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Chronicling America is a searchable digital collection of historic newspaper pages through 1963 sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
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Also, see the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries, a searchable index to newspapers published in the United States since 1690, which helps researchers identify what titles exist for a specific place and time, and how to access them.
As Prohibition loomed and threatened the livelihoods of brewers across the country, brewers responded with a series of innovative ad campaigns. Advertising sought to persuade the public by touting the economic benefits of the brewing industry and the taxes thereon, lauding the health value of “liquid bread,” distinguishing beer from hard alcohol, and making philosophical appeals for liberty. Read more about it!
The information in this guide focuses on primary source materials found in the digitized historic newspapers from the digital collection Chronicling America.
The timeline below highlights important dates related to this topic and a section of this guide provides some suggested search strategies for further research in the collection.
| 1907 | Pabst Blue Ribbon brands itself as a healthy beverage that promotes temperance. |
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| 1908 | Budweiser runs a series of ads invoking historical figures such as Otto van Bismarck, William Shakespeare, and John Hancock. The campaign uses an ad hominem template that will be adopted in 1914 and 1915 to attack prohibition. |
| 1908 | Budweiser runs full page advertisements, in which the Anheuser-Busch logo, a Budweiser bottle, and the Anheuser-Busch plant, were superimposed on a newspaper page, but all of the articles were seamlessly incorporated into the advertisement with headlines like “Beer on the Mayflower,” “The Grain of the Gods,” “World’s Decisive Battles Won by Beer Drinkers,” and “The Temperance Value of Beer." |
| 1912- 1913 | The Seattle Brewing and Malting Company runs advertisements to counter the campaigns of the Anti-Saloon League. |
| 1914 | The manufacture of alcohol in Washington is banned in 1914. Budweiser runs the “National Hero Series,” which targets ethnic minorities by tying the fight against Prohibition to the fight for liberty by the national heroes of Europe. |
| 1915-1916 | The Philadelphia Lager Beer Brewers’ Association begins running a series called “Facts Versus Fallacies,” which attempts to refute prohibitionist arguments. New ads are published twice a week. |
| 1916 | Budweiser introduces its liquid bread ad, suggesting that because beer and bread come from the same ingredients that they are nutritionally equivalent. |
| 1917-1918 | American brewers band together to take out full page ads in newspapers appealing directly to Congress and State legislatures. |
