It was 92 years ago. Though the folly of Prohibition hadn’t completely come to an end, in March of 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Cullen-Harrison Act. Production and sales of beer and wine with an alcohol content of 3.2% were once again legal. By December that same year, the 21st Amendment would fully repeal the 18th.

Beer had been banished in Knoxville for 26 years at the time, the city had the jump on the prohibition movement. But once FDR signed it back in at the federal level, the state of Tennessee, Knox County and Knoxville were back on board, and businesses were lined up to get their licenses in order.

Barley pops were back on the menu as of 5 a.m. Monday, May 1, 1933. There were 52 licenses issued for Knox County, 36 of those were inside the city, mostly at lunch counters. Prices were expected to run between 15 and 25 cents a bottle. Trains and trucks were at the ready to come pouring over the Kentucky border at midnight so the brews were at the ready at the first rooster’s crow.

A side benefit of the ease on prohibition was additional shifts at the ALCOA plant. Business had been picking up at the sheet mill for the manufacture of airplanes, but the return of beer had breweries in Milwaukee looking for alternatives to oak barrels, and aluminum vats were on the list. So, ALCOA had two, eight-hour shifts going, laid-off employees had been called back to work, additional hires were on the horizon.

Liquor license from 1933 when beer was legal again (photo: Knoxville Journal digital archives)

This was good news in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Unemployment across the country peaked around 25%, and those who were working were doing so at considerably reduced wages from before the stock market crash of 1929. Several of Knoxville’s biggest banks failed or were forced into mergers.

This was the decade that gave us The Grapes of Wrath. As beer was coming back online in Tennessee, state troopers and national guardsmen in Iowa were enforcing martial law during forced farm foreclosures. The Tennessee Valley Authority was made official in May 1933, and the little town of Loyston, 150 years old, was about to come off the map due to the building of Cove Creek Dam. By July that same year the dam’s name had been changed to Norris. The TVA was one of those “alphabet jobs,” as my grandfather called them, along with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration that helped put East Tennesseans back to work during a time when gainful employment was hard to find. Just before there was legal beer again, at least 250 young men lined up outside the old Federal Building (now the East Tennessee History Center) to sign up for the C.C.C.

That same week, venerable downtown businessman and prominent Jewish citizen, Max Friedman, received a letter from a Jewish friend in Belgium. On the envelope was a small green sticker that said, in English and French, “not to be forwarded by German ship.” It was small act of resistance by European Jews against the persecution and abuse of Jews ordered by German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. Right here in Knoxville, people knew what was going on in Germany. Hitler’s invasion of Poland and World War II were still six years away.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

Sources: The Knoxville Journal digital archives, Tennessee Encyclopedia, McClung Digital Collection – Knox County Library