The lesson of Max Watman’s Chasing the White Dog is that American history and whiskey are kin. From the Revolution until at least the 1950s, whiskey-making was simply smart farming. Yeoman-distillers used unsold peaches, apples, and corn to make liquor and sell it to neighbors. A North Carolina old-timer named Bluford McGee tells Watman early on that his father, famed for his apple brandy, would blow an industrial whistle to signal townsfolk that the prized first batch was ready. Young McGee’s schoolteacher, his mouth atwitch, would put on his hat mid-lecture and leave a “clear streak of sunshine behind him.” Distilling was universally felt to be legitimate, any law to the contrary notwithstanding.
From the Revolution until at least the 1950s, whiskey-making was simply smart farming.
Whiskey and taxes, locals have long felt, mix none too well. An excise tax provoked the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Where the Treasury Secretary Hamilton saw revenue, Jefferson saw an “armament against the people at their ploughs.” The Internal Revenue Service, established to finance the Civil War, could declare by 1878 that the annual loss from whiskey-tax evasion equaled the annual appropriation for collections nationwide. (The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was part of the Treasury Department until 2003.) The South’s backwoods distillers battled irs men for decades after the war. Yet even in 1869 Brooklyn, Marines needed fixed bayonets to overpower a mob defending an illicit distillery.
Odd, then, those thirteen unlucky years of Prohibition (1920–1933, RIP), which proved
