Busch's Lone Star Legacy
Support for prohibition intensified especially after the start of the First World War. Prohibition advocates argued that German beer barons like Adolphus Busch, who controlled the vast majority of breweries in Texas, were subverting the war effort and were sympathetic to German views. Even though Busch died in 1913, his German ethnicity and the political clout his "foreign capital" afforded him frightened many of the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon rural conservatives in Texas. In the charged atmosphere of World War I, the response to this fear culminated in a series of withering attacks on the brewing industry. Crops needed to make beer, like wheat and rice, were rationed by the government in order to maintain food production. It was increasingly labeled wasteful and un-American. The attached excerpt from the Corsicana Semi-Weekly Light is from a speech prohibitionist Nannie Webb Curtis gave in 1918 in Corsicana, TX, titled "Shall the Kaiser Rule Texas?" In it she suggests that German-American brewers are agents of Kaiser Wilhelm, purposefully wasting food resources that could otherwise serve the American war effort.
Prohibition finally passed nationally and in the state of Texas during the politically charged atmosphere of World War I. Many of Busch's former businesses were sold off and repurposed, but the legacy of Busch's investments remained. For example, the Texas Brewing Company became the Texas Beverage and Cold Storage Company in 1918, then was reincorporated as the Texas Ice and Refrigeration Company, which served Fort Worth on the brewery's original site until 1972. In Houston, the American Brewing Association reorganized as a cold storage for August A. Busch's packing company, and served as a distributor of a near beer version of Budweiser. Likewise, the Galveston Brewing Company became the Southern Beverage Company, which sold the popular XXX Root Beer and XXX Ginger Ale and a near beer called Galvo. The company survived Prohibition, and was eventually purchased by the Falstaff Brewing Corporation in 1956, which updated and expanded the brewery's operations, and operated on the original site (pictured here) until its closure in 1981.
The Lone Star Brewing Company in San Antonio was repurposed by Busch's heirs as the Lone Star Cotton Mill. Although that venture eventually failed, leading to the site changing hands and being repurposed several times over the years, Lone Star beer lives on. The Lone Star name was purchased in the 1940s, and Lone Star beer was produced at a new site in San Antonio until its closure in 1996. However, Lone Star beer is still produced by the Pabst Brewing Company under its famous tagline, "The National Beer of Texas." The Old Lone Star Brewery site now houses the San Antonio Museum of Art. While the Adolphus Hotel is Busch's only business that has operated continually since Busch founded it, Busch's other buildings and businesses fostered a variety of business activities with legacies that lasted long after they left the Busch family's hands.
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Website created by Gabriel Odom and Todd Barnett, PhD