I was reading up on the history of beer in America for a side project I'm working on and I learned about the fucked up ass treatment Germans got from white folks.

(White people and "whiteness" are an invention, let's be real)

We like to think of lager beer as the most goddamn 'Merican drink god himself bestowed upon the country, but it has a storied history.

The short of it is...

Immigration into the US during the the 1830s totaled 600k.
But, in 1840 that number shot up to 1.7 million and in 1850 that number was 2.8 million. Most of those folks were German and Irish. Most Germans were political refugees.

During that time, Americans primarily drank whiskey and warm ale and dirty bars and drinking was associated with gambling and prostitution. However, for Germans who drank cold lager, a lower alcohol beer, drinking a beer was ingrained in the culture. It was something done in communal settings.

By the 1850s white Americans with puritanical/English roots started to dislike Germans who built cohesive communities that had started to also build some political power. The dislike was fueled by anti-immigration and the sentiment that alcohol caused laziness (but, the opposite was true in German communities, it was a cultural element)

A nativtivist political party known as the "know-nothings" created a climate of oppression and violence towards immigrants. Things got so bad German communities had to form their own police and protection networks.

Things peaked with the lager beer riot of 1855. Chicago mayor Levi Boone increased the annual liquor license fee SIX fold and mandated bars be closed on Sundays which specifically targeted Germans. Which, if you remember, the perception for them was different, bars were not a place of gambling and prostitution and this was all happening while Americans were starting to love the idea of beer halls.

Levi Boone riled up his base and ran on an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant platform and won.

You know how the rest of the story goes...during the Lager Riots the police came down hard on protestors and shot at the crowd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lager_Beer_Riot


I say all this to say that while I was reading through that I found myself getting heated because its the same old story. They were anti-Catholic then and they are anti-Muslim now. They were anti-immigrant then...shit, they still anti-immigrant now.

Its the same gotdamn shit today, yesterday and before yesterday but they keep switching out the actors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_nativist_riots


Anyway...I guess another angle for all of this for me is the mass denial of any wrong doing towards black and brown people but then I go a step further and realize that they were even doing the same shit to people who look like them (which, ok, yes, thats a WHOLE other discussion on the invention of whiteness and how its a tool to create in group/out group dynamics) and there is no acknowledgement of it.

It's like none of that shit ever happened and yet Americans like to consume things from the people they oppress and these things are just considered "American" but there is no acknowledgement that all of it is covered in blood and struggle.

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https://soundcloud.com/swageyph/yph-die-with-me