Ken Burns' new documentary to air
"You had demonization of immigrants, smear campaigns in presidential elections, unfunded congressional mandates, government where the means justified the ends, a whole group of people who felt they lost control of their country and wanted to take it back," Burns said.
"Stop me when you've heard enough."
Prohibition from 1920 to 1933 was the law of the land in the form of a constitutional amendment and its enabling legislation, the Volstead Act, which prohibited the manufacture, transportation, sale or service of intoxicating liquor. Ken Burns' new documentary to air,
It was a Noble Experiment that instead proved the law of unintended consequences: organized crime, glamorization of illicit drinking, government corruption, heightened racial and religious prejudice — reflected by the three episode titles: A Nation of Drunkards, A Nation of Scofflaws and A Nation of Hypocrites.
"It is such a precise mirror of America," Burns said. "We are greedy and generous, sincere and hypocritical, corrupt and puritan, all at the same time."
To tell the tale, Burns and directing partner Lynn Novick assemble a familiar cast. Wynton Marsalis, a staple of their "Jazz" series, provides themes based on the music of the Jazz Age. Daniel Okrent, inventor of fantasy baseball and a staple of "Baseball," is senior creative consultant as author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition."
Tom Hanks, Oliver Platt, John Lithgow, Samuel L. Jackson, Patricia Clarkson, Adam Arkin, Sam Waterston and others read the words of crusaders, bootleggers and thugs ranging from Carry Nation to Al Capone, and of forgotten figures like Wayne Wheeler, whose Anti-Saloon League helped champion Prohibition, and Pauline Sabin, the New York socialite who campaigned for its repeal, using the power of the vote that had been won by the suffragettes who helped create Prohibition.
Interview subjects include Donald Moore, who traveled as a child to the Capitol as his father, one of Washington's prominent bootleggers, made his deliveries, and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who recalls his father, who owned a Chicago hotel, asking Capone to tamp down crime while an important business convention was in town.
Capone and his ilk are present on film, as are the speakeasies that after Prohibition became staples of society. So are bootleggers and flappers and rum-runners and teetotalers and race-baiters (Prohibition came on the heels of World War I and the attendant demonization of Germans and German-Americans, who included most of the nation's most successful brewers).
"There's always been superficial glamor — the sexuality, the flapper era, the illicitness of the speakeasy," Burns said. "And we have our perpetual fascination with gangsters. ."
"Prohibition" is not an "Untouchables" remake. It deals with crime but also with politics — specifically, the fact that Prohibition was supported not only by the era's equivalent of the religious right but by suffragettes and the Progressive movement, embodied by the Texas senator, Morris Sheppard, who introduced the bill that became the 18th Amendment. Ken Burns' new documentary to air, ken burns civil war, Ken Burns PBS sunday Oct 2, 18th amendment prohibition, prohibition in the united states, ken burns prohibition documentary,
"People thought they could cure human ills through government action, so Prohibition was supported by the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP, the Workers of the World and their industrial bosses," Burns said.
"It began with the crisis impulse: Alcoholism is a horrible disease, so let's do something about it. But it was waylaid by people who wanted to control behavior and the changing face of America and to go back to a small-town, Protestant vision that really never was."
Source: omaha
