Was Adolphus Busch a poor, maligned German immigrant when he came to America and later joined with Eberhard Anheuser to draft a beer company?
Not like the way the Super Bowl commercial has it, says historian William Knoedelseder, author of “Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer.”
The TV spot that will be viewed by millions around the world during Sunday’s biggest football game of the year is way off, Knoedelseder told Slate:
“Adolphus Busch did not arrive poor and struggling. He was from a fairly well-to-do, successful family. He wasn’t tremendously wealthy, but it would be highly doubtful that he encountered whatever that was at the beginning with him jumping off the boat and people shouting at him. He arrived with a ticket and had his own money. Unless they got a hold of some letters from his family, I don’t know where they get all that information. It’s not something that anyone that’s written about Anheuser-Busch has ever seen before.”
Knoedelseder — a Los Angeles Times reporter from 1977 to 1989 — said the discrimination Germans faced wasn’t anything like the “poor Irish, who had to fight their way in block by block.”
“By the time he got to St. Louis, there was a very sizable German population there. They all arrived in America with money, and deference comes with cash. I did a lot of research in St. Louis, and there weren’t any German ghettos. There were German sections, but they weren’t anything like that. It was a good place to land if you were a German immigrant.”
Budweiser’s 60-second spot, “Born the Hard Way,” also wasn’t meant to be an anti-Trump expression either.
“I was just listening to NPR, and they’re discussing whether it’s a good thing that a company takes a side in a political issue using this ad,” the author said. “It’s laughable. The approval process for an ad campaign for the first slot in the Super Bowl is a very lengthy one, and the last position that Anheuser-Busch would want to take would be what these people are suggesting in this discussion—the left-hand side.
“It’s at best coincidental, I think.”