TANSTAAFL. 
And yes, many places have happy hour with a light buffet offered.
I just finished binge-watching all five hours of Prohibition. Just wanted to say thanks to the OP for mentioning it – another case of a wonderful film that had somehow escaped my attention that someone on the SDMB inspired me to watch. Wow, this guy Ken Burns sure knows how to make a documentary! Some pretty high-priced talent was involved in it, too.
I really enjoyed both the Daniel O’Krent book, and the Burns doc based on it.
Apologies for bringing up politics. But I think there is a striking parallel between Prohibition, and abortion law.
The main similarity is that people of privilege did not/will not have to worry about obtaining booze/abortions.
It was perfectly legal for rich people to buy a warehouse and stock it with ten lifetimes of booze prior to passage of the law. And for rich people to travel to where abortions are legal.
Also, as others have noted upthread, it wasn’t clear how strict the law would be. Early on, the brewers thought that they’d be better off if hard liquor were banished. Many thought beer and wine would remain legal. Sort of like bruising primary elections leading to extremist outcomes.
Great book and documentary!
The doc gives the example of a posh university club that bought enough supply to last its members a prophetic fourteen years. They had a year to do so before restrictions came into effect.
Which other “Ken Burns USA” docs are very good? I did not see the one on Hemingway. I like The Roosevelts - Franklin and Eleanor are both kind of personal heroes of mine.
I saw the “Hemingway” one. It was interesting, and so was the one on the Mayo Clinic.
And of course, the best known ones are on baseball and jazz. Those are up to 8 parts.
I’ve seen a tiny bit of it. So damned boring that I quickly lost interest.
IMO every one I’ve seen: Hemingway, Ben Franklin, Muhammad Ali. The latter had big shoes to fill, since the 1996 documentary “When We Were Kings” and the Will Smith biopic were so good.
The baseball one may be my favorite, since I’m a huge fan of old-time baseball.
If you were a farmer in the 18th and 19th century, it was easier to convert your bushels of grain/corn into gallons of alcohol for trading purposes. And this was particularly true if you had to transport your crop long distances. We sometimes like to characterize prohobitionist as a bunch of Karens who didn’t want anyone to have fun, but alcohol was a pretty serious social problem.
I don’t think that’s quite right. The 18th Amendment didn’t define what an intoxicating beverage was. So a lot of people assumed beer would continue to be available even after the amendment passed. But the Volstead Act defined an intoxicating beverage as that which had .5 percent or more alcohol by volume which put an end to that idea.
The Volstead Act permitted the government to issue permits for certain distilleries to stay in business to produce alcohol for medical or industrial needs.
It’s not so easy to crack down on religious practices here in the United States. And honestly, law enforcement could never keep up with trying to enforce prohibition.
Not quite originally. The Temperance movement in the United States really got its start in the late 18th century. Back then, temperance really meant moderation, and it was only as the decades wore on that it came to mean complete abstinance. The Temperance movement is inexoribly linked to the women’s suffrage movment for some good reasons. In the 19th century, women were expected to remain in the domestic sphere and leave the public sphere to the men. But prohibition allowed women to enter the public sphere under the guise of protecting the family. Also, excessive drinking often affected women and children greatly. If your husband drank half his paycheck the day he got paid, you didn’t have much recourse.
I don’t know if prohibition hastened women’s suffrage, but the Anti-Saloon League was in favor of it because they felt it brought more dry votes.
I think so. Prior to national prohibition, there were states that enacted prohibition after the Civil War. Prohibition was the longest progressive movement in the United States starting in the late 18th century and succeeding in the early 20th by outlawing alcohol.
Nitpick. Daniel Okrent.
Unfortunately, I think Burns makes the slowest and most boring documentaries of anyone who ever lived. They seemed refreshing at first - The Civil War is still his most famous, IMO - and that established his lugubrious style. Jazz was over 20 years ago and that’s the last one I enjoyed. The recent Benjamin Franklin could have said everything in half the time. Maybe he gets paid by the minute.
Read the books. They’re much better.
Prohibition was not lugubrious, in my view, but I agree the main points could have been told in half the time. However, I did not feel that way about Vietnam, Civil War, Jazz, Baseball or Country Music. Those diversions were more entertaining or informative, perhaps. Vietnam in particular managed to express many different viewpoints fairly and completely.
In the United States, coverture was common. It basically meant that women were as children to their husbands who were in charge of the family. Divorce was not a realistic option for most women.
Farmers were allowed to make cider for their own consumption but they weren’t permitted to sell it.
Based only on Prohibition, I’m going to emphatically disagree. As I said above, I’ve just watched it in its entirety, and at no point was I bored. But prohibition is a subject that fascinates me; someone less interested in that period of history might feel differently.
Such blanket and absolute statements aren’t always true. Sure, there’s no end of examples of great books being turned into mediocre films, but not always. In this case, I think it would be hard to justify such a statement, in part because Okrent himself was a major creative contributor to the film as well as one of its principal on-screen commentators.
You could pretty much make that argument about any documentary of any substantial length – that it could be edited down to half its runtime and still tell more or less the same story. But would it be as effective? As informative?
The only question here IMHO is whether an approximately five-hour runtime is an appropriate length. Considered as a conventional film, especially one intended to be seen in theaters, the answer is clearly no. But considered as something to be viewed at home and consumed in several sittings, it’s less a conventional film than it is a sort of audio-visual version of the book. It’s presented in three parts for that purpose, but it’s even more true if you can stop it at any point and resume later at your convenience, in which case it’s literally like an audio-visual book.
My opinion on Burns is just that: my opinion. Others obviously differ. But the opinion is based on more than one data point.
The books are normally written as part of the overall project by people who were writers of the scripts. Therefore they are directly comparable in a way that most adaptations aren’t.
Is a slow, overlong documentary effective? What percent of the audience makes it through to the end? Would another style work better for a different subject rather than forcing all topics into a bed of Procrustes?
Again, I used to like Burns. I’ve stopped liking Burns. Burns is the reason I’ve stopped liking Burns. He’s no different from rock groups or mystery series writers. His early stuff was great, but after 30 years of doing the same thing to diminishing returns he no longer thrills.
His series on the Vietnam War was excellent, I thought.
Ok, so I’m not an expert on the subject, being a brit and all, but from what I read sometime ago there was an overall problem in the late 1890s onwards in the rural US where it was much easier and cheaper to drink alcohol than water. In the hot fields all day (before the health effects of dehydration was known about) this led to some women being widows very early in their life. One of the leaders of the temperance lost her husband to alcohol in his mid 20s, but I can’t google-fu to find her name.
In effect they had a point versus the low regulation on alcohol across the states, but like any such long hard victory, led to a whiplash result much further than really made any sense.
Looks like the one, though it might have been a common problem.
If rural Americans were drinking alcohol in the 1890s it was by choice. The amount of alcohol Americans drank each year peaked at around 5 gallons in the early 1800s whereas it’s about 2 gallons now (though I’ve read that alcohol consumption has gone up so it might be higher now). While in graduate school, I came across a letter written by an Englishman visiting American in the 1820s/30s, and he was positively astounded by the amount of alcohol Americans consumed.
I can only paraphrase as its been so long: “When they greet one another, they drink. When they bid one another farewell, they drink. When they enter into a business negotiation, they drink. When they conclude their negotiation, they drink. When they disagree, they drink. When they reach a consensus, they drink. When they drink, they fight, and when they make amends, they drink.”
Alcohol consumption started going down, in part, because of industrialization. You could have farmers working in the field who were slightly buzzed, but that same worker in a textile mill or on the railroad could cause a lot of damage to the company and himself.
I guess that’s what happens when you form a land from the Scots, have the Germans over and add the Irish later…
Alcohol abuse in the US was a real problem, especially among the working class and especially for women who were married to men who drank too much since these women had no access to political power. Husbands drank their pay, but it was the wive’s responsibility to still figure out how to feed everyone and keep them clothed. Temperance became associated with women’s right to vote and became an early feminist issue.
Ironically, by making alcohol illegal, they loosened social constraints on it and younger women started going to speakeasies, it also promoted a (limited) mixing of the races as white people mingled with other races in the bars; since all of it was illicit, the old rules started to erode. Prohibition created a rift between older women’s rights activists who were against drink and younger women’s rights activists who went out to bars.