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Brewer Busch vividly remembers the night of April 7, 1933. "The crowds were singing and having a wonderful time," he recalls, "and at midnight every factory in St. Louis blew its whistle. Then the trucks rolled out of the gates and took Budweiser to bars all over St. Louis. People were backed all the way out to the curb waiting for their turn at the bar." Gussie, his father and his older brother picked one of the first cases off the bottling-plant line and sent it air express to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a heartfelt token of thanks. Ever since Gussie Busch has been a Democrat ("I'll be damned if I'll bite the hand that fed me"), thus giving some latter-day verisimilitude to Horace Greeley's remark, circa 1860: "I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers were Democrats."
Though the fight was won, it had taken too much out of Gus's father. Suffering from high blood pressure, gout and a bad heart, August Busch Sr. shot himself to death on Feb. 13, 1934. In accordance with family tradition, Gussie's older brother Adolphus III was elected president, and from 1937 to 1945 he kept the company at the top of the industry. Gussie Busch went off to World War II in 1942, spent most of his time helping to break tank-production bottlenecks at Detroit's automotive center, came out in 1945 as a colonel with the Legion of Merit. In 1946, when his brother died of cancer, Gussie stepped into the president's job. But no sooner was he in command than Busch found himself and his company in deep trouble.
The New Leaders. During the war, when demand soared way above production, Anheuser-Busch's sales division had become lazy. With peace and competition, Milwaukee's hustling brewers shot ahead. By the end of 1946, Pabst was on top, though only by a bare 20,000 bbls. Busch was stunned. The next year he pushed sales and production up to 3,608,738 bbls. But still Anheuser-Busch skidded into fourth place. A new leader, Schlitz, took over and kept on top for six straight years.
From 1947 to 1952 Busch rode his company as if it were a balky jumper, forced it over hurdle after hurdle. Overruling his conservative directors, Busch kicked off a $50 million expansion program for the St. Louis brewery to boost capacity 2,630,000 bbls. to 6,230,000 annually, rammed through a $34 million project for an East Coast brewery at Newark, another $25 million for the West Coast brewery. Production rose enough to put Anheuser-Busch in second place, right on the heels of Schlitz. Then, in 1953, Budweiser broke through. With the new Newark brewery capable of turning out an additional 1,840,000 bbls. a year, Anheuser-Busch turned out an alltime record of 6,711,222 bbls., 1,500,000 bbls. more than its nearest competitor, Schlitz. One of the big helps was Milwaukee's eleven-week beer strike, which cost his Milwaukee competitors an estimated 2,500,000 bbls. But Busch kept ahead in 1954, too.