Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6. Getting Back to Business

When Congress amended the Volstead Act on March 22, 1933, legal beer and wine returned to America for the first time since 1920. President Roosevelt’s signature on this bill also ushered in the gradual return of one of Kentcky’s oldest industries, which had been dormant since the end of the Great War. The production and sale of alcoholic beverages—always controversial and always profitable—had been the leading manufacturing enterprise in the state, but national Prohibition virtually dried up this industry. Passage of the Beer Bill cheered millions of Americans who looked for signs of hope from the new administration, and it hastened the end of the Eighteenth Amendment. The end of Prohibition also brought prosperity back to the distillers and brewers and provided new tax revenues for the government. In Kentucky this return to legal liquor was the most dramatic of all the New Deal efforts to revive the nation’s economy. Other administrative measures such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Wagner Act generated massive publicity or brought radical reforms to the working place, but neither produced such widespread enthusiasm as did the repeal of Prohibition. Repeal was a grand gesture that had mass appeal. It came early in the New Deal and started a momentum of restored confidence, which the other programs enhanced and solidified. World War II brought the sustained economic revival that New Deal planners were unable to produce, but that revival operated in an economic arena far different from the languishing situation of 1933.

Prior to the “noble experiment” of Prohibition, the liquor industry in Kentucky was a major part of the state’s economy. In 1910, approximately two hundred distilleries and breweries employed more than four thousand people in the commonwealth.1 Bourbon whiskey, in particular, had become almost synonymous with the Bluegrass State. Named for the county of its origin, this distinctive blend of corn, rye, and limestone water, had become a popular product nationally by the time of the Civil War, and soon no mint julep or Kentucky Derby would have been complete without it. Meanwhile, another Kentucky native, Carrie Nation, was winning a nationwide reputation for her crusade against alcohol, but the efforts of Nation and other advocates of temperance did not have much success until the early twentieth century, when the Progressive reformers undertook a campaign for moral uplift and efficiency. State after state outlawed the production and sale of intoxicating drink, and by the time America entered the Great War in 1917, twenty-five states had become dry.2 Kentucky’s state legislature compromised on this issue in 1912. Its local option provision allowed counties and towns to make their own decisions, and soon a majority of the state’s 120 counties exercised the dry option.3 During the war Congress submitted and the states soon approved the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Kentucky ratified this measure in 1919 and at the same time added the Seventh Amendment to its state constitution. These amendments prohibited both the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.

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