How a New Hampshire Distiller Predicted Prohibition and Its 1933 Repeal

I write this from my porch at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike. My boots are on the rail, a jar of yesterday's hearts sits at my elbow, and the river below gurgles like a drunk humming in church. Barnaby, my black bear, has had his supper and the cooper's dog's supper too, and he lies sulking on his chain. Four hundred pounds of pout and fleas. It is a fit evening for prophecy, so here is mine. Prohibition is coming. I do not mean the little state laws the Maine men keep passing and every Yankee keeps ignoring. I mean the whole nation gone dry, from sea to shining sea. It will not come in my day and maybe not in yours, but it is coming as surely as a rotten molar comes loose.

The Two Rotten Teeth in the Republic's Mouth

A prophet needs credentials, and mine are twenty years spent looking into the mouths of New Hampshire men. Show me a man's teeth and I will tell you which one goes next. This Republic has a mouth full of whiskey, and I have been watching the gums.

The first rotten tooth is the tax. In 1791 Mister Alexander Hamilton, a clever little man with a face like a well-groomed ferret, talked Congress into an excise on home-distilled spirits. It was one of the first internal taxes the young country ever laid on its own people. It fell on the backwoods farmer, who turned his corn and rye into whiskey because whiskey is grain you can carry over a mountain on a mule. The western Pennsylvania boys took that tax about as kindly as a tom cat takes a bath. They tarred and feathered the collectors with hot pine tar on bare skin. One collector, the story goes, had tar so thick in his ears that he could not hear for a fortnight. I count that a mercy, given what they were calling him. In 1794 President Washington called out about thirteen thousand militia and rode at their head to collect a whiskey tax. I have had dentistry patients run farther than that to avoid paying me.

The rebels melted into the hills like lard on a griddle. Two men were convicted of treason, and Washington pardoned them both. He was a distiller himself in later years. Mister Jefferson threw out the internal taxes in 1802. They came back for the War of 1812 and went away again in 1817. After that the American distiller paid not one penny of federal excise for forty-five years, until Mister Lincoln needed a war chest in '62. Mark the pattern: when the government is hungry it bites the jug, and when it is fed it lets go.

The second rotten tooth is the temperance men. The Massachusetts Fifteen-Gallon Law of 1838 forbade buying spirits in any amount smaller than fifteen gallons. The rich man on Beacon Hill could buy a barrel and drink himself blind, but the poor teamster could not buy one glass to warm his gizzard. That same year, at the Dedham militia muster, my favourite Yankee in all history put up a tent and charged admission to see a striped pig. Inside was an ordinary hog with painted stripes, and every visitor was handed a free glass of rum. You were only paying for the pig. The legislature threw the law out in 1840, and folks say the striped pig did more to kill it than all the lawyers in Boston. Then came Maine. In 1851 Neal Dow, mayor of Portland and a man with a face like a disappointed ledger, got the first statewide prohibition law in the Union passed. In June of '55 word got round that the city agency held a stock of liquor 'for medicinal and mechanical purposes.' A crowd gathered to ask why the mayor's whiskey was holier than theirs. Dow called out the militia, the militia fired, and John Robbins lay dead in the street with several others wounded. Dow is the only temperance man in history to shed blood defending the whiskey.

A Prophecy Read in the Beads

I swirled my jar, watched Barnaby's paws twitch while he dreamed, and read the future in order. First, the women will organize, eight or ten years hence in Ohio. They will kneel in their bombazine on the saloon sawdust and pray aloud while the bartender pours around them. A great union of Christian women will grow out of it. Second, a league against the saloon will rise in Ohio, run with ledgers and lobbyists like a railroad. It will care only how a congressman votes and will break any man who votes wrong. Third, a woman near six feet tall will come out of Kansas with a hatchet and smash the barroom mirrors, and she will call it 'hatchetation.' I would marry her for the word alone if she would not kill me on the wedding night.

Fourth, and this is the true root of it: Mister Lincoln's war income tax will lapse, but some day they will write an income tax into the Constitution itself. Today the jug is the Treasury's milk cow, and nobody shoots the milk cow. Once Washington has a new cow, the old one goes to the knacker. Fifth, a great war across the ocean against a German king will make it seem unpatriotic to put good grain in a still, and when the war ends they will not give the country back its liquor. Sixth, in January of 1920 or near it, an Eighteenth Amendment will dry up the entire nation. A congressman from Minnesota with a mustache like a hay rake will put his name on the enforcement act, and it will call anything over one-half of one percent intoxicating. By that measure my mouthwash is a saloon.

After that every cellar will be a still-house and every parlour a saloon with a peephole. Smuggled Scotch will come down from Canada through our own North Country. Doctors will write whiskey prescriptions. The next part is black, and I will not joke it away. The government will order industrial alcohol poisoned, folks will drink it anyhow, and they will die. Some crook will doctor Jamaica ginger with an engine chemical, and tens of thousands of men will walk with the flop-footed 'jake leg' for the rest of their days. Prohibition will not stop the drinking. It will only stop the honest making. After thirteen dry and bloody years, in December of 1933, a Twenty-first Amendment will repeal the whole business. It will be ratified by state conventions, and the thirty-sixth state to vote the dry law dead will be Utah. The bear dreamed it.

The Advance Guard Came With a Hatchet

I have already met the future. Last October a travelling lecturer out of Concord, who called himself Brother Ezekiel Pure, preached at the Pittsfield town hall about the Demon in the Jug. Around midnight he crept up behind my still-house with a hand-axe to stave in my mash barrels. Unluckily for him he came round the north side, and the north side is Barnaby's. I heard the axe bite oak, then my good mash hissing onto the leaves, then a sound like a wet sail tearing. Barnaby had him by the seat. By lantern light I saw a pale, bleeding backside go whipping through my blackberry canes like a peeled onion fired from a cannon. He left the axe in the water trough, half a tract on the path, and one boot. Barnaby licked up the spilled mash and lay three days with his feet in the air. I sent the boot back to Concord with a note: 'Your other one is in the bear.'

What the Revenue Man Found in the Organ

Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer out of Manchester, joined me on the porch. He has hunted stills from the White Mountains to the Green. He explained that a revenue man would rather collect a tax than enforce a ban. Under a ban the honest makers quit, and the scoundrels who are left will cook with anything. He had three stories. The first was a Sons of Temperance hall in Vermont with 'Cold Water, Clear Conscience' painted over the door. Its reed organ wheezed rye, and in the bellows chest the Captain found a silver-soldered copper worm. The still sat in the cellar under the pulpit. He seized it and logged the worm as well made, wrongly employed. The second was an Ammonoosuc widow with a clean pot whose best Saturday customer was a temperance lecturer. Asked to sign his own pledge card, the lecturer fainted backwards into her rain barrel. The third was a Peacham farmer who raised a granite marker reading 'Here Lies Hope, Awaiting the Dry Years.' Beneath it were twelve jugs of cider vinegar and a note: the real ones lay under the hitching post where the Captain had tied his horse.

An old sugarhouse man near Mount Mansfield first made the Captain believe in my prophecy, and he gave it to me in one line: "A tax can be collected, Doctor. A ban can only be chased."

Before the Dry Years: Wash, Copper and the Cuts

If the dry years are coming, the craft must not die with the honest makers. Mind that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit breaks the law, so take what follows as history and natural philosophy. For a rye mash in the Monongahela style, stir coarse-cracked rye and a fair share of cracked corn into hot water and bring it to a scald. Let it cool to about a hundred fifty degrees by the glass, somewhere between a hundred forty-eight and a hundred fifty-eight. Then stir in malted barley, whose natural virtue turns the starch to sugar. Hold it near that heat about an hour, wrapped in quilts if the night is cold, and taste until the raw starch has gone sweet. Cool it to blood-warm and pitch your yeast. Starved or overheated yeast throws off a rotten-egg sulfur gas, so keep it happy with good grain, clean water and an even warmth.

The copper that matters most is not the pot. It is the copper the vapour touches on its way over: the helmet, the lyne arm and the worm. Keep that path bright, and clean it after every run with vinegar and salt, then rinse and dry it. The first pass gives you weak, cloudy low wines. Run them a second time, slow and gentle, and catch the spirit in a long row of small numbered jars. Throw away the foreshots, and be generous about it. Set aside the sharp, varnishy heads. Keep the sweet hearts. Save the oily, wet-dog tails to run again. Then judge each jar by nose and careful taste, not by thermometer. By the federal standard of 1848, proof spirit is half alcohol, so double the alcohol and you have the proof. Buy a Sikes hydrometer. Spirit vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor like a cat looking for a flame. Keep your jar far from the firebox, wipe up spills at once, never leave a running still alone, and keep a bucket of sand by the door, because water spreads a spirit fire. Do not make applejack by jacking, either. Freezing a barrel leaves every bit of the bad spirit in the jug, and the old-timers called the shakes it gave them the apple palsy.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina sent me a cylinder by post-rider. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Red oak is no good for whiskey. Its end grain is full of open pipes, and you could blow soap bubbles through a stick of it. Whatever oak does for whiskey, it does slowly, over months and years in a charred barrel. An afternoon of shavings in a thump keg gives only a little colour, a little sawdust flavour, and a fooled buyer. Hickory ash is potash, which is lye. This valley once sent it out by the barrel for soap, glass and saleratus. It may take some sourness off the taste, but the bad heads boil off early whatever you put in the keg. The only cure is a row of jars and the courage to pour the first ones on the ground. As for the bead, shaking a jar gives you a rough guess at proof and nothing more. A poisoned jug beads just as prettily as a clean one. I struck three cents with my punch, and one of them goes to Wilkesboro with a jar of my hearts so Rabbit's uncle can see what clean looks like. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.