Bitter Brew (Paperback)

Some parts of the book

Inside the iron gates of the giant brewery complex, 300 trucks pressed up to the loading dock, while 1,200 more lined up bumper- to-bumper on the street outside, ready to take their place. From within the plant the rumble of machinery signaled that the long- hibernating giant was now fully awake, as seemingly endless col- umns of brown Budweiser bottles, with their famous red-and- white labels, clattered along snaking conveyor belts to be packed in wooden crates proudly stamped, "Property of Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis Mo."
On the bottling plant floor, brewery president August A. Busch Sr. and his two sons, Adolphus III and August Jr., posed for pho- tographers as they packed a twenty-four-count crate destined for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who'd swept into office in No- vember on the promise of a "new deal" for America that included the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the man- ufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States.
Full repeal would not come for eight more months because it required another constitutional amendment and thus needed rati- fication by the legislatures in thirty-six (three-fourths) of the forty- eight states. But FDR had already made good on his campaign promise to the nation's brewers. On March 13, nine days after his inauguration, he asked Congress to immediately modify the so- called Volstead Act, which had set the maximum legal alcoholic content of beverages at .05 percent, to allow the sale of beer with a 3.2 percent alcohol. “I deem action at this time to be of high- est importance," he said. Both the House and the Senate quickly complied, setting April 8 as the date when the sale of beer could
resume.