I watched the first episode. They seem to portray some of the temperance movement as anti-Catholic prejudice by Protestant groups.
It was interesting how a lot of the organization of single-issue political pressure groups today goes back to the anti-saloon league.
I guess my main point was that Burns doesn’t bring anything new.
Instead of explaining how a small group of neo-puritans were able to force millions of law abiding citizens into crime.
There is a reason why Al Capone and his ilk became millionaires-people wanted to drink-and they saw no reason to follow a Federal law that they saw as stupid and counterproductive. That is the basic problem with the USA-we are a nation of hypocrites, and you cannot tell the truth about anything. Instead, we pass all kinds of laws that are ignored.
Did you actually watch it? I learned a lot about the politics of the late 19th century.
Instead of what? This is the part that everyone already knows and you’re the one accusing Burns of bringing nothing new to the table. And what makes you think this isn’t in the series? Apparently, this is the only thing he should mention?
As opposed to all the other countries in the world, which would *never *do anything like that.
Which it was. Although it was also anti-immigrant in general, and among the hard-drinking immigrant groups were Germans, who were mostly Protestant.
I didn’t watch the Burns show, but IMO histories of the run-up to Prohibition often miss an important point: Yes, the temperance movement was important, and it got Prohibition into the national conversation and into law in many rural states. But it would never, ever, never in a million years have succeeded nationally without the outburst of patriotic fervor which accompanied our entry into World War I.
It did indeed make that point–along with the institution of the Income Tax, negating the government’s need for liquor taxes.
My very dear Sarah:
The indications are very strong that we shall get loaded in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be too wasted…
What were you drinking while watching the broadcast?
Some of those schooners of VERY dark beer the men were holding in photos looked to be pretty tasty, especially compared to the Coors Light pisswater that the other stations shell all day long during football games…
This is the standard line, that booze was stolen while our boys were over there. Again, I didn’t watch the episode yet, but the book takes pains in exploding this as a myth. Yes, it certainly helped that anti-German sentiment skyrocketed because of the war. But this was more of a straw the broke the camel’s back than a new factor. The whole temperance movement was anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and and therefore anti-German for decades. The Germans owned both the beer and liquor industries and had spent huge amounts of money on lobbying, making them the prime political targets.
Prohibition would definitely have happened without the war. The war sped it up a bit, but nothing more. That’s at least the message of the book, and he makes the case for me.
If you don’t watch it you won’t know what Burns is bringing. For one thing, it wasn’t just the neo-Puritans who were for Prohibition. It was also a Progressive movement.
Guess that’s why we’re watching The Works of Ken Burns instead of The Works of Ralph1234c.
MPB: I was drinking Shiner Oktoberfest! Go Czechs!
Which is exactly why a war against Germany was such a tremendous boon to Prohibitionists.
Absent the war, I don’t believe that America would have continually grown more and more anti-alcohol until national Prohibition was adopted. American attitudes toward alcohol have always been cyclical.
Have they? Before WWI more than half the states had voted themselves dry. An Interstate Liquor Act was passed in 1913 prohibiting sales of liquor across state boundaries. The Amendment needed only 36 states to pass, not the entire country.
I admit that the vote in Congress was close and that getting a 36th state was a hard battle. But the trend was overwhelming before the war. The battle wasn’t a matter of getting there from scratch. It was about picking off the last few politicians - a breed who congenitally hate to be the last ones holding out on an issue. That’s why I believe that the war sped up the inevitable rather than turn an obvious no into a yes.
We can’t replay history to see what might have happened. This is opinion, not fact. However, actual history tells us that the majority of Americans were happy to see prohibition arrive because they thought it was a positive good. Prohibition won not because it was put over on an unwilling public but because it was considered to be progress, a modern attitude about a better future. It didn’t turn out that way, but that’s arguing from hindsight. If you look at the world through a pre-1920 prism, everything looks different.
One of the points made (out of many good ones) was that the prohibitionist forces wanted the amendment out of Congress by 1920, when the new census would create more votes in the cities, the center of the antiprohibition movement. But the idea of prohibition was clearly popular before WWII; it’s just that the war silenced the wets, whose most vocal advocates were of German descent.
So there were forces that made it more likely, as well as those that might have blocked it. Even without an amendment, though there would have been prohibition on one form or another; the point of the amendment was to make sure it couldn’t be repealed.
Well to be fair baseball is excruciatingly boring so there’s no real way to make an interesting documentary about it.
Spoiler alert!
There never was a redistricting. Too sensitive politically because of the chance that city reps would make a difference. It’s the only decade in our history without one.
Ep. 2 was fascinating–I had never even *heard *of George Remus; now I have to go find whatever books have been written abut him. I’m glad it was not just the usual Al Capone/Izzy and Moe stories we’ve all heard so many times.
Agreed. Episode 2 was first-class. Remus and Roy Ohlmstead were new to me, as was the fact that NY had the most restrictive prohibition law in the nation. The show was more interesting because it only covered five years instead of a century and because the personalities of the bootleggers were far more interesting (especially Remus) than those of the prohibitionists.
I do wish they’d talked more about “Jake leg (pdf),” though, other than a brief passing mention. I find that story fascinating. Also, I’ve been reading about how poisonous prohibition liquor could be, including the fact that the prohibitionists were perfectly happy to let people die from drinking bad alcohol, since a few dead drinkers acted as a deterrent.
But, other than those quibbles, I loved the episode.
I’ve been drinking a rye old fashioned.
Last Call was good reading and the half-hour I saw of the Burns documentary last night was interesting. I’ll be watching more of it.
It wasn’t a small group. There was considerable anti-booze sentiment, even though the fervent activists were relatively limited in number.
A truth you overlook is that Prohibition was not “ignored” - there’s evidence (cited by Okrent and Burns) that in a lot of places drinking was curtailed because most people were law-abiding.
What really killed Prohibition was not the rise of organized crime or any increases in violent crime in general (interesting op-ed piece in the N.Y. Times on Sunday refuting the claim that homicide rates jumped during Prohibition), or desire for legalized liquor. It was the Depression - jobs and tax revenue were more important than attempting to legislate teetotaling.
The last ep. was a little dull, but you really can’t avoid that if you have to go on about Al Capone and Herbert Hoover and all–though I *so *want someone to run Zombie Al Smith for president; I’d vote for him.
Love, by the way that once they reached the 1920s, Burns started using original music sources again–I got so distracted by the wonderful background music that I forgot to listen to the narration at times. Oh, and Mr. Talking Head Expert? Flaming Youth was not even “arguably” the first flapper movie–that would have been The Flapper, six years earlier.