Wet-Dry Votes in Alabama

"Dry" towns and counties across the state have grown accustomed to the almost-annual referenda on whether to allow alcohol sales. JSU History Professor Harvey Jackson talked about the subject in Wednesday's Anniston Star. (Hmmm...so, when is the last time someone voted to go dry, I wonder?)

Of all the issues that church-going Southerners get worked up over, none is more divisive than whether or not to sell strong drink.

Abortion. Gay marriage. Displaying the Ten Commandments. Even the lottery. The furor they create pales in comparison.

Put a wet/dry vote on the ballot and communities go crazy. Denominations divide. Families fall out. Friends quit speaking to each other. Rumors fly.

It’s nasty.

...most folks, at least those I know, are like Sen. Wyre “Cyclone” Pickett, the Southern sage who, when asked his position on the sale and consumption of liquor reportedly told an audience:

“You have asked me how I stand on whiskey. Well, brother, here’s how I stand.

“If when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison source, the bloody monster that defiles innocence and dethrones reason and creates misery and poverty and, yes, literally takes bread out of the mouths of babes ... if you mean the evil drink that topples God-fearing men and women from the pinnacle of rapturous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of despair and degradation and shame and helplessness, I am against it with all that is within my power . . .

But ...

If when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine and ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and a glow of contentment in their eyes . . . if you mean Christmas cheer, if you mean that stimulating drink that puts a spring into an old man’s step on a frosty morning, if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his glory and happiness and forget, if only for a moment, life’s great tragedies and heartaches and sorrows . . . if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into our treasury untold millions of dollars that are used to provide tender loving care for our crippled children and our deaf and our dumb and our pitifully aged and infirmed, which builds highways and hospitals and schools, then brother I am for that ...

“That is my stand . . . I shall not recede . . . I shall not compromise.”

And I suspect that he never did.

Sounds like that Senator was a pretty wise man. (Although, I wonder if Prof. Jackson may have attributed the quote to the wrong Senator...all the sources I've found on the net, including this one and this one, attribute the "whiskey speech" to Judge Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat Jr., a state senator from Mississippi who delivered the speech in the Mississippi House in 1952.)