One Drink Book Club | The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to The One Drink Book Club. In this episode, we'll be discussing The Whiskey Rebels, a novel by David Liss. The book is an historical fiction or historical thriller set in the 1700s, the late 1700s, in Pennsylvania, both Western Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and follows two characters,

[00:00:28] Captain Ethan Saunders, who served in the Revolutionary War as one of George Washington's spies, and the other is Joan Maycott, a smart and determined woman who finds herself in the Western Pennsylvania wilderness as the victim of financial swindlers.

[00:00:44] And the drama that connects both of them is Alexander Hamilton's Whiskey Tax that he created to fund the Bank of the United States. My guest tonight is Andy Weibull, an old friend and college roommate who lives in Miami, Florida. Welcome, Andy! Thank you, Jamey.

[00:00:59] It's certainly great to be here tonight and always great to see you and a great book, and I'm looking forward to talking about it. Yeah, so one of the elements of The One Drink Book Club is to highlight a cocktail or drink inspired by the featured book.

[00:01:14] And obviously, Andy, the Whiskey Rebels, it's probably an obvious choice, but what did you decide to make tonight? I was really debating. I first thought maybe a brown mumbler, but I decided that you were a little more sophisticated.

[00:01:28] So tonight I'm going with a designation known as the Wisconsin Old Fashioned, but I did use a whiskey instead of a burp. Ah! So explain to me, I always forget the difference between the red and the red. Technically, I used a rye tonight. I'm sorry, we get technical.

[00:01:45] I used the basil Hayden's rye tonight. But what's the difference with the Wisconsin Old Fashioned? The Wisconsin Old Fashioned includes, as it was taught to me, a Wisconsin Old Fashioned includes a little bit of olive juice and olive.

[00:02:01] And then we finish it off with some sparkling water, spritzer water, soda water. Interesting. A little effervescence. It has a little effervescence and it's a little sweet with a little salty. Nice! So I was going to go with the super obvious Old Fashioned, like regular Old

[00:02:19] Fashioned or just like whiskey neat or some bourbon neat, but I decided to go with the Fool's Gold. Ooh! Do tell. I didn't even see that one on my list. So Fool's Gold is bourbon, simple syrup, lemon juice and lemon

[00:02:38] cello with a sprig of sage on it that I grabbed from here. Hey, that sounds great actually. It's good. And I thought since our character Joan Maycott and her husband were swindled with Fool's Gold that this would be the appropriate use of whiskey. Now, just a quick question.

[00:02:58] The lemon cello as a straight drink, I find very pungent. Would you say the simple syrup is cutting it there a little bit? Oh yeah. Well, the bourbon cuts it, I think too. Ah! So you get a double cut. Yeah.

[00:03:12] I tried to make my own lemon cello once, which was a very simple recipe you basically get ever clear. Yeah, right. You can use vodka and then soak it in lemon rinds for like a couple of weeks.

[00:03:27] It actually is pretty good, but man, it'll knock your socks off. Yes, that's the problem. You had to be careful with that as an after dinner drink. Yeah. And it comes cold and frosty glass. And yeah, this came right out of the freezer. It was very good. Nice.

[00:03:42] So my question to you is did you listen to the book or did you read the book? I listened to the book because in the time frame that I had, it fit best for me to listen. However, the story was gripping enough.

[00:03:58] I find that I remember the details better when I read it. And so I would have enjoyed reading this book. The story was gripping. I would have probably thought the same thing. I listened to it.

[00:04:10] I thought the audio narration who was done by a guy named Christopher Lane was really good. Really good. And he did the voices and more importantly, the cadence, especially with Captain Saunders. I thought it was really fun.

[00:04:26] He had the diction for a little bit of a British accent with Saunders or certainly a British syntax with Saunders. Yes. Yes. And I did a little research about David Liss, which was going to be interesting. He studied 18th century British literature. There you go.

[00:04:44] And so I've actually read a number of his other books and several of them take place in the same 1700s time period either in England or in the United States. Interesting.

[00:04:55] And I thought to myself, if my kids came to me and said, hey dad, I'm going to major in 18th century British literature. Hell you are! I thought, but I thought his dad probably had to say, well, who are you? Put this to good use.

[00:05:10] You became this author. You've done well. And I thought he used his knowledge base very well. I mean, he made references to the time period that I did not know and I consider myself a little bit of a student.

[00:05:24] And I thought it added context and depth to the story. Big time. And I would encourage you to check out some of his other books in that same period, especially the ones that take place in Europe because there was lots of that where I was like, oh wow.

[00:05:39] He throws in these little quips about how things are done, whether it's the dueling, how duels work or just even the pub life in these. And he made some references to Loyalists in the story, which I rarely hear about Loyalists

[00:05:58] after the revolution, but they were here and eventually people accepted them into society even though they knew they fought for the other side or were loyal to the other side. Yeah, it was interesting.

[00:06:10] Yeah, they clearly had a stain on their record, but they weren't kicked to the door. They weren't blackballed, at least by the 1790s. Well, one of the questions I can't do is... Well, I'm sorry. What was the narrator's name again? The narrator's name Christopher Lane, the voiceover artist.

[00:06:27] I thought he did a beautiful job of changing the inflection and tone of his voice. And I guess you'd say the pitch of his voice, his Joan Makai voice was excellent. And when he used his Joan Makai voice, I pictured a woman with hair pulled back

[00:06:44] in a very conservative manner. It was really interesting that he could draw out the character. And there were so many characters. One of the things that I've noticed about David Liss's books is that he has a tremendous number of characters and often a very complicated plot line.

[00:07:02] It was very complicated. And I've actually read this now at least twice, and I found it was much clearer to me the second time I picked up on a lot of things I hadn't... I would think so. It was a multi-layered plot.

[00:07:15] And I don't want to get too far ahead on your question, but it took... To me, I was ready for the plot to unfold because I felt like the buildup was multi-layered. I'm like, I don't know where it's going. I just know it's going to be good.

[00:07:33] Well, there were all these little subplots too that happened. Yes. The opening chapter about Captain Saunders who had basically slept with this guy's wife. The guy found out and was out to kill him was an interesting little entry into his life.

[00:07:50] Which made you wonder if he was a main character or just a bit player? But by the third chapter, you're like, no, I think he's a main character. Yeah. And he was one of those ones where there was a lot not to like about him.

[00:08:03] Oh, and this was great. He certainly was a scoundrel, but at the same time, he was really entertaining. Yeah, he was really funny and smart, which made him a great character. And I think you kind of got the feeling he had this good heart. Yes, correct.

[00:08:18] He was a diamond in the rough. At least you wanted him to be. By the third chapter, I wanted him to be. I wasn't sure initially. Yeah. Well, there was that I think the time where I really felt like he hit his low was when

[00:08:32] Lavien who is Alexander Hamilton's kind of like private investigator, essentially, who kind of befriends Ethan Saunders or at least realizes that he might be an asset in his efforts to kind of uncover this plot to do away with the bank.

[00:08:49] And Lavien has him at his house and even offers him a room for the night because Saunders is basically drunk, penniless and now got kicked out of his house. And he ends up trying to seduce Lavien's wife even after he did all these nice things to him.

[00:09:06] And the wife just takes him to task and says, she is not surprised at all. She tells like, what's wrong with you? You clearly don't like yourself. You want to be a bad guy. You need to figure this out because this isn't working for you.

[00:09:20] Well, and that really was the turning point because I think that was where Saunders admitted, okay, something's got to give because this can't go on. And I knew this was wrong. It was wrong. Now I have to go on. I can't do this anymore. Yeah.

[00:09:36] One of the plot lines for the listeners, if you haven't read the book, Ethan Saunders was kicked out of the army, accused of treason that he had been spying for the British and he and his partner had been kicked out.

[00:09:51] And he never quite knew whether his partner had actually been a traitor because his partner died soon after they both got kicked out. And at the time, Ethan Saunders had been practically engaged to his partner's daughter.

[00:10:07] And so after this scandal happened, and this was all while they were serving under Hamilton, Saunders felt like he was disgraced and he didn't want to hang that disgrace on the woman he loved.

[00:10:20] And so he kind of went his separate ways, left her, so he was sad about that. He was sad about his friend. He was kind of his only thing that he had been good at was being a spy. Right. And so it kind of really took him out.

[00:10:33] And what was his last name? His partner's last name, it wasn't flag. Fleet. Fleet, I believe. Fleet. Yes. Fleet. And he was not only partners, but good friends. I think Fleet was a role model for him.

[00:10:48] He so desperately wanted Fleet to be honored and die an honorable man. And so yeah, that was a very touching part of the story. Yeah, agreed. And so at one point in the story, Cynthia, who was Fleet's daughter, who Ethan Saunders had loved,

[00:11:07] comes to Saunders and asks for help because she feels like she and her husband and her children are in danger. So that kind of is how he gets reinvigorated with a purpose. That's the first thing he has all the time. Yeah.

[00:11:21] And so the other part of this, so if one start part is kind of following Ethan Saunders, the other part is following Joan Maycott and her husband who are sold. Basically her husband had served in the Revolutionary War.

[00:11:35] He had all these promissory notes that no one at the time knew whether they were going to be honored by the federal government. Are they worthless or were they worth something? Yep. And so they decided to go with an option. Somebody was offering land out in Western Pennsylvania.

[00:11:50] They told him it was kind of utopia out there, wonderful, fertile land. And if you trade your basically your promissory notes, we'll give you the land and while the promissory notes might be worth more, you just never know they may be worth nothing.

[00:12:04] And so they go out there. And there were many soldiers that were paid by the army with these promissory notes. So here they were a struggling couple in a small or in a large city with virtually nothing to their

[00:12:17] name and they made the fateful choice to go out West. I don't know about you, but I again did not know much about this time period. The idea that Pittsburgh was West is like a funny concept and the fact. And a frontier town. Very much so.

[00:12:34] And I mean, it sounded pretty horrible. Oh, it was terrible. It was disgusting actually the mud that they were burning coal. It was so sooty. And ironically, I had finished the book and within a week of finishing the book,

[00:12:49] I appeared in Pittsburgh and it was so and we drove through West Virginia on the way to Pittsburgh. And the whole thing kind of came rushing back like God, can you imagine traveling this land in a wagon with horses and supplies and oh gosh,

[00:13:08] it just would have been brutal. This was like a cow town that was rough and tumble to say the least. And the people too. I mean when they said as they're going out to their plot, which is basically all woods, there's no there's no fields to to so.

[00:13:26] Woods and hills. So it wasn't even like after you clear the trees and what they didn't even talk about, but having lived in that area, the ground is very stony, very rocky. So even if you clear the trees, which are hardwood tall trees,

[00:13:40] you'd still have to clear rock upon rock upon stone upon stone. It would have been backbreaking work. What I thought was interesting was the well, there were some villains along the way,

[00:13:53] the guys that took them out to the West, you know, the kind of the crew leaders were horrible. And then the guy who was kind of what they figure out when they're there, when they get there is that they didn't actually buy the land.

[00:14:04] They bought like a hundred year lease. And so they don't even own the land that they have. It's relatively worthless anyway. Just terrible people. And they were essentially indentured servants that they were required to pay lease on the land,

[00:14:19] which meant they had to clear the land and improve it for really his benefit only. And it was gut-wrenching to see the predicament they were in. And this newlywed couple, I mean, he did a great job.

[00:14:32] The author of You Were Very Sympathetic with Joan and Andrew as they moved out to this very treacherous place. Absolutely. I think his villains were exceedingly good. They were exceedingly bad. I don't know how you could do that. Yes, they were good villains. Yeah. Henry, Phineas. Tyndall.

[00:14:49] Tyndall, really. Colonel Tyndall was really an awful person. Henry. Henry. Oh yeah, Henry. Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting was the camaraderie of the people who were there. I mean, they did really find some good friends and some really close, smart,

[00:15:12] industrious people out there that kind of stuck together. And again, for the listeners who might have interest, that was an uplifting part of the book. And I think carried the day for that whole section. There was so much to be down about and depressed about.

[00:15:28] But here were these other settlers who had made the same trade, their script for the land. And just when Andrew and Joan were sort of like, oh man, we are in trouble, here comes all these families literally out of the woods to help them build a home,

[00:15:45] to help them figure out how to live in this wilderness, be safe, have a community, have some friends. That was fun. It was uplifting. And you had the feeling they all were sort of cut out of the same cloth. Absolutely.

[00:15:58] And I thought it was, there was a couple of fun situations too that the author put in. Dalton, one of their, probably he would be seen as the leader of this little community of people. Kind of the, you didn't mess with him. He was Irish.

[00:16:12] She had a temper, but could not be beaten. Right. Hard worker. Hard worker, smart. He was the guy who ran the biggest still to make whiskey. But the fact that the author made him gay too, which was kind of a fun twist.

[00:16:25] And in that community, he was the toughest guy there. Nobody said anything about it. Unexpected. Yeah. Which I thought was fun. And his still was basically producing everclear. I mean, that's sort of what I was picturing. It was nasty stuff. Yes.

[00:16:42] And one of the things that was kind of fun was, Jones' husband kind of was an innovator and helped him with the idea of either different recipes and the idea of charring the inside of the barrels

[00:16:55] to impart kind of a sweetness and a flavor that people had not experienced before. Nope. And all of a sudden whiskey turned into a desirable commodity versus just a necessary commodity. Well, yeah. What do you mean? Up until that point, whiskey was whiskey.

[00:17:13] Nobody would sought out a different kind of whiskey. And I actually did a little research. It is unclear when people really started charring the inside of barrels for whiskey. Some of it happened in Europe back in the 1500s. And there's a lot of myths out there, I guess.

[00:17:30] Elijah Craig who I don't know if you've had Elijah Craig. I have. But Elijah Craig was a Baptist minister, I guess in the late 1800s. So this is much, you know, 100 years past this book.

[00:17:44] And he apparently the legend is that his farm burned and some of his barrels burned, but he still was able to use them and then realized, oh wow, this is adding some flavor. Interesting. And this is helpful. Yeah.

[00:17:59] And so Andrew Jones' husband helped the Irish crew really produce what I pictured. It went from clear moonshine to a brownish whiskey that suddenly had a desirable flavor. And they turned into the hottest thing in the tri-state. Well, and I don't...

[00:18:23] Did you know much about the Whiskey Rebellion before you read this book? I mean, I mean... No, not much. Yeah. Same with me. No. And it was fascinating. I had read, I guess, another book that talked about people converting their agriculture

[00:18:39] crops to alcohol or a liquid but primarily alcohol because it was so much easier to transport. You could transport more volume at a lower cost making your agriculture products so much more valuable and boom all of a sudden as soon as that all came together out there,

[00:18:57] you're like, ah, I see where this is going. Absolutely. And the thing that I thought was really interesting was apparently when Hamilton convinced Congress to put the whiskey tax in, number one it was, I think, one of the first sin taxes.

[00:19:12] So like A, it was an interesting thing because of that but B, they taxed the production of it, not the sale of it. So all of a sudden you had all these guys out in Western Pennsylvania who were

[00:19:25] turning all their crops into whiskey because that was the most efficient way to get it to market. But then they were being taxed for cash even if they just made it. So most of these people didn't even have any cash.

[00:19:38] So they were using the whiskey as basically tender and so they were really strapped. If somebody asked them for money on the production and they hadn't even sold it, they just couldn't pay it. They couldn't pay it.

[00:19:50] And all of a sudden you realized, well, they didn't dwell on it but you certainly had the feeling that Hamilton did not understand what the impact, the syntax part he understood in pitch but no one gave credence to the farmers were in a terrible predicament.

[00:20:08] And then the nasty part was the government relied on locally appointed tax collectors to enforce the rule. And that's where the pain came from for the whiskey growers or the ag producers that turned into the whiskey producers and the whiskey tax.

[00:20:28] There is another thing they touched on it a little bit but you can see it today in some of the regulatory things that we have. Apparently the big distillers around Philadelphia and around New York didn't mind the whiskey tax

[00:20:41] because they knew it was going to put all these small guys who had smaller stills out of business. And I think you see this a lot of times with corporations in the U.S. Some regulation comes down the pike and at a certain point the big corporation said,

[00:20:58] okay, we can handle that. We can absorb that regulation and we have the lawyers and the lobbyists and everybody to kind of comply with it but it's fine because it will basically strengthen our position in the market price.

[00:21:12] And they're going to take over the market share of all their little competitors. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I did not know that but it does make perfect sense. And essentially you could see how the bigger distillers could just say, I could extend my

[00:21:28] buying as far west as I want. I can bring it by rail. I just want to knock out the competition. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Wow, I didn't know that. So one of the things I thought was kind of interesting, I was trying to think about

[00:21:42] who if there were any actors that came to mind that would play some of these characters. If Netflix, if this got turned into a Netflix series who would be Ethan Saunders? Who would be? Okay.

[00:21:55] I had that same thought and Johnny Depp was the name that came to mind as an Ethan Saunders. You know what? He's a little bit like the Revolutionary War version of his pirate from Pirates of the Caribbean a little bit. Yeah.

[00:22:10] But you could see him being a little debauchess and still being potentially a white knight at some point in the story. Likeable. I had thought of Colin Farrell. Ooh, I like that.

[00:22:22] Maybe because he had a little bit of an accent and like you said, Saunders had kind of that Revolutionary War English patterns. Now, I never really came up with a face for Joan Maycott.

[00:22:34] The only thing I really could picture was she had dark hair, but that was just my imagination. Yeah, I'm with you. I could kind of see Scarlett Johansson. Maybe I could kind of see her as Joan Maycott. Now we're talking maybe Anne Hathaway. Oh, sure.

[00:22:53] Although I feel like Anne might not be able to handle the rough and tumble. Well, that's true. You're right. Pittsburgh crowd. Joan had a lot of spunk to her. Yes, she did. Although I did really enjoy the story, I think the one thing that stretched my

[00:23:14] understanding and to some point imagination was we had the Maycott storyline in Pennsylvania. We had the Saunders, and they seemed to diverge in my mind. Like the book kept going and I'm like, I don't see how these two groups of actors are going to get together.

[00:23:34] And it took a while for that part of the story to launch. I agree. In thinking about doing this podcast on it, I almost feel like punting on that final, like how they get together because Joan kind of hatches this really complex scheme

[00:23:52] to get revenge for all the people that took advantage of her. The people who sold her the script, who were basically a bunch of speculators who kept buying stock and selling stock and manipulating bank stocks that were going on. I think it's a fascinating part of the book.

[00:24:11] It was. It's really interesting how she kind of ingratiates herself as almost a spy in this world of speculators. But it's also one of those things that it gets kind of complex. It's not easy to like just say, oh, here's what they did to kind of get revenge.

[00:24:27] Yeah. The other interesting element I thought was the Alexander Hamilton. It was more than just references. He became a character in the story. He's a bit of a flamboyant guy. I thought it painted him in a little different light than maybe the general public sees or

[00:24:45] understands Alexander Hamilton, especially as the story wound on. Agreed. And it's kind of interesting. Obviously this was written before Hamilton, the musical and the kind of American public got a much more intense look at Alexander Hamilton.

[00:25:01] But the storyline in there where he was having an affair and being blackmailed over it was true. Like of the real characters in the book, Alexander Hamilton was obviously one. But so was James Reynolds who was kind of this villain in there.

[00:25:16] But Reynolds was the one blackmailing Hamilton because Hamilton was sleeping with his wife. And it was an interesting angle and Reynolds was really kind of one of the nastier. Oh, he was bad. He was bad. Yeah. That whole situation was confusing to me.

[00:25:34] It made early reference, mid reference, late reference. I still didn't understand the relationship until near the end of the story. Like, oh, that is diabolical. Yeah. But he really went through. And he had no loyalties whatsoever. He would double cross anybody in every one. Right on. Yeah.

[00:25:55] He was terrible. He was terrible. And I mean, here's a guy who's basically allowing his wife to sleep with Hamilton just so he can blackmail him for money. I mean, he was a nasty guy.

[00:26:07] Well, the other interesting thing was Reynolds was paid by a lot of different people a large amount of money but never made any reference to it wasn't that he lived in this fabulous home. What was he doing with all this money? That's what I couldn't figure out.

[00:26:21] You know, that's a good point because he still was making the trip out to Pittsburgh with people. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. He was getting paid by both sides. The other characters that were true to history was Dewar, who was the person that sold the

[00:26:38] land to the Maycotts and was one of the chief speculators of the time. And he did in fact, you know, in the book he basically goes to debtor's prison because he had way overextended himself. He was a speculator and things had gone wrong.

[00:26:53] And in real life, he died in debtor's prison. There you go. And he had been a speculator. Clearly this story and the kind of the climactic scheme there did not really happen in real

[00:27:07] life but Dewar was a real person and did in fact speculate and it all went wrong for him. It was painted as a tragic figure but Liz I thought did a good job all along of illustrating why Dewar was only a tragedy in his own mind.

[00:27:26] He was not a Christian athlete by any stretch. No, no he was not. And he also seemed just like kind of a weasley, you know, just an unpleasant character. Slip-brief for sure. Well, trying to think what have we not hit on this?

[00:27:44] I, we've gone through all my questions. I think, no, I think we gave up. We didn't spoil anything. There's still a lot of reading. Yeah. I think there's a tremendous plot that unfolds. No, I think we've covered a lot of the highlights.

[00:28:01] I would, I would highly recommend it. I mean, this would be a book I would, I would say to a friend or a colleague or a family member. This is worth your time. All right. So, so what the things I'm trying to, to institute in the podcast is,

[00:28:13] so how many Wisconsin old fashions would you give it out of five? Out of five? Oh, I'd do four for sure. Okay. Four out of five. I don't think I should drink four and try and talk about the book,

[00:28:25] but I would definitely give it a four out of five Wisconsin old fashions. Yes. All right. Well, Andy, thank you so much for participating here. It was a pleasure, Jamie. Thank you. It was fun and I'm interested to talk about more books as we unfold.

[00:28:40] So this is great. Yeah.