The Saloon or the Biergarten?

As published in the American Brewers’ Review – July, 1916

The saloon is not the most vicious thing.  The most vicious thing is the biergarten, with which our semi-hemi-demi Americans are proposing to replace the saloon. 

The saloon is vicious, certainly, a place of vile pictures, vile talk, vile politics and vile beverages, but in few cases does it entertain women, except those women who entertain men – for a price.

American womanhood is the fountain of American life.  At least half of the race has been kept clean of alcohol.  American children have been given a 50 per cent chance to be born right, and have usually been accorded at least a few years in which to get a right start.

Now the brewers propose to change all of this.  Their plan is to bring the women into the saloons, and also the children.  Make it a family affair.  Call it a biergarten.  Continentalize it.  Break down the finer instincts of American women so that they will not be inclined to oppose the liquor “business.”  Poison their bosoms so that infant Americans will bring alcoholic predispositions into the world with them.

This system will pay more money than the saloon system.  It is a good “business” proposition – for the brewers.

If we must have the liquor “business,” in God’s name let us have the saloon, where men take their drinks standing and fully realize that they are poisoning themselves.  Keep the women and the children out of it.  We have a lot to learn in regard to the alcohol problem, but Europe can’t teach us anything – to say the least, its biergarten professors cannot.

From Bulletin, Research and News Department Temperance Society, M. E. Church, Topeka, Kans., April 7, 1916

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American Brewers’ Review response:

Is this the prize composition in a contest for condensing in the smallest space the greatest amount of mendacity, viciousness, and general moral filth?

And it is published in the name of a great church and pretendedly in the interest of a moral reform by people supposed to possess moral sense?

Or are they really so ignorant and bigoted that they can believe such drivel?

And this is the twentieth century!  And such twaddle is sent to the newspapers of the country for publication.

Pitiful, indeed, are conditions that permit such venom to be speed over the press without evoking the strongest expressions of violent loathing.