Legal Toddy

Plenty of liquor is drunk in Tennessee, and it is legal to manufacture liquor in Tennessee for export to other States. This last is due to the cuteness of rich, tieless old Lem Motlow who owns most of Moore County. In 1937, Lem Motlow wangled a law enabling him to reopen his family's oldtime Jack Daniel No. 7 bourbon distillery at Lynchburg. But not for 30 years, until last week, was it legal to sell liquor in Tennessee. That was due to the assassination of Editor Edward Ward Carmack of the Nashville Tennessean after the hot Governorship campaign of 1908, and to the piety of Tennessee's rural counties.

Editor Carmack was shot down for personal reasons after he had failed to beat Malcolm Rice ("Ham") Patterson, a Wet from Memphis, for the Governorship. In his martyrdom Carmack accomplished what his campaign failed of: the 1909 General Assembly's first act was to pass

(over Governor Patterson's veto) Tennessee's first prohibition law. (A second act: to erect a heroic Carmack statue at the Capitol's entrance.)

Boss Ed Crump of toddy-loving Memphis has fought prohibition since 1933, when he helped swing Tennessee's ratification of the 21st Amendment by a bare 6,808 votes. Since then he has deposed two Dry Governors (McAlister, Browning) who would not go along with him for State repeal. Last week his latest protege, Governor Prentice Cooper, vetoed the Assembly's repealer. This deed may alter Mr. Cooper's political future, but it did not alter the legislators' minds. Crying, "We've got the liquor now: let's regulate and tax it!" they overrode Governor Cooper even as a Dry Assembly overrode Wet Patterson 30 years ago.

Tennessee did not vote back its bars. Its new law permits package trade only, for cash not credit,* with the wet-dry option still reserved to each county. Tax: 70-c- the gallon on whiskey. To Boss Crump's wet Shelby County the only difference will be that thirsty Memphians need no longer drive over the Mississippi River bridge to the nearest liquor store, a big, hugely profitable emporium on the Arkansas shore.

* New York's retail liquor trade was stunned last week when the State Liquor Authority enforced against several leading Manhattan stores a hitherto ignored section of the law forbidding liquor sales on credit.

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