September 28, 2026 • 38 mins
The Munich Beer Riot of 1844 was a reaction to the price of beer set by the Bavarian government. The Lager Beer Riot took place in Chicago in 1855, and was a response to municipal policies put in place by mayor Levi Boone that targeted the city’s Catholic and immigrant populations.
Research:
- Alberts, Brian. “‘Streets as Stages’ — The Munich Beer Riots of 1844.” Good Beer Hunting. https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/blog/2020/7/13/streets-as-stages-the-munich-beer-riots-of-1844
- "Bavaria." Britannica Library, Encyclopædia Britannica, 16 Mar. 2026. libraries.state.ma.us/login?eburl=https%3A%2F%2Flibrary.eb.com&ebtarget=%2Flevels%2Freferencecenter%2Farticle%2FBavaria%2F13830&ebboatid=9265928. Accessed 3 Sep. 2026. Britannica Editors. "Oktoberfest". Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Apr. 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oktoberfest. Accessed 2 September 2026.
- Carpenter, Kim Newak. “‘Sechs Kreuzer sind genug fuer ein Bier!’: The Munich beer riot of 1844: Social protest and public disorder in mid-19th century Bavaria.” A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History. 1998.
- Durica, Paul. “‘A Montstrous Doctrine’ - Chicago’s Lager Beer Riot.” Mash Tun. https://mashtunjournal.org/texts/lagerriot
- Einhorn, Robin. “Lager Beer Riot.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/703.html
- Engels, Frederick. “Beer Riots in Bavaria.” The Northern Star, No. 341, May 25, 1844, p. 6.
- Grossman, Ron. “Chicago’s Lager Beer Riot proved immigrants’ power.” Chicago Tribune. 9/25/2015. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2015/09/25/chicagos-lager-beer-riot-proved-immigrants-power/
- "Ludwig I, King of Bavaria." Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, vol. 34, Gale, 2014. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631010137/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=df1b49ec. Accessed 2 Sept. 2026
- Magelssen, Scott. “The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting.” Theatre Journal, DECEMBER 2015, Vol. 67, No. 4, Possible Worlds (DECEMBER2015). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24582647
- New York Herald, European Edition. “1889: Beer Crisis in Bavaria.” 9/19/1889. Reprinted In the New York Times 9/18/2014. https://archive.nytimes.com/iht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/1889-beer-crisis-in-bavaria/
- Renner, Richard Wilson. “In Perfect Ferment: Chicago, the Know-Nothings, and the Riot for Lager.” Chicago History V, no. 3 (1976): 161-170.
- WBEZ Chicago. Morning Shift. “Fest looks at the history of the Lager Beer Riot.” 4/24/2015. https://www.wbez.org/morning-shift/2015/04/24/fest-looks-at-the-history-of-the-lager-beer-riot.
- Weiss, Jana. “A Lager Beer Revolution: The History of Beer and German American Immigration.” Life & Letters. University of Texas at Austin. Originally published in Not Even Past. 9/19/2023. https://lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2023/09/a-lager-beer-revolution-the-history-of-beer-and-german-american-immigration/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
And I'm Holly Frey. I was looking around for something
Bavaria-related ahead of our trip to Munich when we're going
(00:23):
to go to Oktoberfest, among many other things. And I
wrote this episode before that trip, but it will probably
come out while we're there, I think. While I was
looking for something interesting to talk about, I stumbled across
a mention of a beer riot that took place in
Munich in 1844. But then as I was getting my
(00:44):
research together, having decided that was what I was going
to talk about, I kept getting search results for a
different beer riot, which was in Chicago in 1855. Sometimes
the results also included Hitler's beer hall putsch in 1923.
This episode is not about that at all. That is
(01:07):
a whole other thing. Instead, it is a bit of
a double feature on these two beer riots, which have
a little bit of overlap in what led up to them. Also,
we've talked on the show before a number of times
about how the word riot doesn't typically capture... all the
nuance of a lot of the things that are called riots,
(01:30):
but that is consistently what both of these incidents are
called in everything that I've read about both of them.
So the earliest archaeological evidence of people brewing beer in
Bavaria goes back almost 3,000 years. The oldest continually operating
brewery in Bavaria is the Wiensteffen Monastery Brewery, which has
(01:51):
existed for about 1,000 years. While there were monasteries and
other breweries that were making beer in larger amounts for
most of that history, a lot of brewing happened at
people's homes for their own use using a range of ingredients.
Toward the end of the 15th century, Bavaria passed its
first beer purity law, regulating how beer was made and
(02:15):
mandating that it could include only hops, clean water, and malt,
which was made from barley. They did not really understand
yeast yet. So beer was being fermented with yeast that
was naturally present in the environment. They were not adding
yeast as an ingredient on purpose at that point. Those
(02:36):
earliest laws were followed by the Reinheitsgebot in 1516, which
regulated the quality and safety of beer and also set
the price for a mass of beer. The mass is
a measure of beer that is standardized as a liter today.
After the introduction of these laws, brewing shifted away from
(02:58):
being a task that people did at home to being
a commercial product. By the mid-19th century, the Bavarian government
controlled the brewing industry, and twice a year it would
set the price for a mass of beer. This was
called the beersatz, and it changed twice a year because
summer beer was more expensive to brew than winter beer.
(03:18):
So most of the time, the cost of a mass
was a little more in the summer. This pricing system
also incorporated the fact that brewers had to pay a
tax on their beer. Beer became a huge part of
the culture and way of life in Bavaria. On a
practical level, beer could be safer to drink than water,
especially as the Bavarian government set up this whole food
(03:41):
safety and quality assurance system for beer and the places
that beer was brewed. Beer was also a source of
calories that people really relied on, especially when other food
became more expensive. Consumed in small amounts throughout the day,
beer was perceived as a wholesome food that was suitable
for practically everyone, like a liquid bread. In the mid-19th century,
(04:05):
a middle-class man drank an average of half a mass
of beer a day, while poorer men who were living
mostly on bread and beer and might have meals that
were only beer, they often drank two or three times
that much. On a more intangible level, beer was interconnected
with the idea of a warm, gregarious conviviality and fellowship,
(04:29):
described as gemütlichkeit. Beer and the socializing that naturally came
along with it were connected to community and well-being, individually
and as a society. Taverns and breweries and outdoor beer
gardens set up in the summer were places to gather
and to relax and to look for and to offer support.
(04:51):
People who had just arrived in town or city would
go to the tavern and ask around about where to
find work, and the networks that developed among regulars at
a given tavern turned into support systems for each other
and for newcomers. So beer was seen as a social good,
and the people of Bavaria demanded good beer, to the
(05:11):
point of thinking of it as a right. This also
meant that drinking beer was almost mandatory. People who didn't
want to for whatever reason were seen as not fitting
in and could actually be ostracized. With all that in mind,
it might be surprising that Munich's first Oktoberfest, which is
really associated with beer today, was not really about beer.
(05:34):
There was already a tradition of smaller festivals meant to
kind of finish off the remaining kegs of beer so
that they would be available for a new batch of
beer to be brewed. But that is not what's recognized
as the first Oktoberfest. That was the celebration of the
royal wedding of Princess Teresa of Saxony-Hilberghausen and Crown Prince Ludwig.
(05:56):
This was a five-day festival with horse races on festival
grounds outside the city gates with those grounds named Theresienwiese
after the princess. The king at the time was Ludwig's father,
Maximilian I Joseph. He's also known as Max Joseph. He
was a popular king, and he positioned himself sort of
as a monarch of the people. Max Joseph had become
(06:20):
king when Bavaria transitioned from an electorate to a kingdom,
which came about because of the Treaty of Pressburg in
1805 between Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, and Holy
Roman Emperor Francis II. There is, of course, a whole
huge backstory there, but Max Joseph was trying to position
Bavaria as a modern kingdom rather than a medieval duchy.
(06:43):
He had made all kinds of reforms, including abolishing serfdom
and establishing some universal liberties under a new constitution. His
son's wedding was meant to be a celebration for all
of Bavaria, and about 40,000 people attended. Beer became part
of Oktoberfest as it morphed into an annual celebration in
(07:04):
subsequent years. Ludwig ascended to the throne of Bavaria on
October 13, 1825. Initially, he maintained a lot of the
progressive reforms that his father had implemented, and he also
embarked on a whole lot of new building projects. He
was trying to turn Munich into a more modern city.
(07:25):
He was also a patron of the arts, and his
art collection became a part of newly established museums. But
he was increasingly at odds with the Landtag or the
Bavarian Parliament, and then after a series of uprisings against
monarchies in Europe in 1830, he became a lot more reactionary, stubborn,
(07:46):
and autocratic. Ludwig's departure from many of his father's attitudes
and policies was, intersected with changes that were happening in
Bavaria and the way those changes affected ordinary people. All
of that fed into the beer riots of 1844. The
population of Munich almost doubled between 1810 and 1840, while
(08:08):
the total population of Bavaria had only grown by about 20%.
Much of Munich's growth was, of course, driven by people
coming from smaller towns and villages looking for work. Bavaria
was industrializing, but slowly, and that industrialization was very recent.
Bavaria's first factory was a textile mill that opened in 1837.
(08:31):
There was a lot of demand for manual laborers to
work on all of Ludwig's various building projects, and for masons, carpenters,
and glassworkers. But even with that increased demand, there were
not enough jobs for all of the newcomers. Often, these
were not people who planned to move to Munich permanently.
(08:54):
Munich was an employment hub, and people could go there
and find work in one of the outlying towns and villages,
so they would arrive expecting to stay for a few
days or maybe a few weeks. Vagrancy was criminalized, and
people who were not able to find work in Munich
were supposed to go back to where they had come from.
If they didn't do that and they were caught begging
(09:15):
or loitering, they could be arrested and sent to a workhouse.
But if a person got to Munich and then couldn't
find a job, a lot of times they just did
not have money to go back to their hometown. Or
if they did find a job, it might not actually
pay them enough to support themselves, let alone afford travel
to go somewhere else to try to find a better
(09:36):
paying job. Like much of Europe, Bavaria had operated on
a system of trade guilds, but one of the things
that Ludwig's father had done was to have the state
take control of the trades. So the guilds still existed,
and journeymen still went through an apprenticeship with a master.
But the guilds weren't nearly as powerful as they once
(09:56):
had been, and they didn't have as many resources to
do things. like financially support journeymen as they were learning
their craft. The influx of people to Munich also meant
that there weren't nearly enough masters to train all of
the new journeymen. New journeymen also realized that most of
them would never become masters. There just was not enough
(10:17):
demand for master-level work for all of them. There were
also way too many journeymen for the state to keep
up with, even though the state had taken on much
of that responsibility. Max Joseph had also secularized Bavaria and
confiscated monasteries and land and other property that had belonged
(10:38):
to the Catholic Church. Ludwig later returned a lot of
this property, but Max Joseph's secularization policy put an end
to a lot of the work that the church had
been doing to care for the sick and the poor.
While the Bavarian government set up some programs to help widows,
sick people, the elderly, and military veterans, there just was
(10:59):
not a lot of support for the poor more broadly
anymore or for young, able people who just couldn't find work.
Bavaria also had a system of mandatory military service, but
soldiers were paid very poorly, and many of them also
needed to have other jobs to support themselves. In Munich,
(11:20):
they faced the same work shortages as everyone else. A
lot of soldiers in and around Munich had also come
from the country, and they were used to a very
different way of life with a much lower cost of living. So,
in Munich in the 1840s, food was expensive, Rent was expensive.
There weren't enough jobs. A lot of the support systems
(11:41):
that had existed previously didn't exist anymore, or they were
greatly reduced. Young single men in particular were often living
in rented rooms that were overcrowded and infested with various vermin,
and they were relying on breweries and taverns for most
of their social activity and their food and their beer.
So when the price of beer increased, people got really upset.
(12:04):
We're going to talk more about that after we pause
for a sponsor break. As we said earlier, in the
19th century, the Bavarian government set the price of beer
twice a year, and it was normally a little more
(12:25):
expensive in the summer. The summer was also when a
lot of laborers made most of their money. The weather
was better and the days were longer, so 13-hour days
were typical in the summer. And then in the winter,
a person might work sporadically or maybe not at all.
So in the summer when the beer was more expensive,
people were also drinking more of it, both to quench
(12:48):
their thirst and to keep themselves going through these longer
days of work. Drinking beer could be less expensive than
paying for other food, but it still really added up.
So for a young man doing manual labor, a mass
of beer could cost twice as much as his daily
rent on his room, and he was often drinking two
(13:09):
or three mass of beer a day. Beer prices started
to climb in the 1840s as a series of bad
harvests made grain more expensive. It was obvious that people
were unhappy about this, but there were limits on how
they could express that frustration. Insulting the government's decisions was
considered to be the same thing as insulting the monarch, and, quote,
(13:32):
wounding the king's honor was actually a crime. It seemed
like there was an increase in the number of people
who were arrested for things like insulting the gendarmes and
publicly swearing or complaining in the 1840s, But there's no
documentation for what people actually said when they were arrested
on these occasions. Yeah, it's possible that this was just
(13:54):
a cranky time and that other things are going on.
Everybody's feeling fussy. Yeah. We definitely have a trend sometimes
of getting a lot more angry email when there are
heat waves happening, and that was one of the things
that I thought of when I saw this data about
spikes in arrests for public complaining. On May 1st of 1843,
(14:16):
the Biersatz rose to six and a half kreutzer for
a massive beer. That was a full kreutzer more than
it had been the summer before. A brawl broke out
in a tavern that afternoon, which might have been related
to that price increase, but it's not entirely clear yet.
People were also posting anonymous notes around Munich, including in
(14:39):
the area around the royal residence. These notes were generally
perceived as coming from uneducated workers and other lower-class people.
They tended to be written on cheap paper in poor
handwriting with words that were misspelled or spelled out phonetically.
These anonymous notes did reference the price of beer as
(15:00):
well as other issues like how poorly paid the soldiers
were and how much the king was spending on all
of his building projects. Various brewers started announcing that they
would sell their beer for lower than the official beer sots.
This was a maximum price, not a minimum, but of
course beer was typically sold for the maximum amount possible.
(15:22):
The royally owned Hofbrauhaus announced that because of public demand,
it would sell beer for five Kreutzer for May and June,
but that the price would go back to the official
beer sats level in July. That October, the king's advisors
encouraged him to reduce the beer sats for the winter.
It was set at five and a half Kreutzer, which
(15:43):
was not enough of a drop to really relieve people's dissatisfaction.
The government also increased it to six kreutzer for March
and April in response to the rising grain prices. The
anonymous notes continued, including ones that featured satirical poems and
criticized public officials and even called for the overthrow of
(16:04):
the king. Some also said Long Live Maximilian, which was
the king's son and the crown prince. One note that
was left near the royal residence said in German, if
you want affordable beer and bread, beat the king dead.
In February of 1844, the government set the summer beer
(16:24):
sats at six and a half Kreuzer, and the Ministry
of the Interior announced the price publicly in April. The
date for this new price to go into effect was
May 1st, 1844, which was also the wedding day of
King Ludwig's daughter Hildegard to Archduke Albert of Austria. This
royal wedding added to people's discontent and drew comparisons to
(16:47):
Ludwig's own wedding in 1810. There was nothing comparable to
the festivities that had drawn 40,000 people. People complained that
there were no fireworks planned, something that people could see
regardless of their social class, and that the celebratory parade
was not going through the neighborhoods where poor people lived.
(17:08):
People had been expecting a price increase and had started
planning a demonstration before that increase was even announced. The
demonstration started on the evening of May 1st, after the
wedding ceremony was over. One account was from the Matterbrau Brewery,
but something similar played out at breweries and taverns all
over Munich. At Matterbrow, a group of soldiers ordered beer,
(17:31):
saying that they would only pay six kreutzer for it.
The proprietor told them that they would have to pay
the full price, and then they all started banging their
glasses on the table in unison. When the gendarmes arrived
to try to calm them down, a group of laborers
came over to the table, and then somebody whistled, which
was the agreed-upon signal for them to start smashing things.
(17:52):
They broke glasses, shattered windows, turned over the tables, broke chairs,
and did other damage. There were 33 breweries in Munich,
and all of them were damaged in this uprising. The
crowd also attacked taverns that were selling the brewery's beer.
For the most part, the crowd did things like breaking
windows and furniture and glassware, but they didn't try to
(18:16):
damage or destroy the brewing equipment. Most of the people
who took part in this wave of vandalism were journeymen
or soldiers, so they faced similar economic circumstances. The soldiers
were also angry because they had previously had a stipend
to offset the rising cost of food, and that stipend
had just been repealed, something that had been announced on
(18:39):
April 30th. The royal wedding also took place during the soldiers'
annual leave. So this confluence of factors making the soldiers
both angry and idle and available to participate in this
uprising was described as unfortunate. It seems like the higher-ups
sort of went, we could have planned that better, maybe.
(19:00):
The unrest went on for three days, including a demonstration
outside of the theater where the royal family was. This
night at the theater was on the schedule for the wedding,
which had been publicly announced. Although the gendarmes kept the
demonstrators from entering the theater, they screamed and made enough
noise outside that they disrupted the performance. In addition to
(19:24):
the damage at Munich's breweries, the rioters damaged bakeries, butcher shops,
and royal buildings. They also blocked the streets with carts
and wagons so the gendarmes would have a harder time
responding to what was happening. The number of people involved
also made it difficult for the gendarmes to arrest perpetrators.
If they saw someone throw a rock through a window
(19:47):
or smash a table, that person usually vanished into the
crowd before police could get close. Thousands of people participated
in the riots, the vast majority of them men, but
only a tiny fraction of that were arrested, and most
of those spent only a few hours in jail, or
if they were intoxicated, they stayed until they sobered up. Eventually,
(20:09):
cavalry and infantry units were dispatched to help the gendarmes.
There were only 115 gendarmes in all of Munich. That
was just not enough to deal with what was happening
all across the city. Some of the soldiers, though, didn't
seem all that motivated to intervene, considering how many soldiers
were among the demonstrators and how the reason for their rioting,
(20:33):
like those reasons were things that were affecting the soldiers
that were responding to the disorder as well. German political
theorist Friedrich Engels wrote about the riot in the Chartist paper,
The Northern Star. In his words, quote, the working men
assembled in large masses, paraded through the streets, assailed the
public houses, smashing the windows, breaking the furniture, and destroying
(20:56):
everything in their reach in order to take revenge for
the enhanced price of their favorite drink. The military was
called in, but a regiment of horse guards, when commanded
to mount on horseback, refused to do so. The police, being,
as everywhere, obnoxious to the people, were severely beaten and
ill-treated by the rioters, and every station formerly occupied by
(21:20):
police officers had to be occupied by soldiers, who, being
upon good terms with the people, were considered less hostile
and showed an evident reluctance to interfere. Engels ended this
article with, quote, if the people once know that they
can frighten the government out of their taxing system, they
(21:41):
will soon learn that it will be as easy to
frighten them as far as regards more serious affairs. On
May 2nd, brewers across Munich agreed to sell a mass
of beer at 6 Kreuzer. The Brewers Guild asked the
finance ministry for permission to do this. something the guild
was allowed to request under the existing law. The ministry
(22:04):
approved the price drop and the breweries publicized it. For
some people, this was a victory, but for others, it
was a signal that they should push for even lower
beer prices as well as lower prices on other goods
like meat and bread. So the disorder continued. During the
royal wedding parade, a lot of spectators stood silently as
(22:25):
the king passed by, but then they really cheered for
the carriage that was carrying the crown prince. On May 3rd,
soldiers who weren't responding to the disorder were confined to
their barracks, and the demonstrators wound down. Two weeks later,
soldiers who had helped to restore order got a bonus
of seven kreutzer, or enough to buy a little more
(22:46):
than a measure of beer. An official investigation into the
riot concluded that it had been in response to the
beer price and nothing else, not really exploring all of
the other issues that were going on with unemployment and
cost and quality of living. There were also other similar
uprisings in other parts of Bavaria. In the fall of 1844,
(23:09):
the Biersatz was dropped to five and a half Kreutzer,
and the government considered canceling Oktoberfest because of the threat
of disorder. The festival went on, though, and Ludwig announced
that Hofbrauhaus would sell beer for only five Kreuzer. That
put a lot of pressure on the other breweries to
match that lower price. There was another wave of unrest
(23:32):
after Biersatz was set at seven and a quarter Kreuzer
for the summer of 1846, something officials were so concerned
about that they announced it in February to try to
give people time to adjust to the idea before it
went into effect in May. Soldiers were given a stipend
to help offset that price, but that led to worries
(23:53):
among brewers that soldiers would use their stipend to buy
beer for civilians or that it would make journeymen and
other low-paid people envious or angry. Ludwig's reign did not
last long after this. In 1846, he met past podcast
subject Lola Montes, had an affair with her, and was
forced to abdicate in 1848. This was during a wave
(24:16):
of revolutionary Republican revolts that took place across Europe that year,
including in Bavaria. While these revolts were anti-monarchical in nature,
the end result in Bavaria was that Ludwig's son took
the throne as King Maximilian II on March 28th. That summer,
the Biersatz was set at five and a half kreutzer,
(24:38):
which was a price so low that the brewers complained
they could not afford it. After we take another quick
sponsor break, we're going to talk about a somewhat similar
uprising in Chicago in 1855. The lager beer riot, which
took place in Chicago in 1855, had some connections to
the riots that took place in Munich 11 years before that.
(25:09):
Chicago was a fairly new city, first incorporated in 1837,
and it had a massive immigrant population. Roughly half of
the people living in Chicago in the mid-19th century were immigrants.
About a sixth of the city's population was German, and
there was a large Irish population as well. A lot
of Germans fled to the U.S. in the wake of
(25:32):
that failed revolution in 1848. And people fled to the U.S.
from Ireland in the wake of the Great Hunger, which
we've covered on the show before. That started in 1845.
Beer had the same cultural and social importance for Chicago's
German immigrant community as it had in Bavaria. And beer
was popular among Irish people as well. Bottled beer was
(25:54):
a specialty product at this time, not something that you
could just go buy at a market. So overwhelmingly, people
who wanted beer got it somewhere like a tavern or
a brewery or a beer garden set up by one
of these establishments in the summer. In Chicago's German immigrant communities,
taverns and beer gardens filled a social role that was
really similar to what we described in Bavaria. They were
(26:18):
often also decorated with German-themed decor and they sold German food.
Within these communities, they were seen as family-friendly social establishments,
different from the saloons and other establishments that sold spirits
rather than beer. People typically worked a six-day work week,
with Sunday as their only day off, so Sunday was
(26:41):
when a lot of people relaxed and socialized at a tavern.
But much of the non-immigrant community had a very different
perception of beer and drinking, associating it with degeneracy and
also associating immigrants with drunkenness. Friction around all of this
escalated with the rise of the temperance movement, especially as
(27:02):
it focused on banning alcohol outright rather than the idea
of moderation. In 1855, surgeon Levi Boone was elected mayor
of Chicago. Boone was a member of the American party
also called the Know-Nothings. This party has come up in
a couple of episodes recently. They were a nativist and
(27:23):
anti-Catholic political party. This party's platform also included a threat
of populism, focusing on the needs of workers and common
people as long as those workers were native-born Protestant U.S. citizens.
The Know-Nothings were divided on the issue of slavery. Know-nothings
(27:43):
were elected to multiple other offices in Chicago in the
1855 election as well. As mayor of Chicago, Boone implemented
multiple policies targeting the city's Catholic and immigrant populations. One
was the selective enforcement of an existing law that required
establishments that sold alcohol to be closed on Sundays. He
(28:07):
had police enforce this law only in immigrant neighborhoods, but
not in the rest of the city. He also increased
the fee for a license to sell alcohol from $ 50
to $ 300, with the license lasting for three months rather
than a year. There were 675 taverns in Chicago at
(28:28):
the time, and 625 of those were owned by Germans
or Irish people, so it disproportionately affected those communities. Boone
also reformed the police, merging the day and night watch
into one uniformed law enforcement force and increasing its size,
but without hiring any immigrants to fill those ranks. Brewers
(28:51):
and tavern owners in Chicago refused to pay this new
licensing fee, and some of them just stayed open on
Sundays anyway, even though it meant they might get arrested.
The newly enlarged police force did arrest people who broke
the Sunday closure law or who refused to pay the fee.
And eventually there were so many tavern owners awaiting trial
(29:13):
that the city decided to try one case and then
apply its results to the rest of the charges. The
date of this trial was set for April 20th, 1855,
although it was then delayed until April 21st. This date
was also set as the day for a demonstration. Irish
and German supporters gathered to march to the jail, accompanied
(29:36):
by fifes and drums, to free the people who were
being held for treason. The mayor deputized people in response
to this gathering mob and also summoned the militia and
set up cannons in front of City Hall. The demonstrators'
route required them to cross the Clark Street Bridge, which
was one of only three bridges connecting the north and
(29:58):
south sides of the city across the Chicago River. At
the time, this was a pivot bridge powered by hand
to allow ships to pass by it on the river.
Either the mayor ordered the bridge to be pivoted so
that the demonstrators could not cross it and get to
their destination, or somebody decided to do that with the
(30:19):
hope of preventing mass violence. I saw this described both
ways in different accounts. Although the mob could not cross
the bridge, demonstrators and police exchanged gunfire over the river.
One police officer, George Hunt, was struck in the arm,
and he had to have it amputated. Peter Marsden, who
(30:40):
had fired the shot that hit Hunt, was shot in
the back and killed while trying to flee the scene.
Other people were also shot but survived their injuries. At
least 60 people were arrested in conjunction with the lager
beer riots. Only 14 people were actually tried for their involvement, though,
and then only two of those were convicted. Sometimes this
(31:02):
is described as the first incident of civil disobedience in
the city of Chicago. As for its impact, the city
dropped the license fee from $ 300 to $ 100. But the
bigger outcome was a rise in civic involvement among Chicago's
Irish and German immigrant populations. Municipal elections were just not
(31:24):
something these communities had really been paying attention to. Most
of the services that are handled by city governments today
were managed by churches, charities, private businesses, and neighborhood associations.
So the people who had been voting in municipal elections
were mostly business and property owners. But after the lager
beer riots, Chicago's immigrant communities formed a coalition and voted
(31:49):
out the Know-Nothings the following year. The new government reduced
the fee for alcohol licenses and stopped enforcing the Sunday
closure law. Boone did not run for re-election. Joseph Medill,
who we covered on the show in December, tried to
start enforcing the Sunday closure law in 1874 when he
was mayor of Chicago, but he got so much pushback
(32:12):
about it that he dropped it. German immigrants to the U.S.
were also a big part of trends in beer and
other alcoholic beverages. Prior to the influx of German immigrants,
people were more likely to brew cider from apples or
other fruit. There wasn't a lot of barley being grown
for beer making, and the beer that was made was
(32:32):
more likely to be an English-style ale than a German-style lager.
German beer brewers also banded together to push back against
the Prohibition movement, with the United States Brewers Association founded
by German brewers in New York in 1862. There was
a hilarious-sounding reenactment of the lager beer riots in 2015
(32:56):
for the event's 160th anniversary. This was a fundraiser put
on by Pocket Guide to Hell to benefit Benton House.
Benton House was a settlement house in the Bridgeport neighborhood
of Chicago, and now it's a nonprofit social services organization.
So breweries from Chicago provided beer for this event, and
(33:16):
there were 10 Chicago brewers as the forces of law
and order who faced off against 10 Bridgeport citizens as
the Irish and German saloon keepers. They reenacted this exchange
of gunfire across the Chicago River by throwing dodgeballs at
one another in the Benton House Gymnasium. A review of
(33:38):
this event in Theater Journal described it as degenerating into chaos.
At one point, somebody accidentally turned the lights off, and
they were those really big overhead gymnasium lights that take
a while to come back on once they have been
turned off. And the organizers decided to allow things to
continue with the dodgeball throwing in just semi-darkness as they
(34:03):
slowly returned to normal. Oh, who doesn't want a little
darkness dodgeball? Do you have listener mail to finish this
one off? I do have listener mail. This email is
from Jennifer. And Jennifer wrote, I was thrilled to hear
(34:23):
the episode on the dinner in the Iguanodon. And when
you mentioned a possible future episode on the artist Benjamin
Waterhouse Hawkins, his life was a little wild and he
contributed a great deal to science education. He also has
connections to the United States and to an amazing institution
where I used to work. The first display of an
articulated dinosaur happened at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia,
(34:48):
and Hawkins was the one who put the Hadrosaurus foculi together.
I don't think I said that scientific name right, so apologies.
The Academy has not only pictures of Hattie, as he
has been affectionately known, but about 10 years ago or so,
the Academy Library and Archives acquired a collection of Benjamin
Waterhouse Hawkins' original art from his family. I originally intended
(35:13):
to write to you about reaching out to the Academy
to learn more about the collection if you ever do
an episode on him. But this week, the Philadelphia and
international science community was devastated to learn that the museum
attached to the Academy will be closed September 30th after
198 years of public engagement. As of now, the collections
(35:34):
are expected to remain, and hopefully access will continue to
the 18 million-plus specimens in the extraordinary science library, which
contains rare books found nowhere else in this country and
in only one or two places worldwide, but that is unclear.
Would you consider doing an episode on the Academy in
(35:55):
addition to Hawkins? The Philadelphia and scientific community are beginning
to rally around the closure and what they can do
to preserve this 214-year-old institution for the people and for science.
If you want a little look at what the Academy has,
many rare books and the expedition journals are available at
the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The various departments have also made
(36:17):
collections available to researchers online. Jennifer, thank you so much
for this email, Jennifer, for multiple reasons. Number one, I
did say maybe we would do an episode on Benjamin
Waterhouse Hawkins, but I didn't actually write that down anywhere,
so this reminded me to put it on my actual shortlist.
(36:37):
And the next, thank you for the opportunity to talk
about the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum's Since I don't
live in Philadelphia, I've been to Philadelphia a couple of times.
This is a museum that I have only been to once.
And I also was really sad to hear about the
closure that was announced. As of when we are recording this,
it was announced over this past weekend, or at least
(36:57):
that's when I heard about it. And yeah, it seems
like an enormous loss to the city of Philadelphia and
the world of science communication and educating the public about
science more broadly. And I also would like to say
I love the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is not that
(37:17):
often that we are talking about subjects that are about
things that are included in that library. But anytime we
are talking about something that has something to do with
like biology or, you know, plants, flowers, animals, anything about science, history,
biodiversity connected in some way, that tends to be one
(37:38):
of the places that I wind up finding resources. So yeah,
I want to say that I am hopeful that this
rallying around the museum and the academy and all of
those resources will lead to something being worked out about
it remaining open. But it's hard to feel confident about
that in the era that we are living in. So
(38:01):
thank you so much again, Jennifer, for this email. If
you would like to send us a note, we're at
historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can also find all of
our show notes, including all of the things that we
used as research in this episode, at our website, which
is MissedInHistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on
(38:23):
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
And I'm Holly Frey. I was looking around for something
Bavaria-related ahead of our trip to Munich when we're going
(00:23):
to go to Oktoberfest, among many other things. And I
wrote this episode before that trip, but it will probably
come out while we're there, I think. While I was
looking for something interesting to talk about, I stumbled across
a mention of a beer riot that took place in
Munich in 1844. But then as I was getting my
(00:44):
research together, having decided that was what I was going
to talk about, I kept getting search results for a
different beer riot, which was in Chicago in 1855. Sometimes
the results also included Hitler's beer hall putsch in 1923.
This episode is not about that at all. That is
(01:07):
a whole other thing. Instead, it is a bit of
a double feature on these two beer riots, which have
a little bit of overlap in what led up to them. Also,
we've talked on the show before a number of times
about how the word riot doesn't typically capture... all the
nuance of a lot of the things that are called riots,
(01:30):
but that is consistently what both of these incidents are
called in everything that I've read about both of them.
So the earliest archaeological evidence of people brewing beer in
Bavaria goes back almost 3,000 years. The oldest continually operating
brewery in Bavaria is the Wiensteffen Monastery Brewery, which has
(01:51):
existed for about 1,000 years. While there were monasteries and
other breweries that were making beer in larger amounts for
most of that history, a lot of brewing happened at
people's homes for their own use using a range of ingredients.
Toward the end of the 15th century, Bavaria passed its
first beer purity law, regulating how beer was made and
(02:15):
mandating that it could include only hops, clean water, and malt,
which was made from barley. They did not really understand
yeast yet. So beer was being fermented with yeast that
was naturally present in the environment. They were not adding
yeast as an ingredient on purpose at that point. Those
(02:36):
earliest laws were followed by the Reinheitsgebot in 1516, which
regulated the quality and safety of beer and also set
the price for a mass of beer. The mass is
a measure of beer that is standardized as a liter today.
After the introduction of these laws, brewing shifted away from
(02:58):
being a task that people did at home to being
a commercial product. By the mid-19th century, the Bavarian government
controlled the brewing industry, and twice a year it would
set the price for a mass of beer. This was
called the beersatz, and it changed twice a year because
summer beer was more expensive to brew than winter beer.
(03:18):
So most of the time, the cost of a mass
was a little more in the summer. This pricing system
also incorporated the fact that brewers had to pay a
tax on their beer. Beer became a huge part of
the culture and way of life in Bavaria. On a
practical level, beer could be safer to drink than water,
especially as the Bavarian government set up this whole food
(03:41):
safety and quality assurance system for beer and the places
that beer was brewed. Beer was also a source of
calories that people really relied on, especially when other food
became more expensive. Consumed in small amounts throughout the day,
beer was perceived as a wholesome food that was suitable
for practically everyone, like a liquid bread. In the mid-19th century,
(04:05):
a middle-class man drank an average of half a mass
of beer a day, while poorer men who were living
mostly on bread and beer and might have meals that
were only beer, they often drank two or three times
that much. On a more intangible level, beer was interconnected
with the idea of a warm, gregarious conviviality and fellowship,
(04:29):
described as gemütlichkeit. Beer and the socializing that naturally came
along with it were connected to community and well-being, individually
and as a society. Taverns and breweries and outdoor beer
gardens set up in the summer were places to gather
and to relax and to look for and to offer support.
(04:51):
People who had just arrived in town or city would
go to the tavern and ask around about where to
find work, and the networks that developed among regulars at
a given tavern turned into support systems for each other
and for newcomers. So beer was seen as a social good,
and the people of Bavaria demanded good beer, to the
(05:11):
point of thinking of it as a right. This also
meant that drinking beer was almost mandatory. People who didn't
want to for whatever reason were seen as not fitting
in and could actually be ostracized. With all that in mind,
it might be surprising that Munich's first Oktoberfest, which is
really associated with beer today, was not really about beer.
(05:34):
There was already a tradition of smaller festivals meant to
kind of finish off the remaining kegs of beer so
that they would be available for a new batch of
beer to be brewed. But that is not what's recognized
as the first Oktoberfest. That was the celebration of the
royal wedding of Princess Teresa of Saxony-Hilberghausen and Crown Prince Ludwig.
(05:56):
This was a five-day festival with horse races on festival
grounds outside the city gates with those grounds named Theresienwiese
after the princess. The king at the time was Ludwig's father,
Maximilian I Joseph. He's also known as Max Joseph. He
was a popular king, and he positioned himself sort of
as a monarch of the people. Max Joseph had become
(06:20):
king when Bavaria transitioned from an electorate to a kingdom,
which came about because of the Treaty of Pressburg in
1805 between Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, and Holy
Roman Emperor Francis II. There is, of course, a whole
huge backstory there, but Max Joseph was trying to position
Bavaria as a modern kingdom rather than a medieval duchy.
(06:43):
He had made all kinds of reforms, including abolishing serfdom
and establishing some universal liberties under a new constitution. His
son's wedding was meant to be a celebration for all
of Bavaria, and about 40,000 people attended. Beer became part
of Oktoberfest as it morphed into an annual celebration in
(07:04):
subsequent years. Ludwig ascended to the throne of Bavaria on
October 13, 1825. Initially, he maintained a lot of the
progressive reforms that his father had implemented, and he also
embarked on a whole lot of new building projects. He
was trying to turn Munich into a more modern city.
(07:25):
He was also a patron of the arts, and his
art collection became a part of newly established museums. But
he was increasingly at odds with the Landtag or the
Bavarian Parliament, and then after a series of uprisings against
monarchies in Europe in 1830, he became a lot more reactionary, stubborn,
(07:46):
and autocratic. Ludwig's departure from many of his father's attitudes
and policies was, intersected with changes that were happening in
Bavaria and the way those changes affected ordinary people. All
of that fed into the beer riots of 1844. The
population of Munich almost doubled between 1810 and 1840, while
(08:08):
the total population of Bavaria had only grown by about 20%.
Much of Munich's growth was, of course, driven by people
coming from smaller towns and villages looking for work. Bavaria
was industrializing, but slowly, and that industrialization was very recent.
Bavaria's first factory was a textile mill that opened in 1837.
(08:31):
There was a lot of demand for manual laborers to
work on all of Ludwig's various building projects, and for masons, carpenters,
and glassworkers. But even with that increased demand, there were
not enough jobs for all of the newcomers. Often, these
were not people who planned to move to Munich permanently.
(08:54):
Munich was an employment hub, and people could go there
and find work in one of the outlying towns and villages,
so they would arrive expecting to stay for a few
days or maybe a few weeks. Vagrancy was criminalized, and
people who were not able to find work in Munich
were supposed to go back to where they had come from.
If they didn't do that and they were caught begging
(09:15):
or loitering, they could be arrested and sent to a workhouse.
But if a person got to Munich and then couldn't
find a job, a lot of times they just did
not have money to go back to their hometown. Or
if they did find a job, it might not actually
pay them enough to support themselves, let alone afford travel
to go somewhere else to try to find a better
(09:36):
paying job. Like much of Europe, Bavaria had operated on
a system of trade guilds, but one of the things
that Ludwig's father had done was to have the state
take control of the trades. So the guilds still existed,
and journeymen still went through an apprenticeship with a master.
But the guilds weren't nearly as powerful as they once
(09:56):
had been, and they didn't have as many resources to
do things. like financially support journeymen as they were learning
their craft. The influx of people to Munich also meant
that there weren't nearly enough masters to train all of
the new journeymen. New journeymen also realized that most of
them would never become masters. There just was not enough
(10:17):
demand for master-level work for all of them. There were
also way too many journeymen for the state to keep
up with, even though the state had taken on much
of that responsibility. Max Joseph had also secularized Bavaria and
confiscated monasteries and land and other property that had belonged
(10:38):
to the Catholic Church. Ludwig later returned a lot of
this property, but Max Joseph's secularization policy put an end
to a lot of the work that the church had
been doing to care for the sick and the poor.
While the Bavarian government set up some programs to help widows,
sick people, the elderly, and military veterans, there just was
(10:59):
not a lot of support for the poor more broadly
anymore or for young, able people who just couldn't find work.
Bavaria also had a system of mandatory military service, but
soldiers were paid very poorly, and many of them also
needed to have other jobs to support themselves. In Munich,
(11:20):
they faced the same work shortages as everyone else. A
lot of soldiers in and around Munich had also come
from the country, and they were used to a very
different way of life with a much lower cost of living. So,
in Munich in the 1840s, food was expensive, Rent was expensive.
There weren't enough jobs. A lot of the support systems
(11:41):
that had existed previously didn't exist anymore, or they were
greatly reduced. Young single men in particular were often living
in rented rooms that were overcrowded and infested with various vermin,
and they were relying on breweries and taverns for most
of their social activity and their food and their beer.
So when the price of beer increased, people got really upset.
(12:04):
We're going to talk more about that after we pause
for a sponsor break. As we said earlier, in the
19th century, the Bavarian government set the price of beer
twice a year, and it was normally a little more
(12:25):
expensive in the summer. The summer was also when a
lot of laborers made most of their money. The weather
was better and the days were longer, so 13-hour days
were typical in the summer. And then in the winter,
a person might work sporadically or maybe not at all.
So in the summer when the beer was more expensive,
people were also drinking more of it, both to quench
(12:48):
their thirst and to keep themselves going through these longer
days of work. Drinking beer could be less expensive than
paying for other food, but it still really added up.
So for a young man doing manual labor, a mass
of beer could cost twice as much as his daily
rent on his room, and he was often drinking two
(13:09):
or three mass of beer a day. Beer prices started
to climb in the 1840s as a series of bad
harvests made grain more expensive. It was obvious that people
were unhappy about this, but there were limits on how
they could express that frustration. Insulting the government's decisions was
considered to be the same thing as insulting the monarch, and, quote,
(13:32):
wounding the king's honor was actually a crime. It seemed
like there was an increase in the number of people
who were arrested for things like insulting the gendarmes and
publicly swearing or complaining in the 1840s, But there's no
documentation for what people actually said when they were arrested
on these occasions. Yeah, it's possible that this was just
(13:54):
a cranky time and that other things are going on.
Everybody's feeling fussy. Yeah. We definitely have a trend sometimes
of getting a lot more angry email when there are
heat waves happening, and that was one of the things
that I thought of when I saw this data about
spikes in arrests for public complaining. On May 1st of 1843,
(14:16):
the Biersatz rose to six and a half kreutzer for
a massive beer. That was a full kreutzer more than
it had been the summer before. A brawl broke out
in a tavern that afternoon, which might have been related
to that price increase, but it's not entirely clear yet.
People were also posting anonymous notes around Munich, including in
(14:39):
the area around the royal residence. These notes were generally
perceived as coming from uneducated workers and other lower-class people.
They tended to be written on cheap paper in poor
handwriting with words that were misspelled or spelled out phonetically.
These anonymous notes did reference the price of beer as
(15:00):
well as other issues like how poorly paid the soldiers
were and how much the king was spending on all
of his building projects. Various brewers started announcing that they
would sell their beer for lower than the official beer sots.
This was a maximum price, not a minimum, but of
course beer was typically sold for the maximum amount possible.
(15:22):
The royally owned Hofbrauhaus announced that because of public demand,
it would sell beer for five Kreutzer for May and June,
but that the price would go back to the official
beer sats level in July. That October, the king's advisors
encouraged him to reduce the beer sats for the winter.
It was set at five and a half Kreutzer, which
(15:43):
was not enough of a drop to really relieve people's dissatisfaction.
The government also increased it to six kreutzer for March
and April in response to the rising grain prices. The
anonymous notes continued, including ones that featured satirical poems and
criticized public officials and even called for the overthrow of
(16:04):
the king. Some also said Long Live Maximilian, which was
the king's son and the crown prince. One note that
was left near the royal residence said in German, if
you want affordable beer and bread, beat the king dead.
In February of 1844, the government set the summer beer
(16:24):
sats at six and a half Kreuzer, and the Ministry
of the Interior announced the price publicly in April. The
date for this new price to go into effect was
May 1st, 1844, which was also the wedding day of
King Ludwig's daughter Hildegard to Archduke Albert of Austria. This
royal wedding added to people's discontent and drew comparisons to
(16:47):
Ludwig's own wedding in 1810. There was nothing comparable to
the festivities that had drawn 40,000 people. People complained that
there were no fireworks planned, something that people could see
regardless of their social class, and that the celebratory parade
was not going through the neighborhoods where poor people lived.
(17:08):
People had been expecting a price increase and had started
planning a demonstration before that increase was even announced. The
demonstration started on the evening of May 1st, after the
wedding ceremony was over. One account was from the Matterbrau Brewery,
but something similar played out at breweries and taverns all
over Munich. At Matterbrow, a group of soldiers ordered beer,
(17:31):
saying that they would only pay six kreutzer for it.
The proprietor told them that they would have to pay
the full price, and then they all started banging their
glasses on the table in unison. When the gendarmes arrived
to try to calm them down, a group of laborers
came over to the table, and then somebody whistled, which
was the agreed-upon signal for them to start smashing things.
(17:52):
They broke glasses, shattered windows, turned over the tables, broke chairs,
and did other damage. There were 33 breweries in Munich,
and all of them were damaged in this uprising. The
crowd also attacked taverns that were selling the brewery's beer.
For the most part, the crowd did things like breaking
windows and furniture and glassware, but they didn't try to
(18:16):
damage or destroy the brewing equipment. Most of the people
who took part in this wave of vandalism were journeymen
or soldiers, so they faced similar economic circumstances. The soldiers
were also angry because they had previously had a stipend
to offset the rising cost of food, and that stipend
had just been repealed, something that had been announced on
(18:39):
April 30th. The royal wedding also took place during the soldiers'
annual leave. So this confluence of factors making the soldiers
both angry and idle and available to participate in this
uprising was described as unfortunate. It seems like the higher-ups
sort of went, we could have planned that better, maybe.
(19:00):
The unrest went on for three days, including a demonstration
outside of the theater where the royal family was. This
night at the theater was on the schedule for the wedding,
which had been publicly announced. Although the gendarmes kept the
demonstrators from entering the theater, they screamed and made enough
noise outside that they disrupted the performance. In addition to
(19:24):
the damage at Munich's breweries, the rioters damaged bakeries, butcher shops,
and royal buildings. They also blocked the streets with carts
and wagons so the gendarmes would have a harder time
responding to what was happening. The number of people involved
also made it difficult for the gendarmes to arrest perpetrators.
If they saw someone throw a rock through a window
(19:47):
or smash a table, that person usually vanished into the
crowd before police could get close. Thousands of people participated
in the riots, the vast majority of them men, but
only a tiny fraction of that were arrested, and most
of those spent only a few hours in jail, or
if they were intoxicated, they stayed until they sobered up. Eventually,
(20:09):
cavalry and infantry units were dispatched to help the gendarmes.
There were only 115 gendarmes in all of Munich. That
was just not enough to deal with what was happening
all across the city. Some of the soldiers, though, didn't
seem all that motivated to intervene, considering how many soldiers
were among the demonstrators and how the reason for their rioting,
(20:33):
like those reasons were things that were affecting the soldiers
that were responding to the disorder as well. German political
theorist Friedrich Engels wrote about the riot in the Chartist paper,
The Northern Star. In his words, quote, the working men
assembled in large masses, paraded through the streets, assailed the
public houses, smashing the windows, breaking the furniture, and destroying
(20:56):
everything in their reach in order to take revenge for
the enhanced price of their favorite drink. The military was
called in, but a regiment of horse guards, when commanded
to mount on horseback, refused to do so. The police, being,
as everywhere, obnoxious to the people, were severely beaten and
ill-treated by the rioters, and every station formerly occupied by
(21:20):
police officers had to be occupied by soldiers, who, being
upon good terms with the people, were considered less hostile
and showed an evident reluctance to interfere. Engels ended this
article with, quote, if the people once know that they
can frighten the government out of their taxing system, they
(21:41):
will soon learn that it will be as easy to
frighten them as far as regards more serious affairs. On
May 2nd, brewers across Munich agreed to sell a mass
of beer at 6 Kreuzer. The Brewers Guild asked the
finance ministry for permission to do this. something the guild
was allowed to request under the existing law. The ministry
(22:04):
approved the price drop and the breweries publicized it. For
some people, this was a victory, but for others, it
was a signal that they should push for even lower
beer prices as well as lower prices on other goods
like meat and bread. So the disorder continued. During the
royal wedding parade, a lot of spectators stood silently as
(22:25):
the king passed by, but then they really cheered for
the carriage that was carrying the crown prince. On May 3rd,
soldiers who weren't responding to the disorder were confined to
their barracks, and the demonstrators wound down. Two weeks later,
soldiers who had helped to restore order got a bonus
of seven kreutzer, or enough to buy a little more
(22:46):
than a measure of beer. An official investigation into the
riot concluded that it had been in response to the
beer price and nothing else, not really exploring all of
the other issues that were going on with unemployment and
cost and quality of living. There were also other similar
uprisings in other parts of Bavaria. In the fall of 1844,
(23:09):
the Biersatz was dropped to five and a half Kreutzer,
and the government considered canceling Oktoberfest because of the threat
of disorder. The festival went on, though, and Ludwig announced
that Hofbrauhaus would sell beer for only five Kreuzer. That
put a lot of pressure on the other breweries to
match that lower price. There was another wave of unrest
(23:32):
after Biersatz was set at seven and a quarter Kreuzer
for the summer of 1846, something officials were so concerned
about that they announced it in February to try to
give people time to adjust to the idea before it
went into effect in May. Soldiers were given a stipend
to help offset that price, but that led to worries
(23:53):
among brewers that soldiers would use their stipend to buy
beer for civilians or that it would make journeymen and
other low-paid people envious or angry. Ludwig's reign did not
last long after this. In 1846, he met past podcast
subject Lola Montes, had an affair with her, and was
forced to abdicate in 1848. This was during a wave
(24:16):
of revolutionary Republican revolts that took place across Europe that year,
including in Bavaria. While these revolts were anti-monarchical in nature,
the end result in Bavaria was that Ludwig's son took
the throne as King Maximilian II on March 28th. That summer,
the Biersatz was set at five and a half kreutzer,
(24:38):
which was a price so low that the brewers complained
they could not afford it. After we take another quick
sponsor break, we're going to talk about a somewhat similar
uprising in Chicago in 1855. The lager beer riot, which
took place in Chicago in 1855, had some connections to
the riots that took place in Munich 11 years before that.
(25:09):
Chicago was a fairly new city, first incorporated in 1837,
and it had a massive immigrant population. Roughly half of
the people living in Chicago in the mid-19th century were immigrants.
About a sixth of the city's population was German, and
there was a large Irish population as well. A lot
of Germans fled to the U.S. in the wake of
(25:32):
that failed revolution in 1848. And people fled to the U.S.
from Ireland in the wake of the Great Hunger, which
we've covered on the show before. That started in 1845.
Beer had the same cultural and social importance for Chicago's
German immigrant community as it had in Bavaria. And beer
was popular among Irish people as well. Bottled beer was
(25:54):
a specialty product at this time, not something that you
could just go buy at a market. So overwhelmingly, people
who wanted beer got it somewhere like a tavern or
a brewery or a beer garden set up by one
of these establishments in the summer. In Chicago's German immigrant communities,
taverns and beer gardens filled a social role that was
really similar to what we described in Bavaria. They were
(26:18):
often also decorated with German-themed decor and they sold German food.
Within these communities, they were seen as family-friendly social establishments,
different from the saloons and other establishments that sold spirits
rather than beer. People typically worked a six-day work week,
with Sunday as their only day off, so Sunday was
(26:41):
when a lot of people relaxed and socialized at a tavern.
But much of the non-immigrant community had a very different
perception of beer and drinking, associating it with degeneracy and
also associating immigrants with drunkenness. Friction around all of this
escalated with the rise of the temperance movement, especially as
(27:02):
it focused on banning alcohol outright rather than the idea
of moderation. In 1855, surgeon Levi Boone was elected mayor
of Chicago. Boone was a member of the American party
also called the Know-Nothings. This party has come up in
a couple of episodes recently. They were a nativist and
(27:23):
anti-Catholic political party. This party's platform also included a threat
of populism, focusing on the needs of workers and common
people as long as those workers were native-born Protestant U.S. citizens.
The Know-Nothings were divided on the issue of slavery. Know-nothings
(27:43):
were elected to multiple other offices in Chicago in the
1855 election as well. As mayor of Chicago, Boone implemented
multiple policies targeting the city's Catholic and immigrant populations. One
was the selective enforcement of an existing law that required
establishments that sold alcohol to be closed on Sundays. He
(28:07):
had police enforce this law only in immigrant neighborhoods, but
not in the rest of the city. He also increased
the fee for a license to sell alcohol from $ 50
to $ 300, with the license lasting for three months rather
than a year. There were 675 taverns in Chicago at
(28:28):
the time, and 625 of those were owned by Germans
or Irish people, so it disproportionately affected those communities. Boone
also reformed the police, merging the day and night watch
into one uniformed law enforcement force and increasing its size,
but without hiring any immigrants to fill those ranks. Brewers
(28:51):
and tavern owners in Chicago refused to pay this new
licensing fee, and some of them just stayed open on
Sundays anyway, even though it meant they might get arrested.
The newly enlarged police force did arrest people who broke
the Sunday closure law or who refused to pay the fee.
And eventually there were so many tavern owners awaiting trial
(29:13):
that the city decided to try one case and then
apply its results to the rest of the charges. The
date of this trial was set for April 20th, 1855,
although it was then delayed until April 21st. This date
was also set as the day for a demonstration. Irish
and German supporters gathered to march to the jail, accompanied
(29:36):
by fifes and drums, to free the people who were
being held for treason. The mayor deputized people in response
to this gathering mob and also summoned the militia and
set up cannons in front of City Hall. The demonstrators'
route required them to cross the Clark Street Bridge, which
was one of only three bridges connecting the north and
(29:58):
south sides of the city across the Chicago River. At
the time, this was a pivot bridge powered by hand
to allow ships to pass by it on the river.
Either the mayor ordered the bridge to be pivoted so
that the demonstrators could not cross it and get to
their destination, or somebody decided to do that with the
(30:19):
hope of preventing mass violence. I saw this described both
ways in different accounts. Although the mob could not cross
the bridge, demonstrators and police exchanged gunfire over the river.
One police officer, George Hunt, was struck in the arm,
and he had to have it amputated. Peter Marsden, who
(30:40):
had fired the shot that hit Hunt, was shot in
the back and killed while trying to flee the scene.
Other people were also shot but survived their injuries. At
least 60 people were arrested in conjunction with the lager
beer riots. Only 14 people were actually tried for their involvement, though,
and then only two of those were convicted. Sometimes this
(31:02):
is described as the first incident of civil disobedience in
the city of Chicago. As for its impact, the city
dropped the license fee from $ 300 to $ 100. But the
bigger outcome was a rise in civic involvement among Chicago's
Irish and German immigrant populations. Municipal elections were just not
(31:24):
something these communities had really been paying attention to. Most
of the services that are handled by city governments today
were managed by churches, charities, private businesses, and neighborhood associations.
So the people who had been voting in municipal elections
were mostly business and property owners. But after the lager
beer riots, Chicago's immigrant communities formed a coalition and voted
(31:49):
out the Know-Nothings the following year. The new government reduced
the fee for alcohol licenses and stopped enforcing the Sunday
closure law. Boone did not run for re-election. Joseph Medill,
who we covered on the show in December, tried to
start enforcing the Sunday closure law in 1874 when he
was mayor of Chicago, but he got so much pushback
(32:12):
about it that he dropped it. German immigrants to the U.S.
were also a big part of trends in beer and
other alcoholic beverages. Prior to the influx of German immigrants,
people were more likely to brew cider from apples or
other fruit. There wasn't a lot of barley being grown
for beer making, and the beer that was made was
(32:32):
more likely to be an English-style ale than a German-style lager.
German beer brewers also banded together to push back against
the Prohibition movement, with the United States Brewers Association founded
by German brewers in New York in 1862. There was
a hilarious-sounding reenactment of the lager beer riots in 2015
(32:56):
for the event's 160th anniversary. This was a fundraiser put
on by Pocket Guide to Hell to benefit Benton House.
Benton House was a settlement house in the Bridgeport neighborhood
of Chicago, and now it's a nonprofit social services organization.
So breweries from Chicago provided beer for this event, and
(33:16):
there were 10 Chicago brewers as the forces of law
and order who faced off against 10 Bridgeport citizens as
the Irish and German saloon keepers. They reenacted this exchange
of gunfire across the Chicago River by throwing dodgeballs at
one another in the Benton House Gymnasium. A review of
(33:38):
this event in Theater Journal described it as degenerating into chaos.
At one point, somebody accidentally turned the lights off, and
they were those really big overhead gymnasium lights that take
a while to come back on once they have been
turned off. And the organizers decided to allow things to
continue with the dodgeball throwing in just semi-darkness as they
(34:03):
slowly returned to normal. Oh, who doesn't want a little
darkness dodgeball? Do you have listener mail to finish this
one off? I do have listener mail. This email is
from Jennifer. And Jennifer wrote, I was thrilled to hear
(34:23):
the episode on the dinner in the Iguanodon. And when
you mentioned a possible future episode on the artist Benjamin
Waterhouse Hawkins, his life was a little wild and he
contributed a great deal to science education. He also has
connections to the United States and to an amazing institution
where I used to work. The first display of an
articulated dinosaur happened at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia,
(34:48):
and Hawkins was the one who put the Hadrosaurus foculi together.
I don't think I said that scientific name right, so apologies.
The Academy has not only pictures of Hattie, as he
has been affectionately known, but about 10 years ago or so,
the Academy Library and Archives acquired a collection of Benjamin
Waterhouse Hawkins' original art from his family. I originally intended
(35:13):
to write to you about reaching out to the Academy
to learn more about the collection if you ever do
an episode on him. But this week, the Philadelphia and
international science community was devastated to learn that the museum
attached to the Academy will be closed September 30th after
198 years of public engagement. As of now, the collections
(35:34):
are expected to remain, and hopefully access will continue to
the 18 million-plus specimens in the extraordinary science library, which
contains rare books found nowhere else in this country and
in only one or two places worldwide, but that is unclear.
Would you consider doing an episode on the Academy in
(35:55):
addition to Hawkins? The Philadelphia and scientific community are beginning
to rally around the closure and what they can do
to preserve this 214-year-old institution for the people and for science.
If you want a little look at what the Academy has,
many rare books and the expedition journals are available at
the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The various departments have also made
(36:17):
collections available to researchers online. Jennifer, thank you so much
for this email, Jennifer, for multiple reasons. Number one, I
did say maybe we would do an episode on Benjamin
Waterhouse Hawkins, but I didn't actually write that down anywhere,
so this reminded me to put it on my actual shortlist.
(36:37):
And the next, thank you for the opportunity to talk
about the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum's Since I don't
live in Philadelphia, I've been to Philadelphia a couple of times.
This is a museum that I have only been to once.
And I also was really sad to hear about the
closure that was announced. As of when we are recording this,
it was announced over this past weekend, or at least
(36:57):
that's when I heard about it. And yeah, it seems
like an enormous loss to the city of Philadelphia and
the world of science communication and educating the public about
science more broadly. And I also would like to say
I love the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is not that
(37:17):
often that we are talking about subjects that are about
things that are included in that library. But anytime we
are talking about something that has something to do with
like biology or, you know, plants, flowers, animals, anything about science, history,
biodiversity connected in some way, that tends to be one
(37:38):
of the places that I wind up finding resources. So yeah,
I want to say that I am hopeful that this
rallying around the museum and the academy and all of
those resources will lead to something being worked out about
it remaining open. But it's hard to feel confident about
that in the era that we are living in. So
(38:01):
thank you so much again, Jennifer, for this email. If
you would like to send us a note, we're at
historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can also find all of
our show notes, including all of the things that we
used as research in this episode, at our website, which
is MissedInHistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on
(38:23):
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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