Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 4

When the government suggested that the big national s.h.i.+ppers temporarily cease distribution on the West Coast in order to free up railroad freight cars for the military, only Anheuser-Busch agreed to do so. In a move that was both cla.s.sy and clever, the company withdrew from the region with a published statement to its customers commending "the many fine beers now being brewed on the Pacific Coast," as opposed to those brewed in Milwaukee.

When it came to personal displays of patriotism, Gussie Busch outdid all of his compet.i.tors. Six months after the j.a.panese attack on Pearl Harbor, at the age of forty-three, with four children, he joined the army. To be sure, he didn't sign up for combat duty; he accepted a commission as a major in the U.S. Army Ordnance Department, stationed in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., a posting arranged by his good friend, Missouri senator Harry S. Truman. The a.s.signment was without doubt a cushy one, but it did require Gussie to take a leave of absence from the brewery, forsake the services of his valet and butler, and submit to the authority of the military chain of command, which couldn't have been easy for him. He reported for duty at the Pentagon in a beautifully hand-tailored uniform and by all accounts served with distinction, earning a promotion to lieutenant colonel within six months and another to full colonel in November 1944. He eventually was awarded a Legion of Merit medal for distinguished service, which was pinned on him personally by the secretary of war and worn on his lapel for the rest of his life. He couldn't have been more proud if it were a Purple Heart or a Silver Cross for battlefield heroism.

Contrary to the brewers' initial fears, anti-German sentiment never became a factor with American beer drinkers, and the war actually proved a boon to the business. Per capita consumption in the United States increased by 50 percent during the course of the conflict. Anheuser-Busch s.h.i.+pped nearly 3.7 million barrels in 1944, 2 million more than was ever s.h.i.+pped in Adolphus's time.

But all was not well back at the St. Louis brewery. That summer, Gussie got a phone call from a trusted employee at the plant telling him that a batch of beer had overfermented and tasted bad, but his brother, Adolphus III, was going to bottle and s.h.i.+p it anyway. Gussie was appalled. He immediately countermanded Adolphus and ordered that the tainted beer, a million dollars' worth, be poured down the sewer. Adolphus was furious and threatened to resign as president, but the board of directors talked him out of it. Still, he never forgot what his younger brother had done.

Gussie returned to St. Louis in June 1945, but not to the mansion on Lindell Boulevard. His time in Was.h.i.+ngton, and his rumored romantic liaisons there, had left him and Elizabeth utterly estranged. Along with his eighteen-year-old daughter Lotsie, he moved into a six-bedroom apartment in the so-called Bauernhof at Grant's Farm, an elaborate U-shaped medieval Germanstyle structure his father had built to house his prized horses, cows, cars, carriages, and farm staff. The main house at Grant's Farm had been vacant since shortly after his father's suicide in 1934, but was still maintained and used for family get-togethers at Christmas and Easter and occasional company parties. Gussie's mother, Alice, lived a few hundred yards down the lane in a two-story colonial home the family referred to as "the cottage," which was built for her after her husband's death and qualified as a cottage only in comparison to the three-story, thirty-four-room, fourteen-bath mansion.

Gussie's homecoming was attended by speculation in the newspapers that he would run for mayor, but he dismissed questions about his candidacy as abruptly as he did the tendency on the part of some people to address him as "Colonel Busch." He was flattered by the talk, but not tempted. His eyes were focused on the brewery, and he didn't like what he saw.

In many ways, business had never looked better. Americans were drinking more beer than ever before; overall production had doubled during the war. Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz were gaining significant market share at the expense of regional brewers thanks to returning GIs who had tasted their beer for the first time while on active duty. Profits were up; the St. Louis plant could not brew enough to fill its orders.

The problem, as Gussie saw it, was that for the first time since the turn of the century, Anheuser-Busch was No. 2. On his brother's watch, Pabst had taken the lead. Pabst was A-B's longtime archenemy. Gussie's grandfather Adolphus had competed maniacally with "Captain" Frederick Pabst for decades, no doubt in part because Pabst, too, had gotten his start in the business by marrying the brewery owner's daughter. In 1894, after a panel of judges in Chicago awarded Pabst lager the first-place blue ribbon in a compet.i.tion for "America's best beer," Adolphus personally pursued one of the event's judges across Europe in an unsuccessful attempt to get the decision overturned in favor of second-place Budweiser. The rebranded "Pabst Blue Ribbon" beer outsold Budweiser for the next six years.

Like his grandfather, Gussie couldn't bear to be beaten, whether in equestrian compet.i.tion, gin rummy, or business. A-B's fall from first place reportedly caused him to grouse that "being second isn't worth anything," but the quote seems uncharacteristically tepid for a man given to coa.r.s.e expression. People who knew him always suspected that a reporter had cleaned up what he really said, which could not have been printed in any publication at that time-"Being second isn't worth s.h.i.+t."

As for his own No. 2 position, fate intervened in August 1946 when, after eight days in the hospital, Adolphus III died of cardiac failure brought on by stomach cancer. He was fifty-five and had been ill for some time. Six days later, Gussie was named president of the company at a special meeting of the board of directors, where there were mixed feelings about the pa.s.sing of the torch. Adolphus had not been a particularly dynamic or visionary leader, and his drinking had troubled some members of the family and the board, who thought it sometimes impaired his judgment, as in the tainted beer incident. For the most part, however, they regarded him as a calm, competent, reasonable steward of the company, and a gentleman. Gussie, on the other hand, was volatile, b.u.mptious, hot-tempered, tyrannical, rude, obstinate, impatient, and vindictive. Yet he was also charismatic, fun-loving, infectiously exuberant, and possibly the most brilliant beer salesman who ever lived. Not even his grandfather worked a saloon with such determination or delight-striding across the room, his hand outstretched, his distinctive voice overpowering the din: "My name is Gussie Busch, and I'd like to buy you a Budweiser."

Gussie bounded onto the Anheuser-Busch throne determined to return the company of his father and grandfather to its rightful place at the top. His first order of business was increasing capacity to meet demand. His plan called for a $50 million upgrade of the Pestalozzi Street plant and the construction of a new $34 million plant in Newark, New Jersey. Some board members worried about the cost of the new plant and argued for the cheaper option of acquiring an existing plant and refitting it, as Schlitz and Pabst were already doing in New York. Even though it was duly incorporated, with stockholders and a board of directors, A-B bore little resemblance to a modern corporation. It was in every sense a family business. Of the fifteen members of the all-male board, seven were either direct descendants of Adolphus Busch or married to direct descendants, two were grandsons of Eberhard Anheuser, and the rest were cronies of Gussie. One local writer likened the board to "the cast of a rousing Rudolph Firml operetta, with Adolphs, Augusts, Eberhards and Adalberts crowding each other off the corporate stage.... There's a Wagnerian air to the whole enterprise."

Family members held more than 70 percent of the company stock, with Gussie controlling the largest block. In addition to his own shares, he had the power to vote the shares that his father left to his mother in trust, so it was not particularly difficult for him to get his way. If all else failed, his temper usually did the trick. When told he couldn't do something, his response was typically, "I can't? Just watch me."

Gussie won board approval for the expansion plan, including the new plant, but climbing back into first place took a lot longer than he thought it would. Despite a big increase in Budweiser sales, Schlitz came out on top in 1947, while Anheuser-Busch dropped to fourth place. For the next six years, Gussie worked tirelessly to knock Schlitz from the No. 1 position, personalizing the battle in the same way that Adolphus had done with Pabst half a century before. His near obsession with beating Schlitz was partly due to a personality trait-throughout his life, he'd always needed an enemy to compete against; it's what energized him and inspired him to do his best. But it also derived from his realization that the war had changed the brewing landscape, and the future would be determined by which of the three superpowers came to dominate. As it was with geopolitics, so it was with beer.

In the summer of 1949, Gussie took a break from the brewery and traveled to Europe with his buddy Tony Buford, A-B's chief counsel. After a stay in Paris and a visit with Gussie's aunt Wilhelmina (Adolphus's youngest daughter) in Munich, they took a train to Lucerne, Switzerland, where they stopped for lunch one day at a restaurant called the Swiss House. Gussie was immediately taken with the hostess, a tall blue-eyed blonde named Gertrude Buholzer. Partway through his meal he approached the proprietor and asked, "Who in the h.e.l.l is that beautiful girl?"

"That's my daughter," said w.i.l.l.y Buholzer. "Why do you want to know?"

Gussie replied awkwardly that they were in town looking to purchase schnauzers to breed at his farm in the United States and wondered if she knew where they could acquire some of the dogs. The two Americans paid their bill and left, but they returned the next day. This time, Gussie asked w.i.l.l.y Buholzer if he could meet his daughter. "Trudy" was accustomed to male customers making a fuss over her. At twenty-two, she was stunning, vivacious, and educated. She spoke four languages-French, German, Italian, and English. Her father told her she didn't have to meet the Americans if she didn't want to, but she said she'd be happy to take them to some people she knew who had the dogs. At the end of the day with her, Gussie proposed, never mind that he was twenty-seven years her senior and still married.

Trudy was more amused and intrigued than smitten. She was already engaged to a man named Hans, who was thirty-eight and owned a house on Lake Lucerne. "My parents were crazy about Hans," she recalled later. Still, she agreed, and her parents acquiesced, when a besotted Gussie invited her to visit him in America.

Gussie paid for her ocean pa.s.sage and met her boat in New York, where they stayed for a week at the Plaza Hotel. They went shopping for "New York shoes," took a carriage ride through Central Park, and hit the hottest show on Broadway, South Pacific with Mary Martin. Then he pulled out the stops with a journey to St. Louis via private train car with its own chef and waiters. Stepping off the train in St. Louis's Union Station, Trudy was struck by how ugly the city looked, choked with smoke and covered in soot, so far removed from the lakes and trees of her homeland. She was unnerved, too, by the number of black people on the street; they were a rarity in Switzerland. Belleau Farm, where Gussie put her up during her stay, was much more like home, with its rustic lakeside lodge and fields full of wildlife.

It was her first visit to the brewery, however, that sealed the deal. "That's when I fell in love with him completely, because of the way he handled himself, his a.s.surance and knowledge in telling everyone what to do. It was very s.e.xy to me." More than sixty years later, seated in the dining room at Belleau Farm, eighty-three-year-old Trudy smiled at the memory and confided, "I was in love and l.u.s.t. He was the first man I made love with. I had never had s.e.x before."

Trudy returned home and broke the news to her family-she was in love with the rich American brewer who wanted her to come to the United States to be with him. While she was in Switzerland, Gussie besieged her with love letters, which, she found out some years later, were actually written by his longtime secretary, Dora Schoefield. "She had a beautiful way of writing, and she knew him so well; they were wonderful letters."

Gussie brought Trudy to St. Louis again in the spring of 1950. This time she stayed at Grant's Farm, where he put on a show for the ages, hosting a reception for President Harry Truman, who was in town to attend a reunion of his World War I army unit. Gussie and the president had been friends since Truman was an up-and-coming state politician in Kansas City. As Truman rose to prominence-as FDR's vice president in 1944 and then as his successor following FDR's death in office in 1945-Gussie liked to tell the story of how he once took Truman to Union Station to catch a train back to Kansas City and had to lend him a quarter to make the fare. He contributed a great deal more than that to Truman's come-from-behind campaign for reelection in 1948.

At Grant's Farm, Gussie greeted his old friend at the front gates while Trudy served as one of the hostesses at a dinner party for a thousand guests who were seated at canopied tables in the courtyard of the Bauernhof, surrounded by the Busch collection of antique carriages, coaches, landaus, tally-hoes, phaetons, buggies, Russian sleighs, and German hunting wagons.

After dinner, like two young boys bent on mischief, Gussie and Harry climbed aboard one of Gussie's favorite carriages, the Vigilant, and clattered off into the deer park behind four s.h.i.+ny black horses, leaving the president's Secret Service detachment in their wake. They were gone for more than half an hour, and it's not difficult to imagine that they used the time to enjoy a nip or two from one of Gussie's silver flasks.

Over the next year and a half, Trudy became more and more visible as Gussie's companion, appearing with him at A-B events around the country and traveling with him on vacations to Florida and Europe. All the while, he was trying to extricate himself from his marriage. In 1948 he published a notice in the local newspapers disavowing Elizabeth's debts. "You are hereby notified that, having furnished my wife, Mrs. August A. Busch Jr., with adequate funds to maintain her household, I will no longer be liable to you, or any other person whosoever, for any accounts contracted by Mrs. Busch for any purpose whatsoever, or for any accounts contracted by her on behalf of our two children."

He finally filed for divorce on August 7, 1951, six years after separating from Elizabeth. Citing "general indignities," he claimed that she had exhibited "the most violent wrath and hatred" toward him and had told him on several occasions that she didn't love him. For the next six months, Busch vs. Busch played out in the court and in the newspapers, with each side visiting indignity upon the other, making it appear to the public that the main issues between them were her drinking and his philandering. His lawyers questioned "how much she paid the yard man in 1940" and "how much was spent for whiskey, wine and gin." Her lawyers demanded to inspect his books and records, because "how else could we find out how much Mr. Busch has been spending on other women." The judge, however, denied her request to examine her husband's financial records, saying they were "immaterial," and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld his ruling. A few weeks later, Elizabeth accepted what the newspapers trumpeted as the state's first-ever million-dollar divorce settlement. It consisted of a lump sum of $450,000 for alimony, a property settlement of $480,000, to be paid over a number of years, and the house on Lindell, which was valued at $100,000. She also was awarded custody of the couple's two children, Elizabeth and August III.

August was only five when his father went off to Was.h.i.+ngton. Raised mostly by his troubled, often impaired mother, he had developed into a moody, withdrawn adolescent with a spotty school attendance record and only a few friends. As the ugly dissolution of his parents' marriage dragged on in public, he began acting out. One particularly antisocial episode occurred on Halloween night in 1949, when two neighbor girls accused him of shooting them with a pellet gun when they came to his house trick-or-treating. The girls told the police that when they rang the doorbell at the Busch residence on Lindell, they were greeted with a barrage of eggs, tomatoes, and water from a second-story window, so they ran home and got some eggs to respond in kind. But when they returned, August stood at the second-floor window with a rifle and shot them. The girls were treated for minor contusions, and two police officers went to the Busch house. The story they got from August was that a "swarm of girls" had engaged in an unprovoked attack on the house that started when the butler answered the front door and an egg "came flying through and splattered in the living room." August admitted that he had stood at the window with a gun and warned the girls to go away, but he claimed the gun was partly dismantled and could not have been fired even if he had attempted to do so.

August's version of events did not pa.s.s the smell test, but his mother and the butler backed him up about the gun and took the police upstairs to see it lying on the bed, partly dismantled, just as August claimed. Even though no charges were filed, the preteen contretemps earned a headline in the next day's paper: "August A. Busch III Questioned by Police in Halloween Fracas." It's unlikely that it would have been reported if his name had been anything other than Busch.

Gussie's physical and emotional absence from August's life during this period would eventually have serious consequences for the family and the company. Years later, in describing to a colleague what it was like to grow up as Gussie Busch's firstborn son, August ruefully related an incident that occurred at Grant's Farm when he was a boy: He'd put on an old pair of his late uncle Adolphus's old chaps and had taken one of the farm's tractors on a joyride around the lake when he lost control of the machine and wound up in the water, standing on the seat as the tractor slowly sank. Suddenly he heard his father calling and saw him standing on the bank. He thought he was about to be rescued. Instead, Gussie shouted at him, "August, what the h.e.l.l are you doing wearing your uncle Adolphus's chaps?"

4

"THE MAN WHO SAVED THE CARDINALS"

On March 22, 1952, the day after Gussie's divorce from Elizabeth became final, he and Trudy were married. The ceremony took place in Gussie's cottage on the grounds of the Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and was performed by a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. It was a brewery family affair: Eberhard Anheuser gave away the bride; Gussie's cousin Adalbert ("Addy") von Gontard, an A-B vice president, served as best man; and Gussie's two daughters by his first marriage, Lilly and Lotsie, were Trudy's bridesmaids.

Press coverage of the event was carefully managed. Gussie's public relations man, Al Fleishman, had alerted the local newspapers to the impending nuptials just the day before, telling reporters that August III "was expected to attend." He did not, however, and neither did his sister Elizabeth. Following a breakfast buffet reception that featured unexpected entertainment by comedian Joe E. Lewis, who "just happened to be in town," the newlyweds boarded Gussie's motorbus and left for a two-week Florida vacation.

As Busch weddings went, it was a low-key, seemingly inauspicious event, an impression the newspapers furthered by devoting nearly as many words to Gussie's two previous unions as they did to the one at hand. Trudy's name wasn't even mentioned in the society-page headlines, one of which said, "August A. Busch Jr. Will Marry Swiss Girl Today" (she was twenty-five).

A lot of people underestimated Trudy Buholzer in the beginning, but marrying her turned out to be one of the best moves Gussie Busch ever made, ranking up there with his decision less than a year later to purchase the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Together these two "acquisitions" defined the rest of his life.

The Cardinals weren't even his idea. He was approached in February 1953 by a contingent of local businessmen that included several A-B board members and Fleishman, who was fast becoming one of his most trusted confidants. The men told Gussie that the owner of the Cardinals, Fred Saigh, was in talks to move the team to Milwaukee, where an investor group had offered him more than $4 million for the franchise. Saigh had financial problems and was about to begin serving a fifteen-month prison sentence for tax evasion. He needed to sell the team, they said, but he preferred that the Cardinals remain in St. Louis; he just hadn't been able to find a local buyer. If Gussie was interested, then Saigh might sell the team to A-B for less than the Milwaukee people had put on the table.

Gussie didn't give a good G.o.dd.a.m.n about baseball or the Cardinals. He was a "sportsman"; he enjoyed hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, horseback riding, and coaching-all gentlemanly pursuits. He had never followed professional team sports; that was for the ma.s.ses. He knew that St. Louisans loved their "Red Birds," of course, and that outfielder Stan Musial was considered one of the greatest players in the game. The men who worked at the brewery idolized "Stan the Man" or "Stash" (p.r.o.nounced stosh), as some of them liked to call him, a childhood nickname bestowed by his Polish-born father.

The Cardinals were in fact one of the most successful teams in the major leagues, having won nine National League pennants and six World Series t.i.tles in the previous twenty-seven years. That paled in comparison to the New York Yankees' record of nineteen pennants and fifteen World Series wins, but the Cardinals boasted a broader fan base than the Yankees. As the farthest west and farthest south major league franchise, they were the home team of more Americans than any other ball club. If you lived in Kentucky, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, Tennessee, or a dozen other southern and western states in 1952, you likely rooted for the Red Birds. They were, arguably, "America's team." Which made the radio and TV broadcasting rights to their games all the more valuable. Those rights were then held by the St. Louisbased Griesedieck Brothers Brewery, whose Falstaff brand was the No. 1 seller in the city, a fact that galled Gussie no end. He knew the electronic media's potential for selling beer. In 1950, Anheuser-Busch became the first brewery to sponsor a network TV program, The Ken Murray Budweiser Show. The one-hour Sat.u.r.day-night variety program ran on fifty-one CBS stations and often showed the host and his guests sipping the sponsor's product live on the air. Budweiser registered sales increases in those fifty-one markets that were double those in other cities.

Gussie liked everything he heard. With one move, he could deny the city of Milwaukee, home of Pabst and Schlitz, a professional baseball team, wrest the Cardinals' broadcasting rights away from Griesedieck Brothers, and turn Sportsman's Park, where the Cardinals played, into a giant outdoor tavern-thirty thousand Budweiser drinkers held captive for two or three hours at a time in the sweltering St. Louis heat. Better yet, as Al Fleishman explained, the acquisition could be sold to the public as an act of good citizens.h.i.+p on the part of Anheuser-Busch, and Gussie would be celebrated as "the man who saved the Cardinals for St. Louis."

Done deal. Gussie agreed to pay Saigh $2.5 million and a.s.sume $1.25 million of Saigh's debt. He bludgeoned the A-B board into going along with the plan, which included naming himself president of the team. The board also acquiesced when, after an inspection tour of Sportsman's Park, Gussie decided to buy the stadium for $800,000 and spend another $400,000 on badly needed repairs and refurbis.h.i.+ng.

The local newspapers played the story just the way Al Fleishman said they would. "Busch Saves the Cards for St. Louis" blared the banner headline on the front page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

On March 10, 1953, a stockholders meeting at A-B headquarters drew a record one hundred people (only twenty-one had attended the previous meeting) who voted 99 percent of the outstanding shares in favor of the acquisition. In a room with blowups of recent press coverage displayed on the walls, Gussie spoke about the tremendous public relations potential of the team. "Development of the Cardinals will have untold value for the development of our company," he said. "This is one of the finest moves in the history of Anheuser-Busch." At a subsequent press conference, however, he played up the benefits to the city and delivered a line that Fleishman obviously scripted to preempt any impertinent questions from reporters about the new owner's love of the game.

"I've been a baseball fan all my life," Gussie said. "But I've been too busy to get out to the park in recent years, unfortunately."

In all the excitement surrounding the announcement, Gussie stumbled when he told reporters off-the-cuff that he intended to rename the ballpark Budweiser Stadium. Howls of protest went up immediately, decrying the cra.s.s commercialization of the great American pastime. Baseball commissioner Ford Frick called Gussie directly to tell him the organization could not condone naming a ballpark after an alcoholic beverage. Al Fleishman drew the unpleasant task of trying to talk Gussie out of something he wanted to do. Suggesting that there might be a more appropriate name for the ballpark, Fleishman deftly pointed out that when chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought the Chicago Cubs in the 1920s, he named the ballpark Wrigley Field, not Juicy Fruit Field. Gussie got the point, admitted he made a mistake, and Sportsman's Park became Busch Stadium, supposedly in honor of his grandfather, father, and brother.

Gussie wasted no time establis.h.i.+ng himself as a hands-on owner. Three days after the stockholders meeting, he pulled into the Cardinals spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida, behind the wheel of his motorbus, trailed by a caravan of 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. "h.e.l.l, 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 ant.i.trust laws as they were written).