April Beer

The prospect of "Beer by April'' set the U. S. abubble with activity and excitement last week. Some bubblings: P:Already producing near-beer under Federal license, 211 breweries announced their readiness to swing into production of the "real thing" on only ten minutes notice.

P:New internal revenue stamps for beer kegs were being ground out at top speed by the Bureau of Engraving & Printing. P:Newspapers and magazines started rounding up advertisements of beer and accessories. Anheuser-Busch announced a

$1,000,000 advertising budget the first year.

P:Department of Agriculture scientists reported progress in their fight against downy mildew, foe of hops. P:From Chicago's Wahl-Henius Institute were graduated 24 brewmasters, the first class in 17 years. Orated Dr. Max Henius: "Make all efforts to keep the industry on the highest level, free from the fetters of politics and the saloon." P:By working 24 hours a day a St. Joseph, Mo. factory was turning out ten tons of pretzels per day. Orders were two months behind.

P:From Frankfort, Germany, arrived Engineer Albert Fischer to show U. S. brewers how to put vitamins in their beer. Said he: "Ordinary beer has practically no vitamins and little food value. Ja --you can get fat on dark Munich beer because of its sugar. After three steins of regular beer, you feel bloated. Under our new process which half the breweries of Germany have adopted, you can drink five steins at one sitting and not feel bloated. Take a little rest, drink five more, still you do not feel bloated!" P:At Albany Emanuel Koveleski, president of the New York Bartenders' Union (8,000 members) announced: "We're all set. The bartenders will be all fine, clean, upstanding young men. They'll be classy." P:In Chicago 741 hotels, restaurants, lunch rooms and night clubs were granted municipal beer-selling licenses. P:The National W. C. T. U. shrilled: "No nation ever drank itself out of a depression. If women take to the beer habit they have only to look at some of the beer-drinkers in the London slums to see what is ahead of them. BEER MAKES FAT."

P:Los Angeles Brewing Co. ordered 21,600,000 beer bottles from Owens-Illinois Glass Co.

P:"No Help Wanted" signs were hung out by Philadelphia brewers swamped with job-seekers. Press pictures appeared of huge crowds lined up for work before the Anheuser-Busch plant in St. Louis. P:In Manhattan the fashionable Waldorf-Astoria began to fix up a "tavern" for beer-drinkers. The Fifth Avenue Hotel planned to convert a restaurant into an imitation sidewalk cafe and call it the Roosevelt Room. In Milwaukee where factory whistles and fire-engine sirens welcomed the return of beer the famed old Blatz Hotel revived its palm garden for German beer drinkers. P:Moaned Anti-Saloon League's Francis Scott McBride: "The iron hand of the brewers is again in absolute control. . . ." P:In Brooklyn the Kings County Retail Stationery & Newsdealers Association protested any state distributing plan which prohibited beer sales at stationery stores. P:Manhattan's Fidelio Brewery placed a lithographing order for 80,000,000 beer bottle labels.

P:"We'll be ready," announced New York's Governor Lehman as the State Legislature settled down to enact a liquor-control law. Tammany Hall, caught by an alert press trying to mix beer and politics, fell in behind the Lehman control plan.

P:Missouri's Governor Parks signed a beer bill under which the great St. Louis breweries could promptly open. P:The malt syrup industry started a drive to hold home-brewers in line on the plea that their domestic product was cheaper and stronger than the commercial article. P:From Florida Col. Jacob Ruppert, president of the U. S. Brewers' Association, whose Manhattan plant is set to turn out 2,000,000 bbl. per year, announced: "We'll find the old saloon completely out of the picture. We'll find prototypes of the German beer garden springing up where your average New Yorker will bring his family. . . . We should and can have 5-c- beer. . . . I don't see the racketeer and the chiseler as problems to be considered. Their beer'll be only a drop in the bucket."

From the moment President Roosevelt called for a copy of the Democratic platform, clipped out its beer plank, signed his name to it and sent it to Congress as a special message, there never was any serious doubt about the quick return of beer. Inescapable was the necessity for new revenue to help balance the Budget. Estimate of the Government's first year's income: $125,000,000.

Hero of the beer bill's prompt passage by the House was chunky Representative Thomas Henry Cullen from a tough waterfront district in Brooklyn. A square-faced, hard-boiled Democrat, with a lower lip like Maurice Chevalier's, he is the House's Assistant Majority Leader. In disgrace because of his stand against the President's economy bill fortnight ago, he retrieved some of his lost prestige by sponsoring the Administration's beer bill on the floor. By amending the Volstead Act the measure authorized beer of 3.2% alcoholic content by weight, imposed a $5 per barrel tax, required brewers to take out a $1,000 Federal license. Re-enacted was the old Webb-Kenyon law to protect Dry States from Wet Shipments.

Representative Cullen led off a three-hour debate by reciting the threadbare arguments for beer as a revenue-raiser, "a vital step toward prosperity." Drys raged and roared impotently. Swinging to his feet Missouri's stocky Claiborne announced: "As a good drinking man I'm interested in this beer bill for drinking purposes. I not only want a good glass of beer but I want a good drink of whiskey and I hope the time will come when I can walk into a decent saloon and get both." Then he sat down, chewed his cigar impatiently.

The House passed the Cullen bill 316-to-97, with 73 Republicans going Wet, 58 Democrats staying Dry.

Before the Senate passed (43-to-30) the beer bill, it made three changes: 1) a cut in the alcoholic content to 3.05%, the British tax standard for non-intoxicating beer; 2) inclusion of 3.05% wine, slipped in by California's McAdoo despite the universal opinion of vintners that such "wine" would be slop; 3) a prohibition on beer sales to minors, which would in effect give Federal agents supervision over state distribution.

In conference the House accepted the Senate's wine amendment, the Senate accepted the House's alcoholic content for beer and dropped its no-sales-to-minors proposal. Thus a 3.2% beer bill was sent to the President for his signature. States in which beer sales can start: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Already the Anti-Saloon League was preparing to test the validity of the Cullen Act before the Supreme Court. Big question: is 3.2% beer intoxicating in fact? If so, the court would be inclined to rule that the law is unconstitutional under the 18th Amendment.

Beer of 3.2% compares as follows with famed pre-Prohibition brews: Pabst Blue Ribbon, 2.9%; Schlitz Pale, 3.1%; Anheuser-Busch Budweiser, 3.8%; Cream City Pilsener, 3.3%; Blatz Muenchener, 3.5%; Hammond Muehlhauser, 4.6%.

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