Eat the City(58)
To temperance advocates, beer was code for immigrant filth and sloth, unemployed men who abandon their women for the saloon. The brewers were foreign interlopers who came to America to fatten themselves on sales of their vile lager, leaving a trail of drunk and debauched citizens in their wake. In the 1880s, an evangelist from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union greeted immigrants as they disembarked in New York City, distributing temperance literature in sixteen languages. In the 1890s, the temperance organization advocated restricting immigration to stop the influx of “the scum of the Old World.”
Jacob Jr. moved into the new century with a clear two-pronged strategy for his brewery: expand and defend. The Rupperts and the Ehrets were still at the helm of New York brewing, but the Doelgers, Hupfels, Clausens, Trommers, Piels, and Liebmanns were at their heels. So when he took control of the Ruppert brewing empire from his father, who died in 1915, Jacob Jr. developed the capacity to produce two million barrels a year and lead the pack, working closely with his younger brother George. He promoted the idea that beer was harmless and wholesome. “You may walk the streets of New York City for hours and not meet with a drunken man or woman,” he assured his critics. “Legitimate and orderly saloons do not encourage or create intemperance.” He enlisted medical testimony that beer was safer than milk, and as nutritious as food.
He described his craft as drawn from an ancient and noble tradition, yet also explained to journalists that his beer was brewed with the most sanitary and modern techniques: “aged in glass enameled tanks to ensure perfect cleanliness,” “drawn through sterilized copper pipes, never exposing it to outer air,” “put through a pasteurizing process,” and finally, “carefully examined under electric light.”
He lived in a neighborhood where beer was beloved. “I drank beer from little up,” said one woman in Yorkville, where a child’s household duties included “rushing the growler,” or filling tin pails with beer at the saloon to take home for parents to drink. Sometimes the elderly would attach the pail to a rope to lower out the window to the street and call for a child to ferry it to the bar. A part of family life, beer was also often the quickest way to dull the pain and indignities of assimilation.
Yet at some point, Jacob Jr. realized that it was not beer, but the entire German community that was under attack. Across the country during World War I, mobs attacked Germans, and one Lutheran minister was publicly whipped. About 10 percent of New York City was of German descent. Yet in Yorkville, anti-German hysteria led the names of the German Savings Bank and the German Hospital to be changed to the Central Savings Bank and Lenox Hill Hospital. “You couldn’t walk the street with a German paper under your arm,” said one Yorkville woman. “You’d be abused from one end of the block to the other.”
By late 1917, symphony orchestras were refusing to play the music of Beethoven and Brahms, people were calling saukerkraut “liberty cabbage,” and the government investigated Jacob Jr.’s closest relatives for “disloyalty.” The State Department was concerned that Anna Ruppert, his mother, might be related to the Hohenzollern family of the German kaiser. Agents of the Bureau of Investigation made inquiries, only to conclude that while Anna Ruppert was not a threat, her son George and his wife, Emma, might be suspicious. “George Ruppert’s wife met Count Von Bernsdorff at a dinner party at the Astor Hotel in the Fall of 1915,” noted a government document, which went on to state that she “gave vent to some expressions favorable to Germany and the cause of Germany.” The officials promised to investigate further as necessary.
The fate of brewer George Ehret showed how much was at stake. His daughter had married a German baron, and he was visiting her in Germany when the United States entered the war in 1917. The eighty-three-year-old planned to leave for New York with the U.S. ambassador, but doctors advised him against the long journey, so he stayed put. Soon the Custodian of Alien Property, mandated to seize and administer U.S. properties owned by enemy nationals, took over George Ehret’s $40 million estate (worth nearly $700 million in today’s dollars), including his home, his art, his properties, and, of course, his brewery.
German Americans had been strong and vocal opponents of Prohibition, but with a rising anti-German sentiment, their influence was lost and their protests ignored. Government officials found records showing that German brewers including Jacob Jr. had together lent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the editor Arthur Brisbane to buy the Washington Times. The brewers said they were just trying to promote articles supporting beer and opposing temperance. But their representatives were hauled in to testify at a Senate hearing in late 1918 against charges that they were propaganda agents of Germany. The New York Times headlined, “Enemy Propaganda Backed by Brewers.” That very day, the president signed the popular Wartime Prohibition Act, which cited the need to preserve grain for food and banned the sale of alcohol, easing the country into the full-blown Prohibition soon to come.
JACOB Ruppert Jr. sued the federal government to exclude beer from the new Prohibition law. His lawyer was his friend Elihu Root, who had represented the Sugar Trust before serving as secretary of war and secretary of state and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. In Jacob Ruppert vs. Caffey, Jacob Jr. claimed that beer with an alcohol content of less than 2.75 percent was not intoxicating, and in any case, the new law overreached Congress’s authority. As before, men of science showed up to testify that one could drink more than a dozen beers without inebriation. But this time it didn’t work. The Supreme Court dismissed Jacob Jr.’s injunction restraining the government in 1920. Near beer would be allowed, at 0.5 percent alcohol, but anything more would be verboten. Most beer at the time was about 7 percent alcohol, and Jacob Jr. and other brewers found themselves in limbo—their product was illegal, but they were allowed to exist.