The influence of alcohol on American culture is so widespread as to be incalculable. Much of America’s greatest literature was produced by alcoholics and hard drinkers—Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London, Jack Kerouac and Sinclair Lewis, whose classic 1927 novel about a corrupt evangelist begins: “Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.”

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Much of America’s best art has also been produced by hard drinkers, including Jackson Pollock, who enjoyed spilling paint but not his beloved whiskey, and Robert Rauschenberg, who claimed that he drank a quart of Jack Daniels a day, which might explain why he once made a sculpture by sticking a stuffed goat inside an old tire.

Jazz, America’s classical music, was born in the bars and brothels of New Orleans and came of age in Prohibition speakeasies, including the most famous speakeasy of all, New York’s Cotton Club, whose house band was Duke Ellington’s orchestra. And American popular songs contain nearly as many references to booze as they do to love or lust:

Roll out the barrel…
It’s another tequila sunrise…
Whiskey river, don’t run dry…
Wasted away again in Margaritaville…

Alcohol has spawned many of the iconic characters in American pop culture—the cowboy knocking back a shot of Red Eye, the hard-drinking private eye, the cynical reporter with a bottle in his bottom file drawer and, of course, the anonymous protagonist of a million jokes that begin, “A guy walks into a bar.”

The United States is a sports-mad nation, and our sports are intimately connected with alcohol. We drink a beer while eating a hot dog at baseball games and sip a Bloody Mary while tailgating at football games. World Series winners celebrate by pouring champagne over their teammates’ heads. And stock car racing—which came into its own as a sport after World War II—was created by moonshiners.

In the southern Appalachians, the culture of moonshine never died out, nor did the desire to avoid paying tax on it. Moonshiners souped up their cars so they could outrun
federal “revenuers” on twisty mountain roads and, in the 1940s, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing began organizing races on dirt tracks. “About all your good dirt track drivers were involved in moonshine,” Junior Johnson, the famous NASCAR driver, told me in an interview in 1999. “That’s kind of the way it started.”

At NASCAR’s first official race in 1949, most of the drivers had learned their craft hauling whiskey. Six years later, Johnson, then one of NASCAR’s biggest stars, was arrested while tending his father’s illegal still in North Carolina and sent to federal prison. When he got out, he started racing again, won the 1960 Daytona 500 and became a folk hero. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan pardoned Johnson for his moonshine conviction. By then, NASCAR’s outlaw image had helped to make it a major spectator sport.

“I think it did appeal to people,” Johnson told me. “I think the exposure of you being a good moonshiner and having the fastest car of anybody—it was sort of a glorified thing, like Babe Ruth hitting his 714th home run.”

Last year, Johnson, now age 77 and retired from racing, returned to his first love—making whiskey. He began marketing a legal, 80-proof concoction called Midnight Moon, which he proudly describes as the “best ’shine ever.”

It just might be the perfect beverage for drinking a toast to the grand and goofy history of booze in America.

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