Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder

Cadillacs containing a retinue of cronies and company executives that, according to Post-Dispatch writer Jack Rice, “looked like it had been recruited from a P. G. Wodehouse March on the Rhine.” He strode into Cardinals headquarters at Al Lang Field with his hand out and voice booming: “My name is Gussie Busch and I’m the new owner.” He donned a Cardinals cap and a white flannel team jersey, which he tucked goofily into his baggy gray suit pants, and he posed for pictures in the batting cage with Stan Musial and manager Eddie Stanky. Awkwardly holding a bat as if it were for the first time, he stood at the plate with an uncomfortable smile frozen on his face. A sportswriter described the ignominy: “After fanning on half a dozen softball pitches from the mound, he dubbed a couple of dribblers and called it a day.”
    Meeting the players, he was surprised to see only white faces. “Where are our black players?” he asked Stanky and the coaches. He was told there weren’t any. “How can it be the great American game if blacks can’t play?” he replied, angrily. “Hell, we sell beer to everyone .” In fact, Anheuser-Busch sold more beer to black people than any other brewery. Gussie feared that A-B’s ownership of an all-white team at a time when Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays were in ascendance could spark a black boycott of Budweiser. He also thought it was morally wrong. He ordered Stanky and the Cardinals management to find some black players, fast. They quickly acquired a black first baseman named Tom Alston, but when Gussie learned that Alston was two years older than he’d been told, he demanded $20,000 of the purchase price be returned because he figured he’d been gypped out of two years of Alston’s career. Manager Stanky seemed to understand the new situation perfectly. “Gussie likes me,” he told reporters. “We play gin rummy. I take his money. And when he decides I’m bad for beer, I go.”
    If the Cardinals thought Gussie’s interest in their daily affairs would wane as the novelty of ownership wore off, they were disabused of that notion when it was announced that he would be “following the Red Birds on the road” in a new $300,000 private railroad car that could be hitched to the train that carried the team. The custom-built, eighty-six-foot car had four bedrooms, three conference rooms, a dining room, a kitchen, two bathrooms, an observation lounge, quarters for two attendants, and a communications system that included two-way radios, telephones, and a television set. Stainless steel on the outside and oak-paneled within, it sported an Anheuser-Busch “A & Eagle” trademark insignia on one end and a Cardinals team logo on the other. It was as Buschy as all get-out, and a harbinger of Gussie extravagances to come. A company spokesman hastened to clarify that “the car will be used in the nationwide operation of the brewery, which could coincide with the Cardinals road schedule.”
    A-B’s purchase of the Cardinals drew the ire of Colorado senator Edwin C. Johnson, who embarked on a one-man crusade to undo the deal, claiming that Gussie had “degraded” baseball by reducing it to “a cold-blooded, beer-peddling business.” Johnson introduced legislation to “bring under anti-trust laws any professional baseball club owned by a beer or liquor company” (the U.S. Supreme Court had recently held that baseball teams were not subject to the Clayton-Sherman antitrust laws as they were written).
    With encouragement from Al Fleishman, St. Louis civic leaders jumped to Gussie’s defense. Mayor Raymond Tucker sent a telegram to Senator Johnson praising Gussie as “an outstanding leader in St. Louis affairs” and stating that “the people of St. Louis do not believe the Cardinals are being run for business purposes.” The president of the Chamber