St. Louis Blues

MARQUIS W. CHILDS

A mellow tribute to the old-time St. Louis of the days of Anheuser-Busch—and a glint of optimism for the future

It is somehow right that it should be 7 he St. Louis Blues. Not The Chicago Blues, nor The Detroit Blues, nor. by any stretch of the imagination, The Cleveland Blues. There is in the tempo of that early jazz classic something of the tempo of the city today.

Grass may grow between the cobblestones of the levee, but the levee is there and the old city is there. Obscured, it is true, beneath the smoke of the new industrial St. Louis; so begrimed that the casual visitor departs in haste, glad to be free of what appears only another midland manufacturing base, a vast depot for the chain stores of Texas. Arkansas, Oklahoma; but unmistakably there, discoverable to the persevering.

A tradition of conservatism goes deep into the past. It is with almost a conscious disdain that St. Louis ignores the graces that other cities in the Middle-west employ to woo the stranger. There is no invitation to the waltz. The approach to St. Louis from the East is appalling, past abandoned warehouses, along the disused and crumbling waterfront, through a kind of desert of small factories and Negro tenements. Until six years ago, when a broad program of public reconstruction was begun, the downtown district was cluttered, cramped, hideous. But beneath a forbidding exterior, the character of the city has persisted, mellow and pleasant.

The tempo is slower, the pace easier. Life is not so frantic. People have time, or at any rate they take time, for the amenities. The charm of St. Louis is chiefly the charm of people. Despite the post-war exodus, which left the Middle-west a kind of huge suburb of New York and Paris. St. Louis has retained a society with diverse and curious ramifications, made up of widely assorted people.

There has always been a broad freedom of personal opinion and expression—the natural outgrowth, perhaps, of a society of individualists. Roger Baldwin, who for several years made the City Club a lively forum of ideas and intellects, once questioned whether this freedom was true liberality or merely inert, complacent indifference. It is, however, a genuine liberalism, existing, paradoxically, because of the very conservatism of past and present: because the city is so conscious of its security.

Blackened and grim under the winter smoke pall, which seems to defy all civic attack, St. Louis can on certain soft, Italianate days in the spring present a seductive face to the world. At the corner of Kingshighway and Lindell Boulevard, something spacious and grand happens if the day is right. Forest Park sweeps away to where, dimly, there is the gold and brown roof of the Art Museum; all the proud mansions of the boulevard regain their lost and dimming pride; and. tall and handsome, the new Park-Plaza supplies the modern note.

This is one small section, one street really, Lindell from Kingshighway to the traffic circle before the entrance to Washington University, in a city that meanders over a huge area. But as other streets are widened and plazas created in the large-scale reconstruction program. one may begin to see what the new city will be like when it has finished tearing itself up by the roots. Many phases of the plan are striking and bold. In the plaza before Union Station, for example, the plan calls for a great fountain by Carl Milles, the Swedish sculptor. This is to be in part the contribution of several citizens—one sign that a dormant public spirit is at long last beginning to awaken.

Along with this material upheaval, there is evidence of an intellectual stirring that is more or less indigenous and independent. One of its chief manifestations is a magazine, The St. Louis Review, which in its beginnings and aims is not unlike William Marion Reedy's famous Mirror. If The St. Louis Review survives its second winter, it will have won in all probability a lasting place. And deservedly, for it has begun to justify its announced conviction that the provincial is not necessarily second rate.

In any list of civic assets of long standing one must include the zoo and the art museum. Freed of political control, the zoo has maintained a uniformly high standard. It is. in the European sense, a true zoological garden, for its setting is superb. More, perhaps, than ever before, the art museum has become a force in the life of the city. This has been particularly true under Meyric R. Rogers, the young and brilliant director who came to St. Louis from Harvard by way of Baltimore.

The Municipal Opera, after sinking to a low and indifferent state, was spurred on to complete reorganization. Professional directors were put in charge. Now it offers suave, pleasant entertainment of The Student Prince variety. Even last summer it paid its own way, with the exception of a deficit so small that it was absorbed by the surplus of the previous year. On capacity nights—and they are frequent—when the ten thousand settle into quiet and the lights go down, it is a spectacle that never fails to impress visitors. And that, in the interpretation of the business men who sponsor it, is its chief function.

Returning, former St. Louisans are amazed at the evidences of change they see about them. They had departed with the belief that change might come to the rest of the world

but never to St. Louis. The list of former St. Louisans includes, incidentally, a great many who have made distinguished names for themselves elsewhere: Gerard Swope, bis brother, Herbert Bayard Swope, T. S. Eliot, Zoe Akins, Conde Nast, Fannie Hurst, Dwight Davis, Orrick Johns, the late Sara Teasdale, and, many would insist. Colonel Lindbergh. Although he is not a native, he lived for several years in St. Louis, and it was there that his flight was financed by a group of bankers and business men, including Albert Bond Lambert, one of America's first amateur airmen, a pupil of the Wrights. It is to St. Louis, too, that Colonel Lindbergh has entrusted for public display his astonishing collection of trophies.

The past has been so lush and full of good things that it is not surprising that St. Louis stubbornly resisted inevitable change. There was a time, not too remote, when traffic in St. Louis meant beer trucks drawn by dapple-gray horses, when the phrase "white-collar" had a .far more pleasant connotation than it has today, when a stein was something more than an advertising device for root-beer pagodas.

If one may believe the headier sentimentalists, the city in that period was entirely enveloped in a warm, golden haze that had rather more than a trace of the odor of malt about it. In that innocent day St. Louis was divided, as conveniently as ever Gaul was, into three parts. To the south was Germania, rampant, one long Gemütlichkeit of beer gardens and breweries. The Germanic South Side existed as a separate and distinct province and was quite content that it should be so. Occupying the central place was the St. Louis of the Chouteaus, the Cabannes and the other old Creole families, the St. Louis of the descendants of New England merchants and divines and sea captains IT. S. Eliot's grandfather came as a Unitarian minister and remained to found a university) ; Yankee pioneers and traders; a pleasant if somewhat limited society, excelling in the preparation of excellent punches and juleps, skilled in the arranging of cotillions and the dispatch of a flourishing trade with the regions to the west and southwest. Into the third division fell the rest of the town, the Irish on Biddle Street and the sprawling desert of North St. Louis. Lying in a generous half-moon described by a tortuous curve of the Mississippi, nothing was apparently ever to disturb the tranquillity of the city.

But the revolution was, literally, brewing. A genial, shrewd young German was about to change the course of history.

If ever a man was fitted to his time and his environment, it was Adolphus Busch. It was no accident that he became the king of brewers and St. Louis the capital of beer. He had his rivals in the city—the Lemps and others—and they made good beer. too. But there was only one Busch and South St. Louis was his kingdom. In the swift expansion of this kingdom.

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it was inevitable that he should somewhat upset the tranquil hegemony of the dominant old families. They were to discover with a rude shock one day that St. Louis had rather more to do with beer than was fitting for a proud, old city.

But that was much later. Adolphus's beginnings were modest. To be exact, he was a salesman of brewing supplies. And the first important step toward his destiny was his marriage to a brewer's daughter. Lilly Anheuser was the flower of South St. Louis. Her papa's Bavarian Brewery w'as a modest little brewery, turning out a few hundred barrels of good sound beer each year. As the new son-in-law, Adolphus, revolutionized the Bavarian Brewery, so was he later to revolutionize St. Louis—the happiest large-scale revolution in recorded history.

The views of the nation on the problem of beer were at this time more or less negative. Whiskey was preferred. Whiskey had been a prime factor in the settling of the West, an important truth generally overlooked. And the whiskey habit persisted long after the swamps and the deserts had been conquered. The beer that was available was for the most part heavy and dark.

It remained for a modest agent of Fate to discover a good beer. Carl Conrad, who owned a St. Louis brewery, was inspired by his contact with European brews to make what was perhaps the finest beer produced in America up to that time, a light yellow champagne beer. He was quite content to go on turning out a few barrels of this new brew each month.

But this remarkable new beer came to the attention of Adolphus and that canny young business man was not slow to realize its possibilities. He bought the rights to it, the name and the formula, and gained the friendship of Conrad, a friendship that was to be lifelong. The time, the man and the beer were in happy conjunction; and a city was about to be transformed.

To understand how one man in a single industry could work such a large-scale transformation, it is necessary to understand Adolphus's temperament. He had huge energy, boundless joviality, a good will that was as simple and as natural as the good will of a child. He knew that his beer was the best in America and he wanted to tell everyone about it. No small share of his vast energy went to that laudable end. As his brewing plant expanded, he took an increasing pride in it. He wanted every single visitor to the city to come down to the South Side and see what a beautiful clean brewery he had, how spotless the floors, how shining the vats, how glowing and immaculate every inch of the entire plant. He installed guides and saw to it that every convention and party of tourists paid a visit to his brewery. Such a shrewd business man was, of course, not unaware of the practical value of this policy. But it was no mere business formula. It sprang in part from his large impulse as host, from his desire to meet people, talk to them, laugh with them, tell them, incidentallv, what a fine beer he was making.

Distinguished visitors to St. Lou. Adolphus entertained in person. They were borne away to the most staggering and extraordinary dinners at No. 1 Busch Place, in the shadow of the brewery. If it ever occurred to Adolphus that it might be more respectable, more American, to live apart from the business, particularly since that business was brewing, he must have dismissed the suggestion with genial scorn. One lived at one's place of business; that was strongly implanted in his background.

No. 1 Busch Place was fabulous, Wagnerian. The frescoes in the great dining room dripped with Rhine maidens, wet Rhine maidens in redcloud bathing suits. President Taft in an expansive moment called Adolphus "Prince Busch", and with considerable justice. Presidents, opera singers, authors, if they came to St. Louis, came to No. 1 Busch Place. Adolphus offered them the finest the land afforded. And as a memento of their visit, often he gave the most favored guests one of the little souvenirs, of which he carried always a generous supply in his pocket, the eagle on the Busch beer label, done in chip diamonds, sapphires and rubies.

It is not surprising that St. Louis became identified in the public mind with beer. That was in part the genius of Adolphus, in part the fact that the city had declined in other fields so that the fame of St. Louis beer was a kind of compensation. Chicago had long since eclipsed it in size. Once the starting point of the trade with the West in the days of the pack mule, the railroads had since chosen other routes, originating from Chicago and Kansas City. Dominated by a narrow, mercantile conservatism that clung to ancient monopolies—the Wiggins Ferry was a classic example industrial development was impeded. Thus beer became the city's chief glory.

It was one which the old leaders scarcely cared to recognize. Traveling, they encountered, "Oh you're from St. Louis, oh yes that's where the beer's made, isn't it?" They encountered, too, wherever they went—Shepheard's, the Crillon, the Savoy—that same St. Louis beer—Adolphus took care that it went around the world—he had surpassed Guinness of England in barrels per year. To the overlords of old St. Louis, it was like a bad joke constantly repeated. It was impossible to ignore Adolphus his crenelated brewing castles covered acres and acres and acres of the South Side. But, socially and financially, the old dictators did the best they could.

Of course, it was not really so sharp as this. Only among the more stubborn, the most proud, was the line rigidly drawn against beer and those who made beer. What happened was that the German Gemütlichkeit fused with what remained of savoir faire and graciousness among the older element. The result was a pleasant and rather special type of life that differed in many respects from life elsewhere in America.

It centered about two or three cafes, at least one of which achieved genuine distinction. In its best period, Tony Faust's restaurant had an atmosphere that few restaurants anywhere in America have attained. In the main dining room, spacious, dignified, pleasant, one might eat and drink in leisure, hear good music occasionally, listen to good talk. On the Faust wine list were the finest imported wines and liqueurs. Each day at noon, Adolphus repaired to Faust's for a prodigious lunch in the cool grill room, a lunch that lasted often through the entire afternoon. A special table near the bar was reserved for him and three or four friends. Other restaurants approached Faust's in excellence, notably Cicardi's. Uhrig's Cave and the Delmar Gardens were sylvan retreats where one might enjoy good food and drink and hear Strauss and Gilbert and Sullivan.

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St. Louis of this period was the epitome of contented, comfortable, middle-class life, with a certain flair, a heritage from the French and German elements that were the nucleus of the city. Theodore Dreiser has this iu A Book About Myself, recounting his newspaper years in the city, and in several short stories with the St. Louis background. Bock beer day on the South Side, moonlight "excursions" on the river, hazel nut tart at Specht's, the persistent custom of New Year calls with steaming punch in the reception hall, kaffee klatches, sleighing in Forest Park, red brick mansions with starched white lace curtains at the windows.

This was characteristic of the period all over America, hut St. Louis more than any other city embodied this solid ease of living. That was what the World's Fair of 1904 was about, a glorification of middle-class well-being and contentment. That spree of Beaux Arts fagades and Swiss chalets was dedicated to good living, pleasant entertainment, a mild rapture over peaceful prosperity. It was what the nation sang about when it sang, "I'll Meet You In St. Louis, Louie, At The Fair." Adolphus, as one of the official hosts, if not in actual fact the official host, had a grand time at the Fair.

Changes came swiftly after the Fair year. Adolphus had rather outgrown St. Louis. He was still loyal, but as the king of brewers he was a citizen of the world. With regal ease, majestic splendor, he moved between his huge estate, Villa Lilly at Langenschwallbach, Germany, and his fabulous gardens at Pasadena. A rapid industrial expansion had begun in and around St. Louis. Across the river in Illinois, a dreary industrial waste had come into being, East St. Louis, Venice, Collinsville, Granite City. A grim frost of soot began to alter the appearance of familiar landmarks. And yet St. Louis resisted evidence of change, clung stubbornly to the old and the familiar.

The death of Adolphus in 1913 was herald of the swift disintegration of the comfortable, placid world that had survived from the nineteen-hundreds; it was almost as though he had in some mysterious fashion held the secret of the virtues of this world, a far more fitting patron saint for the St. Louis-Louie than that ardent king of France for whom the city was named. This symbolic death was properly observed. Adolphus would have had a fine lime at his funeral. It was the grandest funeral the city had ever seen, or, it is more than probable, ever will see again. The beer trucks and the dapple-gray horses, all draped in black, paraded around the brewing plant when his body arrived from Villa Lilly where he died. The floral offerings filled the house and covered the lawn at No. 1 Busch Place. There were bottles eight feet high done in lilies of the valley and forget-me-nots, his private car, his favorite horse, his very portrait, all done in flowers, to say nothing of the tons of harps and gates ajar. Even his enemies paid him grudging tribute. It took fourteen hours for a double line to pass his bier at the lying-in-state at Bttsch Place.

The war destroyed the complacent, integral St. Louis. It bred bitter enmities. The Buschs and the other brewers, the whole prosperous, Germanic South Side, were at once suspect. Envy and malice ruled. Industry boomed and cheap soft coal belched a vile, black cloud over the city. Prohibition was the last blow. From ten to fifteen thousand men dependent upon brewing or related industries lost their jobs. A portion of them were remployed when the Busch plant and others were converted to sober enterprises. But, what was more important to the morale of the city, St. Louis lost one of its major claims to fame There were acute growing pain; after the war. The narrow, old streets, the congested downtown district, were wholly inadequate for a modern industrial center. But still the conservative resisted change and looked wistfully backward at the past that was so recent and yet so hopelessly remote. That was German, people said in the aftermath of the war. At last, after a tremendous effort, an incessant barrage of propaganda in the Post-Dis- patch, and a little essential political chicanery, a bond issue of nearly a hundred million dollars was passed to modernize the city. The Post-Dispatch, it should be said, is a major civic asset.

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St. Louis is still in the midst of transition, living in a cloud of brick dust, with mountains of debris on every hand. The general plan is good. There will be space and air and light. Unfortunately, the architecture of the public buildings so far constructed displays a dismal mediocrity, a bastard and rootless classicism that has no place in St. Louis, nor anywhere else for that matter.

Whether all trace of the old city will disappear in this process of change is still a question. But I think not. There is a shred of that stubborn integrity that made St. Louis once something more than another Detroit, another Pittsburgh. And there is a beer keg rising above the horizon, looming like a large and prophetic sun. The breweries are preparing. St. Louis is hopeful that what beer did once it may do again.