Security· Civil Aid and Humanitarian Operations
New York 'Irishtown' Whiskey Raids
A Reconstruction-era duty in support of federal revenue enforcement.
The neighborhood of Irishtown in Brooklyn was a center of illegal distilling, where organized "whiskey men" defrauded the government of liquor taxes and resisted the Internal Revenue officers sent against them. When the federal agents found themselves outmatched, a force of about a hundred Marines under Lieutenant Sherman was called out to back the raids on the illicit stills. The Marines were met in the streets by a hostile crowd that hurled missiles, one of which struck a police officer, but they held their formation and saw the raids through, and their conduct was afterward praised in the warmest terms. The operation was characteristic of the period, when Marines were repeatedly lent to civil authorities against domestic criminal organizations that local police could not handle on their own.
Record no. 479