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April Fools’ Day is an ideal time to honor the memory of Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen, a German baron who lived from 1720 to 1797 and whose exploits were published for an Anglophone readership in 1785 in The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, by Rudolf Erich Raspe. Considering that Baron Münchhausen’s purported feats included riding cannonballs, flying to the moon and pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair, April 1st is indeed an appropriate day on which to recount them. Somewhat more plausible is the report that the baron, who hailed from Bodenwerder, once drank a mug beer of in Königsberg (later renamed Kaliningrad), thereby prompting a subsequent mayor of Bodenwerder to send an ancient silver thaler to Kaliningrad as deferred payment for the brew.
While most of the foregoing information about Münchhausen is fairly widely known, I’m indebted to an historically alert reader (HAR) named Marshall Hier for making me aware of a coincidence most historians seem to have overlooked. According to Hier the HAR, the name Karl Friedrich Münchhausen, which was linked with tall tales in the minds of many, was the likely inspiration for the name Charles F. Murchison, which was the pseudonym used in one of the most ingenious hoaxes ever perpetrated in the history of dirty tricks in American politics.
In 1888 a Republican named George Osgoodby wrote a letter to Sir Lionel Sackville-West, the British ambassador to the United States, in which he identified himself as an Englishman named Charles F. Murchison who was seeking advice on which presidential candidate would best serve the interests of Great Britain if elected. Sir Lionel wrote back and said that the Democrat Grover Cleveland would probably be the preferable candidate from the British point of view. Osgoodby then disseminated this letter among Irish-Americans for whom an endorsement by the British was the kiss of death for any candidate, thus helping to assure Cleveland’s loss to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the election.
The Irish figure prominently in another submission by an alert reader (AR) named Jock Gunter, who sent me an article from a German magazine proving that residents of the Emerald Isle have had a taste for beer for a long time. As reported in Der Spiegel, two Irish archaeologists named Billy Quinn and Declan Moore were excavating a Bronze Age site and realized they had uncovered a 3,000 year-old brewery. Inspired by their discovery, Quinn and Moore decided to brew beer with the same techniques and ingredients their ancestors had used. They called themselves “picobrewers,” meaning they brewed on a larger scale than homebrewers but a smaller scale than microbreweries. By their own account, the quality of their brews has been somewhat mixed, but they remain undaunted and enthusiastic in their enterprise.
As evidenced by all this correspondence from ARs, it’s obvious that Schlafly fans are a pretty brainy group. So, it’s not at all surprising there should be a brain surgeon in their ranks. Dr. Ken Smith, a renowned neurosurgeon at St. Louis University, recently sent me a photograph of an outdoor sculpture at the Missouri Botanical Garden titled Beer for the Wedding. The work by Zimbabwean artist Gift Muchenje depicts four muroora (daughters-in-law) carrying specially brewed wedding beer on their heads.
Despite these continual manifestations of erudition by numerous ARs, public opinion clings to a persistent stereotype of beer drinkers as lowbrow dullards. It’s important, therefore, to establish that this image was demonstrably inaccurate even before Schlafly Beer came on the scene in 1991.
Sergei Rachmaninoff, for example, who was born on April Fools’ Day in 1873, had highbrow credentials that most would envy and few could rival. He also loved his beer. According to Robbi Courtaway’s Wetter Than The Mississippi, which was discussed in this space last month, the famed Russian pianist and composer came to St. Louis in 1920 to play with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Meeting over breakfast at the Jefferson Hotel with Conductor Max Zach, the great maestro said, “I’ll play anything you want….I’ll play at the beginning, the middle or the end of the program; just as you declare–but on one condition.” His single condition was very simple, “I must have a dozen bottles of genuine beer to drink while I am in St. Louis.”
Unfortunately, Prohibition had just begun and good beer was in short supply. Luckily, August A. Busch came to the rescue. “You can say for me that if it isn’t a penitentiary offense, I’ll be glad to accommodate Mr. Rachmaninoff,” Busch said. “Be sure and tell Mr. Rachmaninoff not to go to the brewery, however. Have him come to Grant’s Farm, my home. A brewery is the last place in the world to look for beer these days.”
This story, like everything else in Ms. Courtaway’s book and like everything in this column (even on April Fools’ Day) is 100 percent true…unlike the many tales about Baron Münchhausen.
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