November 8, 2023 • 21 mins
This episode is a look at how in the early to mid 1900’s the abolitionist laws banning the production and consumption of alcohol played a majorly significant role in the creation of what, today, is a veritable institution of the American South, NASCAR.
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Sources for this episode's research:
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-fantastic-history-of-food--3591729/support.
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Please support me on Patreon for just $2 a month: patreon.com/foodhistorypod
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Sources for this episode's research:
- https://winstoncupmuseum.com/nascar-and-prohibition/#:~:text=Across%20the%20country%2C%20bootleggers%20had,cases%20of%20liquor%20as%20possible
- https://www.history.com/news/how-prohibition-gave-birth-to-nascar
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-moonshine-bootlegging-gave-rise-nascar-180962014/
- https://auto.howstuffworks.com/auto-racing/nascar/history/nascar-bootleggers.htm
- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nascar-moonshine
- https://www.ranker.com/list/ways-people-hid-alcohol-during-prohibition/kellen-perry?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=weirdhistory&utm_campaign=wh_active&utm_content=%7Bdate%28%27yyyyMMdd%27%29%7D
- https://www.ranker.com/list/facts-about-early-american-booze-consumption/rachel-souerbry?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=weirdhistory&utm_campaign=wh_active&utm_content=%7Bdate%28%27yyyyMMdd%27%29%7D
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-fantastic-history-of-food--3591729/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
As we heard about in episode fortyone, The World's Worst Sandwich. The
United States of America has a longand storied history with alcohol, and more
specifically the banning and abolition of it. Today, however, is a look
at how in the early to midnineteen hundreds the abolitionist laws banning the production
and consumption of alcohol played a majorlysignificant role in the creation of what today
(00:24):
is a veritable institution of the AmericanSouth, a pastime whereby if you can
keep your foot planted on the acceleratorand have the ability to continuously steer left,
you'll be a champion in no time. That's right. Today we're talking
about how the moonshine bootleggers of theSouth initially souped up their cars and learned
to drive fast in order to evadethe law, and how those very skills
(00:48):
would become the basis of NASCAR.These are the bizarre but true stories from
history and in some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this
is the fantastic history of food.The United States of America has a very
(01:21):
unique relationship with alcohol that spans almostits entire history. In fact, in
one of its most well known originstories, One of the main and seemingly
crucial facts is consistently left out ofthe story even to this day. The
Mayflower carried with it some of America'svery first settlers, the Pilgrims, who
were fleeing religious persecution and seeking afresh start in a new land. Now
(01:45):
we all know they landed at PlymouthRock, established a colony, and the
rest is history. Right Well,it may interest you to know that their
intended destination was in fact what weknow today as New York. But as
they approached the Massachusetts coastline, theybegan to fear that their rations of beer
were hovering awfully low. This wasseemingly too catastrophic for them to even consider,
(02:07):
and so as soon as a safeport could be identified, they docked
their ship and disembarked, not beingable to wait the rest of the trip
to replenish their alcohol stores. Inno time, these settlers would encounter the
Native Americans and begin trading with them. What they soon discovered is that the
Native Americans had no comparable drinking culture, and quickly realized that the more free
(02:29):
alcohol they gave them, the easierthey were to negotiate favorable deals with In
time, drinking problems would arise inthe native populations because of this, and
they would then be castigated by thesettlers for their rowdy behavior, even though
it had been a problem of thesettler's own making. I'm sure it also
didn't help that the water sources inthe colonies weren't always to be trusted and
(02:50):
could contain potentially harmful or even deadlybacteria. So what did people turn to
as a viable and safer alternative?Beer? Of course, the correct brewing
method meant that the harmful bacteria waskilled in the process and made it far
safer to drink, despite its negativeeffects. In an effort to curb some
of these side effects, many earlyAmericans, including most notably George Washington,
(03:12):
would endeavor to produce what they termedas small beer, which contained slightly less
alcohol than its full bodied relatives.And possibly because of all of these factors,
there was for a long time nofirmly defined legal drinking age in the
United States, and on the oddoccasion where there was, it was usually
something low like fifteen years, andeven then hardly ever enforced by the local
(03:34):
police. And while laws since thoseearly days have changed and fluctuated, there
have been moments in history where agroup of people got together and decided that,
in fact, an all out banon alcohol what was what was rarely
needed to solve the ills of society, and this thinking is what led to
the now infamous prohibition. Prohibition inthe United States was a nationwide constitutional ban
(03:57):
on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that lasted
from nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty three. The reasons were firmly rooted in a
variety of social, economic, andpolitical factors. One of the main reasons
was the belief that alcohol was amajor contributor to many societal problems, such
as poverty, crime, and domesticviolence. Many religious groups, particularly the
(04:21):
Women's Christian Temperance Union, campaigned forprohibition as a means to promote morality and
to protect families. It was alsoseen as a way to improve public health
and reduce the burden on hospitals andprisons. Supporters also believed that it would
increase productivity and reduce absenteism in theworkplace. In the months leading up to
(04:42):
the prohibition itself, the writing wason the war for alcohol producers, and
they could see the coming alcoholic apocalypsevery clearly. Winemakers especially had an overwhelming
amount of stock that they did notwant to be left holding once the law
came into effect. This led themto slash their prices in order to get
as man many people to buy fromthem as possible, and in the process
filled their stores and sellers for thecoming drought, and Americans happily complied.
(05:08):
Within just three months, the winemakerswould go on to sell one hundred and
forty one million bottles of wine,enough to fill seventy five Olympic sized swimming
pools. One particularly enterprising businessman namedHoratio Lanza knew that if he simply bent
his own morals a bit, hecould stand to make a fortune, so
(05:30):
in the rush to sell all ofthis wine, he personally bought just over
one point three million gallons of thestuff, storing it in anticipation of the
coming laws, and eventually made akilling when selling it back to people on
the black market at ridiculously inflated prices. And it was because of these very
sorts of black markets that made thepractice of prohibition so much more difficult to
(05:51):
enforce than its supporters had imagined.Along with the rise of these black markets
came the emergence of organized crime,as illegal or bars known as speakeasies and
bootlegging operations sprang up from coast tocoast. And it's that last part of
the sentence that will rarely be focusingin on just a little bit further into
this episode. The government was unableto effectively enforce the law, and so
(06:15):
many people just continued to drink despitethe ban. In fact, the consumption
of alcohol actually increased during prohibition aspeople turned to more potent and dangerous forms
of alcohol, such as bathtub gin. There are many fascinating stories from this
time detailing the lengths that people wouldgo to in order to make or consume
the alcoholic beverages they loved so much. Today, we're going to run through
(06:39):
a few of the more notable andfun examples and then speak about one of
the more long term and potentially unintendedpositive benefits of these illegal practices. To
begin with, there were your obvioussmuggling tactics, like the one named the
booze mule, which simply entailed aman strapping a waistcoat to himself with ten
to fifteen pockets sewon entered into eachone of these pockets, he would slip
(07:00):
a flask of liquor, to thenbe surreptitiously distributed to any paying customers.
This was a brash and easily bustedruse, when police would more often than
not notice a man waddling slightly withhis arms sticking out at a funny angle,
trying very hard to look normal.But there were more subtle methods for
smuggling one's personal liquor stash around town, and one that suited both the gentlemen
(07:23):
of the time as well as theirlady counterparts. They would walk elegantly down
the street, enter their favorite coffeehouse, order their beverage of choice,
and then take a seat somewhere inthe parlor. When their beverage would arrive,
the walking stick they'd been carrying alongwith them down the street would once
again appear. A small button onthe handle would be pressed and a flap
(07:44):
would open up, revealing an entirelyhollow cane filled with alcohol that could then
be discreetly decanted into their morning coffee. Other ladies of the time opted for
less mechanically complex solutions, choosing ratherto merely strap a small flock us to
their thighs that was held in placeby their garters. Then there is the
(08:05):
fantastic pun based solution that gets myvote simply for the wordplay alone. Men
and women would carry a fake bookaround with them that had been hollowed out
internally to hold a small flask ofalcohol. Attached to the flask was a
little pipe with a cap or acork in the end that could then be
poured out directly from the book itself. It held just enough, on average
for four shots of alcohol, andbecause of this, the title of the
(08:28):
book emblazoned across its cover was thecleverly named four Swallows. The bootleggers themselves
had some rather unique methods of tryingto disguise their activities as well, and
possibly the most ingenious of all waswhen moonshiners tending their stills in the forests
and countrysides crafted and then wore speciallydesigned shoes with wooden blocks fastened to the
(08:50):
soles. These wooden blocks had beenspecially carved to leave what appeared to be
nothing more than a cow's hoof printin the soil, making sure that law
enforcement officers wouldn't be able to tracktheir movements to and from their secret distillation
operations. The big city operations,with access to more advanced technology and methods,
used some old, hollowed out torpedoesto smuggle booze across the Detroit River
(09:13):
from Canada into the United States.The torpedoes were filled with alcohol and then
pulled from bank to bank via asystem of underwater cables and pulleys. At
its peak, these torpedoes were smugglingup to forty cases of alcohol an hour
across the river. Prohibition also hadmany unintended consequences. It led to the
loss of vast amounts of jobs inthe legal alcohol industry, and so many
(09:39):
people, simply so that they couldput food on their tables, turned to
illegal activities to make a living,and that is the crux of today's story.
Citizens turned to bootlegging for a varietyof reasons. For some, it
was just a simple way to continueto consume alcohol despite the ban. Naturally,
the demand for alcohol didn't just disappearwith the ban, and therefore many
(10:01):
people were willing to pay a premiumfor it. Now, even before the
prohibition, secret distilleries had been runningfor decades in the rural areas across the
South brewing up home made spirits tosell under the radar and crucially far away
from any sorts of taxes. Thename we all know it as moonshine came
directly from the need to conduct thesesorts of operations in secret. Distillers would
(10:22):
work by the light of the moon, with fewer cars on the roads and
people generally tucked up in bed inside, but also as a means to hide
the smoke rising from their stills.In fact, moonshine production dates back all
the way to the seventeen hundreds,when officials first imposed heavy taxes on the
sale of alcohol. Farmers and immigrantworkers throughout the South took this opportunity to
(10:43):
start making some extra cash by producingand selling alcohol without the cumbersome taxes attached
to it. In these early days, it was just sold locally to friends
and family within no more than atwenty or thirty mile radius. But when
prohibition happened, I'm sure you canimagine how even the small time producers went
into overdrive to meet the rising demand. It also just so happened to coincide
(11:07):
with the rise of mass produced automobiles, which opened up a whole new world
of possibilities bootleggers began replacing their smalltime forty gallons stills with ones that could
hold up to one thousand gallons andbegan hiding them in swamps, dense forests,
and in caves around the Appalachian Mountains. For others without any historical legacy
(11:28):
of moonshining, this new business modelsimply offered them a means of making a
living. The legal alcohol industry hadbeen shut down, and bootlegging provided away
for these people to continue to earna living and support their families. And
along with that, the increase inthe illegal production of alcohol brought more money
into the region as a whole,which helped boost the local economies. In
(11:48):
addition, the government's efforts to enforceprohibition were often ineffective. The government did
not have the resources or the willpower to fully enforce the law, and
many people were able to continue toproduce and sell their homemade alcohol with very
little fear of getting caught. Thesebootleggers, who operated mostly in the South,
(12:09):
had to be resourceful and creative inorder to evade the law that did
choose to crack down on their operations. Now they had a few options at
their disposal. In the scenario.First, they could go straight and shut
the operations down, or they couldgo even more covert and underground in the
distribution of their product. But therewas a third option that became the one
they inevitably went for. No stoppingof their production and certainly no sneaking around
(12:33):
with it. No. This optionwas to simply make sure that if the
police did see them transporting their goods, that those policemen simply wouldn't be able
to catch them. When they wereshipping smaller quantities, they would often turn
to creative tactics, like using secretcompartments hidden within their vehicles to conceal their
moonshine. But each distillery began producingmore and more alcohol and could no longer
(12:56):
keep up with the demand just byhiding the alcohol in their vehicles, so
they turned to another solution. Thedistilleries began employing drivers who, by all
outward appearances would simply be shuttling aroundtown in ordinary looking cars. But it
was what was hiding underneath the normalexterior that made these cars by no means
ordinary. The vehicles were outfitted withheavy duty shocks and springs to absorb the
(13:20):
rough terrain of the back roads,and bumpy mountain passes. The seats in
the back were often removed in orderto ship more booze, and the regular
engines were replaced with high performance racingengines to make sure these cars could outrun
any corps or tax agents they mightstumble upon while out on a delivery.
But it wasn't just the cars thatwere extraordinary, it was the drivers themselves
(13:41):
too. They knew every path,road, twist and turn throughout their areas,
and this came in handy at highspeeds, as they always knew when
to break or when they could getaway with going flat out. Sometimes at
night, when the police were inhot pursuit, their in depth knowledge of
the roads allowed them to turn theirhead head lights off and simply drive by
(14:01):
intuition, the cops losing them inthe darkness. To practice for their inevitable
encounters with the fuzz, they wouldoften race each other on these back roads
and highways, honing their driving skillswhile at the same time getting a chance
to show off their souped up vehicles. Many of these bootleggers who were masters
of these back road races became locallegends, and their races became a source
(14:24):
of entertainment for many people. Inthe beginning, these races tended to only
happen as the result of two bootleggersbragging to each other as to which of
them had the faster car. Butin time they became something to look forward
to on the weekends, when spectatorswould gather at the start and finish lines
to watch these dared devils go headto head. There is a legend that
is still spoken of about a mannamed Jelly Roll who supposedly operated a secret
(14:48):
garage hidden deep in the woods rightby the North Carolina and Virginia state line.
Here, if you were trusted enoughto ever find out where his garage
was, and if you were everpersonally introduce us to him by a trusted
accomplice, you too could have himmake you a car so powerful as to
be almost untouchable and uncatchable by theauthorities. There is a fantastic old tale
(15:11):
talabled by a man named Bill Blair, who tells the story of his father,
Bill Blair Senior, and his escapadeswith the law. One night,
an early model Ford was speeding downthe winding back roads of North Carolina.
It was driven by Bill Blair Seniorand was loaded to the hilt with white
liquor. A few hundred yards upthe road, his friend Elma was driving
like a maniac, possibly after havingimbibed a little too much of his own
(15:35):
precious cargo. This erratic driving caughtthe attention of some local policeman who immediately
set off after him. Bill,still trying to pretend like he had nothing
to do with this crazy driver infront of him, hung back a bit
and watched it all unfold in frontof him. Elma screeched around the corners,
narrowly missing signposts, and led thepoliceman on a wild back roads goose
(15:56):
chase. After about ten or fifteenminutes of this, with Bill making sure
to stay just close enough to theaction to see what was going on,
Elma approached a fork in the road. He faked to go right and then
pulled hard to the left, butended up sliding his car smack bang into
the side of a maple tree.No sooner had the smoke started to rise
from the crashed vehicle than Elma wasshimmering out of the side window, disappearing
(16:19):
into the forest. The policeman whohad been chasing him exited their own vehicle
and began firing their weapons into thedense, dark forest where they thought they
had last seen him run. AsBill approached the scene and began to slow
down his own car, Elma jumpedout of a nearby tree somewhere behind the
policeman, opened Bill's side door andshouted, let's go. The roar of
(16:41):
Bill's engine as his vehicle sprung intolife alerted the police, and as Bill
spared past them, the chase wasonce again back on. With Elma in
the passenger seat and one hundred andtwenty gallons of alcohol in the back,
his car was a lot heavier anda lot slower than usual. Soon the
police had caught up to them,and Bill, not just a fast driver,
but an intelligent one too, sloweddown just enough to allow the police
(17:04):
car to draw up alongside them.Just as they did so, he hid
his brakes and swerved into them,tapping the back of their car and sending
them spinning into the nearby ditch atthe side of the road. Twenty minutes
later, Bill and Elmer rolled upto the secret cabin along the Dan River,
which had doors just big enough todrive through and hide the car inside.
(17:25):
This was just another night for twoexperienced drum runners. As the nineteenth
thirties wore on and prohibition was finallylifted, the demand for bootlegged alcohol waned.
This left behind it a group ofmen now out of work, but
were souped up cars in a skillset that no one needed. They began
(17:45):
turning to these back road races asa way to earn some money, but
it was measly amounts and the riskswere often great. But on December fourteenth,
nineteen forty seven, a man namedBig Bill France, a driver in
his own right, called a meetingof all the other drivers, car owners,
and mechanics in the area. Heproposed the idea of taking these back
road races and formalizing them into onecohesive racing league with standardized rules so as
(18:11):
to ensure the fairness across the board, because these weren't specially designed racing cars,
but rather standard issue models or stockcars with souped up parts. The
new league became known as the NationalAssociation for Stock Car Auto Racing, or
as I'm sure you can guess,NASCAR. Two months later and the first
official race was held in NASCAR's firstyear. Our old friend Bill Blair Senior,
(18:34):
the daring late night bootleg driver wouldgo on to win a championship race
in Danville, Virginia, but thenjust another three races over the next one
hundred and twenty three between then andnineteen fifty eight, when he retired.
But he was not the only formerMoonschina to find their true calling in NASCAR.
Another man and future NASCAR Hall ofFamer went by the name of Junior
(18:56):
Johnson. Junior, whose real namewas Robert Glenn Johnson, used to run
illegal whisky from his family still tothe underground bars in the nearby cities.
He was known for his high speeddriving, but would eventually get caught by
police and serve eleven months in prisonfor his bootlegging antics. His release from
prison just so happened to coincide withthe birth of NASCAR, and he decided
(19:19):
to turn his attention to where histrue skill set lay, and he quickly
began to make a name for himself. He soon won his first race and
would go on to win fifty racesin his career, as well as the
overall NASCAR Championship in nineteen sixty.Once his driving days were over, Junior
Johnson went on to become a teamowner and was instrumental in the continued growth
(19:41):
and popularity of NASCAR across America.Now, it is no hidden secret that
the early boom in the sport wasfunded not by sponsorships or spectator ticket money,
but primarily by illicit moonshine money beingfunneled back into the sport. That
credits the very same Moonshine as theplace it all began. Junior Johnson was
once asked why early moonshiners seemingly madethe best NASCAR drivers, and he responded
(20:04):
with a simple but profound answer.Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought
and love into their cars than anyother races ever will the stakes were always
so much higher. You see,when you lose on the track, you
still get to go home, butlose with a load of whiskey in your
car and you go to jail.This show is made entirely by me,
(20:45):
Nick Charlie Key, with our thememusic having been made by the enigma that
is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Ifyou'd like to support the show, the
simplest way to do that is overon our Patreon account. There's just one
option, so for just two bucksa month, you'll help me keep producing
(21:07):
this show, and in return,you'll get your name forever etched onto our
supporter's Wall of Fame over on ourwebsite and then maybe listen out for your
name in an upcoming episode. So, until next time, bon appetite,
As we heard about in episode fortyone, The World's Worst Sandwich. The
United States of America has a longand storied history with alcohol, and more
specifically the banning and abolition of it. Today, however, is a look
at how in the early to midnineteen hundreds the abolitionist laws banning the production
and consumption of alcohol played a majorlysignificant role in the creation of what today
(00:24):
is a veritable institution of the AmericanSouth, a pastime whereby if you can
keep your foot planted on the acceleratorand have the ability to continuously steer left,
you'll be a champion in no time. That's right. Today we're talking
about how the moonshine bootleggers of theSouth initially souped up their cars and learned
to drive fast in order to evadethe law, and how those very skills
(00:48):
would become the basis of NASCAR.These are the bizarre but true stories from
history and in some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this
is the fantastic history of food.The United States of America has a very
(01:21):
unique relationship with alcohol that spans almostits entire history. In fact, in
one of its most well known originstories, One of the main and seemingly
crucial facts is consistently left out ofthe story even to this day. The
Mayflower carried with it some of America'svery first settlers, the Pilgrims, who
were fleeing religious persecution and seeking afresh start in a new land. Now
(01:45):
we all know they landed at PlymouthRock, established a colony, and the
rest is history. Right Well,it may interest you to know that their
intended destination was in fact what weknow today as New York. But as
they approached the Massachusetts coastline, theybegan to fear that their rations of beer
were hovering awfully low. This wasseemingly too catastrophic for them to even consider,
(02:07):
and so as soon as a safeport could be identified, they docked
their ship and disembarked, not beingable to wait the rest of the trip
to replenish their alcohol stores. Inno time, these settlers would encounter the
Native Americans and begin trading with them. What they soon discovered is that the
Native Americans had no comparable drinking culture, and quickly realized that the more free
(02:29):
alcohol they gave them, the easierthey were to negotiate favorable deals with In
time, drinking problems would arise inthe native populations because of this, and
they would then be castigated by thesettlers for their rowdy behavior, even though
it had been a problem of thesettler's own making. I'm sure it also
didn't help that the water sources inthe colonies weren't always to be trusted and
(02:50):
could contain potentially harmful or even deadlybacteria. So what did people turn to
as a viable and safer alternative?Beer? Of course, the correct brewing
method meant that the harmful bacteria waskilled in the process and made it far
safer to drink, despite its negativeeffects. In an effort to curb some
of these side effects, many earlyAmericans, including most notably George Washington,
(03:12):
would endeavor to produce what they termedas small beer, which contained slightly less
alcohol than its full bodied relatives.And possibly because of all of these factors,
there was for a long time nofirmly defined legal drinking age in the
United States, and on the oddoccasion where there was, it was usually
something low like fifteen years, andeven then hardly ever enforced by the local
(03:34):
police. And while laws since thoseearly days have changed and fluctuated, there
have been moments in history where agroup of people got together and decided that,
in fact, an all out banon alcohol what was what was rarely
needed to solve the ills of society, and this thinking is what led to
the now infamous prohibition. Prohibition inthe United States was a nationwide constitutional ban
(03:57):
on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that lasted
from nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty three. The reasons were firmly rooted in a
variety of social, economic, andpolitical factors. One of the main reasons
was the belief that alcohol was amajor contributor to many societal problems, such
as poverty, crime, and domesticviolence. Many religious groups, particularly the
(04:21):
Women's Christian Temperance Union, campaigned forprohibition as a means to promote morality and
to protect families. It was alsoseen as a way to improve public health
and reduce the burden on hospitals andprisons. Supporters also believed that it would
increase productivity and reduce absenteism in theworkplace. In the months leading up to
(04:42):
the prohibition itself, the writing wason the war for alcohol producers, and
they could see the coming alcoholic apocalypsevery clearly. Winemakers especially had an overwhelming
amount of stock that they did notwant to be left holding once the law
came into effect. This led themto slash their prices in order to get
as man many people to buy fromthem as possible, and in the process
filled their stores and sellers for thecoming drought, and Americans happily complied.
(05:08):
Within just three months, the winemakerswould go on to sell one hundred and
forty one million bottles of wine,enough to fill seventy five Olympic sized swimming
pools. One particularly enterprising businessman namedHoratio Lanza knew that if he simply bent
his own morals a bit, hecould stand to make a fortune, so
(05:30):
in the rush to sell all ofthis wine, he personally bought just over
one point three million gallons of thestuff, storing it in anticipation of the
coming laws, and eventually made akilling when selling it back to people on
the black market at ridiculously inflated prices. And it was because of these very
sorts of black markets that made thepractice of prohibition so much more difficult to
(05:51):
enforce than its supporters had imagined.Along with the rise of these black markets
came the emergence of organized crime,as illegal or bars known as speakeasies and
bootlegging operations sprang up from coast tocoast. And it's that last part of
the sentence that will rarely be focusingin on just a little bit further into
this episode. The government was unableto effectively enforce the law, and so
(06:15):
many people just continued to drink despitethe ban. In fact, the consumption
of alcohol actually increased during prohibition aspeople turned to more potent and dangerous forms
of alcohol, such as bathtub gin. There are many fascinating stories from this
time detailing the lengths that people wouldgo to in order to make or consume
the alcoholic beverages they loved so much. Today, we're going to run through
(06:39):
a few of the more notable andfun examples and then speak about one of
the more long term and potentially unintendedpositive benefits of these illegal practices. To
begin with, there were your obvioussmuggling tactics, like the one named the
booze mule, which simply entailed aman strapping a waistcoat to himself with ten
to fifteen pockets sewon entered into eachone of these pockets, he would slip
(07:00):
a flask of liquor, to thenbe surreptitiously distributed to any paying customers.
This was a brash and easily bustedruse, when police would more often than
not notice a man waddling slightly withhis arms sticking out at a funny angle,
trying very hard to look normal.But there were more subtle methods for
smuggling one's personal liquor stash around town, and one that suited both the gentlemen
(07:23):
of the time as well as theirlady counterparts. They would walk elegantly down
the street, enter their favorite coffeehouse, order their beverage of choice,
and then take a seat somewhere inthe parlor. When their beverage would arrive,
the walking stick they'd been carrying alongwith them down the street would once
again appear. A small button onthe handle would be pressed and a flap
(07:44):
would open up, revealing an entirelyhollow cane filled with alcohol that could then
be discreetly decanted into their morning coffee. Other ladies of the time opted for
less mechanically complex solutions, choosing ratherto merely strap a small flock us to
their thighs that was held in placeby their garters. Then there is the
(08:05):
fantastic pun based solution that gets myvote simply for the wordplay alone. Men
and women would carry a fake bookaround with them that had been hollowed out
internally to hold a small flask ofalcohol. Attached to the flask was a
little pipe with a cap or acork in the end that could then be
poured out directly from the book itself. It held just enough, on average
for four shots of alcohol, andbecause of this, the title of the
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book emblazoned across its cover was thecleverly named four Swallows. The bootleggers themselves
had some rather unique methods of tryingto disguise their activities as well, and
possibly the most ingenious of all waswhen moonshiners tending their stills in the forests
and countrysides crafted and then wore speciallydesigned shoes with wooden blocks fastened to the
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soles. These wooden blocks had beenspecially carved to leave what appeared to be
nothing more than a cow's hoof printin the soil, making sure that law
enforcement officers wouldn't be able to tracktheir movements to and from their secret distillation
operations. The big city operations,with access to more advanced technology and methods,
used some old, hollowed out torpedoesto smuggle booze across the Detroit River
(09:13):
from Canada into the United States.The torpedoes were filled with alcohol and then
pulled from bank to bank via asystem of underwater cables and pulleys. At
its peak, these torpedoes were smugglingup to forty cases of alcohol an hour
across the river. Prohibition also hadmany unintended consequences. It led to the
loss of vast amounts of jobs inthe legal alcohol industry, and so many
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people, simply so that they couldput food on their tables, turned to
illegal activities to make a living,and that is the crux of today's story.
Citizens turned to bootlegging for a varietyof reasons. For some, it
was just a simple way to continueto consume alcohol despite the ban. Naturally,
the demand for alcohol didn't just disappearwith the ban, and therefore many
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people were willing to pay a premiumfor it. Now, even before the
prohibition, secret distilleries had been runningfor decades in the rural areas across the
South brewing up home made spirits tosell under the radar and crucially far away
from any sorts of taxes. Thename we all know it as moonshine came
directly from the need to conduct thesesorts of operations in secret. Distillers would
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work by the light of the moon, with fewer cars on the roads and
people generally tucked up in bed inside, but also as a means to hide
the smoke rising from their stills.In fact, moonshine production dates back all
the way to the seventeen hundreds,when officials first imposed heavy taxes on the
sale of alcohol. Farmers and immigrantworkers throughout the South took this opportunity to
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start making some extra cash by producingand selling alcohol without the cumbersome taxes attached
to it. In these early days, it was just sold locally to friends
and family within no more than atwenty or thirty mile radius. But when
prohibition happened, I'm sure you canimagine how even the small time producers went
into overdrive to meet the rising demand. It also just so happened to coincide
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with the rise of mass produced automobiles, which opened up a whole new world
of possibilities bootleggers began replacing their smalltime forty gallons stills with ones that could
hold up to one thousand gallons andbegan hiding them in swamps, dense forests,
and in caves around the Appalachian Mountains. For others without any historical legacy
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of moonshining, this new business modelsimply offered them a means of making a
living. The legal alcohol industry hadbeen shut down, and bootlegging provided away
for these people to continue to earna living and support their families. And
along with that, the increase inthe illegal production of alcohol brought more money
into the region as a whole,which helped boost the local economies. In
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addition, the government's efforts to enforceprohibition were often ineffective. The government did
not have the resources or the willpower to fully enforce the law, and
many people were able to continue toproduce and sell their homemade alcohol with very
little fear of getting caught. Thesebootleggers, who operated mostly in the South,
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had to be resourceful and creative inorder to evade the law that did
choose to crack down on their operations. Now they had a few options at
their disposal. In the scenario.First, they could go straight and shut
the operations down, or they couldgo even more covert and underground in the
distribution of their product. But therewas a third option that became the one
they inevitably went for. No stoppingof their production and certainly no sneaking around
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with it. No. This optionwas to simply make sure that if the
police did see them transporting their goods, that those policemen simply wouldn't be able
to catch them. When they wereshipping smaller quantities, they would often turn
to creative tactics, like using secretcompartments hidden within their vehicles to conceal their
moonshine. But each distillery began producingmore and more alcohol and could no longer
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keep up with the demand just byhiding the alcohol in their vehicles, so
they turned to another solution. Thedistilleries began employing drivers who, by all
outward appearances would simply be shuttling aroundtown in ordinary looking cars. But it
was what was hiding underneath the normalexterior that made these cars by no means
ordinary. The vehicles were outfitted withheavy duty shocks and springs to absorb the
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rough terrain of the back roads,and bumpy mountain passes. The seats in
the back were often removed in orderto ship more booze, and the regular
engines were replaced with high performance racingengines to make sure these cars could outrun
any corps or tax agents they mightstumble upon while out on a delivery.
But it wasn't just the cars thatwere extraordinary, it was the drivers themselves
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too. They knew every path,road, twist and turn throughout their areas,
and this came in handy at highspeeds, as they always knew when
to break or when they could getaway with going flat out. Sometimes at
night, when the police were inhot pursuit, their in depth knowledge of
the roads allowed them to turn theirhead head lights off and simply drive by
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intuition, the cops losing them inthe darkness. To practice for their inevitable
encounters with the fuzz, they wouldoften race each other on these back roads
and highways, honing their driving skillswhile at the same time getting a chance
to show off their souped up vehicles. Many of these bootleggers who were masters
of these back road races became locallegends, and their races became a source
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of entertainment for many people. Inthe beginning, these races tended to only
happen as the result of two bootleggersbragging to each other as to which of
them had the faster car. Butin time they became something to look forward
to on the weekends, when spectatorswould gather at the start and finish lines
to watch these dared devils go headto head. There is a legend that
is still spoken of about a mannamed Jelly Roll who supposedly operated a secret
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garage hidden deep in the woods rightby the North Carolina and Virginia state line.
Here, if you were trusted enoughto ever find out where his garage
was, and if you were everpersonally introduce us to him by a trusted
accomplice, you too could have himmake you a car so powerful as to
be almost untouchable and uncatchable by theauthorities. There is a fantastic old tale
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talabled by a man named Bill Blair, who tells the story of his father,
Bill Blair Senior, and his escapadeswith the law. One night,
an early model Ford was speeding downthe winding back roads of North Carolina.
It was driven by Bill Blair Seniorand was loaded to the hilt with white
liquor. A few hundred yards upthe road, his friend Elma was driving
like a maniac, possibly after havingimbibed a little too much of his own
(15:35):
precious cargo. This erratic driving caughtthe attention of some local policeman who immediately
set off after him. Bill,still trying to pretend like he had nothing
to do with this crazy driver infront of him, hung back a bit
and watched it all unfold in frontof him. Elma screeched around the corners,
narrowly missing signposts, and led thepoliceman on a wild back roads goose
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chase. After about ten or fifteenminutes of this, with Bill making sure
to stay just close enough to theaction to see what was going on,
Elma approached a fork in the road. He faked to go right and then
pulled hard to the left, butended up sliding his car smack bang into
the side of a maple tree.No sooner had the smoke started to rise
from the crashed vehicle than Elma wasshimmering out of the side window, disappearing
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into the forest. The policeman whohad been chasing him exited their own vehicle
and began firing their weapons into thedense, dark forest where they thought they
had last seen him run. AsBill approached the scene and began to slow
down his own car, Elma jumpedout of a nearby tree somewhere behind the
policeman, opened Bill's side door andshouted, let's go. The roar of
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Bill's engine as his vehicle sprung intolife alerted the police, and as Bill
spared past them, the chase wasonce again back on. With Elma in
the passenger seat and one hundred andtwenty gallons of alcohol in the back,
his car was a lot heavier anda lot slower than usual. Soon the
police had caught up to them,and Bill, not just a fast driver,
but an intelligent one too, sloweddown just enough to allow the police
(17:04):
car to draw up alongside them.Just as they did so, he hid
his brakes and swerved into them,tapping the back of their car and sending
them spinning into the nearby ditch atthe side of the road. Twenty minutes
later, Bill and Elmer rolled upto the secret cabin along the Dan River,
which had doors just big enough todrive through and hide the car inside.
(17:25):
This was just another night for twoexperienced drum runners. As the nineteenth
thirties wore on and prohibition was finallylifted, the demand for bootlegged alcohol waned.
This left behind it a group ofmen now out of work, but
were souped up cars in a skillset that no one needed. They began
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turning to these back road races asa way to earn some money, but
it was measly amounts and the riskswere often great. But on December fourteenth,
nineteen forty seven, a man namedBig Bill France, a driver in
his own right, called a meetingof all the other drivers, car owners,
and mechanics in the area. Heproposed the idea of taking these back
road races and formalizing them into onecohesive racing league with standardized rules so as
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to ensure the fairness across the board, because these weren't specially designed racing cars,
but rather standard issue models or stockcars with souped up parts. The
new league became known as the NationalAssociation for Stock Car Auto Racing, or
as I'm sure you can guess,NASCAR. Two months later and the first
official race was held in NASCAR's firstyear. Our old friend Bill Blair Senior,
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the daring late night bootleg driver wouldgo on to win a championship race
in Danville, Virginia, but thenjust another three races over the next one
hundred and twenty three between then andnineteen fifty eight, when he retired.
But he was not the only formerMoonschina to find their true calling in NASCAR.
Another man and future NASCAR Hall ofFamer went by the name of Junior
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Johnson. Junior, whose real namewas Robert Glenn Johnson, used to run
illegal whisky from his family still tothe underground bars in the nearby cities.
He was known for his high speeddriving, but would eventually get caught by
police and serve eleven months in prisonfor his bootlegging antics. His release from
prison just so happened to coincide withthe birth of NASCAR, and he decided
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to turn his attention to where histrue skill set lay, and he quickly
began to make a name for himself. He soon won his first race and
would go on to win fifty racesin his career, as well as the
overall NASCAR Championship in nineteen sixty.Once his driving days were over, Junior
Johnson went on to become a teamowner and was instrumental in the continued growth
(19:41):
and popularity of NASCAR across America.Now, it is no hidden secret that
the early boom in the sport wasfunded not by sponsorships or spectator ticket money,
but primarily by illicit moonshine money beingfunneled back into the sport. That
credits the very same Moonshine as theplace it all began. Junior Johnson was
once asked why early moonshiners seemingly madethe best NASCAR drivers, and he responded
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with a simple but profound answer.Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought
and love into their cars than anyother races ever will the stakes were always
so much higher. You see,when you lose on the track, you
still get to go home, butlose with a load of whiskey in your
car and you go to jail.This show is made entirely by me,
(20:45):
Nick Charlie Key, with our thememusic having been made by the enigma that
is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Ifyou'd like to support the show, the
simplest way to do that is overon our Patreon account. There's just one
option, so for just two bucksa month, you'll help me keep producing
(21:07):
this show, and in return,you'll get your name forever etched onto our
supporter's Wall of Fame over on ourwebsite and then maybe listen out for your
name in an upcoming episode. So, until next time, bon appetite,
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