Noah S. Sweat

Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat Jr. (October 2, 1922 – February 23, 1996) was an American judge, law professor, and state representative in Mississippi, notable for his 1952 speech on the floor of the Mississippi state legislature concerning whiskey. Reportedly the speech took Sweat two and a half months to write. The speech is renowned for the grand rhetorical terms in which it seems to come down firmly and decisively on both sides of the question while taking a moderate stance. The speech gave rise to the phrase if-by-whiskey.

Career Sweat was elected to the Mississippi House in 1947, at the age of 24. He served only one five-year term, at the end of which he delivered his speech.

He subsequently pursued his career in law. Sweat was the founder of the Mississippi Judicial College of the University of Mississippi Law Center. The writer John Grisham worked as his assistant as a law student in 1980.

According to William Safire, Sweat's nickname was derived from the phrase "sorghum top", a reference to the way in which his hair resembled a sugar cane tassel.

He died in 1996 in Alcorn County, Mississippi, after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

The "whiskey speech" The "whiskey speech", delivered on Friday, April 4, 1952, concerned the question of the prohibition of alcoholic liquor, a law that was still in force in Mississippi at the time the speech was delivered.

Sweat later recalled: "When I finished the first half of the speech, there was a tremendous burst of applause. The second half of the speech, after the close of which, the wets all applauded. The drys were as unhappy with the second part of the speech as the wets were with the first half."

The speech is a common example of escaping between the horns of a false dilemma, although it has been mistaken as equivocation, such that the phrase if-by-whiskey has often used as shorthand for an argument that equivocates to avoid committing fully to a single position of a controversial issue.