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At the turn of the century, the most famous painting in the U.S. was Custer's Last Fight, a huge canvas across which hordes of infuriated redskins hurled themselves at General George A. Custer and the last of his 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn. The man who made the picture famous was a St. Louis brewer named Adolphus Busch,* co-founder of Anheuser-Busch and inventor of Budweiser beer. Reproduced on outdoor posters and hung in countless saloons, Custer's Last Fight became an amazingly successful advertisement. The company filled 1,000,000 requests for copies in 50 years, while Budweiser sales rose steadily.
Nothing could be more appropriate to the $2.5 billion U.S. brewing industry today than Custer's Last Fight. Never has there been such whooping, shooting and scalping. Reason: at a time when nearly everything else in the U.S. economy is bubbling and foaming up, beer sales are going down. Thus, every U.S. brewer, from the Big Three national giants—Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst—on down to the smallest local brewery is on the warpath, each trying to scalp the others in the fight for sales. At the top of the heap, and battling to stay in the No. 1 spot, is Anheuser-Busch's President August Anheuser Busch Jr., grandson of Co-Founder Adolphus. Like his grandfather, "Gussie" Busch is a salesman with a flair for advertising and promotion, combining dawn-to-dusk energy with dusk-to-dawn good fellowship. Says Busch: "This is the year that we are going to separate the men from the boys in the brewing industry."
George Washington Brewed Here. To beer drinkers and nondrinkers alike, the drop in beer sales is surprising. Ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, with "our victuals much spent, especially our beer," beer has been one of the staples of U.S. life. Revolutionary War soldiers got a daily ration; George Washington had his own small home brewery at Mount Vernon. To the sun-baked fisherman, the lawn-mowing suburbanite, the baseball fan, beer has always been the symbol of inexpensive relaxation. This week, as July ushered in the height of the beer-drinking season, Americans were pouring upwards of 100 million bottles a day.
Nevertheless, in 1954 the U.S. consumed but 83 million bbls.—4,000,000 bbls. less than the alltime peak in 1947. In terms of per capita consumption, the dip is even sharper; beer sales last year were down almost 15% from the wartime high of 18.7 gals, per person. And beer is not the only beverage industry hit: hard liquor sales have slumped nearly 30% from the postwar high, to 1.18 gals, per capita. And sales of soft drinks are also down.