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From Lent to Liquor: Drinking the Atlanta Way
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With Easter this weekend marking the end of Lent, many are returning to the consumption of spirits and libations.
Here now, a story of liquor in Atlanta.
106 years ago, prohibition and the 18th Amendment began, leaving downtown 1920 Atlanta shaken and stirred.
A civic party replete with an Uncle Sam costumed man motoring Peachtree Street aboard a water wagon, accompanied by band music and a biplane overhead carrying the coffin of John Barleycorn, while Anti-Saloon League leaflets dropped on the streets.
A celebration like the 4th of July or the New Year’s Eve Peach Drop was to come.
"In the center of Five Points at midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, a towering effigy of John Barleycorn was placed on top of a funeral pyre containing an illegal moonshine still,“ says Ron Smith, the author of Prohibition in Atlanta: Temperance, Tiger Kings & White Lightning.
“Leaders and citizens poured contraband whiskey onto the pyre as the crowd cheered."
24 hours earlier, Atlanta Police arrested a drunk and disorderly man who'd tried to burn the John Barleycorn effigy. Whether in protest or excitement is not known.
Mr. Barleycorn is a mythical figure from a British folk song, where barley — and the drinks made from it, like beer and whiskey — come to life as a man.
This was an epic battle between urban Atlanta and rural Georgia. Divisive politics in America and Georgia.
Sound familiar?
And now a Jan. 16, 1920, celebration of the 18th Amendment was taking effect.
Mr. Smith told me, “The Atlanta festivities consisted of politicians, the police force, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), and the KKK, were several hundred in number.”
Demon rum no more.
Politicians were not particularly worried about drinking downtown; they could drink in private clubs or their homes.
Mr. Smith writes, “It’s all a bit anticlimactic to Georgians because alcohol was banned here 13 years prior.”
Prohibition may have begun years before in the city, but the drinking never stopped.
A few blocks away from the downtown dry celebration festival, Decatur Street was Atlanta’s only major integrated section.
Many cultures connected and immigrants plied their respective trades on or near this street.
One of the most common Decatur Street occupations was that of saloonist.
The saloons and dance halls, however, provided immigrants and African Americans with something that the rest of Atlanta seemed to deny them: a sense of community.
The celebration was a total victory.
No amendment to the Constitution had ever been repealed. And it wouldn’t happen this time. Evangelical Protestants wanted spirits gone with the wind and with the bottle.
Mr. Smith says, “A lot of Atlantans that broke the prohibition law found themselves on a Georgia chain-gang. Nonetheless, Atlanta had a lot of alcohol running and blind tigers. It was often called 'The Wettest City in the South.' I do not think this is true…that title should go to New Orleans.”
As for gangsters, they were here, too — friendlier.
The two notable ring leaders were called “Tiger Kings,” Dan Shaw and Hub Talley. Mr. Talley was the more violent.
And of course, the boys from Dawsonville were players in all this too, driving their powerful Ford Coupes along narrow roads to Atlanta loaded with “moonshine.”
“People in modern times seem to think Prohibition came out of nowhere. This could not be further from the truth. It was nearly a century’s worth of the local temperance movement becoming more of a state than a national movement, “ added Mr. Smith.
The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933.
So, the next time you roll through the Pitch and Putt “Drive Through Window” ordering your 12-pack of Old Milwaukee Tall Boys, pause for reflection — John Barleycorn was burned in an effigy for your drink on Jan. 16, 1920.
**Ron Smith & Mary O. Boyle have authored -- Prohibition in Atlanta: Temperance, Tiger Kings & White Lightning.
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