The state's Alcoholic Beverage Control system emerged from strong and contradictory streams of public opinion that go far back in Tar Heel history: Some people want to drink. Others don't want anyone to drink.
How did North Carolina – a state where private enterprise is almost a religious faith – end up with a monopoly of state-run liquor stores?
The state's Alcoholic Beverage Control system turns 73 years old this year. It emerged from strong and contradictory streams of public opinion that go far back in Tar Heel history: Some people want to drink. Others don't want anyone to drink.
North Carolina imposed statewide prohibition in 1909, a full decade before the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the launching of the “Noble Experiment” nationwide.
Many Tar Heels liked Prohibition and gave it up reluctantly. Yet bootlegging and illicit liquor sales continued briskly throughout that early period. Speakeasies and “blind tigers,” establishments that sold illegal liquor, sprang up “like mushrooms in the rain,” according to one historian. An estimated $15 million worth of alcoholic beverages slipped into the state each year from Richmond, Va., where liquor stayed legal until 1919.
The state's chief of Prohibition enforcement reported in the 1920s that “we have more illicit distilleries than any other State in this Union, and the number is increasing.”
In 1900, Wilmington – with a population of just 20,976, according to the U.S. Census – supported 39 saloons. That total had once been as high as 68, according to Robert M. Fales, a longtime Wilmington doctor and local historian, but a special Superior Court session had closed about half of them.
A majority of the saloon operators, Fales wrote, were German immigrants or their offspring, reflecting Germany's robust beer culture.
Things had gradually changed, though, through the 1800s, as Baptist and Methodist churches gained a stronger foothold in the state – and both denominations became more doctrinaire in their opposition to Demon Rum.
Wilmington's first temperance society was formed in 1833, noted Walter H. Conser Jr., a professor of religious studies and history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Meeting at various Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches around town, the society remained active through the 1850s. Most churches, however, remained ambivalent to the cause, Conser wrote in his book “A Coat of Many Colors,” preferring to spread the anti-liquor message through persuasion rather than government fiat.
Opinions changed after the Civil War, though, as anti-liquor forces found a friendlier reception in the Democratic Party, especially the large number of white Democrats who favored white supremacy and Jim Crow. For example, U.S. Sen. Furnifold M. Simmons – the Democrat who mastered the 1898 white supremacy campaign that led to the Wilmington race riot of 1898 – referred to rural distilleries as “Republican recruiting stations.”
Another white supremacist who backed Prohibition was Josephus Daniels, the influential editor-publisher of the Raleigh News & Observer, whose heated editorials helped fan the flames of 1898. Later, as secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson, Daniels would ban alcoholic beverages from U.S. Navy vessels and bases under General Order 99 in 1914, five years ahead of national Prohibition.
As early as 1881, anti-liquor forces had tried to maneuver a referendum on statewide prohibition through the legislature. That measure, however, was defeated by a vote of 166,325 to 48,370.
Sentiment shifted after 1900, though. North Carolina's enactment of Jim Crow laws – which deprived tens of thousands of African Americans of their right to vote – removed a barrier to prohibition, noted historian Harry McCown. Democrats no longer needed to fear splitting the white vote over the liquor issue.
In 1902, under the leadership of U.S. Sen. Josiah W. Bailey, the North Carolina Anti-Saloon League was organized, with chapters around the state.
The Prohibition forces tightened the noose gradually. In 1903, they pushed the Watts Act through the legislature, which banned the manufacture and sale of “spiritous liquors” outside incorporated towns. (So much for those “Republican recruiting stations.”) Three years later, the Ward Act expanded the ban to towns with populations of fewer than 1,000. Since North Carolina was largely rural, this law effectively introduced prohibition into 68 of the state's counties.
In 1907, Carrie Nation, the ax-wielding temperance crusader, toured North Carolina towns, condemning anyone who tolerated liquor or those who sold it. (Among other fiery remarks, she declared that Salisbury was second only to Chicago as “the whiskeyest-soaked city in the United States.”)
By 1908, the anti-liquor forces were ready for another statewide referendum. This time, they had strong backing from Gov. Robert Glenn, the Baptist State Convention and the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. On May 26, 1909, the measure passed by 113,612 to 69,416, a 62 percent victory margin. North Carolina became the first state in the South to ban the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages, and the first state in the nation to do so by popular vote.
Was that the end of liquor? Not quite.
Grapes and guns
As Fales noted, those with a thirst had three ways to satisfy it. “First, they became acquainted … with a good bootlegger. Second, they made their own home brew at home; and third, they would get a compliant and friendly physician to write them a prescription for a bottle of alcohol, which they could get at the drugstore.” Alcohol was still legal for “medicinal” purposes, and the drugstore dodge became extremely popular.
The new law did prove a problem, though, for a group of Italian immigrants who had settled in a farm colony at St. Helena, near Burgaw in Pender County, on land acquired from Hugh MacRae's Carolina Trucking Development Co.
In 1909 – apparently unaware that Prohibition had gone into effect in North Carolina as of Jan. 1 of that year – the St. Helena colonists decided to plant more grapevines for wine, with the encouragement of business interests in New York. Vines take a while to grow, and it was only in 1914 that the Pender County sheriff began to arrest some of the farmers for local wine sales.
MacRae quickly intervened with the state attorney general, Thomas W. Bickett, who issued a ruling that the St. Helena farmers could continue to grow grapes and make wine – as long as they shipped all of it North, out of state. Eventually, most of the St. Helena colonists moved North, according to Frank Ainsley, a professor of geography at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who's studied the MacRae colonies. In most cases, Ainsley said, the lure of industrial jobs had more to do with their leaving than Prohibition.
Southeastern North Carolina escaped the gangster gunplay of Roaring Twenties' Chicago, but the times were violent enough.
Detective Sgt. Leon George, a “liquor enforcement officer” with the Wilmington police, and U.S. deputy marshal Samuel Lilly were gunned down in a confrontation with moonshiners, July 29, 1924, on a country road in Brunswick County's Northwest township. (As a boy, Fales remembered seeing George's and Lilly's bullet-ridden bodies, laid out in Yopp's Funeral Home.) Charles William Stewart and William Elmer Stewart, father and son, were convicted of murder in the slayings and died in North Carolina's electric chair on April 17, 1925. (Graphic newspaper accounts of the Stewarts' death reportedly helped push North Carolina's General Assembly to switch from electrocution to the gas chamber as the state's mode of execution.)
Other aspects of Prohibition were more comic than grim. In 1926, a Coast Guard cutter intercepted a Canadian sailing ship, apparently trying to enter U.S. waters with a cargo of whisky. The vessel was towed to Wilmington, and the cargo was stowed in the basement of the federal building on Water Street until judge could order its destruction. “The only unexplained thing about this incident,” Fales wrote, “was that, following the judge's order, only one-third of the cases of whisky could be accounted for.”
Illicit beverages apparently flowed freely at the Feast of the Pirates, a three-day festival celebrated in Wilmington during the summers of 1927, 1928 and 1929. According to the script, a crew of make-believe pirates would come ashore on the first day and “capture” the town. Fales recalled that the buccaneers were “well charged up … probably with the aid of one or two drams from a fruit jar containing moonshine spirits.”
Despite the widespread lawlessness, however, and the evidence suggesting that Prohibition actually encouraged excess drinking, many North Carolinians were unwilling for the “Noble Experiment” to end. In 1933, in another statewide referendum, North Carolinians rejected – 293,494 votes to 120,190 – calling a convention to repeal the 18th Amendment. Other states disagreed, and the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th, was ratified on Dec. 5, 1933.
North Carolina never approved the 21st Amendment, though, and, for a time, it kept up Prohibition on its own.
Back in 1923, the state legislature had passed the Turlington Act, named for its sponsor, state Rep. Zebulon Vance Turlington of Iredell. Even more strict than the 18th Amendment, it made it illegal “to manufacture, sell, barter, transport, export, deliver, furnish, purchase or possess intoxicating liquor.” The only exceptions were sacramental wine and medicinal alcohol. Individuals could consume liquor in their homes, but how they could obtain it without violating the act's other provisions is unclear.
The Turlington Act remained in effect in North Carolina, even without the 18th Amendment. It was never repealed. In fact, in a 1966 opinion, state Supreme Court Justice Susie Sharp maintained that the Turlington Act is still in effect, in those parts of the state not covered by subsequent legislation.
And so things remained – for a while. What happened next was similar to later controversies over fireworks sales and lottery tickets.
Time for control
South Carolina and Virginia had meanwhile both legalized liquor sales, at least to some extent. By 1935, North Carolina legislators observed that two-thirds of the state's population lived within 50 miles of either the Virginia or South Carolina lines. Apparently, a lot of them were crossing those lines to buy booze legally – taking huge sums of money, potential tax dollars, out of the state with them.
Thus, in a final flurry of activity before adjourning, the 1935 session of the General Assembly coughed out a number of bills. One of these was the Pasquotank Act, closely followed by the New Hanover Act and a few others. These bills allowed New Hanover and 16 other counties to vote on whether to allow liquor sales within their boundaries on a local option basis. Almost all of these set up government-run “control” stores.
The first such store opened in Wilson on July 2, 1935. That first day, shoppers lined up to buy 825 bottles of liquor (total value: $1,003), and some 100 customers had to be turned away when the store closed at 6 p.m.
In the meantime, legislators also authorized a Governor's Commission to study the issue and report back to the 1937 session. According to Victor S. Bryant, who chaired the panel, the commission quickly determined that in “dry” counties, “whisky could be obtained readily, in the larger centers of population in these counties whisky could be purchased from numerous sources, and the number of people engaged in the business illegally was astoundingly large.”
By contrast, Bryant added, many sheriffs and law enforcement officers in the “control” counties thought conditions had improved and many of the bootleggers had been run out of business.
Thus, Bryant and the commission recommended that North Carolina adopt liquor sales through a state monopoly. The theory was that government-owned stores would avoid the evils of the old-time saloons and would have no incentive to encourage customers to drink more, as a privately licensed dealer might. Also, by putting the management under a separate commission, Bryant and other commissioners thought the system could be kept free from politics.
The legislature approved the commission's plan with few changes. It set up a three-member State Board of Control – the name was later changed to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission – to be appointed by the governor. The state commission would set prices for alcoholic beverages sold in local ABC stores, choose brands and manage sales and distribution. Under laws passed in 1948 and 1949, it would also gain jurisdiction over beer and wine sales.
Except for powers to remove local board members “for cause” and to ratify local rules and store sites, the state commission left considerable leeway for local management with the county (or later municipal) ABC boards. Given the blue laws prevailing in the state at the time, all ABC stores observed Sundays by closing.
The legislature did, however, choose to retain some aspects of Prohibition. Although restaurants and private clubs could handle beer and wine, they could not serve their customers mixed drinks or stronger grades of alcohol. For decades, North Carolinians adapted to the custom of “brown-bagging”; customers could purchase a bottle of whiskey or bourbon or whatever, bring it to a restaurant (presumably in a brown paper bag) and have a bartender mix and serve it on the premises for them.
Not until 1978 was a law passed allowing counties and municipalities to allow “liquor by the drink” on a local-option basis. New Hanover County adopted “LBD,” as it was known, after a county referendum on Jan. 12, 1979, approved the measure by a 2-to-1 margin.
Other aspects of Prohibition lingered. Not until 1976 were stores re-configured for “self-service,” allowing customers to pick their bottles off a shelf and bring them to a cashier, as in other shops. As late as 1953, New Hanover County Commissioners were fielding complaints from constituents objecting to alcoholic beverage advertisements in local newspapers and on radio stations.
And, to this day, ABC stores remain closed on Sundays.
Ben Steelman: 343-2208
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