Guys with the right idea.
Is there a sexier time in American history than the 1920s? Flappers, bootleggers, speakeasies with passwords and secret knocks, the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation, it all seems so ebullient almost tipsy. It's not the domain of history class, where the decade may get one half of one lecture. It's the stuff of English classes where books like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises capture the hard drinking and hard-partying American life at home and abroad.
Prohibition, the new documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, which will air on PBS starting October 2, offers a much more sobering look at the time period. Their focus is on the events surrounding the 18th constitutional amendment and infamous Volstead Act, which together outlawed the sale or transportation of any drink containing over 0.5% alcohol. It created organized crime, undermined people’s faith in law enforcement and was officially repealed in 1933 after just 13 years.
The documentary sums up the period with a few engaging stories beyond “gangsters in Model T’s careening around rain slicked Chicago streets with machine guns blasting,” says Burns. “Or Flappers dancing on a table in a speakeasy with short skirts and bobbed hair. We’re offering the deeper dive. How did this happen? What was it really like for ordinary citizens? How did it end? What were the forces that took it away even faster than the extraordinary forces that made it happen? That’s what we’re after.”
The viewer meets people like bootlegger George Remus who killed his wife or Lois Long, the quintessential flapper who chronicled Manhattan’s nightlife for The New Yorker. “Her father was a minister,” Novick explains, “She cut her hair short and she wore those flapper outfits. She smoked and she drank and she went out on the town every night.”
“One of the things we in the present do is exhibit just an inexcusable arrogance over those who’ve gone before us that they can’t possibly have lived as fully as we do and that’s wrong,” explains Burns. “I love the fact that, particularly in Prohibition, as we’re looking at our grandmothers and our great grandmothers and our great great grandmothers and they’re having pre-marital sex and getting drunk and having a great time, suddenly it doesn’t seem like we invented sex. Or drug use. People have lived for thousands of years the way we do,” continues Burns. “The outer accoutrements of fashion and technology have changed but the inner life of the human being, it looks like, hasn’t.”
Certainly Prohibition-era America bears a lot of similarities to today. One of the bootleggers profiled in the series, Roy Olmstead, had his phones tapped without a warrant—the first such case in American legal history, raising questions about how far the government can infringe on someone’s privacy. There’s also Al Smith, the “Wet” (anti-Prohibition), Catholic, New Yorker who ran for president against Herbert Hoover. The Ku Klux Klan and Southern Baptists eviscerated him, saying, among other things, that if elected he would give the Pope an office.
“It’s upsetting in some ways to see,” says Novick. “Particularly when we talked about the campaign against Al Smith in 1928 and this enormously effective and ugly bigotry that I think would be shocking today. The closest we’ve come is some of the reaction to Obama’s election and the way he was represented in cartoons and signs people held up. It was very similar, I thought, to how Al Smith was treated, sort of dehumanized in many ways.”
Burns was “stunned” at the similarities between the times. “I found this sort of correspondence in a lot of films,” says Burns. “Human beings are going to repeat [events and practices] because human nature never changes. But this era seemed particular focused—a mirror of today. You’ve got single-issue political campaigns that metastasize with horrible unintended consequences. You’ve got the demonization of recent immigrants to the United States and, as always, African Americans. You’ve got unfunded Congressional mandates, which people complain about. You’ve got a whole group of people who feel like they’ve lost control of their country and want to take it back, just like the Tea Party of today.”
Critics have been trying to find a message among all of these similarities, but the film’s topic is still Prohibition not a veiled take on 2011. The power behind Burns’ and Novick’s documentary isn’t what it says about today, but how it sympathetically and honestly potrays the concerns of yesteryear, making sure to give everyone a fair hearing.
“It’s easy to make fun of [supporters of prohibition], portraying them as people who don’t want to have any fun,” explains Novick. “[But] in the late 18th and early 19th century Americans drank three times as much as they drink today and it was mostly men. You’ve got to figure that most men were just staggering around drunk all the time, which was terrible for them and their families.”
Prohibition actually started out as “a noble idea of trying to make people’s lives better by preventing them from becoming sucked into the downward spiral of alcoholism,” says Novick. “It evolved [because] the people who really wanted to bring about Prohibition were very threatened by the changing society. America was becoming much more urban, much more diverse, much more modern and they didn’t like that, especially people living in small towns where change hadn’t yet reached them. And so they really thought that alcohol was the source of all these unsettling changes and that if they could get rid of alcohol they could hold onto the country and prevent it from going in the wrong direction.”
They failed but that doesn’t mean that their attempt was some ridiculous mistake. “[Alcoholism] is still a real social problem today,” explains Burns. “And our film ends and everybody’s happy [that Prohibition’s been repealed] and we say, ‘yes, but…’”
Burns and Novick also seem able to make everything, jazz, baseball, the Civil War, more than just an interesting historical moment. Their documentaries clarify an aspect of being American. Prohibition is no different. “We Americans are particularly torn on the bias between generosity and greed,” explains Burns “between sincerity and hypocrisy, between piousness and prurience. In short between Saturday night at the saloon and Sunday morning at church.” These warring sides of the American self never had a more dramatic stage to battle each other than Prohibition-era America, nor a better chance to have the story of that battle told.
