Brewing a Boycott is the most thorough, analytically rich study of a single boycott—or, more properly, related sets of boycotts, from the 1950s through the 1990s, against Coors—that I have ever read. While a history of the Coors boycott might seem like a narrow focus, Brantley’s book ranges far and wide, using it as a prism to examine many elements of the politics and culture of the 1970s, in particular. If anything, the subtitle of this book sells its findings short: this is indeed a superb analysis of “consumer activism,” but it covers many other forms of grassroots politics. This impressive book sheds new light on the history of intersectional activism and conservative politics, as well as labor and business history. It is one of the most clarifying, empirically rich analyses of post-1960s activism ever written.Boycotts against Coors, which began in 1957, were a form of labor solidarity, but they were also much more. Coors is not just any beer company; as Brantley writes, “the Coors name has been synonymous with union busting, discrimination, and conservatism” (p. 3). Protests against Coors did not merely involve workplace conditions at the Colorado-based firm; they took on the political activism of the Coors family and the emerging conservatism that we associate with the Age of Reagan. Bill Coors spoke against the Civil Rights Act; Joe Coors opposed public television and helped fund the Heritage Foundation.Although the company used “welfare capitalist rhetoric that cast its entire workforce as a tightly-knit family” (p. 15), it was an oppressive employer in many ways, a pioneer in employing methods that became common later. For example, Coors used “permanent replacements and decertification elections—tactics more at home in the 1970s and 1980s” which “suggests that business leaders were testing these strategies well before their heyday” (p. 15). Brantley shows that Coors acted like what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls a “private government.”i The company forced employees to take lie detector tests (p. 24), hired permanent replacement workers before that become popular (p. 19), sent “right-wing literature to the homes of its employees on a regular basis” (p. 27), rarely hired those with “Spanish surnames” (p. 37), and engaged in “weather modification in Southern Colorado” (p. 55).But the bulk of the book is not about the company but about the interlocking circle of activists who fought against the company’s actions and policies in and outside of the workplace. Brantley traces an impressive array of labor, gay rights, Latino, and anti-racist activists who fought against Coors, largely, though not exclusively, through the weapon of the boycott. We think of “intersectional” as a new idea, but that is probably the best term to describe the diverse coalition of political actors treated by Brantley. The book catalogs a rich, creative history of activism in Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, and elsewhere. In the process, we meet familiar figures (Harvey Milk) as well as many queer and Latino activists unknown to history, Teamsters, and brewery workers’ unions acting collectively, and sometimes together.Because of the range of its coverage, and ability to link the particular nature of anti-Coors activism to general political forces, this is a monograph that could be widely adopted for classroom use.
Read full abstract
Dec 14, 2022
Lawrence B Glickman 
Open Access