It wasn’t a collective New Year’s Eve hangover that led Georgia to institute statewide Prohibition 100 years ago today.
“Well, we are the Bible Belt,” said the Rev. Warren Jones, whose boyhood memories of Rome include both temperance leaguers and moonshiners.
Prohibition in Georgia went into effect Jan. 1, 1908 — a full 12 years before the United States’ “Noble Experiment” began. The state never ratified the 1933 end to national prohibition but repealed the state ban in 1935.
A New York Times article from 1908 details strong opposition in larger cities such as Atlanta and Savannah, where distilleries were based, and widespread support in the more rural areas. But articles in the Rome News-Tribune from that period seem to indicate closing loopholes was not a high priority.
A Jan. 12, 1909, headline proclaimed “Just Forty Gallons of Alcohol Consumed By the ‘Sick’ in 1908.”
Four drug stores in Rome filled 637 alcohol prescriptions “for medicinal purposes only,” according to the roundup report that started with the phrase “Ye Gods and little fishes!”
On the same day the paper reported the Rome City Council placing sealing wax on the doors of four near-beer establishments and passing a resolution barring the sale of any beer substitute within the city limits.
Later articles detail test cases aimed at halting the practices of taking orders for whiskey from Chattanooga, Tenn., and operating private clubs.
Members of the Muskrat Club were indicted by a Rome grand jury and charged with selling beer “or something else” on a houseboat the club kept on the Oostanaula River.
Jones said his mother was active in the popular Women’s Christian Temperance Union when he was a young boy in the late 1920s — but folks still harkened back to the early 1900s when there were 13 bars on Broad Street alone.
“My momma used to pin a white ribbon on me every Sunday,” Jones said, referring to the WCTU symbol of teetotaling. “But I still went with my daddy every Saturday to his bootlegger.”
Click here for a New Georgia Encyclopedia information about the temperance movement in the state.
Click here for a a 1908 New York Times article on the vote to enact prohibition in Georgia.
Click here for an excerpt from “A History of Rome and Floyd County” showing a photo of federal agents with a still.
