By Scott Longman
Moonshine running.
Almost no modern American thinks that was a bad thing. Oh, was there some bad aspect to it? Sure. But mostly not: system wide, it proved to be nothing more than willing producers serving willing markets, fit to make Adam Smith sit up and invest in the S&P 500. And to further prove that point, the more notable historic moonshine runners, like NASCAR great Junior Johnson, ended up with nicknames like “The Last American Hero.” More currently, everyone reading this knows the fictional names “Bo and Luke Duke.” It’s not just that we know them, but that we holler in their support.
Why?
Because, at its core, the entire idea of moonshine running was a rebellion against a tyrannical, overbearing federal government.
At the risk of serious oversimplification, some moralistic voices got enough support for a Constitutional amendment, and just like that, all hooch was now bandit. But the Unintended Consequences Effect was in full force: the American appetite for a few cold ones remained unabated, unrepentant, and immediately addressed by the black market, both domestic and imported. Some sources state that total prohibition resulted only in a mere 20-30 percent reduction in national consumption. There are even those who will claim it actually increased.
Appalachian Defiance
That amendment encroached on the livelihoods of families who had been making and selling moonshine for very literally generations, where moonshining supplemented an otherwise often-meager income. Never mind that everyone involved, from maker to transporter to distributor to consumer thought it was a wonderful idea. Nope. The no-hall-pass-for-you people saw that they had a way to take them down.
Magnificently, the many peoples of several Appalachian states weren’t having it.
The first step was, of course, production. The details of that are far beyond the scope of this article, but in one sentence: The moonshine still was typically well away from the home of its owner, and often the production was conducted at night, so that the smoke from the fire was hard to see, giving rise to the “moonshine” moniker.
But the next step was transportation to market. And that’s where the moonshine running car came in. Hard to believe now that we live in an era of Motorola repeaters, sat comms, drones, and helicopters, but back in the day, you really could outrun the long arm of them revenuers. Well, if you knew how to drive.
And if you’d built the right car.
Building a Moonshine Runner
A proper moonshine-running car had to be carefully modified for its mission. The first issue was simply profile. No stereotypical muscle cars or sports cars need apply. Instead, it was a big American sedan, usually four-door, both for its load carrying capacity and its gray-man look. Likewise, no scoops, no spoilers, no stripes, no mag wheels, no stickers, no callout badges. Paint jobs ran toward the drab, lots of dark or earth tones.
One thing the moonshiners couldn’t avoid was performance tires, because if they had to run, that was critical. But that performance profile could be reduced by mounting the tires on plain steel wheels. If the tires came with the raised-white-letter look, all they had to do was mount that to the inside. As to suspension, it had be heavily beefed, both for cornering capability and for carrying the load. Typical were heavy-duty leaves in the rear, and oversized torsion bars or coils in the front, with matched shock absorbers. Sometimes, when not loaded with moonshine, the stance of those cars looked odd, but you could always throw a bunch of sandbags in the trunk if you just had to go buy groceries.
Then, there was the motor. While stealth was generally to be preferred, if a moonshiner had the rollers come on behind him, he very literally had to be capable of outrunning them. In an era long before turbos and EFI, the answer was a good ol’ Detroit big-block, with all the appurtenances thereto: at least a four-barrel carb, high compression, big camshaft, worked heads, dual exhaust, and lots of other speed tricks of the era. Semi-informed supposition is that the differential gearing tended to favor top-end running over stoplight acceleration – at the time, before the widespread use of overdrive, you could pick one or the other, but not go extreme in both.
Did it all actually work? The conclusive proof is that they kept doing it. Was it foolproof? No. Although enough moonshiners succeeded to make it worth doing, some of them did get whisked off to Graybar Cove.
Moonshining ultimately went away for a combined whole bunch of reasons. It would be cool to think it was only improvements in enforcement, including the ability the take down a bandit car. But it was mostly, as in so much of human behavior, simple economics. Lawful competition and increased production costs are mostly what did it.
That moonshine running ultimately tapered off will never diminish the epic spirit that created it.
