During World War 2, the brewing industry trade organization known as the United Brewers Industrial Foundation, which was formed by the USBA in 1937, worked with the U.S. Government to create a series of ads to build morale and on their own to highlight the positive aspects of beer. Out of these grew the more familiar “Beer Belongs” series and the “Home Life in America” series of ads that the United States Brewers Foundation created and ran from 1945 to 1956. You can read my article about these later ads in the current issue of All About Beer magazine. But I recently came upon the ad below that ran in Life magazine’s August 4, 1941 issue, at page 29. I just love the language of the text, which I reprinted below, because it’s hard to read with the ad displayed so small. (Though you can click on it or here to see a larger view.)

In a hurrying, scurrying world

 

there’s serenity in beer and ale

 
Telephones jangling … radios blaring … auto horns honking … airplanes roaring. In big city or small town, peace is hard to find … and precious.

YES! It’s a busy, dizzy world in which we live! And every man and woman in it needs now and then to get away from it all. Needs to sit down quietly and shut out the din and noise for a peaceful hour or so.

In your needed hours of relaxation, beer can play a pleasant part. For this delicious brew does more than delight your taste. Its mellow, kindly nature helps to unsnarl tangled nerves, helps to refresh a weary body, helps to restore a faltering spirit.

Made from nature’s choicest grains and flavored with plump, ripe, fragrant hops, beer is a mild, wholesome brew. In fact, from earliest times, men have called beer and ale the “beverages of moderation.” Make them part of your own plan of balanced, tolerant, temperate living.

Isn’t that just beautiful. It brings a tear to your eye. Beer is certainly part of my own balanced, tolerant, temperate living. It’s funny how the pressures of life in 1941 seem almost exactly the same as those of 2009, isn’t it? I need a vacation. Good thing I’m taking one in less than two weeks.