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This is an excellent partial history of Alabama alcohol legislation by Harvey Jackson for the Anniston Star. The map of wet and dry jurisdictions in Alabama is from the Alabama ABC Board website.

Liquor laws and loopholes: A brief history of how Alabama regulates alcohol
By Harvey H. Jackson
Star columnist and editorial writer
10-26-2008

On Nov. 4, residents of Blount, Cleburne and Randolph counties will vote on a matter that some there likely consider more important than the presidential contest that’s also on the ballot. They will decide if liquor will be legal within their counties’ borders. (Cleburne’s case is a little more complicated; has to do with a muscadine winery. But complicated is what Alabama liquor law is all about — as we shall see.)

When and where to allow liquor and how to regulate it are issues that have long divided Alabamians. The motives of both “wets” and “drys” reflect the shifting coalitions and interests that have dominated state politics for decades. The many votes that have been taken on these questions also reveal how Alabama has changed over the years and point to more changes that are sure to take place in the future.

So it seems to me to be worthwhile to consider how we have gotten to this point — liquor-wise.

Which is what I am gonna do.

Although there were temperance groups running around before the Civil War, making and selling whiskey was too important to many local economies for people to get serious about actually passing laws to stop the stuff. Besides, prohibition was a Yankee movement, inspired by New England Puritans, and what good Southerner wanted to get mixed up in that sorta thing?

But after the war, when Southerners began to talk of a New South where factories and plantations would flourish, things began to change. Industrialists wanted a sober work force in the mills and the mill towns. Planters wanted docile, sober sharecroppers. White folks, church folks who were already wary of black folks, wanted (as a Methodist publication put it) to “keep the passion inflamer out of the hands of the savage race.” And reformers who believed that Christians should make life better for everybody else wanted to protect families from the evils of strong drink.

This powerful coalition — big agriculture, big business, social conservatives — was similar to, and in some cases the same as, the coalition that in 1901 wrote the Constitution that governs us today (and any similarity to the modern Republican Party is not coincidental). Led by Gov. B.B. Comer, a major mill owner and staunch prohibitionist, they pushed for and got a statewide vote to amend the Constitution and dry Alabama up.

But Alabama did not vote dry.

By an overwhelming majority, voters rejected prohibition. Turns out, Alabama was changing. Cities such as Birmingham and Mobile, counties such as Baldwin, and larger towns such as Selma and Huntsville had residents who came from traditions where liquor was not something to outlaw. In addition, there were politicians who wanted the revenue that liquor brought in. And there were those Alabamians who simply did not like someone making these decisions for them. Ironically, if the Constitution had not stripped the vote from African Americans, Black Belt planters might have been able to stuff the ballot boxes with enough votes to win, but having taken that option away from themselves, the measure lost.

However, the prohibitionists were not done. Aware that the Alabama Constitution offered ways to bypass the popular will, they introduced a prohibition law in the Legislature and the coalition passed it.

So it was that in 1915, four years before the 18th amendment brought prohibition to America, Alabama went dry.

Sorta.

Enforcement was spotty, bootlegging paid good money, and hundreds (maybe thousands) of our residents became criminals, either through the making or the consumption.

Then came the Great Depression and politicians found it illogical to outlaw a profitable, revenue-generating business. So Congress once again asked states to vote on national prohibition — this time to repeal it.

And Alabama’s anti-liquor coalition split.

The bone-dry churches and social conservatives railed against repeal. One Methodist Bishop declared that only “the rakes, the roves, the prostitutes, (and) the brothel keepers” were for it. But he was wrong. Businessmen, industrialists and even Black Belt planters either supported repeal or stayed out all together.

So Alabama went wet.

Sorta.

Into the anti-liquor coalition came counties, rural mostly, that had favored statewide prohibition. Having lost that one, they sought permission to outlaw liquor locally — county by county. And the Legislature, still heavily influenced by rural representatives, let them. The result was a flurry of wet-dry votes that produced a patchwork quilt of counties where it was illegal to sell it and counties where it could be sold under an equally patchwork set of circumstances.

“Wet” counties had “state stores” with their distinctive green fronts.

“Damp” counties sold beer and wine, but not the hard stuff.

And there were counties with “foreign” populations that were allowed to serve draft beer while no other counties could. (Draft beer was considered a honky-tonk drink, and since honky tonks were where men got in fights over women who weren’t their wives, the reasoning was that if you keep out beer on draft you minimized the chance of that sort of mischief. Laws that prevented liquor from being served to anyone standing up followed the same logic, for whoever heard of fighting sitting down?)

The problem, of course, was liquor revenue. Dry counties needing money argued that since their residents crossed county lines to buy and drink, they should get a share of the income. Wet counties, with less legislative clout than they would have later, had to let them have it. So, in effect, the state of Alabama subsidized county dryness with county wetness.

Dry counties also became home for one of the legendary alliances never to have existed — ministers and moonshiners.

There is no clear evidence that these two groups ever sat down and worked out an agreement. But what was never formalized surely existed. Bootleggers voted “dry” to drive out legal competition. Church folk voted dry to drive out the legal evil, and thus secured the market for the illegal evil.

Planned or not, it worked.

Until 1978.

That year, Gov. George Wallace called a special session of the Legislature, and on his agenda was a bill to help some friends in north Alabama. They wanted property taxes paid by the Tennessee Valley Authority to go to the counties where the property was located rather than to the state. Wallace proposed splitting the pot 80 percent to 20 percent, with counties getting the bigger share. But when it was learned that some of those TVA counties were also getting wet-county money, the bill was amended to strip all dry counties of their liquor revenue subsidy.

Dry counties rose in protest, so Wallace, to keep his legislative coalition together and focused, restructured the deal. TVA counties would get 75 percent of the money; the state would get 20 percent; and the rest would be split among dry counties. So now it was the TVA that subsidized prohibition.

Meanwhile, Alabama was changing. The population was shifting from rural counties to towns and cities. Court decisions forced the state to reapportion the Legislature to give urban areas more representation. Growing towns began to need more revenue to pay for services town-dwellers expect. One obvious source was liquor taxes. But towns in rural counties were unable to overcome anti-liquor votes outside municipal limits.

So they pressed the Legislature for help and got it in the form of the “municipal option law.”

In its first manifestation, this legislation allowed dry-county towns with populations of 7,000 or more to hold their own wet-dry vote. Later the law was modified to allow towns of 4,000 or more to hold a similar vote if there was already a wet municipality in the county. Then the law was readjusted to allow smaller towns to vote on the issue — with legislative permission.

And if none of these applied, you could open a golf course.

Right.

In 1992, a former legislator from one of those dry counties that had a wet municipality approached friends on Goat Hill for help. He was developing a golf course community but was having little luck because golfers did not want to invest in a country club without a bar. So legislators came up with “community development districts” — did you see that one coming?

According to the plan, if the county was dry but there was a wet town in it, then if a developer had a development with 200 residential sites, an 18-hole golf course and a country club with membership requirements, the developer could get it declared a “community development district” and let the liquor flow.

Finally, in the last Legislative session, a group of legislators pointed out that these laws and loopholes really did not make much sense and might even be denying some residents the right to vote on issues pertaining to their economic wellbeing (not to mention their social activities and the condition of their livers). So a bill was introduced that would allow cities of any size in dry counties to vote wet or dry.

Representatives from dry counties rose in protest, noting that Alabama had some 180 municipalities, and if this was allowed and if those towns went wet there would be no more dry counties.

Supporters pointed out that in Alabama, in reality, “there’s absolutely no such thing as a dry county or city” anyway. All there was were “a bunch of bootleggers out there getting rich.”

Though the arguments pro and con were ancient, the debate was heated, but when the vote was taken the measure passed the House and went to the Senate. And if you remember the last session, whatever went to the Senate stayed in the Senate.

So Randolph and Cleburne and Blount counties will be voting as so many counties before them have voted.

And likely as not, more patches will be added to the Alabama liquor-law quilt.