When pure “blockade” of normal strength sold as cheaply as it did before prohibition there was no great profit in it, all risks and expenses considered. But to-day, even with interstate shipments of liquors to consumers, a gallon of “blockade” will be watered to half-strength, then fortified with cologne spirits or other abominations, and peddled out by bootleggers, at $1.50 a quart, in villages and lumber camps where somebody always is thirsty and can find the coin to assuage it. Thus, amid a poverty-stricken class of mountaineers, the temptation to run a secret still, and adulterate the output, inflames and spreads.
In any case, the fact is that blockading as a business conducted in armed defiance of the law is increasing by leaps and bounds since the mountain region went “dry.” The profits to-day are much greater than before, because liquor is harder to get, in country districts, and consumers will pay higher prices without question.
Correspondingly, the risks are greater than ever. Arrests have increased rapidly, and so have mortal combats between officers and outlaws. Blockading has returned to much the same status described (as previously quoted) by our Commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1876. I have not seen recent revenue reports, but I do not need to; for the war between officers and moonshiners is so close to us that we almost live within gun-crack of it. If Mr. Harkins were alive to-day, he would say: “They used to shoot—and they have taken it up again.”
Observe, please, that this is no argument for or against prohibition. That is not my business. As a descriptive writer it is my duty to collect facts, whether pleasant or unpleasant, regardless of my own or anyone else’s bias, and present them in orderly sequence. It is for the reader to deduce his own conclusions, and with them I have nothing at all to do.
I have given in brief the history of illicit distilling because we must consider it before we can grasp firmly the basic fact that this is not so much a moral as an economic problem. Men do not make whiskey in secret, at the peril of imprisonment or death, because they are outlaws by nature nor from any other kind of depravity, but simply and solely because it looks like “easy money to poor folks.”
If I may voice my own opinion of a working remedy, it is this: Give the mountaineers a lawful chance to make decent livings where they are. This means, first of all, decent roads whereby to market their farm produce without losing all profit in cost of transportation. The first problem of Appalachia to-day is the very same problem as that of western Pennsylvania in 1784.