Drink To This 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
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 some were first class brewers. There were some Irish among the workers, and they too were fans of the Germans’ sudsy “liquid bread.” Before long St. Louis was peppered with huge German beer halls, where the immigrants found community and a feeling of home. For reasons I haven’t yet uncovered, the reactionary political forces of Missouri territory were antibeer. 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 US soil. And one thing to keep in mind was that the so-called “border states” were a key battleground as the civil war broke out. There was a strip
4 TheReader | August 2008
of these states (from Maryland through 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 had 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.) Seizing St Louis 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. One focus of preparation was the state armory, the largest warehouse of weapons on the frontier. Whoever controlled those guns would be better able to crush their enemies. 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