Prohibition: The Amendment That Had to Be Amended

0 Comments09/29/11

In a three-part, five-hour documentary premiering on PBS on October 2, acclaimed film producer Ken Burns, in partnership with Lynn Novick, takes on the Prohibition era, which ran from the 1919 passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the accompanying Volstead Act to the amendment’s repeal in 1933.

For most Americans the very word Prohibition still calls up vivid images of “bathtub gin” and the Roaring Twenties, of bootleggers and speakeasies, of gangsters in bad suits like Al Capone, and of the lawlessness fought by almost mythical heroes like the FBI’s Eliot Ness (you might know him as Kevin Costner from the 1987 movie The Untouchables).

Burns, however, goes beyond the popular images. He shows why you should care. Prohibition and the broader temperance movement were firmly connected with the women’s suffrage movement and women’s liberation. The political battle over drinking was one that had been brewing for a century and came to a head during World War I (with apologies for the wretched puns). It both caused and deepened a divide—one still with us today—between the values of small town and big city, conservatives and progressives, ordinary folk and the more sophisticated “elites,” old-time religion and modern secularism. Today, the debate continues in the context of marijuana and other drugs.

A good recent print source about Prohibition is Daniel Okrent’s 2010 book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. But, of course, plenty of material is available on the Internet. Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Initiatives has a comprehensive collection called Alcohol, Temperance, & Prohibition, with a detailed essay Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda. Browsing the collection, if you click on “Retrieve,” you’ll see facsimiles of hundreds of primary documents—reports, songs, cartoons, posters—about the topic, many of them slightly comical after all these years. A website devoted to the topic comes out of Ohio State University. There you’ll find not only authoritative text materials but also, for example, editorial cartoons that provide visual clues to the temper of the times—or should we say, “temperance of the times”?

If you want to put Prohibition into a larger social, historical, and economic context, you might start with a website from Kennesaw College called The Roaring Twenties. The site has links to a host of topics: fashion, flappers, gangsters and crime, and the Jazz Age—a topic Ken Burns tackled in a documentary titled Jazz in 2000.

To broaden your perspective on this issue still further, check out the website of the National Constitution Center. In concert with PBS, the NCC presented an advance screening of Burns’s Prohibition as part of its symposium “Can We Talk? A Conversation about Civility and Democracy in America.” You can watch webcasts of various presentations, all bearing on the topic of dissent in American life, the kind of dissent that swirled around the Prohibition debate.

We hope you tap these sources. (Sorry, we can’t stop with the booze puns.)

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