Nashville now and then: Quenching a civic thirst

How Eddie Jones, 40 years ago, earned the sword he was presented last night as the inaugural member of the Order of St. Crispin

Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

Eddie Jones, honored last night for his shepherding of the 1967 liquor-by-the-drink campaign in Nashville, holds the sword he was presented upon his induction into the Order of St. Crispin.

What does a fella have to do to get a drink around here? As of mid-1967, the answer was: bring your own bottle, and know the right people. But a campaign was afoot to bring "liquor by the ounce" — the clinical euphemism advocates used for "liquor by the drink" — to Metropolitan Nashville.

Amid legislative chicanery, backroom plotting by business titans and a major get-out-the-vote campaign in the city's most privileged neighborhoods, the campaign came down to a county-wide referendum on September 28, 1967. Liquor by the drink carried the day.

Last night, NashvillePost.com presented the first annual Order of St. Crispin to the man tasked by Nashville's business elite to wage the critical behind-the-scenes political effort that made passage of the referendum possible: Eddie Jones.

The Order of St. Crispin is a new NashvillePost.com award honoring individuals who have done battle in the field of politics and helped make Nashville the great city that it is.

The name of the award comes from the rousing speech written by William Shakespeare for the play Henry V. In the view of our own political reporter Ken Whitehouse, it is the greatest political speech ever written. It was written to motivate, inspire, and encourage a small number of people to realize their potential.

Not Kingsley's cup of tea

If you weren't around Nashville forty years ago — and especially if you have not spent time in some of the all-too-quiet burgs of the South where prohibition was, or is, still at least partly in effect, long after the repeal of the 18th Amendment — you may wonder just why some local leaders thought it so important that folks be able to order a drink here. One cranky outsider's view of the semi-dry Nashville of 1967 will give a hint of the image the city then put forward.

The famously bibulous English novelist Kingsley Amis happened to descend on Nashville in the fall of 1967 as a visiting lecturer at Vanderbilt. Amis came to hate Nashville, and most of the people he met here, with a passion that still burned in his long-suffering gut a quarter-century later. The primitive boozing environment he discovered in the city was just one of many counts in the indictment of Nashville he delivered in his 1991 memoirs, but he elaborated his grievance in some detail:

One sociological note I will contribute because it now belongs to history is the State ban on liquor by the drink, as it was rather mysteriously called. A dying Bible-Belt flicker meant that you could buy as much booze as you could pay for from sundry well-stocked liquor stores, but not to drink then and there. Before you took off the seal, you had to be on private premises, or in a public bar or restaurant licensed to let you drink in it but not to sell you the stuff. So you took your bottle of gin and your bottle of vermouth along to a place called a bar....

The same rules applied to restaurants, of which there seemed to be only two (in a town of nearly half a million), one providing bad, the other very bad food and service, but united in accepting no bookings. There were bars where you could drink glasses of gnat's-piss beer to your heart's content.

Not only in its user-unfriendliness but in its elaborate quasi-logic, this seemed to me a thoroughly un-American arrangement. I would have expected it more of the British Army or some municipal body in Wales.

A secret clique and a hoodwinked senator

Many would find Amis exactly the sort of churlish drunk you wouldn't want to meet in a bar. (He was initially too polluted to sit for an interview when this writer showed up for an appointment at his London home in 1986.) Yet the prevailing view among Nashville's business elite was that the city did indeed need to become rather more spirited, as it were, if it was ever to compete nationally for convention business and other tourism dollars, as well as more general outside attention that might someday translate into progress for local economic development.

Apart from the economic argument, advocates cited the existing state of liquor regulation as bad for public order and safety. "The liquor situation was a mess," Jones remembers. "There were kickbacks, payoffs, bootlegging and whatsoever." Under the law as it stood, patrons were allowed to bring their own bottles into licensed restaurants and bars, but were supposed to carry them back home at the end of the evening. In reality, clubs kept bottles behind the counter with patrons' names on them, or simply sold liquor drinks in direct violation of the law. The cops kept their distance.

"It wasn't a question of whether or not it was right or wrong, at least in my book," recalled real estate developer Nelson Andrews, who would go on to become the most prominent booster of the campaign in the public eye. He spoke about the effort in a 2006 interview for a Nashville Public Library oral history program. Andrews himself did not drink, but he was a realist. "Unless you could ban the process of making alcohol, it was going to be made and people were going to drink it," he said. "So the key was moderation."

Officially, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce created a committee to take on the task of bringing liquor by the drink to Nashville. Behind the scenes, the Watauga Society — a secret group of top business leaders who quietly pushed economic development initiatives in town — clearly had a hand in the effort as well. "Watauga was never directly connected with the chamber," Jones recalls, "but everyone on the committee was also in Watauga."

The committee hired Jones, who was finishing his term as press secretary to Gov. Frank Clement, to provide the political muscle the campaign would need.

Step one in the drive was to get state law changed to make it possible to hold a county-wide referendum on the liquor question. Lieutenant Governor Frank Gorrell, himself a Nashville insider, was sympathetic to the idea. A bill was introduced to allow for referenda in cities of more than 500,000 inhabitants. But rural legislators had little incentive to do the big cities a favor, and strong opposition made for tight votes. In the Senate, the bill's fate ultimately rested in the hands of Mary Anderson, a Nashville lawmaker opposed to loosening liquor laws. And her vote would allow the bill to become law.

You see, Gorrell cut a deal with Anderson. He would let her attach an amendment that would allow the referendum to cut either way: Citizens could vote in liquor by the drink, but they could also return their cities to complete prohibition.

"Gorrell was a pretty good lawyer," Jones remembers. "He researched and found that the amendment was broader than the caption of the bill, which means you couldn't leave it on there. They went ahead and let Mary Anderson offer it, and the bill passed the Senate. Then when it went over to the House, a letter from the attorney general was unveiled, saying the amendment was unconstitutional." As Anderson fumed, the bill became law.

Mobilizing the suburbanites

While Jones lobbied behind the scenes, Andrews became the front man for the chamber's committee, which attorney Charles Cornelius chaired. Investor Pat Wilson, who died early this year, recalled in a 2006 interview for the library project that "the one who got into the mechanics of getting a referendum passed was Nelson Andrews. He organized the community ward by ward," emphasizing the need to get out the vote in favor of the referendum.

Nashville's vote was set for the end of September. Memphis, considered more likely to succeed in a referendum, went first in late July. The measure lost there by 10,000 votes. Shortly afterward, Jones sat down with Nashville Mayor Beverly Briley.

"This Memphis thing kind of frightens me," Briley told Jones.

"The way to make that referendum successful," Jones replied, "would be to make it impossible to buy a drink in this town for a while."

Briley immediately latched on to the idea, as Jones recalls. He summoned his police chief and issued an order: "Beginning Monday, there will be no more whiskey sold in Nashville."

With virtually all of the city's roughly 60 licensed establishments flagrantly out of compliance with the law as written, the police had no trouble enforcing Briley's ban. The clubs of Printer's Alley, the bar at Jimmy Kelly's and even, horror or horrors, the men's grill at Belle Meade Country Club went painfully and suddenly dry.

“By the time that election came, everybody was real thirsty,” Jones remembers.

Still, opponents, led by conservative clergymen, waged a vigorous campaign of their own. A month before the election, they put word around that the liquor industry had funneled massive amounts of money to the "wet" side. Cornelius indignantly denied that claim, and the Nashville Tennessean reported that churches and other sources had ponied up $72,000 to bankroll the "dry" campaign, supposedly three times what the wets had available. (The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner, enemies on so many other fronts, called in unison for a yes on the liquor vote.)

The week before the vote was set to take place, the drys bought a half-hour of time on television station WSIX (precursor of today's WKRN-News 2) to make their case. Wets claimed the station had broken an agreement not to sell time to either side, and they hastily purchased their own 30 minutes of equal time. The programs were to run back to back, and a coin toss determined that the opponents would have the final word. But that turned out not to be the advantage it might have seemed.

The committee enlisted PR guru Hal Kennedy to script the segment and country performer Eddy Arnold to offer what Jones remembers as "an ad lib segment that would bring tears to your eyes, as he talked about his concerns about his teenaged son and why we needed controls and regulations." To hear Jones tell it, the program just happened to run three minutes short, and Kennedy just happened at the last minute to arrange a way of filling the remaining time before the opposing side aired its case. He obtained an instructional film produced by the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.

"We put on three minutes worth of boll weevils, and you could almost hear TV sets clicking off all over town," Jones recalls with a satisfied chuckle.

The final tally

The precinct-by-precinct results of the voting on September 28, available at this link, show a city geographically polarized over the booze issue. The wets took seven primarily suburban districts on the south and west sides of town — Metro districts 24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34 and 35, then occupying more or less the same area those districts occupy today — by a total of 10,896 votes, representing 69 percent of votes cast in those areas. The referendum passed by a citywide margin of 10,105. The results from four fifths of Metro's districts, in other words, would have meant defeat for the amendment if one fifth had not turned out so strongly in favor of it.

The vote was a striking departure from the norm in a town where the balance of political power, for years before and afterward, seemed to be firmly established in East Nashville and areas further north. The business community would achieve only mixed results when it tried to mobilize the public in decades to come, and Jones himself — chosen by the downtown elite in 1987 as the last, best hope of keeping Bill Boner from becoming mayor — would drop out of the mayoral contest weeks before the election.

Nashville would not see another poll draw such a singleminded and decisive turnout in the affluent suburbs between Oak Hill and West Meade until September 11, 2007, when Metro voters elected Karl Dean as mayor in a runoff against Bob Clement. Dean won by a citywide total of 4,599 votes. The same seven districts that had pushed liquor-by-the-drink over the top voted for Dean by a total of 8,049 votes.

A decade after the 1967 vote, Nashville had several first-rate hotels downtown, as well as the new , 600-room Opryland Hotel out Briley Parkway. Two decades on, the city had a purpose-built convention center downtown. Today, Nashville is in the midst of a hotel construction boom in the downtown and midtown areas, while the former Opryland Hotel is now Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, whose latest expansion plans are set to make it the nation's largest convention facility outside Las Vegas.

Eddie Jones, who went on to serve as the Banner's last editor, is still in the business of winning friends and influencing people, serving as a senior consultant to the Nashville PR firm Dye, Van Mol & Lawrence. Framed on the walls of his office there are the State Senate and House resolutions that enabled Nashville's referendum on liquor by the drink.

Birthdays of note this week:

• Attorney Jack Butler, turning 70; attorney Mark Tipps; country star Keith Urban — October 26
• Congressman Zach Wamp (R-Chattanooga), turning 50; singer-songwriter Brad Paisley; and long-haired-country-boy-turned-righteous-scourge Charlie Daniels (sharing a birthday with fellow paragon of tolerance Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) — October 28
• Legal Services of Middle Tennessee founder and Wyatt lawyer Harris Gilbert — October 31
• State legislator Gary Odom (D-Nashville) — November 1

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