The history of the three-tier system
How about the Klan, a book, and a Swedish model for regulating booze?
Want to know why the three-tier system, which regulates alcohol sales in the U.S., is so odd, convoluted, and bizarre?
Then check out this epic, 2,300-word story that I wrote for GuildSomm. Because the history is odd, convoluted, and bizarre. How else to explain a system whose origins include the Ku Klux Klan, John D. Rockefeller, liquor regulation in Sweden, and what one historian termed an abortive insurrection in South Carolina? Or that our current system is based on a 90-year-old book?
And, for those of you who just want the highlights:
• The Klan worked with the Progressives, perhaps the leading political reform group in U.S. history, as well as the suffragette Susan B. Anthony and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League to pass Prohibition. Which strikes me as about as odd as U.S. politics get.
• Don’t believe anyone who says Prohibition was a success. Rockefeller — who didn’t drink and who had supported Prohibition — wrote in 1932, “I earnestly hoped with a host of advocates of temperance, that it would be generally supported by public opinion. . . . This has not been the result, but rather . . . that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens, piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the Eighteenth Amendment.”
• The three-tier system is based on a book, Toward Liquor Control — which is still read and used by state regulators almost a century later. (You can even buy it on Amazon.) In 1933, Rockefeller hired Raymond Fosdick and Albert Scott to write it, and it offers, more or less, the regulatory framework we have today. The authors recommended two approaches: control states, which own the retailers, or state regulation of retailers. In either case, they suggested setting up three tiers and highlighted the need to efficiently collect taxes and to allow local option to go wet or dry.
“‘U.S. Is Voted Dry.’” by Thomas Cizauskas is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.