author
Adolph Keitel
A little-known early 20th-century polemicist, he is remembered for a sharp attack on the brewing industry's political influence during the final push toward Prohibition in the United States. His surviving public footprint is slim, but his book offers a vivid glimpse into the reform debates of 1918.
1 Audiobook
Government by the Brewers?
by Adolph Keitel
About the author
Very little reliable biographical information about this author appears to survive in the easily accessible public record. What can be confirmed is that Adolph Keitel wrote Government by the Brewers?, published in Chicago in 1918 by Appersly & Co., a work that was later preserved by libraries and made available through projects such as Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.
In the book's own prefatory material, he describes himself as having been "for thirty years intimately associated with the brewing industry," which helps explain the book's insider tone and strongly argued criticism of brewers' political power. The work belongs to the intense public arguments of the late 1910s, when temperance, anti-saloon activism, and national Prohibition were reshaping American life.
Because confirmed details about his life beyond this publication are scarce, it is safest to remember him primarily through that surviving work: a brief but forceful contribution to one of the biggest social and political fights of its era.