Two Beer Riots

The Munich Beer Riot of 1844 was a reaction to the price of beer set by the Bavarian government. The Lager Beer Riot took place in Chicago in 1855, and was a response to municipal policies put in place by mayor Levi Boone that targeted the city’s Catholic and immigrant populations.

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• 1:44Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 3:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 3:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. I was looking around for something Bavaria-related ahead of our trip to Munich, when we're gonna go to Oktoberfest, among many other things. And I wrote this episode before that trip, but it will probably come out while we're there, I think. While I was looking for something interesting to talk about, I stumbled across a mention of a beer riot that took place in Munich in 1844. But then, as I was getting my research together, having decided that was what I was going to talk about, I kept getting search results for a different beer riot, which was in Chicago in 1855.

• 4:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sometimes, the results also included Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. This episode is not about that at all. That is a whole other thing. Instead, it is a bit of a double feature on these two beer riots, which have a little bit of overlap in what led up to them. Also, we've talked on the show before, a number of times, about how the word "riot" doesn't typically capture all the nuance of a lot of the things that are called riots. But that is consistently what both of these incidents are called in everything that I've read about both of them.

• 4:49Holly Frey?

  So the earliest archaeological evidence of people brewing beer in Bavaria goes back almost 3,000 years. The oldest continually operating brewery in Bavaria is the Wiensch Stefan Monastery Brewery, which has existed for about 1,000 years. While there were monasteries and other breweries that were making beer in larger amounts for most of that history, a lot of brewing happened at people's homes for their own use, using a range of ingredients.

• 5:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Toward the end of the 15th century, Bavaria passed its first beer purity law, regulating how beer was made and mandating that it could include only hops, clean water, and malt, which was made from barley. They did not really understand yeast yet, so beer was being fermented with yeast that was naturally present in the environment. They were not adding yeast as an ingredient on purpose at that point. Those earliest laws were followed by the Reinheitsgebot in 1516, which regulated the quality and safety of beer, and also set the price for a mass of beer.

• 6:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  The "mass" is a measure of beer that is standardized as a liter today.

• 6:06Holly Frey?

  After the introduction of these laws, brewing shifted away from being a task that people did at home to being a commercial product. By the mid-19th century, the Bavarian government controlled the brewing industry, and twice a year, it would set the price for a mass of beer. This was called the "beer satz," and it changed twice a year because summer beer was more expensive to brew than winter beer. So, most of the time, the cost of a mass was a little more in the summer. This pricing system also incorporated the fact that brewers had to pay a tax on their beer.

• 6:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Beer became a huge part of the culture and way of life in Bavaria. On a practical level, beer could be safer to drink than water, especially as the Bavarian government set up this whole food safety and quality assurance system for beer and the places that beer was brewed. Beer was also a source of calories that people really relied on, especially when other food became more expensive. Consumed in small amounts throughout the day, beer was perceived as a wholesome food that was suitable for practically everyone, like a liquid bread. In the mid-19th century, a middle-class man drank an average of half a mass of beer

• 7:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  a day, while poorer men, who were living mostly on bread and beer, and might have meals that were only beer, they often drank two or three times that much.

• 7:33Holly Frey?

  On a more intangible level, beer was interconnected with the idea of a warm, gregarious conviviality and fellowship, described as "gemütlichkeit." Beer and the socializing that naturally came along with it were connected to community and well-being, individually and as a society. Taverns and breweries and outdoor beer gardens set up in the summer were places to gather and to relax, and to look for and to offer support. People who had just arrived in town or city would go to the tavern and ask around about where to find work, and the networks that developed among regulars at a given tavern turned into support systems for each other and for newcomers.

• 8:17Holly Frey?

  So beer was seen as a social good, and the people of Bavaria demanded good beer, to the point of thinking of it as a rite. This also meant that drinking beer was almost mandatory. People who didn't want to, for whatever reason, were seen as not fitting in and could actually be ostracized.

• 8:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  With all that in mind, it might be surprising that Munich's first Oktoberfest, which is really associated with beer today, was not really about beer. There was already a tradition of smaller festivals meant to kind of finish off the remaining kegs of beer so that they would be available for a new batch of beer to be brewed. But that is not what's recognized as the first Oktoberfest. That was the celebration of the royal wedding of Princess Teresa of Saxony Hilberhausen and Crown Prince Ludwig. This was a five-day festival with horse races on festival grounds outside the city gates, with those grounds named "Terezian Visa," after the princess.

• 9:18Holly Frey?

  The king at the time was Ludwig's father, Maximilian I. Joseph. He's also known as Max Joseph. He was a popular king, and he positioned himself sort of as a monarch of the people. Max Joseph had become king when Bavaria transitioned from an electorate to a kingdom, which came about because of the Treaty of Presburg in 1805 between Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, and Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. There is, of course, a whole huge backstory there, but Max Joseph was trying to position Bavaria as a modern kingdom rather than a medieval duchy. He had made all kinds of reforms, including abolishing serfdom and establishing some universal liberties under a new constitution.

• 10:04Holly Frey?

  His son's wedding was meant to be a celebration for all of Bavaria, and about 40,000 people attended. Beer became part of Oktoberfest as it morphed into an annual celebration in subsequent years.

• 10:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Ludwig ascended to the throne of Bavaria on October 13, 1825. Initially, he maintained a lot of the progressive reforms that his father had implemented, and he also embarked on a whole lot of new building projects. He was trying to turn Munich into a more modern city. He was also a patron of the arts, and his art collection became a part of newly established museums. But he was increasingly at odds with the Landtag, or the Bavarian Parliament. And then after a series of uprisings against monarchies in Europe in 1830, he became a lot more reactionary, stubborn, and autocratic.

• 11:00Holly Frey?

  Ludwig's departure from many of his father's attitudes and policies intersected with changes that were happening in Bavaria and the way those changes affected ordinary people. All of that fed into the beer riots of 1844. The population of Munich almost doubled between 1810 and 1840, while the total population of Bavaria had only grown by about 20%. Much of Munich's growth was, of course, driven by people coming from smaller towns and villages looking for work. Bavaria was industrializing, but slowly, and that industrialization was very recent. Bavaria's first factory was a textile mill that opened in 1837.

• 11:45Holly Frey?

  There was a lot of demand for manual laborers to work on all of Ludwig's various building projects and for masons, carpenters, and glassworkers. But even with that increased demand, there were not enough jobs for all of the newcomers.

• 12:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Often, these were not people who planned to move to Munich permanently. Munich was an employment hub, and people could go there and find work in one of the outlying towns and villages. So they would arrive expecting to stay for a few days or maybe a few weeks. Vagrancy was criminalized, and people who were not able to find work in Munich were supposed to go back to where they had come from. If they didn't do that, and they were caught begging or loitering, they could be arrested and sent to a workhouse. But if a person got to Munich and then couldn't find a job, a lot of times, they just did not have money to go back to their hometown. Or if they did find a job, it might not actually pay them enough to support themselves, let

• 12:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  alone afford travel to go somewhere else to try to find a better paying job.

• 12:49Holly Frey?

  Like much of Europe, Bavaria had operated on a system of trade guilds. But one of the things that Ludwig's father had done was to have the state take control of the trades. So the guilds still existed, and journeymen still went through an apprenticeship with a master. But the guilds weren't nearly as powerful as they once had been, and they didn't have as many resources to do things like financially support journeymen as they were learning their craft. The influx of people to Munich also meant that there weren't nearly enough masters to train all of the new journeymen. New journeymen also realized that most of them would never become masters. There just was not enough demand for master-level work for all of them.

• 13:33Holly Frey?

  There were also way too many journeymen for the state to keep up with, even though the state had taken on much of that responsibility.

• 13:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Max Joseph had also secularized Bavaria and confiscated monasteries and land and other property that had belonged to the Catholic Church. Ludwig later returned a lot of this property, but Max Joseph's secularization policy put an end to a lot of the work that the Church had been doing to care for the sick and the poor. While the Bavarian government set up some programs to help widows, sick people, the elderly, and military veterans, there just was not a lot of support for the poor more broadly anymore, or for young, able people who just couldn't find work.

• 14:19Holly Frey?

  Bavaria also had a system of mandatory military service, but soldiers were paid very poorly, and many of them also needed to have other jobs to support themselves. In Munich, they faced the same work shortages as everyone else. A lot of soldiers in and around Munich had also come from the country, and they were used to a very different way of life with a much lower cost of living.

• 14:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  So in Munich in the 1840s, food was expensive, rent was expensive, there weren't enough jobs. A lot of the support systems that had existed previously didn't exist anymore, or they were greatly reduced. Young, single men in particular were often living in rented rooms that were overcrowded and infested with various vermin, and they were relying on breweries and taverns for most of their social activity and their food and their beer. So when the price of beer increased, people got really upset.

• 15:16Holly Frey?

  We're going to talk more about that after we pause for a sponsor break.

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• 17:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you.

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• 20:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we said earlier, in the 19th century, the Bavarian government set the price of beer twice a year, and it was normally a little more expensive in the summer. The summer was also when a lot of laborers made most of their money. The weather was better and the days were longer, so 13-hour days were typical in the summer. And then in the winter, a person might work sporadically or maybe not at all. So in the summer, when the beer was more expensive, people were also drinking more of it, both to quench their thirst and to keep themselves going through these longer days of work. Drinking beer could be less expensive than paying for other food, but it still really added up. So for a young man doing manual labor,

• 21:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  a mass of beer could cost twice as much as his daily rent on his room, and he was often drinking two or three mass of beer a day.

• 21:36Holly Frey?

  Beer prices started to climb in the 1840s as a series of bad harvests made grain more expensive. It was obvious that people were unhappy about this, but there were limits on how they could express that frustration. Insulting the government's decisions was considered to be the same thing as insulting the monarch and, quote, "wounding the king's honor" was actually a crime. It seemed like there was an increase in the number of people who were arrested for things like insulting the gendarmes and publicly swearing or complaining in the 1840s. But there's no documentation for what people actually said when they were arrested on these occasions.

• 22:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, it's possible that this was just a cranky time, that other things are going on.

• 22:22Holly Frey?

  Everybody's feeling fussy.

• 22:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. We definitely have a trend sometimes of getting a lot more angry email when there are heatwaves happening. And that was one of the things that I thought of when I saw this data about spikes in arrests for public complaining. On May 1 of 1843, the beer satz rose to 6.5 kreuzer for a mass of beer. That was a full kreuzer more than it had been the summer before. A brawl broke out in a tavern that afternoon, which might have been related to that price increase, but it's not entirely clear. People were also posting anonymous notes around Munich, including in the area around the Royal Residence. These notes were generally perceived

• 23:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  as coming from uneducated workers and other lower-class people. They tended to be written on cheap paper in poor handwriting with words that were misspelled or spelled out phonetically. These anonymous notes did reference the price of beer as well as other issues like how poorly paid the soldiers were and how much the king was spending on all of his building projects.

• 23:32Holly Frey?

  Various brewers started announcing that they would sell their beer for lower than the official beer satz. This was a maximum price, not a minimum, but of course, beer was typically sold for the maximum amount possible. The royally-owned Hofbrauhaus announced that, because of public demand, it would sell beer for 5 kreuzer for May and June, but that the price would go back to the official beer satz level in July.

• 23:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  That October, the king's advisers encouraged him to reduce the beer satz for the winter. It was set at 5.5 kreuzer, which was not enough of a drop to really relieve people's dissatisfaction. The government also increased it to 6 kreuzer for March and April in response to the rising grain prices. The anonymous notes continued, including ones that featured satirical poems and criticized public officials and even called for the overthrow of the king. Some also said, "Long live Maximilian", which was the king's son and the crown prince. One note that was left near the Royal Residence said in German, "If you want affordable beer and bread, beat the king dead."

• 24:44Holly Frey?

  In February of 1844, the government set the summer beer satz at 6.5 kreuzer, and the Ministry of the Interior announced the price publicly in April. The date for this new price to go into effect was May 1, 1844, which was also the wedding day of King Ludwig's daughter Hildegard to Archduke Albert of Austria. This royal wedding added to people's discontent and drew comparisons to Ludwig's own wedding in 1810. There was nothing comparable to the festivities that had drawn 40,000 people. People complained that there were no fireworks planned, something that people could see regardless of their social class, and that the celebratory parade

• 25:28Holly Frey?

  was not going through the neighborhoods where poor people lived.

• 25:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  People had been expecting a price increase and had started planning a demonstration before that increase was even announced. The demonstration started on the evening of May 1, after the wedding ceremony was over. One account was from the Maderbrauer Brewery, but something similar played out at breweries and taverns all over Munich. At Maderbrauer, a group of soldiers ordered beer, saying that they would only pay 6 kreuzer for it. The proprietor told them that they would have to pay the full price, and then they all started banging their glasses on the table in unison. When the gendarmes arrived to try to calm them down, a group of laborers came over to the table, and then somebody whistled, which was the agreed-upon signal for them to start smashing things.

• 26:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  They broke glasses, shattered windows, turned over the tables, broke chairs, and did other damage. There were 33 breweries in Munich, and all of them were damaged in this uprising. The crowd also attacked taverns that were selling the breweries beer. For the most part, the crowd did things like breaking windows and furniture and glassware, but they didn't try to damage or destroy the brewing equipment.

• 26:43Holly Frey?

  Most of the people who took part in this wave of vandalism were journeymen or soldiers, so they faced similar economic circumstances. The soldiers were also angry because they had previously had a stipend to offset the rising cost of food, and that stipend had just been repealed, something that had been announced on April 30. The royal wedding also took place during the soldiers' annual leave. So this confluence of factors making the soldiers both angry and idle and available to participate in this uprising was described as unfortunate.

• 27:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, it seems like the higher-ups sort of went, "We could have planned that better, maybe."

• 27:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  The unrest went on for three days, including a demonstration outside of the theater where the royal family was. This night at the theater was on the schedule for the wedding, which had been publicly announced. Although the gendarmes kept the demonstrators from entering the theater, they screamed and made enough noise outside that they disrupted the performance.

• 27:48Holly Frey?

  In addition to the damage at Munich's breweries, the rioters damaged bakeries, butcher shops, and royal buildings. They also blocked the streets with carts and wagons so the gendarmes would have a harder time responding to what was happening. The number of people involved also made it difficult for the gendarmes to arrest perpetrators. If they saw someone throw a rock through a window or smash a table, that person usually vanished into the crowd before police could get close. Thousands of people participated in the riots, the vast majority of them men, but only a tiny fraction of that were arrested, and most of those spent only a few hours in jail or, if they were intoxicated, they stayed until they sobered up.

• 28:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Eventually, cavalry and infantry units were dispatched to help the gendarmes. There are only 115 gendarmes in all of Munich. That was just not enough to deal with what was happening all across the city. Some of the soldiers, though, didn't seem all that motivated to intervene, considering how many soldiers were among the demonstrators and how the reason for their rioting were, like, those reasons were things that were affecting the soldiers that were responding to the disorder as well.

• 29:03Holly Frey?

  German political theorist Friedrich Engels wrote about the riot in the chartist paper The Northern Star. In his words, quote, "The working men assembled in large masses, paraded through the streets, assailed the public houses, smashing the windows, breaking the furniture, and destroying everything in their reach in order to take revenge for the enhanced price of their favorite drink. The military was called in, but a regiment of horse guards, when commanded to mount on horseback, refused to do so. The police, being, as everywhere, obnoxious to the people, were severely beaten and ill-treated by the rioters, and every station formerly occupied by police officers had to be occupied by soldiers,

• 29:48Holly Frey?

  who, being upon good terms with the people, were considered less hostile and showed an evident reluctance to interfere."

• 29:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Engels ended this article with, quote, "If the people once know that they can frighten the government out of their taxing system, they will soon learn that it will be as easy to frighten them as far as regards more serious affairs."

• 30:13Holly Frey?

  On May 2, brewers across Munich agreed to sell a mass of beer at 6 kreuzer. The Brewers Guild asked the Finance Ministry for permission to do this, something the Guild was allowed to request under the existing law. The Ministry approved the price drop, and the breweries publicized it.

• 30:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  For some people, this was a victory, but for others, it was a signal that they should push for even lower beer prices as well as lower prices on other goods like meat and bread. So the disorder continued. During the royal wedding parade, a lot of spectators stood silently as the king passed by, but then they really cheered for the carriage that was carrying the crown prince.

• 30:55Holly Frey?

  On May 3, soldiers who weren't responding to the disorder were confined to their barracks, and the demonstrators wound down. Two weeks later, soldiers who had helped to restore order got a bonus of 7 kreuzer, or enough to buy a little more than a measure of beer. An official investigation into the riot concluded that it had been in response to the beer price and nothing else, not really exploring all of the other issues that were going on with unemployment and cost and quality of living. There were also other similar uprisings in other parts of Bavaria.

• 31:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the fall of 1844, the beer satz was dropped to five and a half kreuzer, and the government considered canceling Oktoberfest because of the threat of disorder. The festival went on, though, and Ludwig announced that Hofbrauhaus would sell beer for only five kreuzer. That put a lot of pressure on the other breweries to match that lower price.

• 31:54Holly Frey?

  There was another wave of unrest after beer satz was set at seven and a quarter kreuzer for the summer of 1846, something officials were so concerned about that they announced it in February to try to give people time to adjust to the idea before it went into effect in May. Soldiers were given a stipend to help offset that price, but that led to worries among brewers that soldiers would use their stipend to buy beer for civilians, or that it would make journeymen and other low-paid people envious or angry.

• 32:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Ludwig's reign did not last long after this. In 1846, he met past podcast subject Lola Montes, had an affair with her, and was forced to abdicate in 1848. This was during a wave of revolutionary republican revolts that took place across Europe that year, including in Bavaria. While these revolts were anti-monarchical in nature, the end result in Bavaria was that Ludwig's son took the throne as King Maximilian II on March 28th. That summer, the beer satz was set at five and a half kreuzer, which was a price so low that the brewers complained they could not afford it.

• 33:06Holly Frey?

  After we take another quick sponsor break, we're going to talk about a somewhat similar uprising in Chicago in 1855.

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  Yeah, folks, a YouTube Premium experience gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, and these are real game changers for us.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that includes, but it's not limited to, ad-free viewing of YouTube. Imagine no more ads popping up in the middle of videos or at the end of videos, uninterrupted videos.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  And now think about this, let's say you're using YouTube on the go, you're exercising, you're washing dishes, you can have YouTube playing in the background with Premium, which means you can keep listening while your screen is locked.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Also, you can download videos offline, so you don't even need Wi-Fi connection to watch your stuff.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  I love this on plane flights.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Ben, how have you been using YouTube Premium?

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  Oh, man. Well, Matt, you know I like to take a night walk, and YouTube Premium is perfect for this because of the background play. So I can pull up a documentary about the neighborhood I'm walking around in, put the phone in my pocket, and still hear everything perfectly.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Amazing.

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• 34:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you.

• 35:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:38Speaker 05

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new Chicken Nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented, too, because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option, too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself. This new Chicken Nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 36:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  For any small business owner, there's a moment when you realize the next hire could be the difference between staying busy and actually growing. The challenge is finding the right person without wasting time sorting through candidates who aren't the right fit. That's where Indeed Sponsored Jobs comes in. When workplace chaos hits and you need someone who can step in and make a difference, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. It helps put your job in front of candidates who match the criteria that matter most to you, whether that's skills, experience, certifications, or location. And you're certainly not alone in using Indeed. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs.

• 37:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's millions of businesses turning to Indeed to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home.

• 38:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors. Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes

• 38:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  of Grown-Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Lager Beer Riot, which took place in Chicago in 1855, had some connections to the riots that took place in Munich 11 years before. Chicago was a fairly new city, first incorporated in 1837, and it had a massive immigrant population. Roughly half of the people living in Chicago in the mid-19th century were immigrants. About a sixth of the city's population was German, and there was a large Irish population as well.

• 39:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  A lot of Germans fled to the US in the wake of that failed revolution in 1848, and people fled to the US from Ireland in the wake of the Great Hunger, which we've covered on the show before. That started in 1845.

• 39:44Holly Frey?

  Beer had the same cultural and social importance for Chicago's German immigrant community as it had in Bavaria. And beer was popular among Irish people as well. Bottled beer was a specialty product at this time, not something that you could just go buy at a market. So overwhelmingly, people who wanted beer got it somewhere like a tavern or a brewery or a beer garden set up by one of these establishments in the summer.

• 40:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  In Chicago's German immigrant communities, taverns and beer gardens filled a social role that was really similar to what we described in Bavaria. They were often also decorated with German-themed decor, and they sold German food. Within these communities, they were seen as family-friendly social establishments, different from the saloons and other establishments that sold spirits rather than beer. People typically worked a six-day work week with Sunday as their only day off, so Sunday was when a lot of people relaxed and socialized at a tavern.

• 40:45Holly Frey?

  But much of the non-immigrant community had a very different perception of beer and drinking, associating it with degeneracy, and also associating immigrants with drunkenness. Friction around all of this escalated with the rise of the temperance movement, especially as it focused on banning alcohol outright rather than the idea of moderation.

• 41:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1855, surgeon Levi Boone was elected mayor of Chicago. Boone was a member of the American Party, also called the Know-nothings. This party has come up in a couple of episodes recently. They were a nativist and anti-Catholic political party. This party's platform also included a threat of populism, focusing on the needs of workers and common people as long as those workers were native-born Protestant US citizens. The Know-nothings were divided on the issue of slavery. Know-nothings were elected to multiple other offices in Chicago in the 1855 election as well.

• 41:50Holly Frey?

  As mayor of Chicago, Boone implemented multiple policies targeting the city's Catholic and immigrant populations.

• 41:59Holly Frey?

  One was the selective enforcement of an existing law that required establishments that sold alcohol to be closed on Sundays. He had police enforce this law only in immigrant neighborhoods, but not in the rest of the city. He also increased the fee for a license to sell alcohol from $50 to $300, with the license lasting for three months rather than a year. There were 675 taverns in Chicago at the time, and 625 of those were owned by Germans or Irish people, so it disproportionately affected those communities. Boone also reformed the police, merging the day and night watch into one uniformed law

• 42:43Holly Frey?

  enforcement force and increasing its size, but without hiring any immigrants to fill those ranks.

• 42:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Brewers and tavern owners in Chicago refused to pay this new licensing fee, and some of them just stayed open on Sundays anyway, even though it meant they might get arrested. The newly enlarged police force did arrest people who broke the Sunday closure law or who refused to pay the fee. And eventually, there were so many tavern owners awaiting trial that the city decided to try one case and then apply its results to the rest of the charges. The date of this trial was set for April 20th, 1855, although it was then delayed until April 21st.

• 43:29Holly Frey?

  This date was also set as the day for a demonstration. Irish and German supporters gathered to march to the jail, accompanied by fifes and drums, to free the people who were being held for trial. The mayor deputized people in response to this gathering mob and also summoned the militia and set up cannons in front of City Hall.

• 43:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  The demonstrators' route required them to cross the Clark Street Bridge, which was one of only three bridges connecting the north and south sides of the city across the Chicago River. At the time, this was a pivot bridge powered by hand to allow ships to pass by it on the river. Either the mayor ordered the bridge to be pivoted so that the demonstrators could not cross it and get to their destination, or somebody decided to do that with the hope of preventing mass violence. I saw this described both ways in different accounts.

• 44:26Holly Frey?

  Although the mob could not cross the bridge, demonstrators and police exchanged gunfire over the river. One police officer, George Hunt, was struck in the arm, and he had to have it amputated. Peter Marsden, who had fired the shot that hit Hunt, was shot in the back and killed while trying to flee the scene. Other people were also shot but survived their injuries.

• 44:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  At least 60 people were arrested in conjunction with the Lager Beer Riots. Only 14 people were actually tried for their involvement, though, and then only two of those were convicted. Sometimes this is described as the first incident of civil disobedience in the city of Chicago.

• 45:08Holly Frey?

  As for its impact, the city dropped the license fee from $300 to $100. But the bigger outcome was a rise in civic involvement among Chicago's Irish and German immigrant populations. Municipal elections were just not something these communities had really been paying attention to. Most of the services that are handled by city governments today were managed by churches, charities, private businesses, and neighborhood associations. So the people who had been voting in municipal elections were mostly business and property owners. But after the Lager Beer Riots, Chicago's immigrant communities formed a coalition and voted out the know-nothings the following year.

• 45:53Holly Frey?

  The new government reduced the fee for alcohol licenses and stopped enforcing the Sunday closure law. Boone did not run for reelection.

• 46:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Joseph Madill, who we covered on the show in December, tried to start enforcing the Sunday closure law in 1874, when he was mayor of Chicago, but he got so much pushback about it that he dropped it.

• 46:15Holly Frey?

  German immigrants to the US were also a big part of trends in beer and other alcoholic beverages. Prior to the influx of German immigrants, people were more likely to brew cider from apples or other fruit. There wasn't a lot of barley being grown for beer making, and the beer that was made was more likely to be an English-style ale than a German-style lager. German beer brewers also banded together to push back against the prohibition movement, with the United States Brewers Association founded by German brewers in New York in 1862.

• 46:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  There was a hilarious-sounding reenactment of the Lager Beer Riots in 2015 for the event's 160th anniversary. This was a fundraiser put on by Pocket Guide to Hell to benefit Benton House. Benton House was a settlement house in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, and now it's a nonprofit social services organization. So breweries from Chicago provided beer for this event, and there were 10 Chicago brewers as the Forces of Law and Order, who faced off against 10 Bridgeport citizens as the Irish and German saloon keepers. They reenacted this exchange of gunfire across the Chicago River by throwing dodgeballs

• 47:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  at one another in the Benton House Gymnasium. A review of this event in Theater Journal described it as "degenerating into chaos." At one point, somebody accidentally turned the lights off, and they were those really big overhead gymnasium lights that take a while to come back on once they have been turned off. And the organizers decided to allow things to continue with the dodgeball-throwing in just semi-darkness as they slowly returned to normal.

• 48:06Holly Frey?

  Oh, who doesn't want a little darkness dodgeball? Do you have listener mail to finish this one off?

• 48:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do have listener mail. This email is from Jennifer, and Jennifer wrote, "I was thrilled to hear the episode on the dinner in the Iguanodon, and when you mentioned a possible future episode on the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, his life was a little wild, and he contributed a great deal to science education. He also has connections to the United States and to an amazing institution where I used to work. The first display of an articulated dinosaur happened at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and Hawkins was the one who put the Hadrosaurus foci together." I don't think I said that scientific name right, so apologies.

• 48:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  "The Academy has not only pictures of Hattie, as he has been affectionately known, but about 10 years ago or so, the Academy Library and Archives acquired a collection of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' original art from his family. I originally intended to write to you about reaching out to the Academy to learn more about the collection if you ever do an episode on him. But this week, the Philadelphia and international science community was devastated to learn that the museum attached to the Academy will be closed September 30th, after 198 years of public engagement. As of now, the collections are expected to remain, and hopefully, access will continue

• 49:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  to the 18 million-plus specimens in the extraordinary Science Library, which contains rare books found nowhere else in this country and in only one or two places worldwide, but that is unclear. Would you consider doing an episode on the Academy in addition to Hawkins? The Philadelphia and scientific community are beginning to rally around the closure and what they can do to preserve this 214-year-old institution for the people and for science. If you want a little look at what the Academy has, many rare books and the expedition journals are available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The various departments have also made collections available to researchers online."

• 50:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Jennifer, thank you so much for this email, Jennifer, for multiple reasons. Number one, I did say maybe we would do an episode on Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, but I didn't actually write that down anywhere, so this reminded me to put it on my actual shortlist. And the next, thank you for the opportunity to talk about the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum. Since I don't live in Philadelphia, I've been to Philadelphia a couple of times. This is a museum that I have only been to once, and I also was really sad to hear about the closure that was announced. As of when we are recording this, it was announced over this past weekend, or at least that's when I heard about it.

• 51:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  And yeah, it seems like an enormous loss to the city of Philadelphia and the world of science communication and educating the public about science more broadly. And I also would like to say I love the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is not that often that we are talking about subjects that are about things that are included in that library, but anytime we are talking about something that has something to do with like biology, or, you know, plants, flowers, animals, anything about science, history, biodiversity connected in some way, that tends to be one of the places that I wind up finding resources.

• 51:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  So yeah, I want to say that I am hopeful that this rallying around the museum and the Academy and all of those resources will lead to something being worked out about it remaining open, but it's hard to feel confident about that in the era that we are living in. So thank you so much again, Jennifer, for this email. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected]. And you can also find all of our show notes, including all of the things that we used as research in this episode, at our website, which is missinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.

• 52:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 52:46Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 53:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 53:50Speaker 06

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• 55:21Speaker 00

  Hola a todos. Soy Jamie Lynn Sigler. Cuando me diagnosticaron tenía veintitantos años y todo mi mundo cambió por completo. Pero con el tiempo decidí que no iba a permitir que eso frenara mi vida. Quise tomar las riendas. Y después de hablar con mi médico sobre mis opciones, la elección para mí fue obvia. Boom! Eso es KISSIMTA. Obtenga más información sobre KISSIMTA o fotumab en kissimta.com.

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