The Tallboy and the Trouble With American Masculinity

A familiar container shows how masculine signs can travel across different identities.

In the spring of 1953 more than 7,000 workers at Milwaukee’s six big breweries walked off the job, and for 76 days brewing across the city stopped. Schlitz answered the next year with a 16-ounce can, reportedly to win back the money the strike had cost it. A 1954 photograph shows Robert A. Uihlein Jr., a Schlitz vice-president, holding a six-pack of the new cans beside the familiar 12-ounce pack. Around 1960 Schlitz began selling a 24-ounce can called the Tall Boy, and the name stuck to every can bigger than the standard. Today the word still calls up the gas station and the corner store. Pabst’s old commercials put its beer in corner taverns, among working men, and the rapper Big Boi remembers the older men in his family drinking tallboys. We found no record of a brewer selling the tallboy as a man’s can. Whatever masculinity it carried came from the men who drank it, and Americans have kept using it to say something about men ever since.

In postwar Milwaukee, beer was both an industrial product and a source of working-class identity. The first two photographs show the machinery of production and the workers asserting the value of their labor. By 1969, Schlitz was advertising the return of its Tall Boy with sexual innuendo and the promise of something bigger. Together, the images trace a shift in emphasis from the people who made the beer to the masculine associations used to sell it.