Reviewed by Peter Slavin

In 1934, Col. Thomas Bailey, a decorated World War I veteran, went undercover on behalf of the federal government in Franklin County, Virginia, to infiltrate and prosecute those involved in its notorious moonshine trade. Posing as a buyer of homemade alcohol, Bailey ate meals with and befriended bootleggers, hung out in backroom bars, recorded the names of rumrunners and studied their routes. People cooperated even after learning he was an investigator. He offered them legal immunity in exchange for information about the big fish, the men at the top. Bailey had discovered a grand conspiracy, involving even state and federal officials. His investigation led to the conspiracy trial of 1935 in what became known as “the moonshine capital of the world,” part of the hillbilly land of Appalachia. It was a trial that caught the nation’s attention. The noted American writer Sherwood Anderson was among the reporters who covered it.

Charles D. Thompson’s beautifully written book about what went on in Franklin County between the two world wars begins with an account of that trial. But Thompson goes far beyond the courtroom to detail the history of moonshining in America, and shows that for centuries distilling and bootlegging illegal liquor — and evading taxes on it — was as American as apple pie in many states.  After all, the Whisky Rebellion of 1794, which was just that, was fought over the imposition of a tax on that product.

Thompson also delves into the surprising history of Prohibition, illuminates the economic forces that encouraged moonshining, discusses how the Irish from Ulster settled Appalachia and introduced homemade whiskey-making into the colonies, probes the competition between Anglicans and Primitive Baptists in the mountains, and describes the bringing of schools to mountain families. Not least, he relates everything readers could ever want to know about the how contraband alcohol was made.

The screen images readers may have seen or stories they may have read of caravans of rumrunners’ cars, dozens of vehicles racing down from the mountains, are true. “The whisky haulers in their souped-up cars topped a hundred miles per hour,” writes Thompson, “at time running at high speeds bumper to bumper, so close that no deputy could break in line to pull anyone over.” But Thompson shatters more important stereotypes about moonshiners. They were not lazy, drunken rednecks looking for a fast buck. They were hardworking people barely eking out a living on the farm who turned to distilling liquor in hard times to make enough cash to keep going and save their farms. In Franklin County, moonshiners were not renegade entrepreneurs but pawns in a multilevel conspiracy organized by county officials and directed by the commonwealth’s attorney.

Bailey, the undercover agent, had found every law enforcement agent in the county implicated in a protection racket. In Thompson’s words, “the supposed enforcers of the law coerced hundreds of backwoods liquor producers not only to get into the business but to pay them a fee to do so —either that or face time in jail.” To avoid prosecution for failing to pay liquor taxes, moonshiners had to pay deputies $25 for each still and $10 for each load of moonshine they hauled. Millions of dollars went to the syndicate rather than the federal treasury, most of it to the commonwealth attorney, the sheriff and other lawmen. They profited handsomely while the distillers remained as poor as ever.

The famous 1935 trial was all about this conspiracy. And so were the two trials that followed, one for jury tampering that convicted lesser officials but exonerated the commonwealth’s attorney Carter Lee despite plentiful evidence of his complicity, and another for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy who knew too much about the conspiracy. Thompson tells the tale of both trials and their back stories in fascinating detail.

Thompson’s analysis of what the conspiracy trial itself revealed is instructive:  “it was not that the Virginia mountains lacked economic activity, but that in the absence of roads, schools and jobs, people had used their skills to invent an economy from scratch, without outside help. The trouble with this strategy was that when the … federal government passed liquor laws making any moonshining illegal,  mountain whiskey production had to be put under wraps, and thus it became wide open to corruption. Instead of eradicating it, local government officials ended up in the middle of the corruption.”

Thompson’s book is eye-opening not only about the illicit liquor trade but also about the big stage on which moonshining occurred. He paints a rich picture of life in Virginia’s mountains in the 1930s. He accomplishes much of this by telling the story of James Goode Hash, a farmer, Primitive Baptist minister and horse-and-buggy mail carrier who was a character witness at the conspiracy trial. “Traveling at a horse’s pace through the community,” writes Thompson of Hash, “he took time to speak to neighbors, help them decipher their mail, and spread any news he learned from them from farm to farm as he went. … He sometimes took his family’s canned goods back to needy families.” Elder Goode, as he was known, was a key member of his farming community and through his work and extracurricular services to his neighbors we see some of the day-to-day ways, hardships and simple pleasures of farming people.

Moonshining has been written about before. But it’s unlikely any previous treatment compares to Thompson’s in doing justice both to the business and its setting in a certain American time and place.

Freelance journalist Peter Slavin has been doing feature and investigative work in Appalachia since 1995, covering local struggles against Big Coal as they developed into a national movement. He’s also written about rural school consolidation, novelist Denise Giardina’s run for office, the “mine wars” a century ago, wind farms and music. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post magazines, Teacher Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and the Financial Times.