“Prohibition In Atlanta” a tale of two cities, wet and dry

As is the mission of most titles published by The History Press, the book can be read as a local story aimed at a local audience. But while it primarily focuses on Fulton County and the city of Atlanta, it covers crisscrossing issues of race, class, religion and sexual politics, near universal in scope. And over the course of a concise 160 pages, the Atlanta writers conjure a compelling cast of characters, from fire-and-brimstone preachers and women’s temperance unionists to wily illegal bar owners and hot-rodding moonshine runners.

What may be most surprising, though, is that several periods of prohibition in Atlanta and Georgia began long before national prohibition in 1920 and continued after its repeal in 1933.

Smith and Boyle begin their story in the frontier railroad town first known as Terminus, and later Marthasville, where edgy Decatur Street was the “sporting section” where drinking, gambling and prostitution openly flourished. Areas with evocative designations such as Murrell’s Row, Snake Nation and Slab Town had similar reputations.

In 1845, Marthasville was renamed Atlanta. A few years later it was incorporated as a city and Moses Formwalt, a still maker, Murrell’s Row saloon owner and member of the appropriately named Free and Rowdy Party, was voted Atlanta’s first mayor.

The saloon-sympathetic “Rowdies” saw vice as an essential part of urban life. But they were strongly opposed by the Moral Party of temperance-minded evangelical Protestants who wanted to eradicate pockets of sin from the city.

So the battle lines were drawn, and as Smith and Boyle write, “The resulting social, moral and legal history of this battle had consequences that still influence the greater Atlanta area.”

In an election held in 1885, the “Wets” and the “Drys” squared off with well-funded campaigns. But when the results were final, by a very narrow margin “Atlanta had become the largest city to ever go dry by popular vote.”

The aftermath was a city even more divided, and there was a rise of all sorts of creative ways of skirting prohibition, including legal medicinal alcohol and patent medicines.

Not exactly the image of flappers and gangsters evoked by national prohibition in the Roaring ’20s, Atlanta’s more genteel 19th century embrace of illegal alcohol took the form of “blind tiger” taverns and liquor ordered up from nearby wet counties, delivered daily on the railroad’s “jug train.”

Discussions of temperance in terms of women’s suffrage, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigrant sentiment, race relations and urbanism are fascinating and reflect how attitudes about alcohol consumption surfaced in a variety of causes and guises.

The final chapters give way to a survey of prohibition’s legacy and a look at new local breweries, distilleries and wineries.

As in their first book, “Atlanta Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in the Hub of the South,” Smith and Boyle conclude “Prohibition in Atlanta” by promoting a few of their favorite haunts.

In the sweep of history, they picture a young businesswoman visiting Atlanta in 2015, taking a seat at the bar at the Luminary at Krog Street Market, the Porter in Little Five Points or the Kimball House in Decatur:

“The drink she orders, whether beer, wine, whiskey or a carefully mixed cocktail, has survived nearly three hundred years of social upheaval and legislation starting with General Oglethorpe’s prohibition against importing distilled spirits into the Colony of Georgia. The state and the city have clearly witnessed one of the longest and most ardent alcohol temperance and prohibition periods in America.”