Ken Burns’ documentaries always leave you feeling that, though you imagined you knew a thing or two about a historical event — the Civil War or World War II, the evolution of baseball or jazz — you’d actually been familiar with only a tiny fraction of the story. Last year when Burns told me he was working on “Prohibition,” his latest film with co-director Lynn Novick, I thought, “Oh sure: Carrie Nation, speakeasies, Al Capone — I know all about that.”
Wrong.
“This is not a documentary about gangsters and flappers,” Burns told me recently when he and Novick were in Chicago for a preview screening of the movie. “Prohibition has always been treated superficially even though, when you look at it closely, it wasn’t just a 13-year hiccup — it really was America’s first culture war.”
The three-part, six-hour series, which premieres on PBS Oct. 2, is a sweeping view of the maturation of a young America yearning to forge a collective utopian identity of sober citizens through individual activism and massive grassroots organizing. Ultimately, the effort — nearly two decades of fighting for and against the constitutional tinkering that created a nation of inebriated lawbreakers — bowed to the intractability of the nation’s complex social problems, not to mention the individualistic spirit of those who were unashamed to take solace with an occasional drink.
The film takes viewers on an American odyssey that spans nearly everything from the origins of alcohol production and consumption to the rise of crooked politicians. Most importantly, the film illuminates for viewers how the aspirations, struggles and missteps of our forefathers and mothers are intimately familiar to our own present-day concerns. By looking at what happened before and after the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act went into effect to provide a large-scale government fix for convoluted social problems associated with alcoholism, we can consider the issues of our day.