A Brief History of Moonshine

People have fermented foods to make alcohol for much of human history. For this episode, when we refer to "moonshine," we're talking specifically about illegal liquor North America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy he Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we
are going to talk about something that's deeply rooted in
American history, having a huge impact on local and regional culture,

(00:23):
crime and law enforcement, and a wealth of music and
television and movies. And that subject is moonshine. Seemed kind
of appropriate for an AU autumnal episode. There are definitely
distilling traditions from all over the world, and they go
back through thousands of years of human history. So when

(00:44):
we say moonshine, we're talking specifically about illegal liquor made
either in violation of distilling laws or more commonly, tax laws,
most often associated with corn, although other ingredients have been
used to make moonshine as well, including sugar. The name
moonshine has also been used in English speaking Europe and

(01:05):
in North America, and it's really its place in North
American history that we are talking about today. People have
fermented foods to make alcohol for much of human history,
and then around two thousand years ago in China, people
figured out that you could distill fermented grains to get
even stronger alcohol. Fermenting grain gave you a mildly alcoholic

(01:26):
result like beer, but if you heated that alcohol and
collected the vapor that rose from it, that was a
lot more potent. By the year eleven hundred, people in
Italy had started distilling alcohol to use this medicine. It
was most obviously consumed as a pain killer. Since then
people have also used it as a cough suppressant and

(01:46):
can and kept some on hand for snake bite, although
to be clear, it's not actually a good idea to
drink alcohol if you have been bitten by a snake. Uh,
snake bite might make for a very handy excuse to
have it around now. People have also used distilled alcohol
to make topical medicines like wound antiseptics, or mixing the
alcohol with herbs and other ingredients to make pain relieving

(02:09):
or antiseptic rubs. Soon this practice of distilling spread across Europe,
with people distilling wines and beers to get stronger alcohols,
and of course, as people found recipes for distilled alcohol
that were more pleasant to drink, people started doing that
as well. In terms of the beverages that have had
the most influence on American moonshine. People in Scotland were

(02:32):
making whiskey out of grain by the end of the
fifteenth century, and by the early seventeenth century in Ireland
people will do we're doing what American moonshiners would come
to do themselves, distilling their whiskey in secret illegally to
avoid paying attacks. That was instituted in sixteen twenty two.
By this point the most common way of making whiskey

(02:53):
was with a copper. Still, colonists from Scotland and Ireland
brought this tradition of distillery with them when immigret to
the America's starting in the seventeen hundreds, many of them
bringing their skills with them when they did. Corn had
already been introduced in Europe by this point, with with
ships from the America's bringing it back with them, but

(03:14):
it was really in the seventeenth century in North America
that people started distilling liquor specifically from corn, rather than
using other grains. The first person known to do this
was George Thorpe, and he was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia.
He wrote to his cousins about doing so in a letter.
It took a while before making corn liquor really took off, though.

(03:35):
One reason was that corn was needed as food. This
was also true of the ingredients for other potable alcohols.
Beers and whiskey are made from grain, wine is made
from grapes, and brandy is made from fruit, and these
were all things that people needed to eat. With fermented
foods mostly being used only as animal feed, people food
was often a higher priority, sometimes so much so that

(03:57):
it was actually illegal to use these food stuff to
make alcohol. Another reason why corn whiskey wasn't immediately popular
was because in the North American colonies people were really
into rum. Rum was introduced to the North American continent
from the Caribbean islands. Rum was also abundant thanks to
its role and the role of the sugar and molasses

(04:19):
that were needed to make it in the Transatlantic slave trade.
At various points prior to the colony's independence, the British
government and other European governments that had controlled colonies in
North America trying to regulate or tax imported spirits. This was,
needless to say, extremely unpopular, and it led to a

(04:40):
rise in people making their own liquor, which wasn't illegal yet.
The Revolutionary War also disrupted the colonies access to the
molasses and sugar that had been used to make rum,
and that's when people really started distealing alcohol from other
foods instead, so making it out of corn became more popular. Then,

(05:00):
after the end of the Revolutionary War, the fledgling United
States government decided to tax domestically distilled spirits, both to
try to curb excess drinking, which was rampant at this point,
and to help pay off the debts that had been
incurred during the war. So to that end, the excise
tax went into effect on March third, sevent This was

(05:22):
an act quote repealing after the last day of June
next the duties heretofore laid upon distilled spirits imported from
abroad and laying others in their stead, and also upon
spirits distilled within the United States and for appropriating the same.
The new law outlined different taxation rates for imported spirits

(05:46):
based on their strength, with stronger spirits progressively taxed more heavily.
It applied those same taxes to domestically distilled spirits, regardless
of whether people plan to sell what they were making
It also taxed small distilleries at an annual flat rate
based on how much their skills were capable of producing,
rather than by how much they actually made. That meant

(06:07):
that the smallest distillers were often paying tax on a
product that they never actually produced, just because their stills
were capable of making it. This was the first time
that domestically distilled alcohol had ever been taxed in North America,
and people were not happy about it. You know anything
about American history. Taxes in general have never been popular,

(06:28):
but the idea that people were going to be taxed
for something that they made for their personal use, not
to sell, or that they never actually made at all,
was galling just on principle. Another problem was that for
people who lived in mountainous or remote areas, it was
easier and safer to turn their crops into alcohol and
sell that than it was to try to transport fresh

(06:50):
food over long and treacherous distances to market. It was
also a way women could make enough money to support themselves,
especially as the daughters and widows of Moonshiner took up
their late relatives work. In these remote areas, people who
made their money selling liquor often had enough to help
fund things like schools and churches in their areas and communities. Basically,

(07:12):
for a lot of people, liquor was the best way
they could make ends meet with the resources that they had,
and this tax was going to cut deeply into their
ability to support themselves. The South, in particular, strenuously objected
to the excise tax. In addition to all of those
reasons above, many in the South were descended from Scott's
Irish immigrants, so distilling was part of a long family

(07:35):
and regional tradition. Almost no Southern representatives voted in favor
of the tax, and the people those representatives represented were
dead set against it. The most obvious result of this
tax was the Whiskey Rebellion. This was an armed rebellion
that will be its own episode later this year, but
extremely briefly. Farmers in western Pennsylvania rebelled against the excise tax,

(07:59):
destroying at tax inspector's home and growing in strength and
resentment until the government sent in the militia in seventeen.
In the face of the militia, those protesting mostly dispersed,
and about one hundred and fifty people were arrested for
treason In eighteen o two, after the election of Thomas Jefferson,
all of the United States internal taxes were repealed, including

(08:22):
the excise tax, with the exception of a brief tax
that was levied to finance the War of eighteen twelve.
The federal government stayed away from taxing distilled spirits for
a few decades, but that changed with the Civil War,
and we're going to talk about how that changed after
we have a brief word from one of the great
sponsors that keeps this show going. So to return to

(08:43):
the story of Moonshine, the United States passed its first
income tax and appointed its first Commissioner of Internal Revenue
in an effort to fund the Civil War. The first
version of the tax code taxed other goods and professions
in addition to attacks on people's incomes. These other taxes
included attacks of fifty dollars on distillers, which was coupled

(09:05):
with attacks of twenty cents per gallon on the alcohol
that those distillers actually made. This law went into effect
in eighteen sixty two. Naturally, the federal government could only
collect this tax in the states that were not in rebellion,
but in the Confederacy distilling dropped for a different reason
during the Civil War, once again the need to use

(09:25):
raw ingredients as food and not for making alcohol. In
eighteen sixty three, the first Revenue Commissioner, Joseph J. Lewis,
recommended raising the per gallon tax on spirits from twenty
cents a gallon to a dollar. He was using a
British tax as a model when he suggested this, and
even as he advocated doing so, he also advised that

(09:47):
this was going to be hard to enforce thanks to
the size of the nation and the remoteless the remoteness
of the places distillers operated, and the fact that that
was five times more money than they were taxed before.
In spite of this contradictory recommendation, the federal government started
raising the tax on spirits in eighteen sixty four. It

(10:08):
rose in increments during and after the Civil War, eventually
reaching two dollars per gallon, making the illegal distilling of
tax free spirits extremely attractive. And just as it was
way more appealing to distill in secret than to pay
the tax, the government had a lot more territory to
monitor thanks to the readmission of the rebelling states back

(10:29):
into the Union, and this also meant that a lot
of the territory that the government was now trying to
monitor for illegal distilling was deeply, deeply distrustful and resentful
of the federal government in the wake of the war.
This was doubly true since the government had implemented the
tax as a way to pay for the war with

(10:49):
the South in the first place. However, although moonshine is
heavily associated with the South and a lot of the
pop culture references to it are rooted in stereotypes of
the South and Appalachia, people were making liquor illegally basically everywhere.
The tax was so high that people were hiding small skills,
not just in barns and hollers, but in kitchens and

(11:11):
basements in America's major cities as well. The government hired
revenue agents also known as revenuers to try to enforce
the law and make sure taxes were paid. These agents
tried to fare it out and then bust up or
confiscate people stills, and they would either confiscate the product
or pour it out on the ground. This led to
violence and riots, especially in cities and towns where word

(11:34):
could spread and people could gather quickly to fight back.
The government lowered the tax back down to fifty cents
a gallon in eighteen sixty eight, but that did little
to stem the tide of illegal distilling, the attempts at
government enforcement, or the violence that followed in its wake.
Attempts to enforce the law and remote, often mountainous areas

(11:55):
did not go well. Federal agents were frequently in unfamiliar
and stretch or its territory where they were actively detested
that couldn't necessarily count on local law enforcement to help
them out, because local law enforcement often took a really
live and let live approach to their neighbors distilling operations.
All through the late eighteen hundreds, revenuers tried to shut

(12:17):
down stills and moonshiners tried to keep on distilling. Revenue.
Agents were killed and injured in the line of duty,
and the media portrayed moonshiners as desperate, uneducated outlaws likely
to kill any hapless people that stumbled over their stills.
This continued to be a joke in my family when
I was growing up, Like my brother and cousin and

(12:37):
I would go play in the woods, and when we
came back, my Grandpa be like, y'all find anybody still,
or don't go too far in the woods, you might
find us still. Anyway. As all of this was going on,
the temperance movement was gaining traction around the United States. Cities, counties,
and entire states were outlawing the sale, manufacturer, and consumption

(12:59):
of alcah hall, which, contrary to anybody's purpose in doing that,
just drove up the demand for moonshiners illegal wears. Then,
with the Eighteenth Amendment, which was ratified on January sixteenth,
nineteen nineteen, it became illegal to make, sell, or transport
intoxicating beverages anywhere in the United States. This amendment went

(13:20):
into effect on January sixteenth, nineteen twenty. And with that,
because no one could make liquor legally, uh, the people
already making moonshine tried all kinds of things to make
their product faster and cheaper, or to dilute the final
products so they could sell more without needing more quality ingredients.
Advances in distilling technology made it possible for moonshiners to

(13:43):
make much bigger runs of liquor, moving from ten to
fifty gallon copper pots to five hundred gallons stills, But
even so that was not enough to meet the additional
demand for illicit liquor during prohibition, and people who were
either ignorant or actly malicious turn to techniques that were
actually quite dangerous to make liquor. They used coils that

(14:06):
were made of lead in their steels instead of copper,
and then the people drinking the resulting liquor got lead poisoning.
People started saving and selling runs of liquor that had
previously been discarded because they contained dangerous ingredients that were
byproducts of the distilling process. The natured alcohol, which was
still legal because of its legitimate uses and things that

(14:26):
had nothing to do with drinking, was added to liquor
as an ingredient, and that could have deadly consequences. The
idea that bad liquor could make you go blind came
from the use of wood alcohol as an additive to
try to get around the law. Almost a decade into prohibition,
law enforcement was confiscating more than ten times as many

(14:48):
stills per year as it had before, and it wasn't
just because more people were making moonshine liquor. Kingpins organized
networks of distillers into their own criminal organizations to increase
productivity and streamline operations. Sometimes law enforcement wasn't just tacitly
ignoring these operations. Officers were actively involved, and these criminal

(15:11):
networks did not just operate in America's most remote corners.
For example, al Capone's Chicago area criminal organization was connected
to a moonshine ring that was tied up in more
than fifty different rates, and this went on until prohibition
was repealed by the twenty first Amendment, which was ratified
on December five of ninety three. So even though people

(15:32):
could get legal liquor again, the end of prohibition did
not put a stop to moonshine. The most famous federal
case related to it took place in nineteen thirty five,
and it was tied to a massive criminal network in
Franklin County, Virginia. Local law enforcement was complicit and actively
part of this criminal ring thanks to its protection racket,

(15:53):
basically charging a fee to moonshiners in exchange for their protection.
One deputy sheriff was murdered just days before a federal
grand jury was to convene on the matter. In the end,
the criminal investigation in grand jury hearing in Franklin County
led to the federal court case United States of America
versus Edgar A. Beckett at All, also known as the

(16:15):
Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of nineteen thirty five. This was
a massive, multiple month case against more than thirty defendants
involving more than five point five million dollars in tax
revenue that was owed to the government. It was not
long after this point that moonshine made another big impact
on American culture, which we're going to talk about after
another brief break for a word from a sponsor. So

(16:39):
we would be remiss if our history of moonshine did
not include its influence on auto racing. Thanks to Henry
Ford's assembly lines, cars became affordable to many Americans in
the nineteen teens. Almost immediately, people who could afford to
buy a car began racing them against one another as
a past time. Of course, people were also using cars

(17:02):
to haul illegal liquor. Moonshine runners would modify the interiors
of their cars so that they would hold as much
product as possible, doing things like removing seats and other
accouterments is necessary, and then they'd refined their driving skills
to both make as many deliveries of illicit liquor as possible,
and to outrun the law on often treacherous, winding, mountainous

(17:23):
roads that led from the skills to the customers. The
next logical step was using those same skills and sometimes
the same cars, to race around a race track. One
of the first people to make a name for himself
doing this was Lloyd C. Known as Lightning, a moonshine
runner who tore up and down Georgia Highway nine, also
known as the Whiskey Trail, hauling illegal liquor. He won

(17:46):
races all over the South before being shot to death
in an argument over about nine dollars worth of sugar
used in the still. He ran with his brother and
his cousin, and that took place in n His cousin
was actually the one who pulled the trigger and was
convicted of his murder. At about this time, the sport
of stock car racing was rather informally organized, and once

(18:09):
the United States entered World War Two, its popularity dwindled significantly.
Rubber and fuel were both needed for the war effort.
The men making the moonshine, on the other hand, often
had way too long of a criminal record to be
allowed into the armed forces instead. The big hurdle and
they're continuing to make moonshine during the war was the
fact that they needed the raw ingredients were once again

(18:31):
needed somewhere else. But once the war was over, people
started racing again, and soon driver Bill France gathered a
group of other racers, promoters, mechanics, and others to form
the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing. You would
know that more likely by its name of NASCAR. Many
of the first NASCAR drivers had, like Lloyd cy honed

(18:54):
their skills hauling illicit liquor. The same was true of
some of the mechanics, who had lots of experience working
on bootleggers smuggling cars both before and after the war.
Some of them had actually gone to serve in the
war and had gotten additional experience working on military vehicles.
On February fifteenth of nineteen forty eight, NASCAR held its

(19:14):
first race. The winner was Robert read Byron, who drove
a car owned by former moonshiner Raymond Parks and maintained
by former Moonshine mechanic read Vote, who was one of
the who was also the person who coined the NASCAR name.
One of NASCAR's first really famous drivers was Junior Johnson,
who Scott's Irish family had been involved in moonshining all

(19:36):
the way back to the seventeen hundreds. Revenue agents actually
raided the Johnson home when he was just a little boy,
and his father wound up going to federal prison. Johnson
himself dropped out of school at the age of fourteen
and started running moonshine for his dad. Just as Lloyd C. Had.
Johnson had honed his driving skills running liquor, this time
in the roads around Wilkes County, North Carolina, before he

(19:59):
made his now car debut in nineteen fifty three. Johnson's
racing career, though, was interrupted by just shy of a
year in federal prison for making untaxed whiskey that same year. Today,
there is actually a Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon Moonshine, which
is a totally above board and legitimately taxed corn liquor enterprise.

(20:19):
But NASCAR's ties to moonshine aren't just about the drivers
having learned to handle a car by out running the law.
Many of NASCAR's earliest owners of the cars, the teams
and the tracks also funded their ventures through moonshine money. However,
as NASCAR really got established, moonshine was starting to wane.

(20:40):
In the late nineteen fifties, the Department of Revenue changed
up its plan for fighting untaxed liquor, focusing on both
the moonshiners and their raw materials. The FEDS started watching
raw materials like sugar jugs and corn, and they also
started trying to educate the merchant community about why it
should not sell those things to moonshiners. There were also

(21:01):
education campaigns for people who might be buying moonshine, and
these campaigns were about the dangers of potentially contaminated product,
either through the deliberate addition of contaminants or by using
dangerous materials like car radiators to build stills. Posters, brochures,
and church fans circulated with warnings like warning moonshine is poison,

(21:22):
and these campaigns worked to an extent, and through the
fifties and sixties, states, counties and cities that had prohibited
alcohol gradually repealed these laws, which reduced the demand for
bootleg liquor. Airplanes and aerial surveillance also made it easier
to spot concealed stills in remote areas, and that made
enforcement of the laws easier. Plus, people living in remote

(21:45):
areas found they could make more money off of another
concealed crop, which was marijuana. Federal law enforcement still does
keep tabs on moonshine, but today when somebody is both
selling and distributing untaxed liquor, not just making it for
their own personal use, there's often another crime and play
at the same time, like a meth lab or illegal

(22:07):
firearms or a pot farm, so it's not usually just
about the hoops anymore when the federal law enforcement does
a rate. More recently, there's actually been a resurgence in
Moonshine is a beverage often made in a way that's
completely legal, licensed by the appropriate licensing bodies and tax
like other liquors, and many of these retain the name

(22:28):
moonshine as a nod to the recipes and distilling techniques
that were originally used to make it. Pet Ants will
point out that moonshine is by nature illegal, so some
brands use other terms like shine or corn whiskey or
white whiskey. Regardless, the result is still an unaged, clear liquor.
Usually made from corn. I actually have recently seen in

(22:52):
the last couple of years during like some of the
food and wine festival type events in Epcot, they sell
moonshine in some of them in some of the storage there,
and it's like, it kind of cracks me up that
now we have artisanal moonshine. There's definitely artisanal moonshine now,
so you can go out for brunch in places I'm
imagining elsewhere also, but especially around the South is where

(23:14):
I've experienced it, and they'll have like moonshine Bloody Mary's
on the brunch menu, uh, which is kind of funny
to me. The first time I ever saw it, I
was like, but isn't moonshine illegal? Anyway? Do you have
some listener mail to top this one off? Do? This
is from Megan and it is from It is related

(23:35):
to our recent podcast that the two part series about Redlining,
and Megan says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I'm an avid
listener to the podcast, especially during marathon training and recently
listen to the red Lining two part podcast and how
to Stop and rewind When I heard you mentioned Richmond,
Virginia and mentioning the digital Scholarship Lab at the University
of Richmond. She goes on to talk about how that

(23:58):
was her Albu mater. I'm talking about us and work
that she did with them while working there for a
while in school there. So to return to the letter.
While I did not work on the Redlining Richmond project,
I did work on several projects, to include electoral mapping
from the nineteenth century and a project called Visualizing Emancipation,
an archival mapping project of notices of runaway slaves and

(24:21):
Union Army army movements in the Richmond Times Dispatch during
the end of the Civil War. The maps that the
DSL digitized of nineteen thirties Richmond were very interesting and
disheartening to look at. While I love my city, the
legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow South
are still very visible in Richmond. The h O l
C Map, with few exceptions, basically looks the same, highlighting

(24:42):
the working class neighborhoods, the historically African American districts, and
the low income neighborhoods. Several of the interstates and freeways
were routed through historically African American neighborhoods, creating a literal
barrier between neighborhoods of different races. It was great to
listen to a podcast that hits so close to home
literally for me on the out out you made for
the University of Richmond and the Digital Scholarship Lab. Thanks

(25:03):
for the informative podcasts and keeping me saying during these
long runs, Megan, Thank you so much. Megan. The reason
that I wanted to read this email is that visualizing
emancipation is amazing. It is basically a map of the
United States. You can filter by all sorts of different
criteria of like types of emancipation activity that was going on,

(25:24):
like uh, freed people who were helping the Union army,
or violence against enslaved Africans, like some of it is
definitely happier than other of it. But you can look
at it on a map and see where all these
things were going on. And then you can also look
on it as a look at it as a list

(25:44):
and read the text of the original source documents that
all of this information came from. So it's just phenomenal.
We're going to put a link to it in our
show notes. So thank you again, Megan for writing to us.
If you would like to write to us. We're a
history podcast that has to Works dot com. We're also
on face Book at Facebook dot com slash miss in
History and on Twitter at miss in History, are tumbler

(26:05):
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We have an Instagram we are missed in History on
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about what we have talked about today, come to our
parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com
and put the word Moonshine in the search bar and
you will find how Moonshine works. You can also come

(26:27):
to our website which is missing history dot com and
you will find show notes the link that I just
talked about to the Visualizing Emancipation project at the Digital
Scholarship Lab, an archive of every single episode we have
ever done, lots of other cool stuff, so you can
do all that and a whole lot more how stuff
Works dot com or a miss than history dot com

(26:49):
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