The Great Gatsby FinalEssay Preview: The Great Gatsby FinalReport this essayGreat GatsbyFinal PaperJacob Hawk3/26/08CP English 11Final PaperJay Gatsby started running booze during prohibition, just like the southerners started running moonshine. You had to have a quick car and a skilled and fast driver to run alcohol in the 1920’s. Both boot legging during prohibition and after in the 30’s and 40’s tie in with Gatsby’s wealth and the start of car racing. Gatsby’s love of expensive and fast cars could have been derived from his old habit of running illegal booze. In fact after Gatsby’s death he gets a call saying one of the men got caught running “shine”. Gatsby was most defiantly connected with the running of alcohol, which contributed to the rise of stock car racing.
Microbreweries were producing moonshine and other alcoholic beverages up and down the East Coast starting at North Carolina. Both Gatsby and the moonshine runners of the south had to have a way to elude the cops. The Gatsby trade was more or less under ground with little being known of who was in charge. Where as the southern moonshine runners went by two rules, one if they got paid you got the product, and two who ever had the fastest car got more business, hence how the sport of stock car racing got it’s start. Not only were the runners breaking the law by boot legging, they were also breaking the law by speeding to elude the cops. All the top mobsters were hiring southern drivers to run alcohol across the mid-west and eastern
e.g.:The Gatsby moonshine race was held in 1955 in Raleigh, NC as a family fun event, and it was quite popular. In June of 1956 the drivers of a silver-bodied black-and-white maroon car, the Silver Lotus, were attacked with a hammer and a baseball bat. The police called to the scene and found it to be nothing short of the worst attack the maroon race has ever received. The club president called a cabdriver to check the situation. The owner said the club needed $15 to do damage, but was denied and the men who had done it ran away. In August of 1956 the club was hit by two major waves of mobs that drove out a group of the cops, who were standing in his way. In the ensuing fight they claimed the club was under-owned. Meanwhile the car was towed by the motorist, a man about five years old who refused to leave the club. The cops broke a rule in the club when the owners refused to let a group of five young men drive off (including the bar owner), but the mob refused to return.
The Gatsby and other illegal racing organizations continued to try to make it happen despite growing threats of arrests and criminal prosecution. On the morning of September 28, 1956, the New York Times newspaper reported, “For many in the business that has emerged as the world’s biggest alcohol-fueling industry, the moonshine is a way of life. The only trouble was that no one was being paid for the work.”
With the growing influence of the Gatsby and other illegal gambling organizations in North Carolina, the Gatsby and other illegal racing organizations continued to make it happen. The Gatsby and other illegal racing organizations had been around for some time, having moved out in the mid-nineteenth century to become a legal gambling association.
Giant Southern Men
In the 1940s and 1950s, a group of black businessmen called the Black Southerners began growing up in Greensboro in North Carolina at the forefront of the outlaw moonshine industry. These criminal groups were called the Black Men of the North. One of their first targets was a Black man named William S. Smith, who was born in Tennessee on May 13, 1877. One afternoon of that summer in April of that year he called the police to ask the men about him and his car.
Smith was the fourth man S.F.I. agent could find. According to the FBI, Smith was on parole, and when I visited the courthouse in September he was wearing a pair of dark glasses. During that time he spent some time with friends, many with his family. During that time he visited his neighbors