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CHAPTER SIX

The Lines of Battle

Internal Revenue Act—

U.S. Brewers Association—Prohibition party

When a nation goes to war, the generals strap on their swords, the bands play, the crowds before the newspaper offices cheer or stand silent as each new bulletin is posted, and a small group of men in Washington look at one another and ask, “Now, just how are we going to pay for all this?”

There was no national debt in 1861, no deficit, and no income tax. The federal government got along well enough on tariff returns. But a war was something else again. Wars are expensive.

Twice the government had imposed a tax on the manufacture of spirits. The first time resulted in the short-lived Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. The second was a War of 1812 act, and like the first was a temporary, emergency measure. Neither was popular nor notably successful. And neither had touched upon beer, the brewing of which in those days had been of little consequence. The situation in 1861 was quite different. Distilling had become a major industry, and brewing could only be described as a colossus.

The statesmen put their heads together and came up with an internal revenue bill that set a license fee of twenty dollars a year on all retailers and a tax of one dollar a barrel at the brewery and twenty cents a gallon at the distillery. Neither the distillers nor the brewers, who had expected something of the sort, made any objection. They had no machinery with which to make an objection heard, anyway. But the temperance people objected—and shrilly. Until this time they had confined their activities to churches and lecture halls, to towns and state capitals. Now they registered their protest on a national scale.

Why should the drys, of all people, oppose a federal tax on liquor and beer? They had good reason.

The tenor of the drys’ argument was that government taxation of the beer and liquor industries was tantamount to government recognition of the legitimacy of those industries. To temperance workers the alcohol business was an evil per se, and the miscreants in Washington had no more cause to deal with distillers and brewers than with murderers, traitors, bigamists. Such a tax would give the government a stake in the alcohol industry, and that was like having a stake in the devil. What the whole thing amounted to, the drys cried, was that the federal government was lending its name as a shield for the wickedness that was alcohol, and this was wrong, wrong, wrong, any way you looked at it. They were vehement. They hammered the point with an assiduity that was virtually sacerdotal. Whenever they referred to the saloon, it was “the legally protected saloon.” And they insisted the saloon was the very entrance to hell.

But the nation needed the money, so the bill was passed.

A few months after President Lincoln had signed the Internal Revenue Act, the drys’ gloomiest fears were confirmed. The malt beverage manufacturers of the country got together and set up a permanent organization, the United States Brewers Association.

The drys now had a palpable villain, and they made the most of it. The brewers in truth had acted openly enough, but the drys yelled “conspiracy.” The adjective they used most often when referring to the association was “nefarious,” but “scheming,” “avaricious,” “subversive,” and “treacherous” were favorite descriptions, too.

The brewers were serious men who had come together for their own protection and without the least thought of being insidious. A friend, Congressman J. W. Killinger, advised them to go to Washington in person rather than hire a lawyer there. They did so, and because they were humble and straightforward they made a good impression. They offered their services to the government in any capacity deemed fitting. They dispatched a committee to Europe to study methods of beer taxation there, and they made this committee’s report available to the proper authorities in Washington, who valued it. They cooperated in many other ways. They did, of course, make an effort to have the tax reduced, and for a while the tax was cut from one dollar to sixty cents a barrel, but the original tax was soon restored.

As far as the drys were concerned, the distillers and the brewers were one, a hateful single enemy, in spite of the fact that the distillers, some three hundred of them, did not organize until 1879, and the distillers and the brewers did not form an allegiance until 1882. The truth was that the brewers were somewhat leery of the distillers, with whom they had little in common except the enmity of the drys. The brewers did not like to think of themselves as dealers in alcohol. They might shake their heads and cluck their tongues at the sight of a man who staggered under the influence of too much schnapps, but what did that have to do with them? Beer was one of life’s blessings. They simply could not understand the dry people’s looking on them as out-and-out criminals.

Nevertheless, the brewers could recognize a clear and present danger when confronted with one. And the drys, they noted, were waxing belligerent. Almost swamped by the Civil War, the dry cause emerged afterward, grew, and spread itself. Town after town, taking advantage of local option laws, closed its bars, and state after state, prodded by the drys, began tinkering with prohibition laws. So the United States Brewers Association at its annual convention in 1867 declared war:

“Resolved, That we will use all means to stay the progress of this fanatical party, and to secure our individual rights as citizens, and that we will sustain no candidate, of whatever party, in any election, who is in any way disposed toward the total abstinence cause.”

The drys, who were not cowards, accepted the challenge. What they had hitherto lacked was a national political body, a party, and they proceeded to fill this need by forming the Prohibition party of the United States in 1869. They were not in the habit of mincing words, and they applauded wildly in 1872 when their first nominee for president, James Black, defined the fight:

“The traffic in these drinks is an illegitimate branch of commerce, and the law should so declare it. Liquor dealers should be treated as criminals, and the grogshop should be abated as a pestilential nuisance. To secure these ends the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of government must be in the hands of those favorable to such policy.”

Black polled only 5,607 votes, but it was a beginning. At least the lines of battle had been drawn.