1933

January–March

 * Event 1

April–June

 * April 7, 1933

MALT DOES MORE THAN FDR CAN...

The new Chancellor of Germany is taking action to curb "Jewish influences." President Roosevelt is supporting a massive new program to bring hydroelectric power to the Tennessee Valley. At a celebrated trial in Scottsboro, Alabama, a white woman is testifying that she wasn't raped by the black men charged with assaulting her. But a headline in the Tennessean tells of the day's top news story: "Beer for Breakfast is Popular, and Nation Finds Supply Taxed."

At 12:01 this morning, Prohibition ended. Nineteen states lifted their bans on possession of low-percentage alcohol, gutting the Eighteenth Amendment. Tennessee's legislature is in the process of making beer legal here, but the people of Nashville aren't waiting for the formalities before they satisfy their taste for the hops. Hordes have descended by car and train on Kentucky border towns, where beer is already for sale and private homes have been converted into temporary rooming houses for revelers.

An enterprising pilot has been ferrying planeloads of Nashvillians to Franklin, Kentucky, where they "washed down pretzels and sandwiches like they were doing food a favor," according to the Tennessean. The "orgy" in Kentucky evokes righteous protests from the Women's Christian Temperance Union, but the defeated prohibitionists have few allies-- aside from the forlorn sellers of bootleg "needle beer," who will soon be driven out of business by legal suds.

--by Tom Wood

Sources: Nashville Banner, 4/7/33; Nashville Tennessean, 4/7-8/33.

(Originally published in Nashville Scene, 4/1/93)