Prohibition began in 1920 and lasted for 13 years. During that time the Anheuser Busch Company survived by manufacturing soft drinks and selling yeast. When Prohibition ended August Busch's son's gifted him with a red wagon and a team of Clydesdales which Busch loaded with kegs of beer and the horses drove the load of beer to the White House for FDR who had been instrumental in the repeal of Prohibition with the adoption of the Twenty First Amendment.
To this day, some 80 years later, several States have still not ratified the Amendment including both Carolinas and Oklahoma.
All one has to do is to travel from State to State today in the 21st Century and there still are some pretty archaic ways of handling the control of the sale of alcohol.
In 1969 when I entered college in Oklahoma, one of the State's that still has not ratified, a woman could buy beer at 18 years old, but a man had to be 21. which meant men in the Freshman class had extra incentive to make friends with a co ed. Also cold beer could only be purchased in a tavern, yet warm beer was displayed and sold at all gas stations displayed between the pumps. The Sooner State at the time also was not liquor by the drink, which meant at the nicer restaurants you could bring your own bottle of liquor and pay a hefty price for ice and mixers. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this was responsible for a much higher level of alcohol consumption. Oklahoma has now overturned those strange restrictions.
All States still continue to control liquor sales which was the provision of the Amendment. The level of control and the manner in which liquor is sold in each State, some are more progressive than others.
While growing up in West Virginia and my father being a frequent consumer of controlled beverages, I was aware that many towns had "State Stores" which were always understated storefronts that featured clerks standing behind steel grates, similar to what bank tellers used to stand behind. There was no liquor visible. A customer would write on a slip of paper the liquor he wanted to purchase, slide the paper under the grate, the clerk would then return with a bottle in a brown paper bag. The purchaser would pay and leave with the brown bag. Even as a young boy in the 1950s waiting in the car for these deals to go down, it seemed like a silly charade to me.
Over the years West Virginia progressed to a somewhat friendlier self service format, where the customer could come in and make their selection from the shelf openly take the the bottle to a cashier, all while praying that they didn't run into anyone they knew from church. The system worked well enough but in order to keep costs down the variety of brands offered were very limited.
My drink of choice at this time was Gentleman Jack, which is a high end sour mash whiskey produced by the same wonderful people who produce Jack Daniels in Lynchburg, Tennessee. A town that I have had the pleasure of visiting and attending a catfish fry hosted by the Distillery. The function featured unlimited pouring of their product, bluegrass music and free cigars. At that time I was a very loyal consumer of their product so I can only think that the experience would be tantamount to a child receiving an all access pass at Disneyland.
In order for me to buy Gentleman Jack in West Virginia I had to special order it by the case and have it delivered to my local State Store.
When Gaston Caperton became Governor of West Virginia, and having come from a business background, he had several initiatives that he offered to modernize and streamline government. One of the most controversial was partially privatizing the State's liquor stores.
The issue was controversial, not just based on the always sensitive liberalization of alcohol, but as there most often is, the hidden political impact. In this case the opposition in the Legislature was based in that almost all of the State Stores were in buildings being rented from political supporters and cronies. Also the stores employees were on the State payroll. They were good jobs that required no heavy lifting and provided excellent positions for Legislators to provide secure jobs for their constituents. Under the proposal both of these political perks were in jeopardy.
I was a State Senator at the time having been appointed by Caperton. The primary reasons I was a Senator for such a short period of time was that I was naive enough to support measures that I thought was for the betterment of the whole State and not to what was the best political position. My best friend and often counselor on issues in the Senate was Joe Manchin. Joe was adamantly against the change and actually did a rare filibuster on the Senate floor against the measure. He had collected telephone books from every town in the State and would read names out of the phonebooks, occasionally stopping and saying that the passage of the legislation would be harmful to the names he just read.
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| Capitol of West Virginia |
I was a member of the Senate Finance Committee. In order for this legislation to succeed it was essential that it receive approval of the majority of the members of Finance. I was summoned to the Governor's Office for a one on one meeting with Caperton with the topic of discussion being this issue that was such a high priority to him.
When I arrived downstairs in the Capitol at the Governor's Office, I was escorted back to his conference room, where I was seated at one end of a conference table. Seated at the other end was The Governor, to his right his Chief of Staff and to his left the State Liquor Commissioner.
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| Governor Gaston Caperton |
Caperton said, "Senator you probably know why I have asked you here", I said "well Governor I am assuming you are going to brow beat me and twist my arm to vote for your damned liquor store bill" He assured me this was not the case, that they only wanted to share all the facts with me and answer any questions I might have knowing once I had all the facts that I would indeed vote to move his measure through the Finance Committee and the Senate.
In this era Ross Perot had popularized charts and graphs to emphasize the finer points of an issue. Caperton began his presentation holding up chart with a bar graph showing a downward line that looked like an upside down hockey stick. "Senator, unlike your own personal situation, liquor consumption in America is decreasing" he said while using his finger to follow the downward direction on the chart.
I said laughing "Gaston, I could stay upstairs if I wanted to be insulted, and besides that comment definitely falls into the pot calling the kettle black category, do you want my vote or not?" he smiled back and nodded in agreement.
He went on to explain that the plan would not relinquish any of the control of liquor by the State in that they would still be the only supplier of booze to retail outlets and could dictate their price to the retailer while tremendously reducing the States costs and liabilities. Meaning higher income to the taxpayers, free market profit to entrepreneurs in the State it was a classic win/win in his view.
I interrupted his presentation by telling them that I was in favor of the initiative as I understood it; but I had a couple of questions. The first being that I had noticed a few years earlier when the state had enabled wine to be sold in supermarkets that there was very little variety of wine available and what was available was of low quality, was this going to happen to liquor? The ABC Commissioner quickly shot back,"you are worried about your Gentleman Jack aren't you?" I responded, "well yeah but, it did seem in order for private enterprise and therefore the state to succeed a broad choice would need to be available" I was assured that the competition created would allow for a broad selection. My other concern was the job security of the existing employees and they agreed that no one would be displaced nor would any existing employee have to sacrifice any benefits that they had accrued.
The Bill passed and the system has worked very well for over twenty years now for the people of West Virginia. Though many States such as North Carolina still have State operated ABC Stores that are overseen and managed by Boards in each individual county an inefficient system that is prone to corruption, yet the suggestion of modernizing the archaic marketing is still politically unacceptable which I suppose is understandable from the only State that actually passed a referendum not to ratify Prohibition.
At this stage I rarely drink alcohol of any type. And have some horrible experiences and some wonderful experiences in my life that can be directly attributed to alcohol.
I can't help but wonder what the United States would be like had Prohibition continued and yet somehow I find it somewhat lugubrious that the end of Prohibition was portrayed as such salvation for our Nation.
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