Reading Notes.

In "The Spirits of Just Men – Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen In The Moonshine Capital of The World", author Charles D. Thompson Junior describes the plight of the farmer in the 1930s, " As this upheaval took place (i.e., the agricultural mechanization) subsistence farmers still left on their little farms – those who had learned special skills as intricate as reaching into the uterus of a cow to rearrange the legs of a breech-birth calf, how to repair harnesses and make hinges for doors, or how to butcher their own meats and build barns from timber on their own land – would be told they were unskilled in the search for off-farm jobs. Their choices would be to hang on where they could at least manage their own time or sell themselves to an ungrateful industrial world. Some went willingly off the farms. Others remained and instead turned to the ingenuity they had always relied on." ( i.e., the production of illicit moonshine – even here they were exploited by the gangsters and lawmen who demanded their 'fair' shares that always turned out to be much more then the worker, of course – shades of the closing of the commons and clearing of the land for industrialization in Britain. John Ayers.