Germans have lengthy loved and commemorated alcohol. When the Irish missionary Columbanus first encountered Germans within the early seventh century, he occurred on a ritual sacrifice of beer.
Even after the Germans turned Christians, most spiritual leaders adopted the biblical view of alcohol as a part of God’s bounty. Martin Luther was keen on beer and wine: he often acquired drunk, and he used the tunes of well-liked consuming songs for a few of his hymns.
Such was the custom behind missionary pastor Frederick Schmid, who got here to Michigan in 1833 to plant congregations among the many state’s German immigrants. However Schmid, who based each Zion Lutheran Church and Bethlehem United Church of Christ, rapidly realized that different native ministers had a lot stricter attitudes towards alcohol. Repulsed by the widespread choice for onerous liquor and the behavior of happening drunken sprees, many advocated an outright ban on consuming.
In June 1834, Schmid was approached by an area Presbyterian minister. Would Schmid use his authority to steer Ann Arbor’s Germans to comply with Presbyterian temperance tenets, which forbade not solely alcohol however even espresso and tea?
Schmid replied that it was not needed for a Christian to submit himself to such a yoke. Individuals with the Holy Spirit inside them wouldn’t drink an excessive amount of nor misuse the presents of God. Jesus, Schmid added, drank wine.
The conflict of cultures that started that day would final virtually a century. The Germans arrived in Ann Arbor amid an important temperance motion amongst native-born People-one that may culminate in nationwide Prohibition in 1920.
Most German settlers noticed issues very similar to Schmid. Their perspective is enshrined within the structure of Freedom Township’s Bethel Church, wherein solely heavy consuming is condemned. Within the churchyard is a headstone with the date “February thirty first.” In accordance with former pastor Roman Reineck, farm households would go to with the stonecutter as he labored. They’d carry some onerous cider or wine, and by the tip of the day the date did not matter.
Within the townships, the place German had been the bulk, such socializing was of little concern. However the German love of alcohol was a a lot larger drawback in Ann Arbor. Between 1868 to 1918, metropolis directories report 221 completely different locations shelling out alcohol, greater than half of them owned by German People.
Edith Staebler Kempf (1898-1993) informed tales in regards to the nineteenth century saloon run by Charlie Behr. Professors, legal professionals, and well-to-do German farmers went there. Behr additionally served meals, and by Kempf’s account, there was by no means any rowdiness.
The Yankees-Michiganders whose households had come from New England or New York State-might have ignored Germans promoting beer to different Germans. However Ann Arbor’s scholar inhabitants was a special matter. Most U-M college students of the period got here from Yankee households and grew up in Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian properties, the place teetotalism was enforced. On their very own in Ann Arbor, some reveled of their newfound freedoms-including the liberty to drink.
At first, the College of Michigan saved an in depth eye on college students. They lived on campus, had a 9 p.m. curfew, and had been required to attend obligatory chapel twice a day to listen to sermons given by college members, who had been largely ordained Protestant clergy.
That modified when Henry Philip Tappan took over as college president in 1852. Tappan had visited analysis universities in Prussia, and he started recruiting college on the premise of scholarship, not church affiliations. Tappan additionally abolished the college’s dormitory as a result of he wished college students to be extra impartial and dwell off campus, like college students in Europe.
Tappan himself drank wine together with his meals, and he did not care if college students drank beer. He did communicate out towards distilled spirits, however this hardly glad the extra conservative college and regents.
Free from the authority of oldsters and the college, college students turned to alcoholic hell-raising. In 1856, scholar mobs attacked German consuming locations within the “Dutch Struggle.” The battle started when Jacob Hangsterfer ejected two rowdy college students from his beer corridor. They returned the subsequent night time with buddies armed with knives and golf equipment. When Hangsterfer refused to serve them free drinks, the scholars broke open kegs and barrels and destroyed furnishings and glass.
Quickly after, six college students climbed by a window at Henry Binder’s resort and saloon and helped themselves to drinks set out for a German ball. Binder might seize solely one of many college students and held him hostage. The others acquired reinforcements from campus. When Binder demanded $10 for the stolen refreshments, the scholars attacked with battering rams. With the brick partitions giving means, Binder set his big canine on the scholars. However the college students’ canines killed Binder’s canine. Then the scholars went to get the muskets they utilized in navy drills-at which level Binder properly launched his captive.
Known as on the carpet by the regents, Tappan emphasised the college’s persevering with necessities for every day chapel and Sunday church attendance, in addition to different proof of an ethical scholar physique. He additionally known as for enforcement of a brand new metropolis ordinance prohibiting the sale of alcohol to minors and to individuals who had been drunk. However the next yr, a former scholar died after consuming at Binder’s saloon and a pal’s room.
Tappan joined temperance-minded townspeople in pressuring metropolis council to informally agree that no liquor licenses could be granted east of Division Avenue, making a “dry line” to protect the campus space. However Tappan misplaced factors with the regents when he refused to take a private temperance pledge. Although he elevated the college to nationwide stature-raising enrollment tenfold, laying the foundations of the legislation and engineering faculties, and far more-the regents had been extra involved together with his perceived ethical failings. They fired 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 inauguration. On the ceremony, a regent made some extent of detailing Tappan’s “sinful” conduct.
President Haven, nonetheless, had no higher luck curbing the city’s rowdy college students. In 1867, he knowledgeable the Women Library Affiliation that Ann Arbor was “disgraced all around the nation” as a “place of revelry and intoxication.” By 1871, stung by brawls, nighttime ruckuses, and damaging pranks, Ann Arbor voters elected a college college member as mayor. Silas Douglas promptly had the city marshal warn the saloons {that a} lengthy ignored Sunday closing ordinance could be enforced.
Ann Arbor’s battle over alcohol ultimately turned a statewide concern. The Michigan department of the Ladies’s Christian Temperance Union issued a flyer in 1881 decrying town’s saloons for making males “brutes.” The flyer lists thirty-seven saloon keepers by identify, the good majority of them German People, and contends that “Ann Arbor could be higher off morally, socially, intellectually, and in each different means, if this disgustingly lengthy listing of males would each one among them die with the small-pox throughout the subsequent week.”
In 1887, Michigan voted on a proposed modification to the state structure prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Ann Arbor’s closely German Second Ward (at this time’s Previous West Aspect) rejected it ten to 1. The Yankee- and university-dominated Sixth Ward voted three to 1 in favor. It misplaced narrowly statewide.
Ann Arbor’s temperance forces lastly achieved some success in 1902, when the casual dry space across the college turned part of town constitution. By 1908, eleven Michigan counties had enacted native Prohibition ordinances, and annually an increasing number of counties joined them. In 1916, Michigan voters once more thought of a Prohibition modification to the state structure.The Second Ward nonetheless voted no, by virtually two to 1, however Ann Arbor as an entire voted for Prohibition, as did the state.
The late Ernie Splitt recalled the federal government inspectors arriving on the Michigan Union Brewery on Fourth Avenue on the day the state went dry, Might 1, 1918. In accordance with Splitt, everybody had a drink, even the inspectors. Then “the remainder of the beer was poured down the drain. That was the saddest day of my life.”
Hordes of Michiganders headed for Ohio to get booze, main Michigan’s governor to order state troopers to patrol the border. Automobiles ignoring their roadblocks had been fired upon, and the governor was compelled to declare restricted martial legislation. A passenger was shot within the neck when a driver did not cease for troopers on the freeway exterior Ann Arbor. However a search of the automobile turned up no liquor.
In 1918 congress accepted the Eighteenth Modification, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating drinks. It was ratified by the states early in 1919 and took impact in January 1920.
Prohibition did scale back heavy consuming, particularly among the many working class, in rural areas, and on faculty campuses. But it surely had the alternative impact amongst well-to-do Anglos.
Bootleggers and unlawful consuming institutions largely ignored beer and wine, concentrating as an alternative on extra worthwhile onerous liquor. Cocktails turn out to be stylish.
It was estimated that 400 to 600 circumstances of whiskey had been introduced from Canada throughout the Detroit River nightly. A lot of it then was pushed to Chicago, often passing by Washtenaw County en route.
One chilly April night time in 1927, Ann Arbor law enforcement officials William Marz and Erwin Keebler stopped a automobile downtown. The driving force had no registration, so Marz stood on the automobile’s operating board to direct it to police headquarters whereas Keebler adopted behind of their patrol automobile. Close to headquarters, one of many passengers pulled out a gun and fired 5 occasions by the window, blasting Marz to the pavement. The automobile sped off. Thankfully, Keebler had insisted Marz placed on a bulletproof vest.
When the police escalated their enforcement efforts, gangsters merely used their huge income to purchase quicker automobiles and extra weapons. Abnormal residents feared being caught within the crossfire. They put American flag stickers on their windshields with the inscription, “Do not Shoot, I am Not a Bootlegger.”
With legislation enforcement officers pissed off by the bootleggers, they struck on the little man-in Ann Arbor, Metzger’s German Restaurant. In 1929, proprietor Invoice Metzger was cited for promoting onerous cider and positioned on probation for 5 years. He was fined $100 and could not depart the state with out the consent of the courtroom. He, his autos, his enterprise, and his residence could possibly be searched at any time with out a warrant. To stop any future cases of his cider fermenting, he might now not promote cider in any respect.
Over the course of the Nineteen Twenties, even non-Germans started to query Prohibition. They got here to understand that they’d solely changed the hated saloon with the speakeasy and the blind pig and started to suppose that the reasonable German method, consuming beer and wine, is perhaps OK.
Within the 1932 presidential election, Franklin Roosevelt ran as a moist candidate. As one among its first acts, the brand new congress handed the Twenty-First Modification, repealing Prohibition. That April, Michigan turned the primary state to ratify it. By Might, sale and consumption of alcohol had been authorized once more in Ann Arbor.
The Michigan Union Brewery reopened because the Ann Arbor Brewery. Kurt Neumann, a longtime resident of “Cabbage City,” because the Previous West Aspect was identified, recalled how males from the neighborhood would cease in, fill steins straight from a spigot, and sit round speaking and consuming. Sadly, different locals weren’t as loyal to “Ann Arbor Previous Tyme,” “Creme High,” or “City Membership”-perhaps as a result of it was all the identical beer, simply with completely different labels. The brewery closed for good in 1949.
In 1960, native voters lastly permitted bars to serve liquor. In 1964 they changed the century-old dry line with a smaller dry island across the college, and in 1969 even that was eradicated. Ann Arborites had repealed the final remnants of the Yankee campaign towards alcohol.
This text initially appeared within the Ann Arbor Observer for September, 2009. Extra on Ann Arbor’s historical past, together with images, beery and in any other case, could also be discovered at a web site: http://www.celticgerman.com