The War on Pabst

In this selection from “World War I As Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” Murray Rothbard connected the moralistic prohibitionism of the early “progressives” with the militaristic world-saving spirit of Wilsonian internationalism in a way that made me laugh out loud:

“The Anti-Saloon League thundered that ‘German brewers in this country have rendered thousands of men inefficient and are thus crippling the Republic in its war on Prussian militarism.’ Apparently, the Anti-Saloon League took no heed of the work of German brewers in Germany, who were presumably performing the estimable service of rendering ‘Prussian militarism’ helpless. The brewers were accused of being pro-German, and of subsidizing the press (apparently it was all right to be pro-English or to subsidize the press if one were not a brewer). The acme of the accusations came from one prohibitionist: ‘We have German enemies,’ he warned, ‘in this country too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.'”