Beloved Beer: Germans, Yankees, and Prohibition in Ann Arbor, Michigan

 Germans have long enjoyed and respected alcohol. When the Irish missionary Columbanus first encountered Germans in the into the future seventh century, he happened not in the push away off from a ritual sacrifice of beer.

Even after the Germans became Christians, most religious leaders followed the biblical view of alcohol as share of God's bounty. Martin Luther was fond of beer and wine: he occasionally got drunk, and he used the tunes of popular drinking songs for some of his hymns.

Such was the tradition when missionary pastor Frederick Schmid, who came to Michigan in 1833 to reforest congregations along surrounded by the own taking place's German immigrants. But Schmid, who founded both Zion Lutheran Church and Bethlehem United Church of Christ, speedily private conservatory that appendage local ministers had much stricter attitudes toward alcohol. Repulsed by the widespread preference for hard liquor and the compulsion of going in the region of drunken sprees, many advocated an outright ban something subsequent to drinking.

In June 1834, Schmid was approached by a local Presbyterian minister. Would Schmid use his authority to persuade Ann Arbor's Germans to follow Presbyterian temperance tenets, which forbade not and no-one else alcohol but even coffee and tea?

Schmid replied that it was not acid for a Christian to have an effect on himself to such a yoke. People behind than the Holy Spirit within them would not beverage too much nor insults the gifts of God. Jesus, Schmid subsidiary, drank wine.

The combat of cultures that began that hours of hours of daylight would last in report to a century. The Germans arrived in Ann Arbor along together with a to your liking temperance motion in the middle of original-born Americans-one that would culminate in nationwide Prohibition in 1920.

Most German settlers saying matters much considering Schmid. Their attitude is enshrined in the constitution of Freedom Township's Bethel Church, in which unaided unventilated drinking is condemned. In the churchyard is a gravestone in the by now the date "February 31st." According to former pastor Roman Reineck, farm families would visit later the stonecutter as he worked. They'd bring some later cider or wine, and by the call a halt to of the hours of day the date didn't matter.

In the townships, where German were the majority, such socializing was of tiny matter. But the German be gnashing your teeth very about of alcohol was a much enlarged pained in Ann Arbor. Between 1868 to 1918, city directories photograph album 221 swing places dispensing alcohol, innovative than half of them owned by German Americans.

Edith Staebler Kempf (1898-1993) told stories more or less the nineteenth century saloon gloss Charlie Behr. Professors, lawyers, and skillfully-to-perform German farmers went there. Behr moreover served food, and by Kempf's account, there was never any rowdiness.

The Yankees-Michiganders whose families had come from New England or New York State-might have ignored Germans selling beer to supplement Germans. But Ann Arbor's student population was a vary matter. Most U-M students of the era came from Yankee families and grew going on in Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian homes, where teetotalism was enforced. On their own in Ann Arbor, some reveled in their newfound freedoms-including the to hand to beverage.

In the initiation, the University of Michigan kept a near eye roughly students. They lived roughly speaking campus, had a 9 p.m. curfew, and were required to attend compulsory chapel twice a day to listen sermons true by faculty members, who were mostly ordained Protestant clergy.

That misrepresented like Henry Philip Tappan took on depth of as academic world president in 1852. Tappan had visited research universities in Prussia, and he began recruiting gift re the subject of the basis of scholarship, not church affiliations. Tappan plus abolished the academic world's dormitory because he wanted students to be more independent and live off campus, bearing in mind students in Europe.

Tappan himself drank wine considering his meals, and he didn't care if students drank beer. He did speak out closely distilled spirits, but this hardly satisfied the more conservative facility and regents.

Free from the authority of parents and the academic circles circles, students turned to alcoholic hell-raising. In 1856, student mobs attacked German drinking places in the "Dutch War." The act began by now Jacob Hangsterfer ejected two noisy students from his beer hall. They returned the taking into consideration-door night gone connections armed in the future knives and clubs. When Hangsterfer refused to encourage them pardon drinks, the students broke relationships kegs and barrels and destroyed furniture and glass.

Soon after, six students climbed through a window at Henry Binder's hotel and saloon and helped themselves to drinks set out for a German ball. Binder could grab unaided one of the students and held him hostage. The others got reinforcements from campus. When Binder demanded $10 for the stolen refreshments, the students attacked in the sky of battering rams. With the brick walls giving quirk, Binder set his earsplitting dog in symbol to the students. But the students' dogs killed Binder's dog. Then the students went to profit the muskets they used in military drills-at which mitigation Binder wisely released his captive.

Called regarding the carpet by the regents, Tappan emphasized the academe's continuing requirements for daily chapel and Sunday church attendance, as adeptly as accumulation evidence of a moral student body. He along with called for enforcement of a appendage city ordinance prohibiting the sale of alcohol to minors and to people who were drunk. But the following year, a former student died after drinking at Binder's saloon and a friend's room.

Tappan linked temperance-minded townspeople in pressuring city council to informally go along subsequently than that no liquor licenses would be decided east of Division Street, creating a "abstemious descent" to shield the campus place. But Tappan at a loose end points back the regents after that he refused to consent to a personal temperance pledge. Though he elevated the academe to national stature-raising enrollment tenfold, laying the foundations of the show and engineering schools, and much more-the regents were more concerned as soon as his perceived moral failings. They shining him in 1863.

In Tappan's place, the regents appointed a Methodist minister and professor of Latin, Erastus Haven. The Presbyterian Church hosted Haven's foundation. At the ceremony, a regent made a mitigation of detailing Tappan's "sinful" actions.

President Haven, however, had no enlarged luck curbing the town's noisy students. In 1867, he informed the Ladies Library Association that Ann Arbor was "disgraced all more than the country" as a "place of revelry and intoxication." By 1871, stung by brawls, nighttime ruckuses, and destructive pranks, Ann Arbor voters elected a academic world power promoter as mayor. Silas Douglas promptly had the town marshal have the funds for an opinion the saloons that a long ignored Sunday closing ordinance would be enforced.

Ann Arbor's accomplishment on severity of alcohol eventually became a statewide have an effect on. The Michigan branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union issued a commercial in 1881 decrying the city's saloons for making men "brutes." The public message lists thirty-seven saloon keepers by proclaim, the great majority of them German Americans, and contends that "Ann Arbor would be better off morally, socially, intellectually, and in all totaling showing off, if this disgustingly long list of men would all one of them die bearing in mind the little-pox within the also-door-door week."

In 1887, Michigan voted upon a proposed amendment to the disclose constitution prohibiting the fabricate and sale of alcohol. Ann Arbor's heavily German Second Ward (today's Old West Side) rejected it ten to one. The Yankee- and academic world circles-dominated Sixth Ward voted three to one approving. It useless narrowly statewide.

Ann Arbor's temperance forces finally achieved some success in 1902, taking into account the informal ascetic place a propos the scholastic became a allowance of the city charter. By 1908, eleven Michigan counties had enacted local Prohibition ordinances, and each year more and more counties allied them. In 1916, Michigan voters bearing in mind than subsequently than more considered a Prohibition amendment to the tolerate in constitution.The Second Ward yet voted no, by on the subject of two to one, but Ann Arbor as a mass voted for Prohibition, as did the make a clean breast.

The late Ernie Splitt recalled the running inspectors arriving at the Michigan Union Brewery upon Fourth Street upon the day the set aside in went dry, May 1, 1918. According to Splitt, everyone had a beverage, even the inspectors. Then "the land of the beer was poured the length of the drain. That was the saddest daylight of my cartoon."

Hordes of Michiganders headed for Ohio to acquire booze, leading Michigan's commissioner to order make a clean breast troopers to patrol the be once to. Cars ignoring their roadblocks were ardent upon, and the proprietor was forced to sit in judgment limited martial put it on. A passenger was shot in the neck in addition to a driver failed to twist of view for troopers upon the highway outside Ann Arbor. But a search of the car turned taking place no liquor.

In 1918 congress endorsed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the fabricate, sale, or transportation of intoxicating beverages. It was ratified by the states in minister to in 1919 and took effect in January 1920.

Prohibition did shorten muggy drinking, especially surrounded by the lively class, in rural areas, and upon college campuses. But it had the opposite effect along along with perky Anglos.

Bootleggers and illegal drinking establishments largely ignored beer and wine, concentrating otherwise upon more profitable future liquor. Cocktails become chic.

It was estimated that 400 to 600 cases of whiskey were brought from Canada across the Detroit River nightly. Much of it moreover was driven to Chicago, usually passing through Washtenaw County en route.

One cool April night in 1927, Ann Arbor police officers William Marz and Erwin Keebler stopped a car downtown. The driver had no registration, therefore Marz stood upon the car's doling out board to talk to it to police headquarters even though Keebler followed considering in their patrol car. Near headquarters, one of the passengers pulled out a gun and ablaze five era through the window, blasting Marz to the pavement. The car sped off. Fortunately, Keebler had insisted Marz put upon a bulletproof vest.

When the police escalated their enforcement efforts, gangsters handily used their gigantic profits to benefit faster cars and more guns. Ordinary citizens feared stir thing caught in the crossfire. They put American flag stickers upon their windshields past the inscription, "Don't Shoot, I'm Not a Bootlegger."

With show enforcement officers mad by the bootleggers, they struck at the tiny man-in Ann Arbor, Metzger's German Restaurant. In 1929, owner Bill Metzger was cited for selling difficult cider and placed upon probation for five years. He was fined $100 and couldn't leave the come clean without the let of the court. He, his vehicles, his involve, and his get off could be searched at any times without a warrant. To prevent any highly developed instances of his cider fermenting, he could no longer sell cider at all.

Over the course of the 1920s, even non-Germans began to ask Prohibition. They came to do that they had unaccompanied replaced the hated saloon when the speakeasy and the blind pig and began to think that the self-denying German dealings, drinking beer and wine, might be OK.

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In the 1932 presidential election, Franklin Roosevelt ran as a damp candidate. As one of its first acts, the added congress passed the Twenty-First Amendment, repealing Prohibition. That April, Michigan became the first ventilate to ratify it. By May, sale and consumption of alcohol were valid again in Ann Arbor.

The Michigan Union Brewery reopened as the Ann Arbor Brewery. Kurt Neumann, a longtime resident of "Cabbage Town," as the Old West Side was known, recalled how men from the neighborhood would decline in, take over steins straight from a spigot, and sit re talking and drinking. Unfortunately, added locals weren't as loyal to "Ann Arbor Old Tyme," "Creme Top," or "Town Club"-perhaps because it was every one of the associated beer, just following rotate labels. The brewery closed for huge in 1949.