Yep! A couple of other European immigrant groups did this too. I was reading an illustrated book of how very privileged they were. If you were 11 or so, you could graduate from picking rocks out of heaps of coal coming down a chute, with your bare hands in the winter, to get one of the cool jobs underground. To protect you from overly dry throat while manning the coal chutes they'd issue you some chewing tobacco.
I remember asking my father what the song about Moonshine was about.
He explained that these people were very poor, the only work available was hard labor for dirt wages in the mines. To avoid the mines they set up stills and sold their own liquor.
The mines got the Feds to go after them with a vengeance to destroy any ability to earn money other than mining. He then told me how he and his brother would make gin in their bathtub with their father during the depression.
He grew up in the Red Hook district of NY, born in 1917, his stories of the Depression would curl your hair.
Which is something to remember the next time some dumbass neocon drones on about Capitalism and muh "Free Market." We've NEVER had a free market, the government has ALWAYS been the enforcer of corporate interests.
Yep! A couple of other European immigrant groups did this too. I was reading an illustrated book of how very privileged they were. If you were 11 or so, you could graduate from picking rocks out of heaps of coal coming down a chute, with your bare hands in the winter, to get one of the cool jobs underground. To protect you from overly dry throat while manning the coal chutes they'd issue you some chewing tobacco.
I remember asking my father what the song about Moonshine was about.
He explained that these people were very poor, the only work available was hard labor for dirt wages in the mines. To avoid the mines they set up stills and sold their own liquor.
The mines got the Feds to go after them with a vengeance to destroy any ability to earn money other than mining. He then told me how he and his brother would make gin in their bathtub with their father during the depression.
He grew up in the Red Hook district of NY, born in 1917, his stories of the Depression would curl your hair.
Which is something to remember the next time some dumbass neocon drones on about Capitalism and muh "Free Market." We've NEVER had a free market, the government has ALWAYS been the enforcer of corporate interests.
Very true, no argument on that from me