The Daily News reports this image as a wine barrel confiscation, but the truck reads”Knickerbocker Storage” and Knickerbocker was the beer brand of Jacob Ruppert. Therefore, the brewers thought they would be immune from Prohibition. When the Temperance movement was mostly directed at the saloons and hard alcohol distilleries, it initially helped beer sales as lager was used to replace over indulgences in hard liquor. The prohibitionists were outraged by the federal liquor taxation as they believed it gave legitimacy to the industry. Thomas Nast’s 16th amendment illustration in Harper’s Weekly, 1878. Suddenly, the brewers’ taxes were not as important.Īnd then came the 18th amendment: Prohibition. Īnd they were: until Taft proposed the 16 th amendment implementing the federal income tax in 1909. The brewers thought they were ‘untouchable’. In the early twentieth century, brewing was the fifth largest manufacturing industry. The liquor industry contributed over 50% of the federal government’s internal revenue from 1875-1894. And one can better understand the Gilded Age and rise of the corporation by examining the USBA’s lobbyists. The relationship between the brewers and the government was one of the first examples of business mixing with politics. But, they expected respect and trust in return. Thus, they were more flexible in accepting the government’s influence than the liquor distillers. They hoped to encourage a similar positive relationship in the US and were willing to “accommodate themselves to the IRS”. The German brewers looked “back in fondness at the respect and support German governments accorded beer”. While breweries contributed a massive amount to the federal government by means of taxes, liquor distillers responded to taxation with evasion and fraud. President Lincoln signed Part of The Revenue Act of 1862, included a beer tax. Brewery workers who were not included in this association also felt a new national identity and were among the earliest laborers to organize into a union. The German brewers responded to their new national influence by founding the United States Brewers Association. But the tax revenue from the beer industry also supported the nation itself, especially after the war. Liquor and beer taxation began in 1862 to help finance the Civil War.
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