author
Adolph Keitel
A grain broker and malt producer with deep ties to the brewing trade, he wrote from inside the industry at a moment when the politics of alcohol were boiling over in the United States. His surviving book is a sharp, argumentative look at the power brewers held in public life during the Prohibition era.
1 Audiobook
Government by the Brewers?
by Adolph Keitel
About the author
Best known for Government by the Brewers? (1918), he presented himself as someone who had been "for thirty years intimately associated with the brewing industry." That insider claim gives the book its distinct voice: part exposé, part reform tract, and part warning about the political influence of brewers in early twentieth-century America.
Library and public-domain records identify the book as a 1918 publication issued in Chicago. In it, he argued that the brewing industry was tied to corruption, vice, and election interference, making the work a vivid example of the fierce debates that surrounded temperance and the approach of national Prohibition.
Very little biographical information beyond his connection to the brewing business and this publication is easy to confirm from reliable public sources. Even so, his work offers a revealing snapshot of a turbulent period in American social and political history, when arguments over alcohol were also arguments about power, morality, and government.