[PLUG-TALK] Beer and American history

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Mon, Jul 03, 2017 at 03:08:38PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   We have some home-brewers here, and it's highly likely that most of us
> like to take advantage of the plethora of local craft beers. Beers are one
> way of tracking American history as reflected in the Smithsonian's museum.
> Read about it here:
> 
> <http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/03/532250762/how-the-story-of-beer-is-the-story-of-america>

Ah, history without the embarassing bits.  We don't want
the kiddies finding out what scofflaw scoundrels their
ancestors were.

Two hundred years before the times covered by the article,
"pioneers" AKA vagabonds and escaped convicts crossed the
Appalachians to build farms in territory that the British
government had set aside for the indians (aka "Native
Americans" aka "First Peoples", the labels preferred by
guilt-ridden Euro-Americans).

Labels aside, what the illegal settlers did was grow grain
for money.  But shipping grain on mules on deer trails to
Atlantic coastal cities was hellishly expensive.  Instead,
they turned the grain into whiskey, which they (illegally)
traded with indians for (illegal) beaver furs.  They
shipped the furs to Europe via New York and Boston, for a
600x markup over the wholesale price of grain shipped to
those "cities".  Often, they broke even more laws by
bypassing English ports and smuggling the furs directly
to France and the rest the continent, bypassing British
customs duties and trading-with-the-enemy laws.

After the beaver were wiped out, New England sea captains
moved on to the triangle trade of "rum and guns, slaves,
and molasses".  They would trade rum and guns for slaves
in West Africa (that's how some of my distant ancestors 
became "immigrants"), which they traded for mollasses in
the Carribean (where the profits were higher for illegal
trade with the French), and brought the molasses back to
New England to make more rum (and pay for more guns).

In 1753, a colonial Virginia major, George Washington,
marched across the Appalachians to grab land and trade
whiskey with the indians.  His crew of renegade indians
ambushed a french ambassador's party and killed them,
which led to the Seven Years War in Europe, the bloodiest
war in history to that date (British colonists called it
the French and Indian War).  We got many new Americans
when draft dodgers left Europe for the Americas.  The
British crown attempted to pay back some of the cost of
that war by restricting trade and imposing customs
duties on colonial trade.    That didn't work.

John Brown, one of the founders of Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island, was one of those smugglers;
so was John Hancock.  Brown was a hero in Providence for
attacking the British customs cutter "Gaspee", killing
the British crew, and burning it to the waterline in 1772.

----

Celebrate this Independence Day by drinking moonshine,
burning stuff, and thwarting governmental restraints
on free trade (download an illegal copy of "Finnegan's
Wake", perhaps).  We come from a long line of pirates
and scoundrels, and we fought bloody wars to remain so.

Let's do our rascally drunken ancestors proud!

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com