"...infamous episodes of the war. It was no accident that the Grain Board was placed under the remit of the War Department; Secretary Goff had proven himself one of the more dept "bean-counters" as Secretary Root huffily referred to his Cabinet rival [1] and his quick turnaround on a number of logistical snarls in ordnance and supply had endeared him to military brass and impressed the President, and not just in comparison to his maligned predecessor Herrick. As such, the daunting task of keeping the swelling armies being pushed into Maryland, Kentucky, and western Texas - and, soon, an Expeditionary Force earmarked for operations abroad - not only supplied but more importantly fed fell on Goff's exhausted bureaucrats, who under the guise of the War Procurement Order established the Grain Board until a more sophisticated Congressional solution could be found. [2]
The Grain Board immediately began buying up huge amounts of grain, bidding the price up, leading to a ban on grain exports passed both by executive order and soon Congressional action. While a huge boon for once-struggling farmers and thus popular with Farm Belt Democrats who otherwise took a dim view of the Hughes administration, this still meant that there was a surge in grain prices within the country and meant that there was now internal competition for the market, meaning that either civilian grain supplies would be rationed or something drastic would have to be done, and the administration had a straightforward one - a federal ban on the transshipment of alcohol across state lines for the duration of the war and state bans on the distillation of liquor or brewing of beer that may contain ingredients needed to feed the armies.
Hughes was a teetotaler personally but skeptical of outright prohibition, and Goff regarded the temperance activists with a great deal of contempt, but prohibition as a movement had gained a tremendous amount of steam in the previous quarter-century and found purchase among many Protestants who saw it as the moral question of the times and who were single-issue voters on going beyond local options into wholesale statewide or even federal bans. While its political implications could be complicated, especially out West - Washington was one of three states that banned it totally and it was the core fault line between the two largest factions of the Oregon Democrats - it was primarily a Liberal phenomenon. As a result, a number of political appointees at the War Department were outright prohibitionists who eagerly used their newfound power. The war had of course ended all imports of popular distilled products from the Confederacy and would severely hamper the trade of Irish whiskies, but domestic brews drew even more grain and was seen as the real scourge by the moralizing temperance crusaders who had burrowed their way into the Grain Board and that set up a crisis with the beating heart of American beer - Milwaukee.
Beer and Milwaukee are, to many Americans, are virtually synonymous. While cities like Newark and Cincinnati enjoyed robust brewing cultures it was the “German Athens” that was the epicenter of beer brewing in the United States, and home to a strong culture of beer halls and gardens rather than saloons or taverns. Milwaukee’s major breweries Schlitz, Blatz and especially Pabst produced so much of their product that they had for years been one of the largest traders in hops and grains futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world’s largest commodities market, larger even than any of London’s, and locked in their order sizes and prices months in advance. This meant that they were due shipments at prices lower than the going rate, and upon the formation of the Grain Board several nationwide breweries, but especially Pabst, had rushed in to lock up as many futures as possible at pre-spike prices, leaving the government short of their grain quotas. In other words, overpaying for too little of what they needed.
The ostensible reason the Grain Board attempted to seize by force the grain shipments to Milwaukee was that they needed to get their allotted grains for feeding armies, by hook or by crook, but the image of War Department agents and Wisconsin National Guardsmen marching on the massive Pabst brewery, combined with the ban on interstate alcohol sales and much-discussed proposals to ban alcohol production during the war gave a very different impression. The workforce at Milwaukee’s breweries was also heavily unionized, generally German-speaking and voted for the city’s socialist machine headed by Mayor Emil Seidel and Congressman Victor Berger, giving it a sharply political aspect, too.
The Milwaukee Beer Garden Riots were thus one of the worst civil disturbances of the war. Five blocks of Milwaukee’s brewing district burned down and six men died. The Grain Board retreated after the outcry, and Congress - pushed in part by Berger - stepped in with a stopgap law to better regulate the grain market during the war, largely defusing the dispute, and Pabst voluntarily slashed their production by 70%.
Politically, the Beer Garden Riots were background noise in the broader war but were not soon forgotten by German Wisconsinites. Once thought to be running out of steam, Milwaukee’s Socialists instead retrenched their power; Socialists would control city hall in “Red Milwaukee” without interruption until the early 1980s and Berger’s Congressional seat would stay staunchly Socialist with only a few interregnums as well. A sense of persecution similar to the Samoan War attached itself in many German communities, particularly the post-riot revival of crude stereotypes about beer garden culture, and the German volunteers in the Great American War helped inspire a German-American cultural renaissance across the Upper Midwest…”
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
[1] Keep an eye on Root's position in the Cabinet
[2] "An army marches on its stomach" - Napoleon Bonaparte