The Red Flannel Rag

greatest profit off the hard work of laborers such as Uncle Shirley who worked for a few

cents an hour.

Uncle Shirley told me that bootleggers preyed on Hopkins Gap moonshiners,

“They often had the local sheriff’s hands in their pockets.” When the pressure from the

law got real bad on us, the bootleggers quit paying us as much for our whiskey. They

knew we couldn’t make it and also sell it, so they drove into Hopkins Gap and bought it

from our houses.”

My daddy a dded, “Nobody liked the bootleggers. As times changed, they became a

necessary evil. We had to sell to them because the law was watchin’ us too close.’’

Sympathetic Revenuers?

My dad told me that some people would have starved during the depression if

t hey didn’t make moonshine. He believed the revenue agents had sympathy for people

during the depression. “I know of times when they got reports of mash barrels at a

certain place,” he said. “They would go in and bust up barrels that were reported

purpose ly and walk by mash that hadn’t been reported. They had to bust up what was

reported to save face.”

The government began to put pressure on the moonshiners around 1933. This

new attitude toward moonshiners coincided with the passage of The Emergency

Conservation Work Act establishing the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC). The CCC

employed young men between seventeen and twenty-three in work camps where they

were assigned to various conservation projects. The men were paid thirty dollars a

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