Moonshine, illegal, untaxed whiskey distilled by the "light of the
Moonshining in the United States dates back to colonial days, but the industry's most infamous period began with Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s and continued after its repeal and the establishment of the alcohol tax. As time progressed, a vocabulary evolved around moonshining. The term "bootlegger" is said to have originated with the mandate against the sale of alcohol to Indians, when traders often concealed flasks of liquor in their boots to avoid detection. By the early twentieth century, a bootlegger was technically the seller of illegal alcohol, the moonshiner was the producer, and those who transported the product were called "runners" or "blockaders." But often these duties overlapped, with moonshiners delivering their own products or runners selling some as well. Law enforcement officials attempting to stop moonshiners were nicknamed "revenuers."
Despite the ban on the production and sale of liquor, there was a great deal of demand for it, and moonshiners did their best to meet that demand. Before Prohibition became law with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, bootleggers traveled regular routes like milkmen, going door to door delivering whiskey in saddlebags and hot water bottles. During the Prohibition era, Chicago was considered the center of illegal liquor activity. But the secluded stills of the rural South produced the life and legend most associated with moonshine, rising out of places such as Dawson County, Ga.; Cocke County, Tenn.; Franklin County, Va.; and Wilkes County, N.C.-once the self-proclaimed "Moonshine Capital of the World."
Moonshining was a highly profitable industry. If a bootlegger rounded a curve and spotted a revenuer roadblock, he might just jump from the car, leaving the agents to deal with the run-away auto and its illegal cargo. Moonshiners could lose every third car and shipment and still turn a profit. Federal agents, besides combing the countryside for moonshine stills, were forced to create new ways to combat the runners. Often the agents themselves drove cars they had confiscated from bootleggers. One inventive roadblock tactic was known as "spiking." Several large nails would be embedded in a two-by-six board, and the agents would throw the "spikes" onto the road in the path of a moonshine car, shredding the tires and forcing the driver to stop.
The lore surrounding moonshine eventually made its way into popular culture. North Carolina's tradition of auto racing developed in the garages of bootleggers, particularly on the roads between North Wilkesboro and Charlotte. Legendary auto racers Junior Johnson and Curtis Turner were well-known bootleggers in the 1950s. Many of the winning entries at local Saturday night race events would be hauling illegal whiskey the following morning. Movies such as Thunder Road (1958), starring Robert Mitchum, and television series such as The Dukes of Hazzard offered both factual and fictional accounts of the exploits of moonshiners in the rural South. Moonshine Kate became wildly successful in Georgia in the late 1910s with songs such as "The Drinker's Child," paving the way for a niche industry of bootlegger songsters. The most famous was hard-drinking, three-fingered banjo player and renowned bootlegger Charlie Poole, who, with his North Carolina Ramblers, recorded a string of massively successful albums in the late 1920s, touting hits including "Take a Drink On Me" and "Good-bye Booze." Poole died young, however, fittingly expiring in 1931 at the end of an epic bender.
There is a large body of literature regarding moonshine, one that is likely to increase in the twenty-first century as the actual practice of moonshining is supplanted by trafficking in other contraband and bootlegging recedes into the realms of romantic nostalgia. In reality, much illegal liquor was virtual poison, high in lead salts, although some excellent distillers undoubtedly came up through the moonshine ranks. Even by the early 2000s, Stokes County white liquor had found favor in the nonbackwoods, supposedly sophisticated Research Triangle area of central North Carolina.