I like beer. Last week, I discovered that I have this in common with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. In his appearance before the Senate Judicial Committee on Thursday, Kavanaugh blasted back against the allegation against him that he had sexually assaulted Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a party when they were both high schoolers in Maryland some 35 years ago. In the political melee, Kavanaugh’s declaration that he “like(s) beer” has been taken up as a cudgel.
Liking beer may seem an innocuous thing to say, but beer is political. What it means to “like beer” has changed radically in the past century.
I teach a class called “Beer, Baseball & the Bible” at Western New England University that looks at American literature, history and culture from the period around the 1920s. And it strikes me that as I stand up in front of my classes – mostly first year students – that the landscape of American beer has changed a lot in the two decades (and change) since I reached legal drinking age. But that pales in comparison to the changes that I talk to them about in class.
One hundred years ago, the family values issue of the day was prohibition. The country was divided into drys and wets: those who were for amending the United States Constitution to prohibit alcoholic beverages, and those who were against it. We tend to overlook the importance of this dispute in our history, but keep in mind that passions ran high enough to pass not one, but two amendments to the U.S. Constitution on this issue only 13 years apart.
To “like beer” in the 1920s, after the 18th Amendment was ratified, was to engage in an activity that was not only illegal but unconstitutional. The prohibition cause had held up the saloon as a symbol of all that was wrong with America at the time: dirty, low class, full of immigrants and sin. During World War I, to “like beer” in the eyes of the dry cause, was to be un-American, as the brewing industry itself was so conspicuously German.
Although the wet/dry divide crossed party lines, it also reformed the parties. The Democratic Party in particular was riven between its traditional power base in the rural and southern states (which tended to be dry) with a rising working class in the cities (which tended to be wet). Republicans held the presidency all throughout the 1920s, in part because of that divide. When Franklin Roosevelt broke through for the Democrats in 1932 with his New Deal coalition, part of that deal was the repeal of Prohibition, which happened in 1933 with the 21st Amendment.
One of the consequences of Prohibition was that it drove a lot of brewers out of business, such that of the thousands of breweries in operation before Prohibition, only a few hundred were able to restart production afterward. This saw a trend in the consolidation of the beer industry into only a few leading brands, like Budweiser, Miller and Coors. The big breweries were all driven to be number one nationwide, and competed with one another for market share, often targeting the “super user” of young males, particularly through sports marketing.
Which leads us to how we might interpret Kavanaugh’s assertion that he “liked beer” as a teenager in 1982. As an underage drinker and a multi-sport athlete, Kavanaugh may have fit into this category of “super user.” Although Kavanaugh didn’t quantify his drinking habits and asserted aggressively that he had never blacked out from drinking or failed to remember what happened after he drank, he clearly drank often and didn’t seem to limit himself to just one “ski.” Kavanaugh and others may like to deflect away the correlation between drinking and sexual assault, but the idea that beer fuels and enables bad behavior didn’t come from nowhere – and has been around for longer than a century.
When I show my students a picture of a bottle of Budweiser, a symbol that bridges the divide between the beer culture of today and the beer culture stretching back before Prohibition, they view it differently than I did when I was their age – and I’m only a little younger than Kavanaugh. My students are coming of age in an era after the craft brewing revolution. I remember when beer consumption in America was a rigid orthodoxy, when drinking something other than one of the big labels like Budweiser was enough to label you a non-conformist. I always find it surprising when students look up at the picture of Budweiser and say, “swill.”
Today, even in small-town Greenfield, Massachusetts, you have your pick of craft brewers producing a range of beers distinguished by their flavor profiles and stylistic creativity. Perhaps not everybody drinks craft beer (it’s getting to be an expensive habit), but you can’t walk into a package store or a beer aisle any more without noticing that beer is no longer an oligarchic industry controlled by a few well-connected players.
Somehow, I suspect that when Kavanaugh says that he likes beer, he means something different than I do when I say it.
Andrew Varnon teaches at Western New England University and coaches the boys tennis team at Greenfield High School. He lives in Greenfield with his family.