George Brown Raised the Bible Against Prohibition

Foreword:  In May 2012, on a post here I profiled J.T.S. Brown and his family as one of the pioneering Kentucky distilling clans. In the vignette, I also introduced briefly George Brown, a half-brother, who had joined J.T.S. in a Louisville liquor business only to break away on his own about a decade later. That business is still extant as the famous Brown-Foreman Company.  George definitely has deserved a post of his own, if for nothing else, his book on the Bible and Prohibition.

George Garvin Brown, shown here, was born in Munfordville, Kentucky, in September 1846, part of three generations of Browns in the Bluegrass State. His grandfather, William, had emigrated with a young wife from Virginia,  settling down as a planter and merchant.  William’s son, John, was a merchant, postmaster, and officer in the Confederate Army who married twice.  George was a product of the second marriage;  his mother was Mary Jane Garvin.  

“I was raised on a farm, a son of Scotch and Irish parents from whom I inherited the highest reverence for religion and the Bible,” he later wrote. At the age of sixteen in 1862 Brown moved 74 miles north to Louisville, Kentucky, to attend the Male High School.  Founded in 1856, this institution was the first secondary school west of the Allegheny Mountains and highly prestigious.  How long Brown stayed is unknown but he pursued an early career as a wholesale drug salesman, working for a man named Henry Chambers.  Asked by J.T.S. Brown to join his liquor firm as a partner in 1870, George agreed.  Likely a result of George’s experience, the company initially concentrated on medicinal sales.  

Introduced in 1873, the company flagship whiskey was "Old Forester," reputedly named after a physician, Dr. William Forrester, who had endorsed its use, but eliminating one “r” on the label to avoid direct reference to the well-known physician.  Old Forester was bottled and sealed at the distillery as a way to guard against adulteration and substitution of the contents.  The sealed bottle was popular with doctors and pharmacists who sold the product.  Their endorsements spurred the Browns to seek a wider customer base among the drinking public.

In 1874, for reasons still unclear, Georges’ partnership with J.T.S. Brown ended.  Some accounts say that the half-brothers could not agree on the quality of whiskey to be sold, with George favoring a higher priced quality liquor, while J.T.S. was more interested in generating a wider customer base with cheaper whiskey.  George moved on to form his own company.  With him went George Foreman, originally of Paris, Kentucky.  Hired initially as a salesman, Foreman eventually moved up to the post of bookkeeper.  The new firm also included Brown’s old boss, Henry Chambers, who was bought in as major stockholder.  The company became Brown, Chambers & Co. 

Meanwhile George was having a personal life.  In Louisville he had met Amelia Bryan Owsley, born in Danville, Kentucky, the daughter of Erasmus and Catherine Owsley.  They married on February 1, 1876, in Louisville.  George was 30;  Amelia, 28.  The couple would have nine children over a nineteen year period, five daughters and four sons.  Two of the boys would die in infancy, obviously a source of great household sorrow.

In 1876, Brown’s cousin from Ireland, James Thompson, was hired in a management role.  As the reputation of Brown, Chambers for bottling and selling quality bourbon grew,  Brown determined to create a separate sales agency to serve as the merchandising arm of the liquor house.  He enlisted Foreman and Thompson for the work.  Two years later Chambers retired and sold his shares to Mssrs. Brown, Thompson and Foreman.  The reorganized company became Brown, Thompson & Co. with Foreman as a junior partner.

This management team was intact for the next decade of expansion.  In 1890, however, Thompson sold out to Brown and Foreman in order to strike out on his own, using his profits to buy the Glenmore Distillery in Louisville from the Monarch estate.  The company name was changed once again, now it was Brown, Foreman & Co.  Brown owned 90% of the stock, Foreman 10%.  

This arrangement held for another decade until 1901 when Foreman died and his widow sold his share to Brown while permitting the continued use of Foreman’s name.  Now a sole proprietor, George lost no time in incorporating the firm, capitalizing it at $100,000.  Up to this time, Brown did not own a distillery. He was operating as a wholesaler, obtaining product from a range of Kentucky producers,including the Mellwood distillery in Louisville,  J.B.Mattingly at St. Marys in Marion County and Pleasure Ridge Park in Jefferson County.  

Now in full charge, in 1902 Brown moved quickly to acquire the Ben Mattingly Distillery, #14, District 5. Insurance underwriter records compiled in 1892 indicate that that the distillery was located 1-1/2 miles southwest of St Marys. The plant was of frame construction with a shingle roof. The property included a cattle shed and three warehouses, one still unfinished. Both of the bonded warehouses were of frame construction with shingle roofs, one located 160 feet east of the still, the second  located 170 feet east of the still.  In 1907 Brown expanded the facility, expending $70,000 (equivalent today to $1.5 million) to build additional warehouses and a bottling house.

Now having an assured supply of whiskey,  Brown added new proprietary brands to his Old Forester flagship.  They included “Old Tucker Whiskey," “Old Forman,” “Beech Fork,” “Fox Mountain,” “Cloverdale,” “Gilded Age,” “Major Paul,” and “Old Polk.”   He registered many, but not all, these labels in 1905 after Congress had strengthened the trademark laws.  He also advertised several widely through saloon signs, serving trays, pocket mirrors and back-of-the-bar bottles, examples seen throughout this post.

In insisting on bottling his whiskey at the distillery, Brown was significantly ahead of his time.  He had already been using glass for years before the Bottled-in-Bond Act was passed by Congress in 1897, mandating that whiskey distilled under the Act (bestowing tax benefits) had to be bottled at the source.  When the Owens bottling machine was invented in the early 1900s, Brown was in a position quickly to avail himself of the savings.

After Forman’s death, George also brought in a new management team. Of them the most important was his son Owsley Brown designated as the manager of the sales department.  These executives were able to free up the founder for his national role in fighting prohibition.  From his position as the first president of the National Liquor Dealer’s Assn., George became a leading spokesman and writer against the movement to ban liquor and beer production and sales throughout the U.S.  A caricature of him in the book “Kentuckians as We See Them,” depicted him sitting on a barrel of Old Forester penning a diatribe.

The propensity of “dry” proponents to cite religion and the Bible encouraged Brown to write his famous book on the subject, entitled “The Holy Bible Repudiates ‘Prohibition.’”  The subtitle describes the contents as a compilation of all Bible verses that mention wine or strong drink,  His objective was to prove that the Scriptures “commend and command” the temperate use of alcoholic beverages — not a total ban.  Copyrighted in 1910, Brown sold it for $1.00 in cloth cover, 25 cents in paper.

In the introduction, Brown openly admitted his bias:  “I have been a whiskey merchant and manufacturer for forty years and believe now, as I have always believed, that there is no more moral turpitude in selling an intoxicating liquor than there is in manufacturing and selling any other product.” His purpose for writing, he said, was “to expose the most dangerous propaganda against civil and religious liberty that has ever confronted the American people — ‘prohibition.’”

What followed was Brown’s line by line parsing of Old and New Testament Biblical passages where wine or strong drink is mentioned and, where needed, he said, to add his own “honest explanation” of each passage.  He found many opportunities for comments, with a particularly long exposition over the Wedding Feast at Cana, concluding:  “If it had been wrong to make or use wine and give it to one’s neighbors, Jesus would not have set this example.”

Brown ended his book with a brief chapter he called “Reflections.”  In it he provided a harsh critique of prohibitionists.  Among them:  “This sort of fanaticism when practiced in the name of religion, is on the principle, ‘it is not our duty now to burn heretics but we will make the laws and Caesar will do the rest.’”  The book found a ready audience among the distillers, liquor dealers, saloonkeepers, and drinking public of America.  Brown was widely hailed for his scholarship but, as might be expected, pilloried by the “Drys.”

George Brown did not live to see his worst fears realized, dying in January 1917 at the age of 71, three years before the imposition of National Prohibition. He was buried in Louisville’s Cave Cemetery where the graves many of Kentucky’s distilling giants can be found.  Appropriately, Brown’s above ground granite tomb bears a large cross. His widow Amelia would join him in the family plot seven years later.  

The Brown-Forman Company continued to thrive even after George Brown's death.  Owsley Brown took over for his father.  When Prohibition arrived Owsley secured one of only ten federal permits allowing Brown-Forman to store whiskey and distribute it to druggists for sale by doctor-written prescription — a trade that boomed during the ensuing fourteen years.  After Repeal Owsley resumed to normal distilling and sales of whiskey.  With family members down to five generations involved in its management since 1890, Brown-Foreman has grown steadily to become one of the largest wine and spirits companies in the world with sales in excess of $2 billion annually. 

George Garvin Brown has remained a hallowed figure in the whiskey dynasty he set in motion.  In his honor, a 68-foot tall Old Forester bottle was erected on the company’s Garneau Building.  Moreover, Brown’s book seemingly has never been out of print.   During the 21st Century it has been reprinted often and currently is readily available for purchase.  One publisher has commented:  “This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”  George would be proud to know that.