Part of a TV series review Wall Street Journal: "The History of a Calamity" Email Print Save ? More . .smaller Larger By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ In the 91 years since the 18th Amendment went into effect, the wonderment surrounding this event has never faded. How, in the United States of America, the land of the free, could Prohibition ever have come to be?
For answering that question alone—which Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's "Prohibition" do in a remarkable first episode—the series would have to be considered a triumph. The story begins with a look at 19th-century America, and at the lives of the obscure, often desperate, Americans—mostly women—who were the first to mount a war against the sale of alcohol.
New York Daily News/PBS
Federal agents pose for news cameras during a 1922 liquor raid in New York .Prohibition Oct. 2, 3 and 4 at 8 p.m. EDT on PBS .
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ In the 91 years since the 18th Amendment went into effect, the wonderment surrounding this event has never faded. How, in the United States of America, the land of the free, could Prohibition ever have come to be?
For answering that question alone—which Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's "Prohibition" do in a remarkable first episode—the series would have to be considered a triumph. The story begins with a look at 19th-century America, and at the lives of the obscure, often desperate, Americans—mostly women—who were the first to mount a war against the sale of alcohol.
New York Daily News/PBS
Federal agents pose for news cameras during a 1922 liquor raid in New York .Prohibition Oct. 2, 3 and 4 at 8 p.m. EDT on PBS ."America was awash in drink" from the earliest days of the Republic, series consultant Daniel Okrent observes in his enthralling book "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition." But by the 19th century, alcohol consumption and attendant problems had apparently grown beyond control. By 1830, the film informs us, the average American male over the age of 15 was consuming the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey a year.
The era's crusaders against the sale of drink had gone to war out of rage and despair—because of the men who spent their pay in bars and abused their wives and children. As one of the show's historians grimly describes it, these husbands would wander home drunk and do whatever they wanted. By the end of their battles, the lives of these women were forever changed, according to one memoir from the period. Having experienced the exhilaration of political action, these crusaders could not now be expected to return home satisfied to take up their sewing.
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CloseWalter P. Reuther Library/Wayne State University/PBS
Men in Detroit heed a sign warning of 'last call' in the days before Prohibition's 1920 start. .Hillsboro, Ohio, housewife Eliza Jane Thompson, who led the earliest efforts to close the saloons—"Mother Thompson's Crusade," it was called—would cause chaos throughout the state and ultimately spread to others. Ms. Thompson had begun her campaign in December of 1873, leading cadres of determined, praying women to block the entrances of saloons. Nothing else in this series laden with memorable images can quite equal the pictures of those anonymous women, clad in black, calmly parading through the streets, or bent in prayer in front of bars. They would succeed in winning sympathy, enough to get local saloon keepers to shut their doors.
Elsewhere, the demonstrators encountered rougher treatment—especially, the filmmakers explain, in larger cities where immigrant workers didn't take kindly to women trying to close down their saloons. Members of a fire company hosed them with icy water. The owner of a German beer garden put a cannon in the doorway and threatened to blow away any woman trying to pass—which didn't prevent one intrepid demonstrator from sitting on the thing. The crusade spread to 31 states and territories, but in the end could not be sustained. Greater powers than theirs were required to shut down the sellers of alcohol.
And in that regard no force would prove more potent than the late 19th century's Anti-Saloon League, which the film calls the most powerful pressure group that ever existed in the U.S. Its operating principle was to defeat any elected official in any state who failed to support the league's goal—a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
None of this is to underestimate, of course, the ferocity and power of the crusaders against drink who had come before, and the film does not. It's hard not to come away impressed, if bleakly, by efforts like the Womens' Christian Temperance Union's program of required temperance classes three days a week in the nation's public schools—a program the WCTU managed to bamboozle the schools into accepting. In these terrifying indoctrination classes, which the film describes in rich detail, millions of American children learned that one taste of alcohol could lead to blindness, madness or death. And there was the possibility too, the children were told, of spontaneous combustion—just one drink of alcohol might cause their bodies to go up in flames.
Not all is fervor and fanaticism in this saga, of course—criminality and unparalleled corruption arrive in due course. The panel of commentators provides light touch, mainly of dour wit as they assess life during Prohibition. An early section on the power and interests of the great German immigrant beer companies—Schlitz, Pabst, Busch, etc.—is delectable. The same can be said for the considerable scholarship here on the glories of bars and their uses to mankind, most of it provided by Pete Hamill, who brings a distinct air of authority to the discussion. Taken together there is in these 5½ hours, breathtaking in their scope and detail, nothing approaching a dull moment.
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