First Draft Follies: The "Women's Crusade" of the 1870s, Part Three of Three

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. When the material is lengthy, I break it into several parts; this is part three of three.

The setting here is the early 1870s, when the American temperance movement, which had been derailed by the Civil War, regrouped and renewed its efforts to eliminate alcohol in the United States.

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Had the women’s crusade been an isolated incident, brewers might have dismissed it as the work of cranks. But the sidewalk prayer meetings represented just one grasping tentacle of a newly revived, many-limbed temperance and prohibition movement. Hundreds of thousands of warriors banded together in the National Temperance Society or the Independent Order of Good Templars (which welcomed women).

In 1872, the Prohibition Party nominated one James Black for president. (Of the more than six million votes cast in that election, he amassed a grand total of 5,608.)

Social pillars launched campaigns against the “concert saloons,” divey joints that featured “waiter girls” who allegedly served drinks in the front rooms and sex in the back. In New York and Chicago, state legislators passed and police enforced Sunday closing laws.

In Hamilton County, Iowa, eight women sued eight saloonkeepers, charging the tapsters had led the women’s husbands down the road to inebriety. In Wisconsin, sponsors of county agricultural fairs banned beer, wine, and liquor from their events.

“On every hand, in every state,” complained the editor of Western Brewer, the nation’s newest brewing trade journal, “these communists are actively at work.” (*1)

The St. Louis Whiskey Ring scandal inflamed prohibitionists’ passions. Over a period of about three years in the early seventies, the ring’s members systematically defrauded the federal government of liquor taxes. Its network of members, spies, and agents stretched from distilleries in St. Louis to the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and from there to the White House, where the ring’s mastermind served as personal secretary to President Ulysses S. Grant.

Brewers, who played no part in the scandal, denounced the distillers and distanced themselves from the appalling facts of the case. In the minds of temperance enthusiasts, however, the slimey scandal provided proof that “Rum Power” still haunted the land and so steeled the resolve of crusading women and pro-temperance politicians.

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*1: “Progress of the Puritan’s War,” Western Brewer 2 (February 1877): 42).

First Draft Follies: The "Women's Crusade" of the 1870s, Part Two

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. The material here is presented "as is" from the first draft of the book that became Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. When the material is lengthy, I break it into several parts; this is part two of three. The setting here is the early 1870s, when the American temperance movement, which had been derailed by the Civil War, regrouped and renewed its efforts to eliminate alcohol in the United States.

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And so it went in another nine hundred towns in thirty-one (out of thirty-seven) states and the District of Columbia. The tens of thousands of marchers met with but limited success and may have done the cause more harm than good: most men were hostile, and many of the women played to type, thereby reinforcing the common view among men idea that a woman’s place was in the home. “It is easy enough to conquer a man, if only you know how,” one crusader explained.

I wish you could see me talking to some of these saloon men that I would never have spoken to before; I employ my sweetest accents; . . . I look into their eyes and grow pathetic; I shed tears, and I joke with them--but all in terrible earnest. And they surrender. (*1)

The hypocrisy left a bad taste in the mouth of an Ohio man.

“It is a little amusing,” he commented, “to hear one of these women talk to ‘their man’ as they have him cornered behind his bar, and to see how he takes to talk of that sort.”

He listened to one crusader as she “opened out her battery of words,” telling the proprietor that she “loved” him and “always had.”

“I’ll venture a treat,” the man scoffed, “that this same woman never thought of this poor devil of a saloon-keeper before, and if she had met him on the street . . . she would not have spoken to him.” (*2)

Still, there was no doubt that the crusaders placed themselves in real danger. In some communities minor riots erupted and mobs attacked the women. At a march in Pittsburgh, hecklers jeered and threw rocks, paint, eggs, bricks, and beer at the women. One man used a horsewhip to rescue his wife from the crowd.

In Plano, Illinois, the occupants of a saloon removed themselves to the second floor of the building and dumped “the contents of baser toiletware” on the crusaders below. (*3)  In one town, a man exposed himself to a group kneeling for sidewalk prayer.

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*1: Blocker, ‘Give to the Winds Thy Fears’: The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Greenwood Press, 1985), 43.

*2: Ibid. *3: Ibid., 60.

First Draft Follies: The "Women's Crusade" of the 1870s, Part One

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. When the material is lengthy, I break it into several parts; this is part one of three. The setting here is the early 1870s, when the American temperance movement, which had been derailed by the Civil War, regrouped and renewed its efforts to eliminate alcohol in the United States.

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The “Women’s Crusade" of the early 1870s was the inadvertent by-product of an otherwise ordinary evening of entertainment. In the 1870s, lectures and speeches were the most common forms of mass entertainment. Experts of all sorts toured the United States speaking to large audiences on everything from homeopathy to hydropathy; transmigration to trans-Atlantic travel.

Among them was Diocletian Lewis, a physician-reformer with interests in abolition, women’s rights, and temperance. In late 1873, he took the platform in front of a crowd of about a thousand at a hall in Fredonia, New York. There, he touted the virtues of temperance, denounced the evils of liquor, and regaled his listeners with tales of drink-induced woe and degeneracy.

Lewis capped his discourse with an anecdote about how, some forty years earlier, his own mother, married to a drunk, had led a group of her friends into a saloon where they prayed until the bar owner was persuaded to shut his doors and find other employment.

The following morning, a hundred or so women who had attended Lewis’s lecture gathered at a Baptist church to discuss what they had heard. Shortly after noon, the women began marching, first to the bar at the Taylor House Hotel, and from there to the city’s eight liquor retail outlets.

At each stop, the women demanded that the male owners of the establishments abandon their devilish business and then prayed for their redemption. Only one of the men so targeted agreed to find another line of trade.

Over the next few weeks, the Women’s Crusade spread across New York and the midwest. It arrived in Milwaukee in late February when the city’s “gentle raiders” mailed postcards to hundreds of saloons. "Sir,” the cards read, “believing your own conscience must smite you for your criminality in dealing out liquid damnation to our husbands, sons and brothers, we propose to aid that conscience by praying in your gilded hall of vice, next Monday March 2.” (*1)

On the appointed day, the women’s efforts provided plenty of entertainment for the throngs who pushed past them on Milwaukee’s sidewalks, but not much else. No saloonkeepers repented; none shut their doors.

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*1: “The Gentle Raiders,” Milwaukee Sentinel March 2, 1874, p. 1.

First Draft Follies: Woodstock

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification.

This edition is particularly folly-ish, and prime example of how easily I wander off-track when something interesting catches my brain. Because let's face it: Woodstock had nuthin' much to do with beer. For the record: I was not at Woodstock. Indeed, I was not even aware it was happening. (I was an exceptionally oblivious fifteen-year-old.)

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Eight hundred miles east of Milwaukee, four men of disparate personalities and backgrounds were organizing an event that they hoped would make them rich. They planned to hold the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August in rural upstate New York.

The quartet spent the summer of ‘69 lining up acts; researching the merits of temporary toilets; signing food vendors, and scrambling to find a location after their first choice was snatched from them at the last moment. Hugh Romney and the Hog Farm commune agreed to operate a free food kitchen, babysit kids on bad trips, and provide concert “security.” (For that task, Romney informed a Woodstock Ventures representative, he would require “‘fifty cases of seltzer bottles and three truckloads of chocolate cream pies as ammunition.’”) (*1)

By opening day, August 15, 1969, a city-sized swarm of hippies, heads, and freaks had established camp at Max Yasgur’s farm. Outside the site, vehicular traffic overwhelmed the region’s roads and highways.

The cops, fearing the worse, blockaded the parking lots, a decision that exacerbated the chaos and produced the largest traffic jam in New York state history. Thousands of people abandoned their cars and walked the last several miles.

For three days, a crowd estimated at anywhere from 100,000 to a half a million, listened to music, danced, sang, made love, died (two people), and sloshed through odorous mud spawned by torrential rain.

The “official” food supply--hot dogs and hamburgers--ran out almost before singer Richie Havens, who went on first because the opening act was stuck in traffic, plucked a guitar string. “Bring food,” the organizers begged the outside world.

That was easier said than done, thanks to abandoned vehicles and barricaded highways. Locals who knew the back roads delivered carloads of cold cuts, water, soda, and fruit juice, but, given that all the nearby towns combined were not as large as Woodstock City, their efforts fed the encampment’s fringes but not much more.

No matter. Most attendees were beyond caring about food. Kids drank acid-laced kool-aid and water, smoked and ate hash, ingested god-knows what other drugs, and guzzled wine from that basic hippie accoutrement, the goatskin.

Beer was conspicuous by its absence. Art Vassmer, who owned a general store in nearby Kauneonga Lake, sold out his stock of six-packs. Some kids hauled in coolers loaded with beer, but that ran out long before the music did. A local bar owner showed up with a truck loaded with beer.

It sold “like crazy,” less because kids craved beer than because liquid of any sort was welcome on a hot day in August in a temporary city cut off from the outside world.(*2)

Nor did any of the long-haired, mud-soaked trippers care whether the national beverage was available or not. Who needed beer when pot, hash, and acid were as accessible as the air and rain and far more fun?

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*1: Robert Stephen Spitz, Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969 (New York: The Viking Press, 1989), 90. *2: Joel Makower, Woodstock: The Oral History (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 217.

First Draft Follies: Music and the "New" Beer, c. 1970. Part 2 of 2

Part One --- Part Two 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification.

This two-part excerpt concerns the use of music to market beer in the early 1970s.

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When Harry Jersig called, Sullivan listened. Jersig owned Lone Star Brewing in San Antonio, Texas. The company had done well over the years, mostly because Jersig tended the local market with loving care.

But in the early seventies, Texas was changing and bigger brewers were invading his market. Jersig knew that it was time to rethink his strategy. He hired Barry Sullivan as Lone Star’s new vice-president for marketing.

Sullivan signed on in the fall of 1973, just as the peak of the baby boomers hit their early twenties. There were, Sullivan could see, a lot of potential fans for Lone Star. He could also see, however, that Lone Star’s image needed some work. Jersig had always sold the beer as pure Texas, a down-to-earth beer for hard-working, down-to-earth people. Texas was being overrun by another kind of “people”: young, urban, educated, and relatively liberal. Down-to-earth-hard-working wasn’t going to work on them.

Music, however, would. And music was something Texas had plenty of in the early seventies. And not old-fashioned Bob Wills-type stuff, but deep country steeped in rock and roll and rhythm and blues. “Woodstock in Western wear.” (*1).

The epicenter of this new country rock was the Armadillo World Headquarters, a cavernous club--it could accomodate fifteen hundred people--on Austin’s south side that began life as a National Guard armory.

The AWH opened in August 1970. Willie Nelson, who had left Nashville for Austin and become a godfather of the new “cosmic cowboy” music, played there. So did Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep at the Wheel, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Bonnie Raitt, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. The Armadillo specialized in weird pairings: The Clash billed with died-in-the-wool Texan Joe Ely. Bruce Springsteen and The Pleasant Valley Boys.

This, Barry Sullivan decided, would become the nursery for the new Lone Star. He gave free beer to the groups playing the Armadillo. He hired those same players to record one minute radio jingle, “Harina Tortilla.” When producers from public television began filming sets at the Armadillo and broadcasting them as Austin City Limits, Lone Star underwrote the project.

Outside the Armadillo, Sullivan focused on print and radio. His “art director” was about as far off Madison Avenue as it was possible to get: Jim Franklin was a skinny, bearded young kid who dressed in shorts, t-shirts, and sandals.

Franklin fancied armadillos and one of his first ads for Lone Star consisted of a desolate landscape, where “‘everything was laid to waste and the only things that were left were [Lone Star] longnecks sticking out of the ground and armadillos running around.’” (*2)

The television commercials were just as goofy: A camera crew filmed real Texans as they engaged in “‘bizarre cultural rituals,’” Texas style: seed-spitting and buffalo-chip-tossing competitions, an armadillo beauty contest, a “Ceuero turkey trot.” (*3)

Funny. Irreverent. Completely off the wall. Perfectly suited to baby boomers who’d long since left their parents’ paths. Sales rose by a million cases in 1974. Lone Star, small regional beer par excellence, was hip.

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*1: Michael Ennis, “The Beer That Made Armadillos Famous,” Texas Monthly 10 (February 1982): 175.

*2: Ibid., 177.

*3: Ibid., 179.

First Draft Follies: Music and the "New" Beer, c. 1970, Part 1 of 2

Part One --- Part Two 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification.

This two-part excerpt concerns the use of music to market beer in the early 1970s, looking specifically at the use of music by Narragansett Brewing in Rhode Island and Lone Star Brewing in Texas.

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Barry Sullivan understood the potential for “small” beers; understood that the new generation of beer drinkers had marched down a new road, lured by the beat of some far-off and different drum. More important, however, he understood how to play that drum.

Sullivan was a Canadian-born, major-league hockey player. When he left the ice in 1953, he emigrated to St. Louis to work in sales at Falstaff. He spent time in Missouri and also in Texas, which was one of the brewery’s biggest markets. In 1968, the company sent him to Rhode Island to oversee Narragansett, which had not performed well since Falstaff’s 1965 acquisition.

Sullivan was busy familiarizing himself with the beer and region when Woodstock fell upon the land. Sullivan’s sons, “long-haired” teenagers, insisted that their father take notice of what their generation was capable of doing. (*1)

Sullivan watched the live news coverage of the traffic jam, the rain, the mud---and realized two things. First, long hair and drugs be damned; these were good kids, a medium-sized city’s worth and no trouble. Second, this rock-and-roll stuff was the key to their hearts and minds.

He organized a series of  “mini-Woodstocks” throughout the Narragansett territory. (*2) No fool, he emphasized the music, not the beer, downplaying the Narraganset name to the extent that no beer was even sold at the venues. The focus was the names and their music: Janis Joplin. Santana. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Led Zepplin.

Sales soared. Three years later, Sullivan was back in St. Louis, this time as Falstaff’s national marketing coordinator. But Falstaff’s management, he soon realized, ignored the youth market and the need to rethink marketing strategies.

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*1: Michael Ennis, “The Beer That Made Armadillos Famous,” Texas Monthly 10 (February 1982): 119. *2: Ibid., 119.