As we heard about in episode forty one, The World's Worst Sandwich. The
United States of America has a long and storied history with alcohol, and more
specifically the banning and abolition of it. Today, however, is a look
at how in the early to mid nineteen hundreds 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, a pastime whereby if you can
keep your foot planted on the accelerator and 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 the South initially souped up their cars and learned
to drive fast in order to evade the law, and how those very skills
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
unique relationship with alcohol that spans almost its entire history. In fact, in
one of its most well known origin stories, One of the main and seemingly
crucial facts is consistently left out of the story even to this day. The
Mayflower carried with it some of America's very first settlers, the Pilgrims, who
were fleeing religious persecution and seeking a fresh start in a new land. Now
we all know they landed at Plymouth Rock, established a colony, and the
rest is history. Right Well, it may interest you to know that their
intended destination was in fact what we know today as New York. But as
they approached the Massachusetts coastline, they began to fear that their rations of beer
were hovering awfully low. This was seemingly too catastrophic for them to even consider,
and so as soon as a safe port could be identified, they docked
their ship and disembarked, not being able to wait the rest of the trip
to replenish their alcohol stores. In no 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
alcohol they gave them, the easier they were to negotiate favorable deals with In
time, drinking problems would arise in the native populations because of this, and
they would then be castigated by the settlers for their rowdy behavior, even though
it had been a problem of the settler's own making. I'm sure it also
didn't help that the water sources in the colonies weren't always to be trusted and
could contain potentially harmful or even deadly bacteria. So what did people turn to
as a viable and safer alternative? Beer? Of course, the correct brewing
method meant that the harmful bacteria was killed in the process and made it far
safer to drink, despite its negative effects. In an effort to curb some
of these side effects, many early Americans, including most notably George Washington,
would endeavor to produce what they termed as 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 no firmly defined legal drinking age in the
United States, and on the odd occasion where there was, it was usually
something low like fifteen years, and even then hardly ever enforced by the local
police. And while laws since those early days have changed and fluctuated, there
have been moments in history where a group of people got together and decided that,
in fact, an all out ban on 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 in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban
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, and political factors. One of the main reasons
was the belief that alcohol was a major contributor to many societal problems, such
as poverty, crime, and domestic violence. Many religious groups, particularly the
Women's Christian Temperance Union, campaigned for prohibition as a means to promote morality and
to protect families. It was also seen as a way to improve public health
and reduce the burden on hospitals and prisons. Supporters also believed that it would
increase productivity and reduce absenteism in the workplace. In the months leading up to
the prohibition itself, the writing was on the war for alcohol producers, and
they could see the coming alcoholic apocalypse very clearly. Winemakers especially had an overwhelming
amount of stock that they did not want to be left holding once the law
came into effect. This led them to slash their prices in order to get
as man many people to buy from them as possible, and in the process
filled their stores and sellers for the coming drought, and Americans happily complied.
Within just three months, the winemakers would 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 named Horatio Lanza knew that if he simply bent
his own morals a bit, he could stand to make a fortune, so
in the rush to sell all of this wine, he personally bought just over
one point three million gallons of the stuff, storing it in anticipation of the
coming laws, and eventually made a killing 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 the practice of prohibition so much more difficult to
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 to coast. And it's that last part of
the sentence that will rarely be focusing in on just a little bit further into
this episode. The government was unable to effectively enforce the law, and so
many people just continued to drink despite the ban. In fact, the consumption
of alcohol actually increased during prohibition as people 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 would go to in order to make or consume
the alcoholic beverages they loved so much. Today, we're going to run through
a few of the more notable and fun examples and then speak about one of
the more long term and potentially unintended positive benefits of these illegal practices. To
begin with, there were your obvious smuggling tactics, like the one named the
booze mule, which simply entailed a man strapping a waistcoat to himself with ten
to fifteen pockets sewon entered into each one of these pockets, he would slip
a flask of liquor, to then be surreptitiously distributed to any paying customers.
This was a brash and easily busted ruse, when police would more often than
not notice a man waddling slightly with his 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
of the time as well as their lady counterparts. They would walk elegantly down
the street, enter their favorite coffee house, order their beverage of choice,
and then take a seat somewhere in the parlor. When their beverage would arrive,
the walking stick they'd been carrying along with them down the street would once
again appear. A small button on the handle would be pressed and a flap
would open up, revealing an entirely hollow 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 rather to merely strap a small flock us to
their thighs that was held in place by their garters. Then there is the
fantastic pun based solution that gets my vote simply for the wordplay alone. Men
and women would carry a fake book around with them that had been hollowed out
internally to hold a small flask of alcohol. Attached to the flask was a
little pipe with a cap or a cork 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, and because of this, the title of the
book emblazoned across its cover was the cleverly named four Swallows. The bootleggers themselves
had some rather unique methods of trying to disguise their activities as well, and
possibly the most ingenious of all was when moonshiners tending their stills in the forests
and countrysides crafted and then wore specially designed shoes with wooden blocks fastened to the
soles. These wooden blocks had been specially carved to leave what appeared to be
nothing more than a cow's hoof print in the soil, making sure that law
enforcement officers wouldn't be able to track their 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 torpedoes to smuggle booze across the Detroit River
from Canada into the United States. The torpedoes were filled with alcohol and then
pulled from bank to bank via a system of underwater cables and pulleys. At
its peak, these torpedoes were smuggling up to forty cases of alcohol an hour
across the river. Prohibition also had many unintended consequences. It led to the
loss of vast amounts of jobs in the legal alcohol industry, and so many
people, simply so that they could put 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 variety of reasons. For some, it
was just a simple way to continue to consume alcohol despite the ban. Naturally,
the demand for alcohol didn't just disappear with the ban, and therefore many
people were willing to pay a premium for it. Now, even before the
prohibition, secret distilleries had been running for decades in the rural areas across the
South brewing up home made spirits to sell under the radar and crucially far away
from any sorts of taxes. The name we all know it as moonshine came
directly from the need to conduct these sorts of operations in secret. Distillers would
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 immigrant workers throughout the South took this opportunity to
start making some extra cash by producing and 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 a twenty or thirty mile radius. But when
prohibition happened, I'm sure you can imagine how even the small time producers went
into overdrive to meet the rising demand. It also just so happened to coincide
with the rise of mass produced automobiles, which opened up a whole new world
of possibilities bootleggers began replacing their small time forty gallons stills with ones that could
hold up to one thousand gallons and began hiding them in swamps, dense forests,
and in caves around the Appalachian Mountains. For others without any historical legacy
of moonshining, this new business model simply offered them a means of making a
living. The legal alcohol industry had been shut down, and bootlegging provided away
for these people to continue to earn a living and support their families. And
along with that, the increase in the illegal production of alcohol brought more money
into the region as a whole, which helped boost the local economies. In
addition, the government's efforts to enforce prohibition were often ineffective. The government did
not have the resources or the will power to fully enforce the law, and
many people were able to continue to produce and sell their homemade alcohol with very
little fear of getting caught. These bootleggers, who operated mostly in the South,
had to be resourceful and creative in order 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 could go even more covert and underground in the
distribution of their product. But there was a third option that became the one
they inevitably went for. No stopping of their production and certainly no sneaking around
with it. No. This option was 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 were shipping smaller quantities, they would often turn
to creative tactics, like using secret compartments hidden within their vehicles to conceal their
moonshine. But each distillery began producing more and more alcohol and could no longer
keep up with the demand just by hiding the alcohol in their vehicles, so
they turned to another solution. The distilleries began employing drivers who, by all
outward appearances would simply be shuttling around town in ordinary looking cars. But it
was what was hiding underneath the normal exterior that made these cars by no means
ordinary. The vehicles were outfitted with heavy duty shocks and springs to absorb the
rough terrain of the back roads, and bumpy mountain passes. The seats in
the back were often removed in order to ship more booze, and the regular
engines were replaced with high performance racing engines to make sure these cars could outrun
any corps or tax agents they might stumble upon while out on a delivery.
But it wasn't just the cars that were extraordinary, it was the drivers themselves
too. They knew every path, road, twist and turn throughout their areas,
and this came in handy at high speeds, as they always knew when
to break or when they could get away with going flat out. Sometimes at
night, when the police were in hot pursuit, their in depth knowledge of
the roads allowed them to turn their head head lights off and simply drive by
intuition, the cops losing them in the darkness. To practice for their inevitable
encounters with the fuzz, they would often race each other on these back roads
and highways, honing their driving skills while 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 local legends, and their races became a source
of entertainment for many people. In the beginning, these races tended to only
happen as the result of two bootleggers bragging to each other as to which of
them had the faster car. But in time they became something to look forward
to on the weekends, when spectators would gather at the start and finish lines
to watch these dared devils go head to head. There is a legend that
is still spoken of about a man named Jelly Roll who supposedly operated a secret
garage hidden deep in the woods right by the North Carolina and Virginia state line.
Here, if you were trusted enough to ever find out where his garage
was, and if you were ever personally introduce us to him by a trusted
accomplice, you too could have him make you a car so powerful as to
be almost untouchable and uncatchable by the authorities. There is a fantastic old tale
talabled by a man named Bill Blair, who tells the story of his father,
Bill Blair Senior, and his escapades with the law. One night,
an early model Ford was speeding down the winding back roads of North Carolina.
It was driven by Bill Blair Senior and was loaded to the hilt with white
liquor. A few hundred yards up the road, his friend Elma was driving
like a maniac, possibly after having imbibed a little too much of his own
precious cargo. This erratic driving caught the 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 in front of him, hung back a bit
and watched it all unfold in front of him. Elma screeched around the corners,
narrowly missing signposts, and led the policeman on a wild back roads goose
chase. After about ten or fifteen minutes of this, with Bill making sure
to stay just close enough to the action 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, but ended 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 was shimmering out of the side window, disappearing
into the forest. The policeman who had been chasing him exited their own vehicle
and began firing their weapons into the dense, dark forest where they thought they
had last seen him run. As Bill approached the scene and began to slow
down his own car, Elma jumped out of a nearby tree somewhere behind the
policeman, opened Bill's side door and shouted, let's go. The roar of
Bill's engine as his vehicle sprung into life alerted the police, and as Bill
spared past them, the chase was once again back on. With Elma in
the passenger seat and one hundred and twenty gallons of alcohol in the back,
his car was a lot heavier and a lot slower than usual. Soon the
police had caught up to them, and Bill, not just a fast driver,
but an intelligent one too, slowed down just enough to allow the police
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 at the side of the road. Twenty minutes
later, Bill and Elmer rolled up to the secret cabin along the Dan River,
which had doors just big enough to drive through and hide the car inside.
This was just another night for two experienced drum runners. As the nineteenth
thirties wore on and prohibition was finally lifted, the demand for bootlegged alcohol waned.
This left behind it a group of men now out of work, but
were souped up cars in a skill set that no one needed. They began
turning to these back road races as a way to earn some money, but
it was measly amounts and the risks were often great. But on December fourteenth,
nineteen forty seven, a man named Big Bill France, a driver in
his own right, called a meeting of all the other drivers, car owners,
and mechanics in the area. He proposed the idea of taking these back
road races and formalizing them into one cohesive racing league with standardized rules so as
to ensure the fairness across the board, because these weren't specially designed racing cars,
but rather standard issue models or stock cars with souped up parts. The
new league became known as the National Association 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 first year. Our old friend Bill Blair Senior,
the daring late night bootleg driver would go on to win a championship race
in Danville, Virginia, but then just another three races over the next one
hundred and twenty three between then and nineteen fifty eight, when he retired.
But he was not the only former Moonschina to find their true calling in NASCAR.
Another man and future NASCAR Hall of Famer went by the name of Junior
Johnson. Junior, whose real name was Robert Glenn Johnson, used to run
illegal whisky from his family still to the underground bars in the nearby cities.
He was known for his high speed driving, but would eventually get caught by
police and serve eleven months in prison for his bootlegging antics. His release from
prison just so happened to coincide with the birth of NASCAR, and he decided
to turn his attention to where his true 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 races in 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 team owner and was instrumental in the continued growth
and popularity of NASCAR across America. Now, it is no hidden secret that
the early boom in the sport was funded not by sponsorships or spectator ticket money,
but primarily by illicit moonshine money being funneled back into the sport. That
credits the very same Moonshine as the place it all began. Junior Johnson was
once asked why early moonshiners seemingly made the best NASCAR drivers, and he responded
with a simple but profound answer. Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought
and love into their cars than any other races ever will the stakes were always
so much higher. You see, when you lose on the track, you
still get to go home, but lose with a load of whiskey in your
car and you go to jail. This show is made entirely by me,
Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having been made by the enigma that
is the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to support the show, the
simplest way to do that is over on our Patreon account. There's just one
option, so for just two bucks a month, you'll help me keep producing
this show, and in return, you'll get your name forever etched onto our
supporter's Wall of Fame over on our website and then maybe listen out for your
name in an upcoming episode. So, until next time, bon appetite,