Anheuser-Busch’s beer ad for the 2017 Super Bowl looks more like a protest film against President Trump’s immigration policies than an actual pitch for brew. The 1-minute commercial tells the tale of the German-born Adolphus Busch, co-founder of the St. Louis-based suds empire, as he survives Titanic-style ocean catastrophes to arrive in America in 1857, only to be greeted by a torrent of nasty nativist slurs as soon as the boat hits the dock: “You don’t look like you’re from here.” “You’re not wanted here.” “Go home.”
The idea seems to be that Americans back then made a huge mistake in failing to welcome a latent entrepreneurial genius. Just as, I guess, Donald Trump is making a huge mistake in forging ahead to build a wall along the southern border in order to halt illegal entries, and in his order temporarily halting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries associated with terrorism. Anheuser-Busch, as might be expected, is denying that the ad is a political statement, saying it’s an expression of some “universal” yada yada.
But of course you could read the ad as an argument against letting immigrants travel to America’s shores to get into the brewing business. Beer Advocate and Rate Beer placed one Anheuser-Busch product, Natural Light, at the top of their lists of America’s very worst beers. As blogger Refined Guy wrote:
Next in line came another Anheuser-Busch product, Natural Ice, followed by Budweiser Select 55, manufactured by…I don’t even have to tell you. Bud Light Chelada was also way up there, along with Busch Ice. Need I say more?
But I do! How about Busch Light? Oh, and also Bud Light. And Busch Beer. And Bud Ice (not to be confused with Natural Ice). And Budweiser Chelada (how many of those undrinkable products are there?). All at the top of the ghastly list. Even plain old Budweiser, which isn’t too awful if you’re stuck somewhere with a limited dive-bar menu, doesn’t rank very high.
So I ask: Are these really the kind of immigrants we want to let into our country?
Still, to his credit, Adolphus Busch really was a talented beer marketer, who got in early on the practice of putting the brew into bottles instead of kegs, greatly extending the shelf life of a highly perishable product. But it seems from the historical record that Busch’s chief foes weren’t xenophobic nativists (St. Louis already had a flourishing German community and numerous breweries when he arrived there). His actual enemies were prohibitionists. The Prohibition Party, responsible for shepherding the 18th Amendment through ratification, complained in 1912 (a year before Adolphus Busch’s death in 1913) that he had a reputation of “malodorous notoriety” and had celebrated his golden wedding anniversary as a “Belshazzar’s carnival” where the beer presumably flowed. Trying to draw exact parallels between events of 1857 and events of 2017 is probably a mistake.
