res you can’t buy beer in any old place. But in Pennsylvania you can go through a drive-through and buy beer in a drive through, which is so weird to me. But you can’t buy beer after 8pm on a Saturday. It’s a very strange- it’s so interesting that every state has its own culture.
Sarah: Right like in Main you can buy liquor at the grocery store. In New York State you can only buy beer and wine coolers at the grocery store. How much more convenient would my life be if I could buy wine at the grocery store?
Marissa: Right super convenient.
Marissa: That’s like one reason to live in Florida. You can just buy wine wherever you want.
But that’s just sort of interesting- there is in Pennsylvania there is this strict overbearing control over alcohol sales but at the same time there is in backwoods areas there is that same culture.
Sarah: I would say that the people that fomented the rebellion are the ones moving inland later. Because today, Western Pennsylvania does not consider itself part of Appalacia. But if you go over the border into West Virginia, that’s where you will start to see more of that culture around moonshine. Not in Pennsylvania. My husband’s from Western PA and he is certainly not a moonshine culture type.
Marissa: No, but at the time they were sort of the yokels I was mentioning in the 1790s.
Cody: Ok, so I’m kind of interested to get you guy’s thoughts on taxation. Different ways that people protest. Maybe your thoughts on the rights of individuals to protest taxation. The rights of the government to quell a protest. I know, maybe this is an area that you can speak a little bit more to. Can you share your perspective on that?
Marissa: Right. Well for me I’m originally a British historian, so I’m thinking of it- there’s a long complicated in France and in Britain in protesting taxation. Especially excise taxes, and protesting against local magistrates and people like this- the whole tarring and feathering, that’s not like obscene in any way. There is a long culture of protest that was seen as an acceptable way to voice your opinion and your desires in a government that didn’t necessarily have direct representation. So for me, there actions make sense in a very European kind of way.
Sarah: The government’s actions or the actions…
Marissa: No, the actions of the Western Pennsylvanians. And then George Washington’s reaction is then sort of a new way of thinking about the federal government. I think. That’s how I think of it, coming from my British background.
Sarah: I think this is also, this is not my time period- I study later in the 19th century, but later it’s- it becomes, I don’t want to say common, but the United States used the Army against it’s own people multiple times, usually during labor disputes or during riots. Even during the Civil War, the New York City draft riots, the military comes in to quell that. The Homestead Strike, the military is sent in by the president to put down that strike. Um, so to me looking maybe backwards it seems like in-line.
Marissa: I agree, it seems like it set a precedent for what was an acceptable way for the American military to interact with civilians who were protesting.
Sarah: And I also see this, I don’t know as much about George Washington as I do about Alexander Hamilton, it doesn’t surprise me at all about Hamilton. As much as we’d like to think of Hamilton as a populist, he wasn’t right, he was an elitist. And the founding fathers hated the idea of mob rule and the people being able to choose what laws they were going to follow, so to me it makes sense. Although I do think it sets a troubling precedent.
Marissa: Perhaps, but compared to the French Revolution which is gearing up right when the American Revolution is ending- the French made a lot of mistakes because they didn’t understand how dangerous mob rule could be. And they didn’t understand delegating sovereignty to your representatives, and things like that. They tried to apply democratic principles to society in a very literal way that did not work and devolved into chaos. So really, I tend to think that