Book Summary
Manny Shwab and the George Dickel Company: Whisky, Power and Politics During Nashville’s Gilded Age (McFarland 2024)
There was once a Tennessee whiskey that dwarfed Jack Daniel’s, and a powerful man was behind it: V.E. “Manny” Shwab. Until now, virtually nothing has been written about either. Their story is one of a Jewish Alsatian immigrant’s dream of finding community and prosperity in the New world; of smuggling during the Civil War; of the raging, sometimes fatal, battle against Prohibition; and of the wild side of rapidly growing Nashville during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Manny” Shwab was a Tennessean known as the “owner” of Tennessee politics, and–because of his George Dickel company, saloons, and Cascade Whisky–the “debaucherer of more young men than anyone else in the state.” He was also one of Tennesee’s richest and most powerful men for four decades. This is the first full-length biography of V. E. Shwab, written by his great-grandson, and also the first complete history of the George Dickel company.
The Interview
Donna Meredith
Donna Meredith: Writing any book is a big undertaking that takes many months if not years. How long did you work on this book?
Clay Schwab: The notion for the book began about ten years before publication, with erratic bouts of research and writing. But I became engrossed—obsessed, to be honest—in the subject and research about four years before its submission to the publisher. I do not believe four to five thousand hours is hyperbolic.
DM: What motivated or inspired you to write about this story?
CS: All I knew about the George Dickel whiskey company was that my family had owned it, sold it after Prohibition, and that my great grandfather made a hell of a lot of money presumably from the company. But no one in our family claimed to know a thing about it, or seemed to care. So the initial motivation was a casual curiosity about V. E. Shwab.
My son ran across Chuck Cowdery’s whiskey blog. The New York Times had declared Chuck “the dean of American whiskey writers. He was bemoaning the fact that whiskey distilleries were not promulgating their true, rich histories. As example, he wrote that the owner of George Dickel was promoting a “Keebler Elf” image of Dickel, the man, and that surely there were some Shwabs who would like to correct the record. I qualified as a Shwab, so that planted the notion to be more serious about the research.
I became fascinated by what I was learning about V. E. “Manny” Shwab, and about his internationally famous Cascade Whiskey, “Mellow as Moonlight” that had dwarfed other Tennessee whiskeys, including Jack Daniel’s, for decades. When on a trip to London, our Uber driver, a recent immigrant from Croatia, asked where we were from. I said “Tennessee,” and he beamed “Elvis and Jack Daniel’s!” The thought that George Dickel could have been so synonymous with Tennessee that a Croatian Uber driver would have known it, struck a nerve.
But I was learning that there was much more to Manny than Cascade whiskey. He had become the richest man in Nashville, one of the richest in the South, and probably the most powerful, albeit notorious, man in Tennessee politics. But surprisingly, there was no mention of him in the various histories of the state. My research took me to Ridley Wills who has written over thirty books on the history of Nashville. We met many times to discuss my research, the multiple influences Manny had on Nashville’s development, and the bothersome fact that he was unknown. Ridley stated, “You have to tell the story.”
Frances Turnbell, the editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, said this book would “fill a real gap in the literature.” So the motivation to write the book was in place. But for the motivation to finish the book, I visited Manny at the Mt. Olivet cemetery in Nashville where he is buried in a plot with his family and George Dickel (they married sisters) and promised him I would correct the record.
DM: What research was required for the writing of this story?
Clay Shwab
CS: I spent many days in the Archives at the Tennessee State Library, East Tennessee Historical Society, and the Nashville Library, mostly scrolling through microfiche. I interviewed Tennessee historians: Jack Neely, Knoxville; Ridley Wills, Nashville; Kay Gaston, Spring Hill; and Francis Turnbell, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, as well as local Rabbis. I reviewed the archives at the George Dickel distillery in Tullahoma (Cascade Hollow). I reviewed various online whiskey related blogs, Wikipedia citations, Civil War and whiskey-related history books.
But by far the richest, most time consuming, and the most fun research was reading the many hundreds of newspaper articles from 1850 to 1930, looking for any mention of Manny, George Dickel, Cascade Whiskey, and any other related search term I could think of. Newpapers.com proved invaluable, and readers will see there are over 225 newspaper citations in the book.
DM: What details were most challenging to get right about the setting?
CS: It seems accepted that today’s political atmosphere is more divisive, caustic, and contentious than any since the Civil War; but, at least in Tennessee, the years from the 1880s until 1920 were even more contentious over the issue of prohibition. Newspapers were unabashedly biased, giving wildly differing “factual” accounts of events. Manny was either “the debaucherer of more young men than any other man in Tennessee,” a “one man Tammany Hall,” or a philanthropic, consensus building visionary, dragging Tennessee into the 20th century while elevating Tennessee whiskey to a stellar reputation.
He, more than any other Tennessean, was fighting the prohibition freight train. But out of the hundreds of articles mentioning him, I found only one quote from him. He never stepped out of the shadows. So, gleaning the facts from competing realities proved challenging.
DM: What are you working on next?
CS: I plan to convert Manny’s story into a screenplay. I believe the rich and interesting characters and the subjects of whiskey, Nashville’s gilded age (there was a pre-Music City Nashville), saloons (brothels), smuggling, and the fight against prohibition are well suited for a docudrama.
I also am compiling around a dozen sets of letters written between family members and soldiers during the Civil War. My father collected them from Nashville homes when he was a boy in the 1930s. They tell much about life during that dark time.
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