Still ‘Shining : White Lightning Is Striking Again; Higher Alcohol Taxes and Lack of Federal Enforcement Are Among the Reasons, Experts Say

Among the names it has known: White liquor. White lightning. Stump liquor. Bootleg whiskey. Moonshine. ‘Shine.

For years, just a mention would glaze faces with nostalgia, conjuring up visions of fast-driving booze runners and of mountain men cooking illegal whiskey in crude but ingenious stills that, from time to time, got raided by hard-driving revenuers.

But it’s not just nostalgia anymore. The moonshiners apparently had dwindled, law enforcement officials say, but had never left completely. Lately, more and more moonshine is being seized in the South. Reasons are unknown, but speculation focuses on hard times, increased taxes on legal liquor and the spinoff effect of increased crackdowns on crack, cocaine and marijuana.

“It’s just a multitude of damn things,” says Capt. Homer Jenkins of the Georgia Department of Revenue’s enforcement unit.

No national statistics are available, but Georgia revenue officials report destroying 105 illegal distilleries, or stills, in the last four years--30 last year alone. Back in the early 1980s, according to John Brady, director of the Georgia Department of Revenue’s alcohol and tobacco tax unit, “we only had one, two or three a year. There was not a lot of activity.”

“Some years ago we . . . took the position that moonshine was no longer a federal problem,” said Paul Lyon, a special agent in charge of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Charlotte, N.C. “It does appear now (that) we are seeing more incidences of trafficking in quantities that would cause us concern.”

Lately, several officials say, they have seen the retail end of the business expanding to big cities up North, including Washington, Philadelphia and New York, where home folks from down here sell the white liquor in “shot houses.”

Here in Rutledge, a village of about 700 people some 60 miles east of Atlanta, one pending case is both a reminder of another time decades ago and a sign of the new times, when the resurgence of moonshining may prompt law enforcement agencies to focus more on the issue.

Recently county sheriff’s officers seized 180 gallons of 100-proof illegal liquor at the home of William Herbert Autry and charged the 77-year-old man with possession of non-tax-paid liquor, a misdemeanor.

For his part, Autry claims not to know what all the fuss is about. “I’ve never mistreated nobody,” he declares. “I don’t know why they’re so hot on me.”

Autry, who says poor health prevents him from working, acknowledges that he made moonshine a long time ago but insists he did not produce the liquor seized at his home, a green house with a tin roof and a barking dog.

“The truck come and put it out,” he says, asserting that he does not know who left the liquor. “It was just before Christmas. Something must have happened, ‘cause they didn’t never come back.”

Meanwhile, “I sold a little of it,” he adds. “I sold it for $12 a jar, what I sold. ‘Course, I didn’t want to make no big thing out of it. I wanted to make a little off it. I didn’t know a whole lot of what was going on.”

In Madison, Ga., eight miles east of Rutledge, the seized liquor sat in neatly stacked boxes inside the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department. It was clear, poured in half-gallon canning jars--360 of them.

At $12 a jar, the ‘shine would cost $24 a gallon, just $6 more than the tax alone--federal, state and local--on a gallon of 100-proof legal liquor in Georgia. (A federal tax increase went into effect in January.) During a recession, price could be a powerful incentive for some.

Lt. Mike Pritchett shakes one of the jars, and as it fizzes slightly, he says, “You’re supposed to be able to look at the bubbles and tell how good it is, but I never learned to do that.”

For moonshine aficionados, the only real tests are the smell and the taste. Pritchett uncapped a jar for a visitor, and the smell dredged up long-forgotten memories of happy men gathering in Southern woods to sip white liquor hidden in bottles under leaves, inside stumps and hollow logs. The visitor did not taste. The liquor was evidence and will be destroyed.

But the smell also recalled the bad side of ‘shine, the stories of sickness and death attributed to bad batches of the liquor.

Descriptions of how moonshine is made show it is not for the faint-stomached.

Recipes vary but typically include cornmeal, sugar, yeast, malt and water, notes Alec Wilkinson in his book, “Moonshine.” The mixed ingredients are called mash, which, he writes, attracts insects in hot weather, and they add themselves to the mix in vats. Wilkinson also notes that some bootleggers “pack horse manure around the vat or fill a pillowcase or burlap sack with manure and lower it into the vat” to keep the mixture warm. Others have used lye or car batteries for the same purpose.

In South Carolina, where about a dozen stills are destroyed annually, Joe Dorton, chief of enforcement at the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, sneers: “If you can imagine a cross between rubbing alcohol, vodka and kerosene, that might be close. But after the fourth drink, you won’t mind.”

Indeed, moonshine has remained a favorite drink for many people. “Some older people--that’s all they want,” Pritchett says.

Many like it because it has the taste of forbidden fruit, experts say. “It’s like the child you tell, ‘Don’t do this,’ and he’s gonna bust hell wide open doing it,” says Deputy Chief Mike Wolfe of the Hancock County, Ga., Sheriff’s Department.

Drinkers in the Soviet Union make illegal liquor when they cannot get enough vodka, which is rationed, and a few U.S. soldiers in dry Saudi Arabia reportedly did as well during the Persian Gulf War.

But for the most part, moonshining is a Southern phenomenon, experts say.

Why is not known, but there are some guesses, such as the vast rural areas, large numbers of poor people looking for cheap drink and a history of rebellion against the federal government, which levies taxes on legal liquor.

That’s not to say that all Southerners like moonshine, of course. Henry Dennis, 40, who lives in Rutledge and works as a plywood painter, recalls that as a child he heard men praising “that Georgia Moon,” but he favors store-bought gin.

In the 18th Century, according to Dorton, moonshining began as “a protest by the Scotch-Irish against the government,” adding that “some of the old-timers who are in that business today do it as a protest against government regulations.” Perhaps the most hated regulations ever were those that made up Prohibition, the effort between 1920 and 1933 to prevent Americans from drinking alcohol.

In an ironic twist, officials are blaming part of their current enforcement problem on the government’s effort to save energy, charging that federal permits allowing production of fuel alcohol are being used as covers to brew white lightning. Lyon, the ATF official in Charlotte, calls this practice “one of our principal problems.”

The fuel alcohol is supposed to be mixed with gasoline to render it undrinkable. But Dorton mentions one permit holder in South Carolina who “makes a huge amount of alcohol, and we don’t believe all of that alcohol is being burned in tractor engines.”

Dorton asserts that the complicated web of federal and state laws, including privacy provisions, makes it difficult to police abuses of the alcohol fuel permits. Currently, 181 alcohol fuel permits have been granted in the Southeast, and the ATF fields 86 inspectors in the region’s seven states, according to ATF chief of technical services Myrna Gilleland in Atlanta.

No federal official will assert that the 86 inspectors, whose jobs also include checking firearms and tobacco facilities, could closely check for violations of moonshine laws. Moonshine enforcement, they point out, is a fairly low priority because for years it has not posed a significant public threat.

Moonshining began to wane in the 1960s, partly because the price of sugar rose prohibitively and partly because of hard-driving law enforcement campaigns like “Operation Dry-Up.” Over the years, federal officials turned over most enforcement to local officials, who still take the lead. But that will change, officials say, if moonshining continues to escalate.

Meanwhile, for every report of a busted still these days, there are other memories.

Robbie Hamrick, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, still has pictures of himself and other Carroll County, Ga., officials at a raided still from about 20 years ago. In those days, he remembers, they carried “rocks in our pockets,” not guns. There’s no way revenuers would travel without guns these days.

And Tom Stokes, special agent in charge of the Atlanta ATF office, recalls returning to Georgia six years ago, and seeing a news report about a moonshiner being busted in Meriwether County. “I said, ‘I worked that same guy back in the 1960s.’ Some things never change.”

Staff researcher Edith Stanley assisted in the preparation of this story.