Friday A/V Club: Legalizing Liquor-By-the-Drink

On Election Day, as my colleague Jacob Sullum noted
earlier this week, voters considered, and in some cases passed,
measures to strike down some of the legal relics restricting the
alcohol trade. In honor of those battles, here’s a vintage ad on a
similar theme.

It dates from the 1970s, when one of the hot issues in North
Carolina politics was whether commercial establishments should be
allowed to sell “liquor by the drink.” This had been banned across
the state in the Progressive Era; in 1973, a referendum proposed to
end the statewide rule and let counties decide the issue for
themselves. Opposition to this idea was led by the Christian Action
League, but because they knew they needed more than just the
evangelical vote they created a new group called
People Who Care About North Carolina that focused on secular
arguments.

In this case, the commercial highlights the idea that allowing
restaurants to serve mixed drinks will lead to more drunk driving.
But another argument creeps in at the :19 mark, when a woman
explains that that she’s lived in Atlanta—that sinful urban
wasteland—”and I don’t want a bar on every street corner in
our town.”

The anti-liquor forces won that round, but it was a temporary
victory. In 1978 the legislature passed a law devolving the
decision to the counties, and voters in several sections of the
state promptly marched to the polls to
legalize it. That left Oklahoma as the last segment of the
union with a statewide ban; it in turn folded in 1984.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)