Columbia Beer Poster
Columbia Brewing Co., St. Louis Mo., 1895. Chromollithograph
by C.W. Shonk
MHS Photographs and Prints
MHS Collections
Beer and national identity have traditionally been connected through both the medium of advertisement and careful branding by company executives. Almost every American beer company has employed some variation on a national symbol to equate partaking in their libations with an act of patriotism. The linkage between beer and pride of nation is perhaps not surprising when considering that much of American political life took shape in beer halls and colonists of the Revolutionary era rejected English beer for home-made product as an act of rebellion. Additionally, it was often immigrants, proud of their adopted homeland, who established breweries and beer gardens.
The Columbia Brewing Company of St. Louis, which opened in 1892 on the city’s North Side, routinely equated their beverage with American ideals. The company’s broadsides and lithographs often featured a likeness of the mythic “Columbia”--the Greek goddess figure who was envisioned as feminine and, yet, a fierce defender of liberty. Here the blonde and youthful “Columbia” stands draped in the American flag in an ethereal scene. She holds her arm outstretched in a welcoming pose while clutching her red, white, and blue battle shield.
Organized by the Virginia Historical
Society with additional support from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter
Foundation and the
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Changing Exhibitions Fund, American. Support
in St. Louis is provided by The Stanley and Lucy Lopata Foundation
This exhibition has been made possible in part
by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Great Ideas Brought to Life.
