Memories of Beer Lovers, Hemp Farmers & Bloody Revolution
Posted by Mike E on July 17, 2008
By Mike Ely (Kasama Project)
Ok, I admit it. I’m not your usual observer. When I heard that Budweiser had been bought by the Euro-capitalists InBev, I was not concerned.
I don’t care who owns the factories in the U.S. I don’t worry the U.S. heartland is being infiltrated by foreign interests. And certainly, I don’t consider Budweiser a national treasure. The truth is that it’s almost undrinkable.
But my ears perked up when I read how Budweiser’s maker, Anheuser-Busch had roots in St. Louis that went back before the Civil War. Ah, my friends, THERE is a story worth telling. And I’m going to sit back in the damp heat of this Chicago evening, sip on a couple of Fat Tires, and tell it to you, just because I hate patriotic bullshit and because I love revolution.
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First, there is nothing American about beer making in St. Louis.
St. Louis in the 1850s was a raw river town situated where the Missouri River and the broad Mississippi met. It was a frontier town in many ways and the jumping off point. It was the “end of the line” for civilization. But it was also one of the first American industrial cities, with one of the heaviest concentration of of factory workers in the country. And these workers were not native-born Americans.
A great many of them came straight from Germany – and formed part of a very large German speaking population that then dominated both the urban and rural landscape from St. Louis to Chicago, to Cincinatti and far into the farmlands of Pennsylvania. And these immigrant workers were a very rowdy and radical bunch. Many were veterans of Europe’s great revolutionary battles of 1848 – the first upheavals when working class and communist revolution emerged as a living threat to the world’s ruling classes.
And, at the same time, surrounding this heavily leftwing, workingclass, German-speaking city was a countryside filled with some of the most ugly, racist, pro-slavery forces in the U.S. The Missouri River stretched west from St. Louis, and its shores were lined with slave plantations producing raw materials for twine — a product that shipped downriver to bind the cotton bales of the Mississippi Delta.
The slave owners of Missouri were quite militant. They produced the political gangs called “border ruffians” who crossed the western Missouri border into nearby Kansas territory, where they engaged in armed struggle with abolitionists like John Brown over whether Bloody Kansas would be a slave state or free.
So you can imagine that there was a tension growing through the 1850s between the pro-slavery farmers of the Missouri floodplains and the anti-slavery and often communist workers of St. Louis.
There was a parallel, and little known cultural clash going on at the same time: the German workers arrived as beer drinkers and quite a few of them were first class brewers. There were some Irish among the workers, and they too were fans of the Germans’ sudsy “liquid bread.”
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Before long St. Louis was peppered with huge German beer halls, where the often lonely immigrants found community and a feeling of home. For reasons I haven’t yet uncovered, the reactionary political forces of Missouri territory were anti-beer. Maybe they didn’t want this foreign culture to take root. Perhaps they had some early religious prohibitionist logic. But in any case there was an early political clash when a major push was made to ban beer in St. Louis, and (needless to say) the German workers pushed back.
Here is an irony worth thinking about: In the Mississippi river valley, this important historical clash started between beer lovers and hemp growers. And, believe it or not, revolutionary sympathies go with the beer drinkers.
At a time when social organization among immigrants was primitive, the fight over beer helped spur a sense of common identity among the workers, and gave rise to a number of political newspapers. And the movement that emerged from these circles were increasingly active in the fight over slavery. I have on my bookshelf a rare little book that gathers articles and histories from these German immigrant newspapers – and it is clear how they started to articulate deeply revolutionary views that spoke for a highly conscious and engaged working class population.
You may have studied the civil war a little…. I know I have always been fascinated by this first, truly revolutionary war on U.S. soil. And one thing to keep in mind was that the so-called “border states” were a key battle ground as the civil war broke out. There was a strip of these states (from Maryland through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, to Missouri). They had sizable populations of slave owners and slaves – but a general political mood that was divided over the issues of secession and war.
And in this fight over the border states, Maryland had a particular importance because it surrounded the Union capital, so that if it joined the slavery confederation, Washington DC would be harder to defend. And the mood was so bad that Abraham Lincoln was almost killed in Baltimore as he traveled from Illinois to DC to assume the presidency. At the other end of the country, St. Louis has a major strategic importance for the war: It was the major anti-slavery center on the Mississippi. (Nearby Memphis was a creature of the Mississippi Delta, it was one of the urban nerve centers of the slave empire – filled with slave markets and holding pens.)
And so, as war broke out, all sides prepared to seize St. Louis by force. And if it had fallen to the slavocracy, it would have been quite hard for the Union’s armies to gain a foothold on the Mississippi, and it would have been that much harder to defeat the South.
On the surface, the politics of St. Louis did not look promising. After 1860, the new governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was clearly a pro-slavery diehard, and the bastard was scheming to secede from the Union and pull the state into slavery’s confederacy.
Step by step the tensions mounted, and started to go from political to military preparations. One focus of preparations was the state armory, the largest warehouse of weapons on the frontier. Whoever controlled those guns would be better able to crush their enemies.
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Here again beer enters the story. Because the German workers started to prepare for battle. Led by veterans of the 1848 Revolutions, they started to secretly train themselves in discipline and military tactics. Their plan: to rise up against the state government in armed insurrection, to seize the armory, and defeat the governor’s army.
Where did they do their drills? In the cavernous beer halls of St. Louis. At a given time, they would gather. The doors would be sealed and put under vigilant guard. The tables would be cleared away. And cartloads of sawdust would be scattered deep on the beerhall floors.
And with the sawdust muffling the tramp, tramp, tramp of their feet, the workers prepared themselves for war – learning the unit movements so central to the warfare of that day. Outside, on the streets, the many spies of the governor could not hear what was going on within.
I won’t go into great detail about the heroic and fascinating ways that violence erupted. Led by a determined army officer Nathaniel Lyons the anti-slavery forces struck and struck hard. They seized St. Louis and the armory. And they shattered the schemes of the slave owners. They routed the Governor’s troops in the early battles. And they bottled up the slaveowners of the Missouri River – cutting them off from the Confederacy.
What followed was one of the most bitter civil wars I have ever studied: Missouri was criss-crossed by vicious pro-slavery deathsquads that carried out horrific murders and mutilations. Their raiders came dressed in a cloud of human scalps sewn into their clothes and bridles – as they spread terror among those who opposed the sale of human beings. If you have ever wondered where the frontier killer Jesse James got trained, it was as a triggerman for one of the most notorious death squads of the slavocracy.
Hemp made its appearance here too, right in the midst of the fighting: in several key battles the Confederate forces build protective breast works out of the hemp bales pulled from their slave plantations, piling up the bundled hemp harvest to protect themselves from Union bullets.
Fighting against the slavocrats were a complex array of forces, and at their core were new Union army units led by radical Republican John Charles Fremont, recruited heavily from among the German workers of St. Louis. The first known actions of communists in the U.S. was the revolutionary armed struggle of these largely German-speaking forces, led in part by Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, an energetic communist co-thinker of Karl Marx.
These units militantly emancipated many slaves that fell into their hands. This was in direct contradiction with the policy of President Lincoln who, afraid to offend the leading forces of other border states, insisted in the early days of the civil war that slaves should not be freed, but should be treated as “contraband property.” In this dispute, Fremont was removed from the command of the Missouri armies, and these revolutionary working class forces were dispersed into larger armies in order to better control them.
There are, in my opinions, many lessons and insights within this story. And more in the parts I have left untold.
But I tell this story now just to make a single point:
Anyone who thinks that Budweiser and the beer industry of St. Louis is a story of patriotism, Americanism, of all-American “national treasures,” of a whiteman’s “heartland” of traditional values and conservative xenophobia…. Anyone who runs that story just doesn’t know.
The story of beer in St. Louis is a story of communist immigrant workers who didn’t speak English, who hated the mistreatment of kidnapped Africans in the United States and who were willing to kill and die end the horrific practices of human slavery.
Deal with it. Pass it on.
Saoirse said
Great piece Mike but do you really want to link revolutionary politics to Budweiser? At least Heineken has that cute little red star on the label.
Carl Davidson said
Great story, Mike. Long live Weydemeyer!
One of these days, I’ll write a piece about my ancestors and the Whiskey Rebellion, which was more than a tax rebellion and not much about whiskey.
zelig said
great article. never thought much about bud(taste or historically).
reminds me of this piece i read a few years ago in z magazine about guiness:
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/13741
ShineThePath said
“The story of beer in St. Louis is a story of communist immigrant workers who didn’t speak English, who hated the mistreatment of kidnapped Africans in the United States and who were willing to kill and die end the horrific practices of human slavery.”
What puts a damper on this story is that the beer is truly awful. The only thing that salvages its existence was commercials of the Chameleons and the Frogs back in early 2000′.
Just to be less serious for a moment… :)
Mike E said
STP:
Budweiser is TRULY awful beer — imho. And I don’t drink it.
And i have no doubt that the liquid bread quaffed in mass quantities by the early communists of st. Louis was NOTHING like that watery modern American non-brewed chemical concoction sold as “beer.”
But if the media want to make “Budweiser” and St. Louis breweries into an “American tradition” — then fine, lets explore what those early days were really about!
And lets be clear that this has never been some classless Christian speak-English Anglo-white nation of the rightwing imaginings. Those radical German workers were denounced (at the time, all through the 19th century) as foul, alien, culturally unassimilated, dangerously radical, hostile to religion, and violently opposed to U.S. institutions (including slavery but also capitalism). And as Haymarket showed twenty years later, they remained pretty unrepentant about it!
Also see our article on the Haymarket May First days — and the “troublesome element”
celticfire said
Interesting hidden history. Thanks for sharing it.
gangbox said
For the record, I actually like Budweiser – it’s my favorite beer!
More seriously, the New York Times had an article trying to whip up chauvnist resentment against the Belgian corporation ImBev buying out Budweiser.
The Times piece linked resentment of European capitalists buying an American corporation to legitimate working class concerns – like the fact that unionized brewery workers will be laid off in the US – and in Belgium – and in third countries (Brazil, the Czech Republic, Canada ect) where both firms have factories.
It doesn’t help matters that the main union in the beer brewing industry in America (the Brewery and Soft Drink Workers Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters) has a similar “buy American” take on the buyout question.
The Teamsters do have some legitimate concerns – ImBev is a much more anti union firm than Anheueser Busch is, especially in ImBev’s Brahma division in Brazil.
There is at least one partial silver lining here – unusual for multinational mergers (where the national unions usually try to fight for their piece of the pie at the expense of unions from other countries) there actually has been an attempt by the Teamsters, the Belgian Food and Hotel Workers Union, the Brazilian Food Workers Union and the Quebec Service Workers Union to work together to deal with the new company.
Hopefully, they can maintain this unity – and reach out to brewery workers unions in other countries where ImBev and Anheuser Busch operate.
Ezry said
When you think about it, the bad things that did go down and pro slavery communist additude the beermakers had, as far as todays standards go, yeah, not so popular, but, they really did make history out to be what it would become today. And budweiser fuckin rocks. Just not warm….
Mike E said
Ezry:
A clarification. The communists of St. Louis were AGAINST slavery (as was Karl Marx in his writings from afar on the U.S. civil war).
cassiusghost said
Congratulations!
An important and lively analysis of peoples’ history.
I am most happy to post a link to this everywhere I blog!
T. G. I. F.
Cheers!
entdinglichung said
nice article … another famous “Forty-Eighters” from Germany (and much better known than Weydemeyer among leftists in Germany) who played a role during the civil war was the leader of the radicals during the revolution of 1948/49 in the Southwest german grand duchy of Baden Friedrich Hecker; after the victory of the conservative forces in Baden, around 80.000 (~ 5% of the population) left Baden (among them almost all revolutionaries with their families, which meant, that the hotbed of revolution in Germany in the era 1830-1850 became a normal, “pacified” area) left the country for the USA, Argentine (here, “Forty-Eighters” from Baden also played an important role in he early radical and workers’ movement), Chile, Australia and other destinations
p.s.: Budějovický Budvar is the original, Budweiser only the copy … ;-)
Comments said
This is a very interesting piece, an example of the lively and varied journalism and commentary that makes Kasama just a delight to read.
Beer’s a serious subject to a lot of people. Marx once wrote an article for the German newspaper Rheinische Zeitung about demonstrations in London against church-backed laws limiting the hours of alehouses in the city. There was a huge working-class outcry against them. Can’t find the article right now; can anybody steer me to an online translation?
Mike E said
comments:
I think the communist movement should, at long last, take a stand on marijuana.
Literally millions have been jailed over marijuana in an outrage that should be intolerable, and should be called out. I have never understood why the Maoists (i was part of) did not speak out, why the “new draft programme” of the RCP doesn’t take a clear and militant stand against the criminalization of herb, and against the jailing of people for the non-crime of possessing and trafficing in herb.
this is not because intoxication is so wonderful (it isn’t, it “divides into two”) but because we should speak out against real injustices, and because our communist movement should not be mum, silent, in the face of the real ways that this system manifests itself.
gangbox said
Mike,
Why just limit legalization to marijuana? Why not the other Schedule I Narcotics too?
Yes, there are a lot of folks locked up for using and/or selling weed – but there are also lots of folks incarcerated for selling cocaine, and crystal meth, and heroin, and extacy, and special K ect ect ect – shouldn’t we call for their freedom too?
Mike E said
I think the use of prison as the main social response to all these drugs is a great injustice — and is tied in many ways to the generalized use of the state’s repressive power against the people generally, and especially the poor. my personal thought is that all drugs should be decriminalized, and that there is a parallel need for a radical transformation of the treatment of addicts. (I.e. from prison to healthcare).
Marijuana is in a category of its own because (imho) it is (unlike the “hard drugs”) not addictive (even less so than alcohol which is selectively addictive for a portion of the population). And I think of the criminalization of weed as something very analagous to the period of alcohol prohibition in the U.S. Clearly both marijuana and (obviously) alcohol can have some powerful negative impacts on individual lives and society — when their use is out of control. But the use of jail to punish possession and consumption is totally irrational and unjust.
Drugs like cocaine, crack, crystal meth, and heroin are (again, imho) a more complex matter — because these chemicals have been (as the Panthers used to say) a “plague upon the people” — ruining lives and communities. the goal of criminalization here is not to permit moderate social consumption, but to create the conditions for a more systematic and socially enlightened containment of their use (treating addicts as victims and patients, mobilizing communities for transformation, draining the power of the illegal economy, etc).
Mike E said
this article has gotten some circulation online from energetic crossposting.
One place it appeared is My Beautiful Wickedness, where the following interesting comment was made:
‘I love those Midwest Germans. One other factor in their willingness to fight against slavery: the revolutions of 1848 weren’t just about socialism, or even democracy; they were also, in what would become Germany, about creating a single German state out of a hodgepodge of little princedoms. These folks believed in The Union (and possibly were responsible for making it such a central element in Lincoln’s thought). The idea of breaking up the United States was anathema to them, a step backwards into political backwardness and a way to disenfranchise practically everyone. And they had fought against that back in Europe, and were glad to fight against it again. A lot of Germans (Bohemians, actually) in Texas formed military units and fought their way to join up with the Union armies. Brave folks.’
Thanks. (19th century Bohemia is now the modern Czech Republic. Bohemia historically included Czech people and the Sudeten Germans.)
bridgett said
Mike, would you like me to link back here (from where I posted it at My Beautiful Wickedness)? I don’t have many readers (about fifty a day) but in turn, my posting was picked up by the much much bigger Tiny Cat Pants and so through her posting, I could perhaps get some traffic your way. I got your piece off H-Labor, so I wasn’t quite sure where to link to.
Mike E said
bridgett:
Welcome to Kasama. Feel free to link back to our site here. we are working to present revolutionary reporting, discussion and history in ways we hope will travel well.
gangbox said
Mike,
There is a danger to treating the narcotics question as a medical issue.
It’s one thing to say that the customers who buy and use cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, special k, extacy ect are addicts in need of medical treatment.
That’s basically correct – and that’s how the addicts should be treated by society.
But, there has been a move among a section of the prison reform movement to treat incarcerated drug dealers medically rather than to treat them as prisonser to be punished legally.
The problem is, the primary reason that people become drug dealers is because they are unemployed and need a job – the addiction question is secondary.
Just to be clear, I would suspect that a large proportion of folks who end up being drug dealers were at least recreational users prior to them selling.
And drug dealing does often lead to heavy use and even adiction – testing fresh batches of drugs for quality control, and using drugs with suppliers, workers and customers, are a big part of the job.
But, the primary reason folks become drug dealers is still economic – remember, there are lots of stockbrokers, doctors and lawyers who get high… but they already have jobs (high payings ones at that) so they don’t have to sell, unlike the unemployed White kids from the trailer parks (and their jobless Black and Latino counterparts from the urban projects).
Treating the economic problem of drug dealing as a medical problem is wrong – it ignores the real roots of the drug trade, and the fact that the only real way to “treat” drug dealers is to give them alternative employment in other industries.
We have to remember that fact.
And I think we also really need to avoid using the bourgeoisie’s war on drug rhetoric (even unintentionally).
After all, it’s capitalism that’s a “a “plague upon the people” — ruining lives and communities” – not Hector and Ray on the corner trying to sell a couple of grams.
Admittedly, hard drugs are not good for you – in particular Crystal Meth, which has some nasty side effects (one of my brothers went to an early grave because of them).
But, the decisive problem here is capitalism and it’s depridations against low income workers of color, not a few poor unemployed folks trying to make a dollar by selling dope.
Comments said
I think Avakian in one of his DVDs answers a question about the RCP attitude to marijuana. He says something to the effect that the party in power won’t arrest people for mere pot smoking but will try to create conditions in which people are less inclined to smoke it. In the absence of any programatic statement, this word of the leader constitutes the line.
Quorri said
Gangbox says:
“But, the primary reason folks become drug dealers is still economic – remember, there are lots of stockbrokers, doctors and lawyers who get high… but they already have jobs (high payings ones at that) so they don’t have to sell, unlike the unemployed White kids from the trailer parks (and their jobless Black and Latino counterparts from the urban projects).”
I guess this is probably/could be true, that most people sell drugs as a response to their economically dismal situations in life. My personal history with drugs and drug dealers pointed much more heavily toward a different story. Granted this is a soft and heavily singular sort of research but….
All the drug dealers I ever knew well enough to know anything about them, which was a pretty generous sized handful of people, seemed to be drug dealers BECAUSE they had become addicted to their drugs of choice(s) enough to need an easier way to supply themselves with the substance(s), aside from mowing the occasional lawn, etc. Granted every single last one of them was of the lower class. I think that it would be easy for others looking in to the scene to say, “of course they were looking for the money they never had growing up and so they started selling drugs”. But I think, rather, that they were broke and hopeless and had dealt with life as society’s shit piles long enough to want to skip out on drugs for a while, and then got trapped in the addiction.
Now that I’ve taken the time to write all that out, I guess there is not much difference from becoming a drug dealer in order to get money and then becoming addicted, versus becoming a drug addict to escape the reality of being shit poor and then becoming a dealer to support the habit….. hmmmm.
It might be a hugely different story too, had I grown up in an area of concentrated social stratification, like an urban project, etc.
Mike E said
A beer site has recently post this piece….. so lets lift a foaming brew to the early communists of St. Louis.
In fact, this piece has made the rounds in some major ways….
artemi0 said
LOL,
To say this piece has made the rounds is wildly understating the matter.
For what it’s worth- I have used this piece as an introduction to revolutionary politics with 2 audiences that I consider significant;
1. My little brother and all his friends
2. My work circle- generally reactionary general contractors mixed in with immigrant labor.
Now I have shared my politics with people who I consider friends and family over the years. I suspect I have gotten the same results as “many of you”.
This piece seems to have connected and resonated much more- at least for a moment.
Glad to see it’s getting around
t1201971 said
I quit drinking a few years ago, but me and beer used to be tight- best, uh, buds as it were. Mike, have you ever tried a Japanese wheat beer called Hitachino? It is THE best!!
So you don’t buy any of Bud’s “drinkability” propaganda?
Otto said
My great grandfather immigrated to St. Louis in the 1800s to dodge the draft for the Franco-Prussian War. He was a socialist and an athiest.
I don’t know much of his history except he worked packing china plates. This is interesting.