The Lager Beer Riot

Another example of German immigrants' love of beer, and how it shaped U.S. history:

The Lager Beer Riot occurred in Chicago, Illinois in 1855 after Mayor Levi Boone, great-nephew of Daniel Boone, renewed enforcement of an old local ordinance mandating that taverns be closed on Sundays and led the city council to raise the cost of a liquor license from $50 per year to $300 per year, renewable quarterly. This move was seen as targeting German immigrants. On April 21, after several tavern owners were arrested for selling beer on Sunday, protesters clashed with police near the Cook County Court House. Waves of angry immigrants stormed the downtown area and the mayor ordered the swing bridges opened to stop further waves of protestors from crossing the river. This left some trapped on the bridges, police then fired shots at protesters stuck on the Clark Street Bridge over the Chicago River. A police captain from Hyde Park lost an arm in the riot. Rumors flew throughout the city that some of the protesters were killed, although there is no evidence to support this. Loaded cannons set on the public square contributed to these rumors. The following year, after Boone was turned out of office, the prohibition was repealed. This riot concluded in one death and sixty arrests.

Chicago's rapid growth in the 1840s and 50s was due in large part to German and Irish Catholic immigrants. These immigrants settled in their own neighborhoods, German immigrants congregating mainly on the North Side, across the Chicago River from City Hall and the older, Protestant part of the city. The German settlers worked a six-day week, leaving Sunday as their primary day to socialize; much of this socialization took place in the small taverns that dotted the North Side. German-language newspapers, the Turners, and German craft unions gave the German population of Chicago a high degree of political cohesiveness; the Forty-Eighters among them were used to demonstrations as a political tool.
As in much of the rest of the country, distrust of Catholic influence produced a backlash in the form of the “Know-Nothing” movement. In the election of 1855, the American Party (the party of the Know Nothings) gained control of Chicago's government, with Levi Boone as mayor. Boone, a Baptist and temperance advocate, believed that the Sabbath was profaned by having drinking establishments open on Sunday. Boone's actions were in anticipation of Illinois enacting by referendum a Maine law that would prohibit the sale of alcohol for recreational purposes. The referendum failed in June 1855, by a statewide vote of 54% to 46%.

German immigrants and their love for beer also became a target of the Prohibition cause during World War I:

National prohibition was advocated as a wartime measure after the US declared war on Germany in April 1917 and the prohibition amendment passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification late in 1917. The wartime prohibition act was passed in 1918 at the very end of the war; but the Lever Act August 1917 had already banned distilled spirits production for the remainder of the war and reserved supplies of grain for food production, and by 1919, just before the Volstead Act went into effect nationally, 27 states had enacted full prohibition laws. Anti-German sentiment worked in the interests of extending prohibition in wartime because most of the breweries had been founded in the 19th century by German immigrants to the US, and retained German names. Thus wartime hostility toward Germans helped the rise of prohibition. But more fundamentally, the movement drew upon an anti-alcohol culture long instilled among middle-class people in city suburbs and small towns, the Protestant churches and their allies in the rural population in the south and west, and some urban progressives who saw alcohol as a source of inefficiency, poverty and social disputation in American life. The war simply gave these disparate groups an opportunity to align their movement with wartime nationalism and its crusading spirit of self-sacrifice.

The Anti-Saloon League, which, unfortunately, was founded in Ohio to try to end the German and other mostly Catholic or Lutheran immigrants' embrace of saloon and beer garden culture, took the demonization of U.S. citizens of German extraction who enjoyed their beer to a new level:

National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain should be made into bread for fighting men and not for making liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew."

This bigotry and religious zealotry helped kick off the most widespread era of law-breaking and organized crime in U.S. history, until sense was restored in 1933.  Lesson learned: don't get between a man and his beer.