MN 13

Hello, everyone! Phoenix Woman here, sitting in for Pouting Baby while he recovers from a nasty case of diaper rash takes the evening off. Hope you’re all doing well tonight.

The subject of tonight’s post: Moonshine. See, during World War I, the Federal government encouraged farmers to produce more foodstuffs than ever before, as it was needed for the war effort. The government guaranteed prices for crops, which spurred farmers to borrow money to buy more land and to invest heavily in the first generations of motorized farm equipment. Unfortunately, when the war ended, so did the price supports, and millions of farmers nationwide were suddenly faced with huge debts they had almost no hope of repaying, and land they had bought just a year or two earlier was suddenly worth only a small fraction of the price they’d paid for it. Thus began the Farm Depression, which foreshadowed, and contributed to, the Great Depression that would follow a decade later.

The Farm Depression was extremely severe. Families that had recently expected to create long-lasting prosperity for themselves were soon faced with starvation. No region of the country was spared. But, because of a quirk of fate, some regions were given a way to ease the pain and to even achieve prosperity for a few years — though at the price of learning a contempt for the law and societal structures. One of these regions was Minnesota’s Stearns County.

The lifeline for Stearns County turned out to be the Volstead Act, or the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, that banned the sale of alcohol in the United States of America. While the Volstead Act — named, ironically enough, for the prohibitionist Minnesota congressman who sponsored it — made booze illegal, it certainly didn’t stop people from drinking. What it did was fuel the rise of various organized-crime syndicates, collectively known as “the Mafia“, and cause normally-law-abiding Americans to turn to drinking unsafe “bathtub gin”, expensive whiskies smuggled in from Canada or Mexico, or — in the case of Stearns County’s residents — become master distillers on the sly. They were well equipped for this, as most of them were German, Polish or Irish Catholics with both a long tradition of drinking and brewing and a shared religious belief that had sacramental wine as a featured component. Priests not only preached against Prohibition from the pulpit, they often actively aided the moonshiners among their parishioners, and some even became moonshiners themselves.  [cont'd.]

The grain used in the creation of most Stearns County liquor was Minnesota 13, a high-yield, short-season corn variety developed by University of Minnesota agronomists that allowed Minnesota farmers to grow corn as a cash crop. One farmer was so proud of his double-distilled product that he started putting “Minnesota 13″ on the labels he painstakingly lettered by hand, and soon all Stearns County liquor went by that name. Its superior quality, relatively low price, and easy availability soon caused it to become the whiskey of choice at Al Capone’s Chicago speakeasies; this saved him the problems — and deaths — presented by engaging in machine-gun battles at the Canadian and Mexican borders.

In the current discussion of what legalization of marijuana might bring, some people have pointed to the use of National Park Service lands as surreptitious marijuana farms by Mexican drug cartels, suggesting that legalizing weed wouldn’t cause these cartels to suddenly give up their pot farms. But the experience of Stearns County shows otherwise. Once Prohibition was repealed in 1933, all the money — and the profit motive — went out of moonshining. One producer cited in Elaine Davis’ book on the subject stated that repeal of Prohibition cost him $30,000 in revenue.

One should also note the similar motives behind the Stearns County moonshiners of the 1920s and many of the marijuana growers in Mexico. Just as poverty and the opportunity presented by criminalizing booze led to normally law-abiding Minnesota farmers becoming moonshiners, the inability of Mexican farmers to make a living growing food crops (an inability that was touched off by NAFTA) fuels both Mexican emigration and drug importation to the US — and cartel-led drug smuggling is far more violent and deadly than undocumented worker emigration. But one suspects that too many people are making too much money from the artificially-high prices created by drug prohibition for them to willingly give up their gravy trains, no matter how many people die at or near our borders.