolished German as the official language at the brewery and ordered busts and paintings of Chancellor Bismarck removed from the premises.

Despite these efforts, Budweiser sales dropped from nearly $18 million in 1913 to $12 million in 1917. Lilly Busch's continued presence in Germany became a public embarra.s.sment to her son and the brewery when it was revealed that both of her daughters' husbands were involved in the German war effort. Lilly finally returned to the United States in 1918, but only after President Woodrow Wilson established the office of Alien Property Custodian, which was empowered to seize all American a.s.sets owned by people living in an enemy country. Upon her arrival in Key West, Florida, the ailing seventy-five-year-old widow of Adolphus Busch was detained for forty hours and subjected to a strip search that included "a very thorough examination of her v.a.g.i.n.a and womb," according to her lawyer, who decried the treatment as "unexcelled in brutality, an examination not perpetrated on the poorest prost.i.tute or female pick-pocket."

Lilly's property was seized pending the results of an investigation by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee into the activities of Anheuser-Busch and other German-surnamed breweries in the United States, based on the flimsy suspicion that they might be secretly funding the German war machine. The Busches and the brewery were eventually given a clean bill of health and an apology from the U.S. attorney general, and Lilly's property was returned to her by order of President Wilson shortly after the Armistice was signed. But August A.'s problems were just beginning.

On December 8, 1917, Congress pa.s.sed the Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages nationally. The amendment was to take effect one year after the ratification by the states. However, on September 16, 1918, with more than half a million U.S. troops fighting in France, President Wilson issued a ban on the production of beer in order to conserve grain for the war effort. The ban was short-lived, ending with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. But two months later, on January 16, 1919, the Nebraska legislature became the thirty-sixth to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment. Manufacturers of alcoholic beverages howled that the American people would have rejected Prohibition overwhelmingly if it had been put up to a popular vote, a claim that appears to have been borne out by the bootlegging success of Al Capone and his gangster cohorts during the b.l.o.o.d.y, booze-soaked Roaring Twenties that followed. August A. angrily dismissed the amendment's pa.s.sage as "an attempt to subst.i.tute the authority of law for the virtue of man," and he predicted that the experiment ultimately would fail. He vowed to keep his company operating, one way or another, until it did.

In the meantime, Anheuser-Busch sought to rally the public against the amendment with promotional pamphlets and ads that testified to the societal benefits of its product. "The temperate use of a temperate alcoholic beverage like beer makes for the advancement of individual progress; the evils incident to outlawing it make for demoralization," proclaimed one. "Pure beer, such as Budweiser, is the nation's greatest aid to temperance, a home beverage which promotes both physical and moral well being."

Another brochure quoted Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as saying that fermented beverages were "generally innocent, and often have a friendly influence upon health and life." It cited records from the Mayflower indicating that beer was on the Pilgrims' minds when they put in at Plymouth Rock rather than push on to their intended destination in Virginia, "for we could not now take time for further search or consideration; our victuals being much spent, especially our beer." If that wasn't enough, a translation by George Smith of the British Museum of text on clay tablets found in Nineveh in 1872 purportedly proved that beer was part of the cargo on Noah's Ark: "with beer and brandy, oil and wine, I filled large jars."

As the official start of Prohibition approached-midnight, January 18, 1920-August A. called his two sons into his office. They were grown men-Adolphus III was twenty-nine, Gussie, twenty-one-and their inheritance guaranteed that they would never need to work again if they didn't want to. "You can afford to ride this out and retire," their father said, "but in my book Prohibition is a challenge and we owe it to our employees to keep going."

Given that they had 6,500 employees and an annual payroll of more than $2 million, it was a challenge that even Adolphus would have found daunting. And there was some question as to whether August A. was up to the task. As a young man, he'd shown little interest in the family business, announcing at age nineteen that what he really wanted to do was be a cowboy. He even bought himself an outfit and a six-shooter and, much to his father's chagrin, embarked on a six-month sabbatical at a ranch in Montana. But the prodigal eventually returned to St. Louis and dutifully submitted to Adolphus's strict program for learning the business from the bottom up, starting as a brewer's apprentice and rising methodically through the ranks under the unwavering eye of his father, who ceaselessly bombarded him with letters of instruction, exhortation, criticism, and praise, some running as long as twenty pages. A typical pa.s.sage reminded him, "Our whole welfare and happiness ... depends solely and only on the success of our brewery; its earnings are sufficient to make us happy for all time to come."

August A. was a gentler personality than Adolphus, shy and soft-spoken, adverse to publicity, and more attuned to the life of a country squire than that of a hard-driving industrialist. Unlike his father, he didn't enjoy travel. On a 281-acre parcel of land 8.5 miles from the brewery, he built a $300,000 French Renaissance Revival chateau that was easily the grandest residence in the state of Missouri. The estate featured a $250,000 stable for his prized horses, a private zoo that included what he boasted was "the world's tiniest elephant," named Tessie, and a 175-acre "deer park" with a large pond and a clear, burbling stream that serviced his world-cla.s.s collection of bison, antelope, elk, and deer from j.a.pan, Siberia, India, Europe, Canada, and Virginia. Deer parks-enclosed hunting areas for royalty or the aristocracy-dated back to medieval times in Europe and were popular among the upper cla.s.ses in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. August A. was especially proud of his herd of European roe deer, similar to the ones his father had hunted from the time he was a boy in Germany right up until a few days before his death.

The property upon which August A. built his mansion was steeped in American history. A previous owner, Colonel Frederick Dent, acquired it in 1821 and used it as a country home, which he called White Haven. One of Dent's sons roomed with Ulysses S. Grant at West Point, and when Grant was stationed at the nearby Jefferson Barracks, he became a frequent visitor and a suitor to Dent's daughter Julia. The couple married in 1848 and lived at White Haven on and off for the next three decades. At one point right before the Civil War, Grant built a two-story log cabin on the property with the help of several of Dent's slaves. He called the handcrafted residence Hardscrabble. During his years in the White House, he managed the farm from afar and planned to one day retire there. But after a financial swindle left him bankrupt, he mortgaged the property to William Vanderbilt, along with many of his Civil War trophies. When Grant was dying of throat cancer, Vanderbilt offered to forgive the debt, but Grant refused.

August A. Busch bought the property in 1903, by which time it had become known simply as Grant's Farm. Four years later he bought Hardscrabble Cabin, which had been sold, disa.s.sembled, and moved elsewhere, and had it reconstructed on the southern edge of the property, bordered by a fence made from 2,563 rifle barrels he purchased from a local armory that was shutting down.

Grant's Farm became the wild frontier refuge that August A. had sought as a young man out West. It was here, away from the unceasing sound and odor of the factory, that he engaged in his favorite pastimes-hunting, breeding livestock, and spoiling his five children.

Over the years, however, as three of his brothers died (Edward, Peter, and Adolphus Jr.) and the fourth was born profoundly handicapped, August A. shouldered more and more of the burden of leading the company. When his father pa.s.sed away and he a.s.sumed the presidency at age forty-eight, he was as schooled and experienced in the art and business of brewing as any man could hope to be. Unfortunately, four years into his stewardship, the American brewing industry was in effect legislated out of existence.

As they sat in their father's office in January 1919 discussing their uncertain future, both Adolphus III and Gussie agreed to join him in the fight to keep the company operating, even if they had no idea how he was going to manage it. In the end, he did it by diversifying. Over the next thirteen years, Anheuser-Busch survived by making products that were spin-offs of its brewing business: rail cars, truck bodies, refrigeration cabinets, ice cream, a nonalcoholic form of Budweiser, a malt-based soft drink called Bevo, barley malt syrup, and baker's yeast. The latter two products-branded with the Budweiser name-proved the most successful, not coincidentally because they were the key ingredients in the nation's booming illegal home-brew trade. As Gussie would admit years later, "We ended up as the biggest bootlegging supply house in the United States."