Ruppert, Prohibition, and the Babe (the Babe Ruth Deal, Part 2)
The New York Times, 6 Jan, 1920, p. 1.
Tuesday, January 6, 1920 would be warmer than the day before, predicted The New York Times to readers picking up that morning’s recently anointed newspaper of record. The rest of the front page offered frostier forecasts. Headlines announced the march toward one of 1920’s landmark developments in the United States–prohibition (“Ban on 2.75 Beers in Wartime Upheld by Supreme Court”)—and the difficult progress toward another, national women’s suffrage (“G.O.P. Women Ask Equality with Men”). (By the way, in New York State, women had had the right to vote since November of 1917.)
The foremost concern of The Times though was clearly “reds” and the campaign to suppress them; four linked front-page articles documented the government’s ongoing crackdown of alleged communist subversives via surveillance, arrest, and deportation. The lead story, given a two-column headline, reported the raids that the Justice Department conducted during the previous night “here”—meaning in New York City. The January 6Times page one, as a whole, grayer and more crammed with text than we are accustomed to seeing now, hints at the cultural contours of 1920, foreshadowing major shifts as they would play out for New York City and its denizens.
New Yorkers sitting down with the broadsheet and scanning left to right would have started with the morning’s big prohibition-related news, that the US Supreme Court had voted five against four to deny a plea to keep low-alcohol beer on the market. Below the article’s headline, a sub-heading–or “deck,” in newspaper lingo—names the plaintiff in the case, announcing: “Jacob Ruppert’s Petition for an Injunction Dismissed.” Colonel Jacob Ruppert, Jr., representing the United States Brewers Association, had challenged the U.S. Congress’s constitutional right to define intoxicating beverages, specifically appealing the legislature’s judgment that 2.75 percent alcohol-content beer can indeed inebriate. Ruppert was fighting for the life of his family’s Ruppert Brewery, sometimes called Knickerbocker Brewery: 35 buildings located between 2nd and 3rd Avenue and 94th and 95th Street in Manhattan’s Yorkville district. In 1920, the complex had for over 40 years been an economic anchor and jobs generator to what was then a heavily German-American part of the international Upper East Side, a neighborhood that was home to immigrants from across Central and Eastern Europe. A few blocks away at 88th Street, Gracie Mansion was a public facility serving visitors to Carl Schurz Park. Now the Upper East Side is known for its wealth and conservatism, and Gracie Mansion, fulfilling the vision of Robert Moses, serves as the mayoral residence. The Brewery did indeed stay in operation into the 1960s; since 1965 its site has been occupied and commemorated by the Ruppert Towers.
A 1915 Evening World feature shows the world’s largest brew kettles being installed at the Ruppert Brewery. Thanks to Baybottles.com.
The Rupperts built their brewery in the 1880s, several decades after bringing the family trade from Germany to the New World. Their beers had been popular, most of all the Knickerbocker label. A print advertising campaign successfully branded it as “New York’s Favorite.” The brand name, probably drawn from Washington Irving’s writings, alludes to the original Dutch settlers of New York City née New Amsterdam—although no one is certain how a style of pants came to evoke a people.
1909. Thanks to Baybottles.com.
In early 1920, Jacob Ruppert, Jr. was attempting to keep this business in business but his fight against the “drys” ended in Washington, DC that January 5.
Knickerbocker Beer 1915 map of New York. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, NYPL..
The front-page ink that the defeat earned was not new for him. Ruppert had made front-page news by running for congress, selling racehorses, and injuring himself while heroically, but unsuccessfully, trying to corral a runaway carriage horse.
This was someone who had been a public New York figure for two decades, prominent in politics, business, and high society. Born in New York in 1867 as his family’s second son, Ruppert attended the prestigious Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School (whose most famous recent pupil was Baron Trump). After graduating high school, Ruppert eschewed college to apprentice in the family business, but his sights were set beyond beverages. He soon translated his social position and his own savvy into first a colonelship in the National Guard and then election to the US House of Representatives. From 1899 to 1907 he served a faithful Democrat and cog in New York’s notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine that had controlled New York politics through a mix of graft, patronage, and force since the early 1800s. As an elected legislator, his highest-profile action was a 1906 written dissent from an attempt to add literacy tests to an immigration reform bill. His argument helped sway Teddy Roosevelt against the proposal, despite the fact that Ruppert was from the President’s opposition party. During and after his congressional career, Ruppert was a familiar figure in elite New York City social circles, where he was known for speaking with an affected German accent, this a century after his family’s immigration, even throughout the war with Germany that the US would enter in 1917.
Ruppert became a full-time businessman in 1915, assuming control of the family brewery and serving as president of the US Brewers Association. He could see prohibition coming, and for the next few years spearheaded a legal charge against it, all the while diversifying his financial interests. He had his contingency plans in advance. A sports enthusiast, Ruppert owned a stable of horses and a kennel of racing dogs, and on December 31, 1914, he and his partner, Captain Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, had bought a baseball team, the New York Yankees. Always with a keen eye for branding, Ruppert proposed that the team be called the Knickerbockers, thinking to double up on his brewery’s marketing success. The plan fell through when newspapers editors weighed in that the name was so long as to be unwieldy.
Jacob Ruppert (r.) with New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchell at the first game of the 1915 baseball season, 1915. Wikicommons
By coincidence, the same day that the Supreme Court was ruling against his petition, Ruppert was announcing a business deal, a deal that he is popularly known for today, the main reason for his fame. The deal also appeared in the January 6 Times—and in morning newspapers all over the US. It was not the Times’s habit to accord page one space to sports, so Ruppert’s non-alcohol-related and more triumphant news appeared in the sports section, on page 16, as an eight-column headline: “Ruth Bought By New York Americans for $125,000, Highest Price in Baseball Annals.” “Ruth,” meant George Herman “Babe” Ruth, major league baseball’s best player–though not yet universally recognized as such–in 1920 its most controversial, and its biggest box-office draw. The “Americans” of the headline signaled the Yankees, the baseball franchise Ruppert was intent on making profitable, motivated in part to compensate for his imminent loss of beer revenues. In the early days of winter, with the 1920 baseball season three months from starting, the Yankees bought Ruth’s contract from the Boston Red Sox, who had heretofore been the most successful organization in the American League in which both teams played.
Ruppert, as Yankees team president, announced the deal himself, proclaiming that he had taken a step toward his “life purpose” of bringing the Yankees “to the world’s series.” Heretofore mired in mediocrity, the franchise had never really sniffed a championship. Bringing Ruth to the Yankees would indeed shift the balance of power in baseball, much more than was understood at the time. For many baseball fans, the Ruth deal provides the crux of a great sports rivalry, a moment that became both franchises’ touchstone for the entire rest of the century–until the next brought change. For many sports enthusiasts, the deal represents the foundation story of modern major league history, and the ascendancy of professional athletics. Beyond the sport, Ruth’s transfer from New York to Boston signals a turning point in culture, its effects impacting attitudes at the core of modern US society. (More on that soon …)