The Dark Side of Coors Light
The Coors family has been supporting conservative causes for decades.
By Annika Carlson
February 1, 2008
Coors Light may be the official beer sponsor of the National Football League at this year’s Super Bowl, but for years it has been the unofficial sponsor of right-wing causes across America. The company has a shady past, from the owners offering grants to rightwing organizations to policies of screening potential employees for communist sympathies. Lately Coors has been trying to make up for its checkered past, but it’s time for a trip down memory lane.
The Coors Brewing Company was founded in 1873 in Colorado and produces American favorites like Coors, Coors Light, Blue Moon, Killian’s Irish Red, and several refined Keystone varieties. Coors merged with Canadian brewer Molson in 2005, in hopes that both companies could boost their sales in the United States and Canada. In 2007, Molson Coors merged again, this time with beer behemoth SABMiller’s operations in the United States and Puerto Rico. Today, Coors Brewing Company is the third largest brewer in America.
Coors’ works hard to maintain a pearly, progressive sheen to hide its deep, conservative pockets. It was one of the first corporations in America to offer same-sex partner benefits, and it makes corporate donations to a variety of African American, Asian American and Hispanic organizations. This makeover, however, does not obscure Coors’s union-busting, minority-hating past. In addition to unleashing Zima on the world, the company grappled with a crippling boycott of its products after the union at the company’s flagship facility in Colorado went on strike and was subsequently broken by the company. As then-president of Adolph Coors Co. Jeff Coors said in a Los Angeles Times article agreeing to union demands is like “inviting the Russians in to take over America.” Until 1986, prospective Coors employees were sometimes required to take lie detector tests, answering questions about their sexual orientation, communist leanings, and how often they changed their underwear. (Yeah, really.) Hardly best business practices.
While the corporation itself doesn’t directly fund the massive right-wing infrastructure, Coors family members make donations with their beer-fed fortunes. The Adolph Coors Foundation, named for the brewery’s founding patriarch, was established in 1975 to help divvy up the family riches. Since some assets in that family trust can only be used within Colorado, Adolph Coors Foundation board members set up a new organization in 1994 that could spend unrestricted assets across the country. Through the Castle Rock Foundation, otherwise unspecified Coors family funds are used to finance national conservative organizations like Independent Women’s Forum and Young America’s Foundation.
The Coors family tree reads like a who’s who of conservative philanthropy—nearly all the men in the family work for the company, and nearly all share the same right-wing ideology. Adolph Coors, the founder of Coors Brewing Company, passed it down to his grandsons, brothers Joseph and William Coors. Joseph’s five sons—Joe Jr., Pete, Jeff, Grover, and John—all work in the Coors empire, and all of them are self-described born-again Christian fundamentalists. William’s son Scott also works for the family business.
In both the extremity of his conservatism and high levels of funding for conservative organizations, Joseph Coors set a precedent for the family. William affectionately called him “a little bit right of Attila the Hun.” Joseph was an active member on Reagan’s kitchen cabinet, funding the Gipper’s campaigns and providing him with unofficial counsel. Joseph gave right-wing godfather Paul Weyrich the founding grant for the Heritage Foundation, paving the way for decades of research, spin, and messaging by the country’s preeminent conservative think tank. And because one conservative think tank is never enough, Joe also gave a founding grant to Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation, which on its Web site asks the eternal question of our generation: “Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture?” If not, the organization asserts, the United States will become “no less than a third world country.”
Joseph Coors also funded the Council for National Policy, a secretive enclave in which influential conservatives discuss the future of conservatism in the United States. Several members of the Coors family regularly attend CNP’s meetings, rubbing elbows with the likes of Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly. He donated an airplane worth $65,000 to the Nicaraguan Contras. In fact, it’s hard to avoid Coors money in the conservative movement: The foundation funds the John Birch Society, the Landmark Legal Foundation (aka the Ronald Reagan Legal Center), and Pat Robertson’s Regent University, among many others. Despite his legacy of supporting socially conservative causes, Joseph had a fairly public mistress throughout the late 1980s—an indiscretion that eventually led him and his wife to separate, according to his son Jeff Coors. So much for family values.
Though it didn’t bring familial bliss, Joseph’s conservative political advocacy inspired his son Pete Coors to join the fight. In 2004, Pete ran for an open U.S. Senate seat in Colorado against state attorney general Ken Salazar, whose popularity and progressive politics contrasted sharply with Coors family history. During the campaign, he battled the Coors’ family’s ultra-conservative legacy almost as much as his Democratic opponent, and tried to slap the same friendly face on his candidacy that the brewing company used to repair its image decades before. While his family and its various foundations continued to pour money into, for instance, litigation against environmental regulation, Pete tried to sell himself as a conservationist, leveraging his former presidency of Ducks Unlimited. Ultimately, Colorado voters didn’t buy Pete’s Coors Light image, and he lost the race. After election Salazar refused to support Bush’s proposed federal ban on gay marriage, and even became the target of one of Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family ads that asked, “Why doesn’t Senator Salazar believe every child needs a mother and a father?”
But Joseph and Pete aren’t the only family members getting in on the game. Joseph’s brother William infamously told a group of minority business leaders that the best thing slave traders did was “to drag your ancestors here in chains,” as recorded in a 1985 New York Times article. Not incendiary enough? He went on to note that Africans “lack the intellectual capacity to succeed.” He went on to sue the Rocky Mountain News for publishing his remarks, claiming they were taken out of context. In a later interview, though, he clarified his position, remarking that slaves came out on top by being brought to America—after all, he said in a 1988 Los Angeles Times article, “you don’t see Jesse Jackson, or any of these other blacks, making any mass exodus back to Africa, do you?” The company donated upwards of $750 million to African American and Latino groups after William’s tirade—so it’s no wonder he got shunted from the company to the Castle Rock Foundation shortly thereafter.
William’s son Scott is in on the act, too. He did a stint as Coors Brewing Company’s ambassador to gay consumers, traveling across the country shaking hands and donating to GLBTQ nonprofits. Does Scott see any conflict between him family’s socially conservative legacy and the equal rights organizations he visits? Apparently not: His father told him that if any of the organizations Coors’ foundations support “are blatantly contrary to the rights of gay and lesbian people, I want to know about it, I will investigate it and put a stop to it.” Such an effort would probably require shutting down major portions of the Heritage Foundation—not to mention the rest of the right-wing organizations sponsored by Coors—but it doesn’t seem that William’s made much progress in that area.
So when cracking open a cold one, remember to toast the things that make the Coors family great: union-busting, lie-detecting, Heritage-funding, double-talking and, of course, its beer.
Annika Carlson is Special Assistant to the Director of Campus Progress.
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Comments
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Considering that most things you talked about are over 20 years old and Joseph Coors is dead, it begs the question: So what?
— Chris - Feb 1, 08:33 PM - #This “union busting” she talks about as though it were some current event, occurred in 1957, 51 years ago. Coors brewery has been a union employer for decades.
— Emily - Feb 1, 09:49 PM - #Anika is a perfect example of why the voting age should be raised to at least 30. What is being taught on our college compuses these days is down right scary.
— Ron - Feb 2, 07:43 AM - #Anika is a perfect example of why the voting age should be raised to at least 30. What is being taught on our college compuses these days is down right scary.
— Ron Norfleet - Feb 2, 07:44 AM - #Just did some reading on the “union busting” incident. (Maybe Annika should do some.) This so called “union busting” was a perfectly legal election in which the Coor’s employees by an overwhelming majority voted to de-certify their union. A union which at that time was overrun with corruption and ties to organized crime. If this is “union busting,” wouldn’t workers be better off with more of it?
— Emily - Feb 2, 02:07 PM - #I’m trying to follow this girl’s logic and, therefore, abstain from buying products in order to stop rich people from using their power to influence the political process.
The Coors (pronounced “curs”) part won’t be hard. If Zima tastes anything like their flagship beer, well it makes me wonder how long ago that horse walked by.
But damn, now I can’t watch Michael Douglas movies. I suppose I should also toss out my DVD of “Shawshank Redemption.”
Can anyone tell me how to keep from putting Soros/Ethanol in my pickup?
— RAGGEDSTEP - Feb 3, 08:50 AM - #It’s unfortunate that those who negatively commented on this article, like much of the population in this country, didn’t do their homework. I expected more from college students (unless the authors are the often used plants of extremists who monitor non extreme sites).
— Sharon Dupree - Feb 3, 09:12 AM - #One place to start research on the dealings of the Coor’s family is the Southern Poverty Law Center. You should also try reading a book (don’t have it within reach but you can go to Amazon and find it) on the family politics and fortune. You will find out that the deep-seated hatred that engulfs this family didn’t stop just because publicized incidents happened over a number of years ago. This family, in large part through it’s foundations, has been a major supporter of any number of groups and individuals that have and still do perpetuate hatred, bigotry and dissention that’s extremely profitable. This family, like other financiers in this category, keeps their money in the family, so to speak (Waltons, Bradlees, etc). They support the political cadidates who support their causes and visa versa. One of these politicans is Tom Tancredo, who masked his bigotry by using anti-immigration fear tactics and who had direct links to hate groups on his official web site.
So, seeing that the criticism seems to be coming from the same couple of sources, maybe they and their political allegiances should be checked out.
“It’s unfortunate that those who negatively commented on this article”
It’s unfortunate you failed to see their legitimate arugemtns: mainly, that the funding provided to these organizations was undertaken in the past by a person who is dead. The author failed completely to tie the current management and owners of Coors Brewing Company to any of the activities cited, indeed appears to of intentionally left of the fact that Adolph Coors is dead.
The author failed to also prove that Coors Brewing company uses any of the profits that it generates today to fund any of these activities. Bottom line, bad journalism.
— Chris - Feb 3, 10:13 AM - #“So, seeing that the criticism seems to be coming from the same couple of sources, maybe they and their political allegiances should be checked out.” ___Sharon Dupree
Gosh, Sharon, maybe we could establish a kind of secret police for this project. I would put up my true progressive history against your apparently knee-jerk, lemming-like political stances anyday.
— Emily - Feb 3, 12:14 PM - #The future of the progressive movement does not lie in clinging for dear life to the failed, old “leftist” cliches of the last century.
The writer needs to do some more homework before writing this article. She claims that Molson Coors merged with SABMiller. News flash…they did not merge, they signed a definitive agreement to form a Joint Venture on December 21st. No one bought the other; that is why it is a joint venture, NOT a merger.
— Jeana - Feb 3, 04:40 PM - #Be careful what you post here. Any line of thought that explores new directions for progressivism or fails to fall into lockstep with the failed “leftist” cliches and groupthink of the last century will be quickly deleted. No wonder it’s so hard to ignite any passion for the progessive movement in our fellow students today.
— Emily - Feb 3, 05:17 PM - #Sorry. Please disregard that last post. They have restored my previous post.
— Emily - Feb 3, 05:20 PM - #Madame Dupree, I don’t wish to pile on here but a point needs to be made. Wealthy people have a disproportionate influence on public policy. The only way to combat that, without trampling free speech, is for the electorate to become well- informed.
So, let’s not skewer people whose politics we disagree with while ignoring others just because we may embrace their outlook.
It’s very early, I’ve had lots of coffee, so please let me vent a little.
I am sixty and monitor this site because it’s refreshing to see campus activism is still alive and well. I also see issues addressed here that get little coverage in the MSM.
“Old Leftists” like my self are not lockstep people. We understand that liberal and liberatarian share a root commonality and don’t want ANYONE breathing down our necks.
With that in mind, I suggest college students need to listen to more Dylan.
— RAGGEDSTEP - Feb 4, 06:40 AM - #““Old Leftists” like my self are not lockstep people. We understand that liberal and liberatarian share a root commonality and don’t want ANYONE breathing down our necks.”
I you understand that then you certainly aren’t lockstep. If only that were true of more people from the 60’s. Though I wasn’t born at the time, I envision the 60’s as a perfect marriage of leftism and libertarianism. But looking around me at the former hippies many of whom are now our tenured professors, I can’t help but think that perfect marriage ended in divorce somewhere along the line and libertarianism was sent packing.
— Emily - Feb 4, 06:16 PM - #DYLAN ROCKS!
Gee—Here’s what I do: I choose the beer I drink based on how it tastes. Coors products, regardless of their or my political philosophies, for the most part taste poor. I therefore don’t buy them. Problem solved. Grow up. There are not enough progressive, leftist or union member beer drinkers to put a dent in Coors world-wide beer sales even if we could coordinate a boycott. And most union members choose their beer the same way as most of the lemming beer drinkers out there: “Which one’s on sale?”
— Tim - Feb 7, 06:02 PM - #For the list of right-wing speakers you left out the grand-daddy of them all, Richard Mellon Scaiffe—but maybe since he is the most secretive one of all, and rarely gives intervierws much less talks, you are correct.
A separate page should be devoted to this man. He goes all the way back to dissing Ike with his phony and extreme John Birch Society.
He also funded the $2 million dollar ‘Arkansaw project’ to get people to lie about Bill Clinton and one of his old Birchers made sure there would be no protests against Bush when the GOP had their convention here in Philadelphia.
Ike called a special news conference to say that he strongly disagreed with them, after they had said he supported their views.
— Andy Lang - Feb 8, 08:30 AM - #It’s sad when people can’t engage in a discussion wihout the patented name calling or take discussions to be direct affronts to their political beliefs about themselves, like the person who wanted to get into a pissing contest about whose liberalism was better. One group of people does this better than anyone else and does it when they don’t have actual facts to back up their rhetoric.
— Sharon Dupree - Feb 17, 12:05 PM - #Those who had a hard time connecting the dots didn’t go to the additional sources cited or they didn’t do research suggested by these sources.
Futhermore, actual evidence does exist that there are people who monitor opposing ideological sites and send mass comments to counteract viewpoints and to skew poll numbers. This has nothing to do with “secret police” and everything to do with suppressing opinions.
Finally, never did I suggest that someone shouldn’t have a different opinion, unlike those who denigrate all who don’t share their political philosophy and recommend banishment from the cult-like group. What I suggested was that people do some of their own research instead of relying upon what they are initially told. As part of my own independent research before this article was written, I have done this. I, again, suggest that others do the same. They can start with finding out who actually gets money from the COOR family and other politically similar foundations.They just might find out something about forced religious teaching in public schools, secretive funding to private schools teaching hatred and division, the “abstinence only” fight that was a statefailure before becoming a federally publically financed disaster, the tort and malpractice sham and any number of programs and laws designed to line wallets while controlling free will. Expanding one’s mind and constantly evaluating one’s personal philosophies is a wonderful thing. eing stuck in the past instead of learning from the past equals closed mindedness, which used to be a bad thing in obtaining a higher education.
You know… after reading this article … I think that I still will enjoy my Coors just the same as I did yesterday (before reading this article). Commenting on events over 20 years old holds no substance because they are so old that they are not relevant anymore! Nice Try!
— Trey Worley - Feb 27, 02:42 PM - #As hard as this idiot tried to make Coors look bad – she ended up giving them a great commercial
— Maury O'Keefe - Mar 22, 11:27 AM - #free of chargeher going to college was a great waste of her parents money !! COORS TO YOUannika sucks small penises because she is fat, ugly, and a shitty writer. your trying to stir people up but in fact you are just an idiot. see ya in class—bitch!
— John - Jul 5, 03:15 PM - #