Jim Bradshaw: When the sugar went into stills, not coffee cups

When south Louisiana men were hauled into court during Prohibition and accused of making moonshine whiskey, at least a handful of them seemed genuinely surprised to find out that the mess of tubes and barrels discovered in their cabins was actually a still.
For example, two men accused of operating a still in the middle of a south Louisiana swamp told federal magistrate W. Alex Robertson they had “nothing whatever” to do with the strange piece of plumbing that was in their cabin. They said “they are by trade timbermen” who were “sent to the isolated cabin to stay while cutting trees,” that the still was already in the cabin, and they did not use it.
The judge voiced some skepticism over their story, especially after he got a whiff of what was in jars that the men also “found” in the cabin.
In another instance, the manager of a farm near Opelousas said he was “in absolute ignorance” of a moonshine operation uncovered in a cabin on the place.
He said the cabin had been leased to a tenant who had recently moved, and surely that unnamed man must have simply left his still behind.
If that was the case, the sheriff said, the tenant abandoned “a modern moonshine operation” that was so ingenious that “it seemed a real pity to break it up.”
A newspaper said “the plant consisted of two stills, one of a large capacity; two oil stoves; ten molasses barrels full of fermenting ‘mash’; one drum of oil; ten gallons of ‘white mule’; gallon measures, corn meal, and innumerable other articles absolutely needed for the operation of a modern moonshine outfit.”
The “mash” ─ grain (usually corn) mixed with sugar and water and allowed to ferment ─ was destroyed, but the rest of the apparatus was loaded onto a wagon and “attracted a good-sized crowd” when it was hauled into town.
  A storekeeper was arrested in Lafayette for stocking what was described as “a lot of this new kind of kicking stuff that masquerades under the name of wine,” that could be made and sold as “medicine.”
When the merchant protested, he’d done nothing illegal, the judge noted that more than forty cases of the stuff were found in his store and wondered aloud if there were that many sick people needing “medicine” in Lafayette.
Not all of the protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears. Many of the defendants who were charged under a pre-Prohibition state law had to be set free.
That law made it illegal to sell liquor without a proper license, but the state supreme court ruled that the new federal law made it impossible to get a license. The court held that the state could not require a license if there was no way to get one.
In the federal courts. juries of their peers were often sympathetic to the moonshiners, and found them not guilty or gave them only a minor fine.
Lots of the jurors were probably making illegal hootch themselves.
In fact, stills became so prevalent in south Louisiana that the Crowley Signal, without saying just how its editors knew this, warned in 1921 that overproduction was killing the moonshine market.
“Moonshine preferred has dropped from $15 to $5 per quart and moonshine common can be had as low as $1 per quart,” the paper said.
“Honest” moonshiners were getting panicky because “the market is glutted … and everybody and his brother is manufacturing instead of purchasing the product.”
There seemed to be no worry about honest grocers who were having trouble keeping sugar on their shelves because of the huge amounts going into corn mash instead of morning coffee.
 A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.