Jim Bradshaw: What Prohibition? The spirits kept flowing

Federal agents and local sheriffs worked overtime in Prohibition days to keep illegal spirits from making Christmas cheer too cheerful, but only with limited success.
The law banning the sale of liquor in the U.S. went into effect in 1920. It was almost immediately challenged (unsuccessfully) in Louisiana by a wine exporter from  Paris, who argued that the 1803 Louisiana Purchase Treaty gave France the perpetual right to send liquor to the Louisiana Territory.
It was an interesting argument, but it didn’t work. It also didn’t make much difference. Folks in Louisiana didn’t pay any attention to all that legal mumbo-jumbo. They were too busy making their own replacements for the outlawed booze. Over the next decade they created a supply system that rivaled even  the biggest retailers, despite occasional interruptions by the law — often at this time of year when the bootleggers were busiest.
The New Era newspaper in Eunice reported in late December 1931, “Those who have not obtained their Christmas supply of liquor should hurry if they do not wish to pay a high price [for it]. … Prohibition officers … have been rather active in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes, arresting rum runners who were off to selected markets with their cargoes.
“For three successive weeks raids have been conducted in these two parishes, stills and whisky having been destroyed. This week, the officers, working on tips, started holding up cars for their ‘firewater’.”
The Rayne Tribune reported that the feds had gone so far as to seize more than a million empty liquor bottles nationwide “to prevent bootleggers refilling.”
  None of seemed to have much effect. Two days before Christmas in 1932 the headline in the Eunice newspaper was “Booze Dealers Report Great Xmas Business.”
The article began, “St. Landry bootleggers have been doing a land office business. … The fame of St. Landry’s liquid corn has brought hundreds of customers from far and wide.” The newspaper said “current reports” were that “a great portion of the output of more than a thousand stills was gobbled up by rum runners of Texas and Oklahoma.”
 That outside business cut into the supply for local consumption, and the good St. Landry stuff was scarcer “than at any time since prohibition went into effect and St. Landry farmers discovered that corn in liquid form was more profitable than corn in the shuck.”
St. Landry bootleggers made the “choicest” liquor because they reportedly aged it longer than in most other places. Because of that, “rum runners from New Orleans, who for years  have been frowning on ‘corn,’ have been transporting considerable amounts of St. Landry brand to satisfy the thirst of Crescent City merry-makers.”
That land-office business was profitable, too.
“Those in a position to judge” said that corn grown to make booze brought more money into St. Landry than its big cotton crop, which was usually worth about $2 million a year.
And it appears that St. Landry’s choice booze remained in demand even after Prohibition ended on Dec. 5, 1933.
“Some people are so used to their bootleg stuff they wouldn’t like bonded liquor,” one dealer predicted just before it was made legal again, Another told the Crowley Acadian Signal just after the era ended, that it was “hard to understand why there was any demand for bootleg liquors when good liquors can be purchased, but that those accustomed to moonshine appear to prefer it.”
The anonymous New Era writer gave no indication of how the newspaper was able to report on the moonshine industry with such authority,
Dare we suggest that an upright newspaper editor might from time to time lay in a personal supply?
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.