Prohibition and the Past as Prologue

Americans love great stories told well, but the idea of learning from history tends to get little more than lip service. Just ask Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

A scholar of the Great Depression, Bernanke keeps running up against economists and politicians who not only have failed to absorb the lessons of that era of grinding human hardship, but who also seem hell-bent on repeating its mistakes.

Such are the challenges facing "Prohibition," a three-part documentary series.

Its very title invokes what feels like ancient American history, a peculiar period dating back some four generations. Its content revolves around a notion that today sounds absurd, even quaint: a nationwide ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Even considering the sexy, violent mythology the period spawned, getting American viewers to watch "Prohibition," much less learn anything from it, seems daunting.

The veteran filmmaking team that made "Prohibition," led by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, boasts a compelling track record of great stories told well: "The War," "Baseball," "The Civil War," "Jazz," "The National Parks" and more than a dozen others.

"Prohibition" follows in that tradition. It bubbles and bursts with stories notorious and stories unknown, stories about incidents, people and places, including the mammoth breweries and German immigrant community of St. Louis. But great stories are not enough. The competition for people's time and attention is unrelenting, and today's more present-centric viewers need to feel some kind of connection with accounts of the past.

So Burns and Novick have been emphasizing the many contemporary resonances of their historical film as they've traveled the country promoting it in sessions with university students, local public television supporters, civic groups and newspaper editorial boards.

Burns told St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial and news staff members that "Prohibition" underscores "how much the past is really like the present."

The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the sale of intoxicating beverages as of Jan. 16, 1920, and the federal statute spelling out the terms and conditions of the ban were the result of a process that began with a desperate search for a solution to a real problem of the early 1800s: the rampant consumption of alcohol by men and the damage their drunkenness inflicted on women, children, society as a whole and themselves.

By the early 1900s, that quest had mutated into a ferocious political force that its leaders astutely channeled into political leverage and political action.

They literally believed they were on a mission from God, which justified any and all tactics.

Armed with arrogance and zeal, the advocates of prohibition used their single issue as a wedge to enforce a "with us or against us" standard: Prohibition or Treason, went one slogan. The movement "metastasized with unintended consequences," Burns said, including the flourishing of organized crime, the transformation of ordinary Americans into routine lawbreakers, and unbridled corruption of government and law enforcement.

America lives today in a state of political paralysis that is perhaps the most maddening and cruelest unintended consequence of wedge-issue tactics, which initially were seen simply as a strategic campaign tool. That process has metastasized to the point that aspiring public servants now must satisfy the all-or-nothing standards of fringe elements that exert disproportionate leverage within their respective parties. Their no-limits, take-no-prisoners approach dissuades or crushes practical-minded men and women who might be inclined to govern from the left-center or right-center through reasonable compromise.

Novick described her film as "an anatomy of a mistake" for which no individual proponent was held accountable or paid a political price. The lesson, she admitted, was that the politics of ruthlessness wins, at least for a while.

In the end, Americans became fed up with the excesses of Prohibition: the often exuberant disregard for the law among consumers and the erratic, graft-ridden enforcement of it against suppliers. It also finally became too obvious to deny that prohibiting the sale of alcohol had done nothing to solve society's real and imagined problems — including the genuine problem of alcoholism — as its believers had promised it would.

Examined under the high-resolution microscope of Burns' and Novick's film, Prohibition seems less like a mistake than like national insanity.

The Depression slapped us back to reality. The economy was in tatters, millions of Americans couldn't get work, millions more had lost their homes to foreclosure and eviction, and men, women and children of all ages and races were struggling and suffering in big cities, small towns and the rural countryside. Private charities and churches could and did all they could do, but the need — then as now — was beyond their capacity.

After the governmental and societal failure of Prohibition, Burns said, the concept of the New Deal signified the people's collective agreement on the role of government.

"Government had an obligation to remake financial institutions and remake agricultural processes," Burns said. "It also had to help those devastated by the Great Depression."

There was no place else left for them to turn

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