I opened the Drudge Report this morning and saw this piece about the predictable xenophobic response to a European company (the fantastically-named InBev) angling to purchase Anheuser-Busch (the maker of Budweiser, Michelob, etc.).
The irony in this story is just too much for me to take.
I wrote a paper last semester about the history of the temperance movement in the United States (just a wiki-link, not my paper), and one of the overriding themes was how racism and xenophobia towards free-spirited Irish and German immigrants by tee-totalling nativist Protestant Americans basically led to Prohibition. The final push in the 1910s towards National Prohibition was given by the outpouring of racist anti-German sentiment during WWI against largely German-American brewers like the Anheuser and Busch families.
Now Americans are defending their German brewers against European infidels by saying crap like "Like baseball, apple pie and ice cold beer (wrapped in a red, white and blue label), Anheuser-Busch is an American original."
They were sure singing a different tune one hundred years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment