Temperance and the makers: what the dry crusade did to the plants

1908 — 1933

The option-era frame: Temperance reached Indiana's makers through statute before it reached them through Washington. The state's county-option law of 1908 let counties vote themselves dry or wet; the Proctor Law of 1911 moved the voting unit down to the city and township. What St. Joseph County, or the city of South Bend, voted under those laws, the record reached by this section does not contain: no county-option result for this county appears in the county histories, the register nominations or the institutional accounts this section is built on, and the Bars & Nightclubs section carries the same question open from the saloon side. The settling records are named here as a work order — the South Bend Tribune's run and the Hoosier State Chronicles newspaper archive, and the county commissioners' minutes — and the gap is printed rather than filled. What the makers' own record shows about the wet era's temper is behavioral: in the option law's own years the Muessel company was building its mammoth brewhouse (about 1911) and the saloon keepers' association was the plant of a going trade, which is the record of businesses investing as if the wet trade would last.

The end came from the state, then the nation: The makers' end, when it came, was not a local vote but a statute: Indiana's bone-dry law, enacted in 1917 and effective 2 April 1918, stopped legal brewing in the state before the Eighteenth Amendment stopped it in the nation, and the Crime section of this history carries what the dry years meant in this city — the enforcement, the rings, the bought badges. From the makers' side, the same years print as three different answers to the same law, and the answers are the entries around this one. The Muessel Brewing Company tried near beer — the legal cereal beverage of at most one-half of one percent — failed at it, and closed about 1922, its ground idle until the pre-Repeal enlargement. The South Bend Brewing Association changed its name and its trade, making Hoosier Cream Soda and ice as the South Bend Beverage and Ice Association, and lived to brew again. And the Mishawaka boundary brewery, for this entry's single fact, likewise survived the dry years to pour again after Repeal and brew until 1951. The temperance movement's twenty-six years of Indiana statute thus sorted the city's makers not by size but by adaptability: the oldest and largest name died of the dry law, and the keepers' cooperative outlived it by converting.

Repeal's asymmetry: Repeal, when national Prohibition ended on 5 December 1933, did not restore the field it had cleared. The association came back at 50,000 barrels a year and had thirty years of life left in stages; the Muessel plant came back enlarged but passed within three years out of local hands altogether, to the Winnipeg company of the next entry, its founding family's name surviving on the ground and the park rather than on a label — the Muessel brands, Standard, Bavarian and Arzburg Export, were discontinued in the reorganization. The dry crusade's permanent effect on South Bend's making, printed at the record's size, is that: the city entered Prohibition with two breweries of its own and emerged from it with one, and the survivor was the cooperative.

Sources:

1. The makers' records assembled in this section — the Muessel company's near-beer failure and close about 1922 and the association's soda-and-ice conversion and 50,000-barrel return, from the National Register nomination and the History Museum's account respectively, as printed in the entries above.
2. Indiana's temperance statute frame — the county-option law of 1908, the Proctor Law of 1911, and the state prohibition law of 1917 effective 2 April 1918 — as stated in the standard Indiana legal-historical record; Crime section of this history — the dry law's date and the enforcement record, cross-referenced; Bars & Nightclubs section — the same open county-option question from the saloon side, with the same settling records named.