Difference between revisions of "Category:Alcohol"

Alcohol consumption is a divisive and enduring issue in Arkansas, driven over time by religion, politics, and economics. As early as 1768 Captain Alexandre de Clouet traveled to Arkansas Post on the orders of the Spanish governor to explain the debilitating effects of alcohol to the local Quapaw Indians. In 1787 the Spanish colonial government outlawed the sale of alcohol to the Quapaw, and Arkansas Territory extended the ban to all Arkansas Native American tribes in 1806. Ashen victims of the violent New Madrid earthquake, the first clutch of Little Rockians resettled here under a relief bill passed in the 1810s, found themselves toe-to-toe with traveling bands of swindlers, mercenaries, and traders, many of them "swallowed up in dram-drinking, jockeying, and gambling." By 1820 central Arkansas was so thick with saloons that the state government began taxing them to slow down growth in the business. It didn't work. The Little Rock Temperance Society, a chapter of the evangelical American Temperance Society, was founded in 1831. The Little Rock Temperance Society was populated with local businessmen and others in the middle class who wished to keep tippling at a minimum in order to promote order in a frontier society. Ten years later the Arkansas State Temperance Society organized a march through downtown Little Rock on Main Street.

In 1853 the Arkansas State Legislature banned the sale of alcohol to slaves without owner permission.

During the Civil War, the state banned the manufacture of whiskey to protect supplies of corn for military use. The Confederate governor Harris Flanagin later admitted that the banning had failed. After the war, federal revenue agents began hunting down moonshiners in the state flaunting the federal excise tax on whiskey and other spirits.

In 1876 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) founds the the first Arkansas chapter of that organization in Monticello. The first state conference of the WCTU took place in Searcy in 1879. By 1888 the state had seventy-five WCTU chapters.

General Assembly in 1879 passed a local-option law requiring that Arkansas communities vote on dry county measures at least every two years.

In 1894, prominent businessmen and politicians organized themselves into the Arkansas chapter of the Anti-Saloon League. The organization fell apart around 1906 because of intense rivalries between church member denominations.

The manufacture and sale of alcohol is prohibited by state law in the Newberry Act of 1915. In the year of the passage of the Newberry Act, only twelve counties remained "wet."

The shipment of liquor into the state was prohibited two years later under the "Bone Dry" Liquor Law of 1917.

Arkansas became the twenty-seventh state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Prohibition) in 1919.

Prohibition was repealed under the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933. Two years later the General Assembly repeals the 1915 prohibition law and makes local-option elections more difficult.

Liquor sales in hotels and restaurants was permitted under a General Assembly law passed in 1943.

An act drafted by the Temperance League of Arkansas failed in election by an 167,578-122,252 margin in 1950.

A mixed-drink bill framed by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller passed in 1969.

Legislation championed by Senator Lu Hardin in 1993 made local-option votes on wet/dry counties more difficult by raising the petition requirement to 38 percent of all registered voters.

References

• Jack Schnedler, "Bottle Battles: The Never-Ending War Over Alcohol in Arkansas Plays Out in a Sprightly Exhibit and Book," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 8, 2005.

External links

• Old State House exhibit - John Barleycorn Must Die: The War against Drink in Arkansas