After we moved to West Virginia, we realized a lot of people, our families included, had a somewhat distorted idea of the state. The first visitors we had after we moved were mostly amazed that we didn’t live in a trailer park, or at the very least a “double-wide” somewhere out in the sticks. Most of them, at first, didn’t believe us when we told them we were almost a suburb of Washington, D.C. and lived closer to New York City than our own state capital.
One thing that most were aware of was moonshine — moonshine is almost synonymous with West Virginia. Tennessee is known for their whiskey and Kentucky is known for Bourbon, but when a lot of people think of moonshine, they think West Virginia.
Usually when people think of moonshine, they think about rednecks tramping through the Appalachian backwoods, making white lightning in illegal stills. During the years of prohibition, millions of gallons of moonshine were sold — often the supply couldn’t keep up with the demand. After prohibition ended in 1933, the moonshine trade plummeted. Recently, the beverage seems to be making a comeback. Almost all liquor stores today sell some sort of moonshine, a lot of it “packaged” in mason jars.
After the Revolutionary War, the nation found itself fairly deep in debt. To help pay off the country’s obligations, a federal tax on liquor was established. Now since one of the main reasons the war was fought in the first place was to escape taxes instituted by the British, American citizens were furious over the tax and most people continued to distill their own whiskey without giving the government its cut. Of course the government sent tax collectors out and that didn’t go over big either and eventually led to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The militia supposedly stamped out the rebel movement, but in actuality only served to drive whiskey distillers further underground. The liquor tax was repealed by Thomas Jefferson, but 60 years or so later, the expenses incurred by the Civil War brought back the liquor taxes.
Today “XXX” usually means an adult movie. In some of the western movies I saw growing up, the saloons often had big jug sitting around with “XXX” on it. Turns out that “XXX” stood for moonshine, and more specifically, moonshine that had been triple-distilled. In the days portrayed in the western movies, the equipment for producing moonshine was rather crude, but after the third run, the jug contained some serious stuff — so it was labeled with three X’s.
Today we read about all the schemes used by narcotics traders to smuggle their product. People that smuggle alcohol have been using most of those schemes for years. A lot of the earliest NASCAR drivers were former (or current) moonshiners. Possibly due to driving skills acquired while outrunning the revenuers. The term “bootlegging,” sometimes used in conjunction with the moonshine business is derived from smuggling — transporting alcohol in a boot.
Bootlegging was a term I heard often growing up in Oklahoma. Oklahoma was one of the last holdouts in terms of allowing (legal) sales of alcoholic beverages. What is now the state of Oklahoma was Indian Territory and it was against federal law to sell or give alcohol to American Indians. In 1889 Indian Territory became Oklahoma Territory and was opened to non-Indian settlement. Saloons began operating adjacent to Indian lands. The liquor traffic was so heavy over the next twenty years, that when Oklahoma became a state in 1907, framers of the state constitution included the prohibition of all alcoholic beverages. Of course that didn’t stop the distilling, selling, and consuming of moonshine. After national prohibition was repealed in 1933, the state legislature, influenced by religious conservatism, passed a law declaring that nothing stronger than 3.2 beer, in alcohol percentage level, could be sold in Oklahoma. That law was not repealed until 1959.
Because of Oklahoma laws moonshine and, especially, the bootlegger who sold illegal whiskey to his customers have played a unique part in the history of the state. Because the law prohibited the selling of 3.2 beer where dancing was allowed, the bootlegger became a major fixture at dance halls. A lot of Oklahoma folk legends are of bootleggers (like many West Virginia folk legends are moonshiners.)
Bootleggers in Oklahoma, since 1933, usually didn’t peddle moonshine though — most sold liquor that had been legally distilled and bottled and “imported” from other states.
So it turns out that both my native and adopted states have a deep-rooted history in the illegal alcohol business.
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