I’ve solely the very best respect for the documentarian Ken Burns. He’s America’s storyteller: an unrivalled filmmaker whose creativity, ardour and elegance shine via each historical past he portrays. My intent is to not dunk on anybody, however somewhat to begin a dialog about how People as a society grapple with our personal contentious historical past. Our identities are formed by the collective experiences of our previous, and the way we see ourselves in relation to them. Collectively, we always reframe and revise the previous to make it make sense to us within the current.
It simply so occurs that the very best place to begin that dialog is with Burns and Lynn Novick’s five-and-a-half-hour TV miniseries Prohibition (2011), which covers that the majority misunderstood chapter in US historical past, from the 1919 ratification of the 18th Modification – prohibiting ‘the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’ – till its repeal by the twenty first Modification in 1933. Prohibition deserves our consideration as a result of it displays what we expect we find out about historical past, somewhat than the precise historical past itself. It’s what the comic Stephen Colbert known as ‘truthiness’ in reality’s stead. The issues begin inside the first 5 seconds of the movie. The filmmakers set the narrative tone for your entire sequence with an epigraph – stark white letters centred in opposition to a black background:
Nothing so wants reforming as different folks’s habits.
Fanatics won’t ever study that, although it’s written in letters of gold throughout the sky.
It’s the prohibition that makes something treasured.
– Mark Twain
Direct. Eloquent. Authoritative. Damning. The framing is obvious: temperance activists are the dangerous guys, ‘fanatics’ hellbent on altering different folks’s habits who’re dumb sufficient to ‘by no means study’ the obvious classes staring them proper within the face. The issue is that Twain by no means actually stated that. As a substitute, it’s a mosaic of unconnected quotes, spanning totally different works of fiction and nonfiction over time.
‘Nothing so wants reforming as different folks’s habits’ comes from Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894): Twain’s serialised novel about race, slavery and small-town faith. ‘Fanatics won’t ever study that …’ was scrawled in Twain’s journey pocket book whereas in London in November 1896 as he extolled the virtues of ‘temperate temperance’. And ‘it’s the prohibition that makes something treasured’ got here 11 months earlier whereas in India, as Twain ruminated about Adam, Eve and forbidden fruit throughout his go to to Allahabad.
When stitched collectively, they make for a compelling framework for what we really feel to be true about temperance and prohibitionism. Within the 11 years for the reason that launch of the TV sequence, no one appears to have observed this. Nonetheless, the epigraph units the stage for what’s to return. Burns and Novick are gifted storytellers, and each story wants battle – heroes versus villains, good guys versus dangerous guys. They’ve forged prohibitionists because the dangerous guys, as they so usually are when prohibition is remembered: hard-headed fanatics intent on dictating ‘different folks’s habits’ in a way most undemocratic and un-American.
The key to essentially understanding temperance and prohibition historical past will be boiled down to 1 phrase: site visitors. Generations of social reformers and activists – each in the USA and around the globe – centered not on the alcohol within the bottle, nor on ‘different folks’s habits’, however on what they known as ‘the liquor site visitors’: unscrupulous sellers who received folks hopelessly hooked on liquor for their very own revenue. The distinction between opposing liquor and the liquor site visitors is refined, however massively essential. Liquor is simply the stuff within the bottle, however trafficking is about revenue and predation; like human trafficking, diamond trafficking or the site visitors in narcotics and opioids.
The ‘site visitors’ will get talked about solely thrice within the Prohibition sequence. Within the first minutes, the Nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher – who impressed the trendy temperance motion together with his sequence of sermons condemning alcohol in 1826 – declares that ‘like slavery, the site visitors in ardent spirits should come to be thought to be sinful.’ After that, the site visitors – the factor prohibition was all about – all however disappears from the Prohibition documentary.
Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance (1827) are sometimes credited with kick-starting temperance, although not as a result of they have been ‘eloquent’, as Prohibition suggests. Rhetorically, they have been fairly unremarkable. As a substitute, they started a whole social motion by offering a blueprint for motion: a boycott to undermine the profit-driven site visitors. ‘Let the patron do his obligation,’ Beecher advised to his temperance followers, ‘and the capitalist, discovering his employment unproductive, will shortly uncover different channels of helpful enterprise.’ Relatively than invoking Biblical tales of drunken sinners, Beecher’s Sermons repeatedly cite one verse specifically: Habakkuk 2:9-16: ‘Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunk additionally.’ From its very inception, then, temperance was a motion for financial justice and group betterment, somewhat than a gaggle of spiritual cranks as they’re extra conventionally portrayed.
Prohibition was not concerning the stuff within the bottle, however in opposition to the predatory capitalism of the liquor site visitors
Prohibition articulates the traditional narrative, because the voiceover by Peter Coyote proclaims that America’s prohibition expertise ‘would increase questions concerning the correct function of presidency’ and ‘who’s – and who will not be – an actual American’. The framework is obvious: the ‘drys’ are the dangerous guys, and the ‘wets’ are the true patriots, absolutely exercising their freedom to drink.
In constructing their case concerning the ubiquity of booze in early America, Burns and Novick then line up a number of the biggest leaders in US historical past. But portray them as pro-liquor patriots requires a really selective studying of the historic document. ‘For many of the nation’s historical past, alcohol was at the least as American as apple pie,’ Prohibition’s narrator explains:
At Valley Forge, George Washington did his finest to ensure his males had half a cup of rum each day, and a half a cup of whiskey when the rum ran out … Thomas Jefferson collected high quality French wines and dreamed of a day when American vineyards might match them … Younger Abraham Lincoln offered whiskey by the barrel from his grocery retailer in New Salem, Illinois. ‘Intoxicating liquor,’ he later remembered, was ‘utilized by all people, repudiated by no one.’ A younger Maryland slave named Frederick Douglass stated whiskey made him really feel ‘like a president’, confident ‘and unbiased’.
In actuality, every of those males – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass and scores extra – might rightly be listed amongst America’s nice prohibitionists. However how is that potential? Easy: by once more recognising that prohibition was not concerning the stuff within the bottle, however in opposition to the predatory capitalism of the liquor site visitors.
Did Common George Washington make sure that his males had liquor at Valley Forge? Positive. However he additionally understood that the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania had – on the request of native Native American tribes – a strict prohibition in opposition to trafficking the ‘white man’s depraved water’ relationship again to William Penn’s Nice Legislation of 1682. That the early colonial Pennsylvania was arguably spared the bloody Indian Wars that plagued the opposite colonies is credited to the justice and honest play between colonisers and natives embodied within the Quaker prohibition.
When ragtag militias from throughout the colonies arrived in Valley Forge in 1777, they usually supplemented their meagre provisions by buying and selling their liquor with native tribes in defiance of the Quakers’ prohibition. The backlash was so nice that Common Washington ordered his personal prohibition in opposition to liquor trafficking, commanding:
All Individuals no matter are forbid promoting liquor to the Indians. If any Sutler or soldier shall presume to behave opposite to this Prohibition, the previous will probably be dismissed from Camp, and the latter obtain extreme Corporal Punishment.
Washington additionally required prohibition to take care of self-discipline within the ranks. Eleven troopers in every brigade have been charged ‘to grab the liquors they might discover within the unlicensed tippling-houses’ and ‘notify the inhabitants or individuals dwelling within the neighborhood of camp that an unconditional seizure will probably be product of all liquors they shall presume to promote sooner or later.’ In the course of the Continental Military’s navy campaigns, any unscrupulous sutler (civilian provisioner to the military) who ‘adulterated his Liquors or made use of Poor Measures’ to get the troopers drunk and earn more money off them could be court-martialled.
For the way usually they’re invoked in debates over freedom and liberty, it’s noteworthy that a lot of America’s Founding Fathers – together with Washington himself – have been prohibitionists. Take into account Thomas Jefferson – a famed viniculturist, as Burns and Novick rightly recommend. But it was Jefferson himself who pushed for the primary US federal prohibition legislation, greater than a century earlier than the sixteenth Modification, and a era even earlier than Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance.
Jefferson’s prohibition was met with near-universal approval by tribal leaders
In 1802, President Jefferson was visited by Chief Mihšihkinaahkwa, or ‘Little Turtle’ of the Miami Confederacy, who travelled from present-day Ohio to elucidate how white squatters have been violating treaty provisions and getting natives drunk to swindle their furs, land and possessions. Little Turtle addressed Jefferson:
Father: when our white brothers got here to this land, our forefathers have been quite a few and blissful; however, since their intercourse with the white folks, and owing to the introduction of this deadly poison, we have now turn into much less quite a few and blissful.
Moved, President Jefferson took the unprecedented step of petitioning Congress to ban the site visitors in liquor within the huge ‘Indian Nation’ past state and territorial jurisdictions. The ensuing replace of the Act to Regulate Commerce and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes (1790) authorised the president to take such measures ‘as to him could seem expedient to forestall or restrain the merchandising or distributing of spirituous liquors amongst all or any of the stated Indian tribes.’ Bartering Indians’ livestock, crops, clothes, weapons or cooking utensils for whiskey risked a high quality of $50 and 30 days in jail. Jefferson ordered the secretary of conflict Henry Dearborn to strip the business licences of any white dealer caught trafficking in liquor. And whereas it will be erratically enforced, Jefferson’s prohibition was met with near-universal approval by tribal leaders.
Admittedly, Washington and Jefferson’s prohibitionism should not widespread data. Alternatively, Abraham Lincoln’s abstinence was legendary. Trustworthy Abe incessantly recounted his ‘first temperance lecture’, when, in 1836 at a group bridge-raising, the strapping 6’4” younger man of 27 was challenged to raise a complete barrel of whiskey over his head. He did so with ease. When some whiskey trickled onto his face, Lincoln spat it out, advising his impressed onlookers that ‘in case you want to stay wholesome and powerful, flip [liquor] away out of your lips.’
His political opponent, Stephen Douglas, mocked his temperance tales within the first Lincoln-Douglas debate of 1858. ‘He might beat any of the boys wrestling, or operating a foot race,’ Douglas stated of Lincoln, and ‘might break extra liquor than all of the boys of the city collectively’: a jab that met with uproarious laughter from the group.
In reality, it was the mudslinging Douglas who charged that Lincoln was as soon as a ‘grocery keeper’ – a well-understood insinuation that he offered whiskey on the sly – supposed to color ‘Trustworthy Abe’ as a canting hypocrite. It didn’t work: Lincoln vehemently denied the baseless character assassination. And, some 160 years of historic analysis has but to seek out any proof that ‘Abraham Lincoln offered whiskey by the barrel’ … however that doesn’t cease it from being offered as unquestioned reality in Burns and Novick’s Prohibition. It’s not. We do have proof, nevertheless, that when Springfield legislators drafted the Illinois statewide ‘Maine Legislation’ prohibition in 1854, Lincoln was instrumental in getting it handed.
Lastly, Burns and Novick allude to ‘a younger Maryland slave named Frederick Douglass [who] stated whiskey made him really feel “like a president”, confident “and unbiased”.’ That is supremely ironic, as that ‘I used to suppose I used to be a president’ line got here from Douglass’s tackle ‘Temperance and Anti-Slavery’ delivered in Scotland in 1846. In it, Douglass defined how:
Within the Southern States, masters induce their slaves to drink whiskey, with a view to hold them from devising methods and means by which to acquire their freedom. To be able to make a person a slave, it’s essential to silence or drown his thoughts … In no different approach can this be so nicely completed as by utilizing ardent spirits!
As a slave, Douglass drank as he was informed; however as a free man, he turned probably the most outspoken temperance orator of his day. ‘All nice reforms go collectively,’ Douglass was fond of claiming: abolitionism, girls’s suffrage and temperance – as Prohibition rightly factors out in a while. All three opposed the political, social and financial subordination of man by man as Karl Marx would put it. In the end, like Lincoln, Douglass vowed ‘to go the entire size of prohibition’.
To Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Douglass, one might add a litany of nice People on the ‘dry’ aspect of the ledger. Suffragists corresponding to Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer and Sojourner Fact railed in opposition to the liquor site visitors, as did abolitionists together with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Martin Delany; Civil Rights leaders Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B Wells and Booker T Washington; Native American leaders like Black Hawk, Crimson Jacket and Tecumseh; socialists like Eugene Debs; Democrats together with William Jennings Bryan, and famed Republicans together with Theodore Roosevelt, who took on corrupt saloonkeepers as New York Metropolis Police Commissioner, and later fought for a prohibition plank in his 1912 presidential marketing campaign.
Wait: if we add Roosevelt to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln – that’s all 4 guys on Mount Rushmore we might put within the prohibitionist ranks. If prohibitionism actually raised questions on who was or wasn’t a ‘actual American’, Prohibition might have talked about that our most American of monuments in actuality honours 4 prohibitionists.
Early on, Prohibition introduces us to the author and former New York Instances editor Daniel Okrent, who recurrently appeared in Burns’s award-winning TV sequence Baseball (1994). Within the PBS Preview of Prohibition, Burns and Novick clarify how they struck up a dialog with Okrent, who was writing his personal book on the topic: Final Name: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010). They determined to collaborate, and the Prohibition documentary was born. Consequently, its thesis mirrors that of Final Name, which Okrent himself colourfully poses:
How does a freedom-loving folks, a nation that’s constructed on particular person rights and liberties, determine in a single form of a crazed second, it nearly appears, that we will inform folks how you can dwell their lives?
Decelerate. We have to unpack Okrent’s false assumptions. First – as we’ve already seen – prohibitionism was not about telling folks how you can dwell their lives. Second, it wasn’t one ‘crazed second’, as American prohibition historical past stretches again centuries, probably predating the republic itself. Third – and most significantly – let’s give attention to that self-image of People as a nation of freedom-lovers, devoted to particular person rights and liberties. Maybe what we conceive of as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are not the eternal truths we conceive them to be, however are literally contested and always in flux. Perhaps the rationale we don’t perceive prohibition historical past right this moment is as a result of we don’t perceive ‘freedom’ right this moment. Or maybe we don’t perceive how prohibitionists understood freedom. If we actually think about ourselves to be a freedom-loving folks, then ‘what do you imply by freedom? For whom? To do what? And to whom?’ should not trivial questions.
Liberating one group usually means prohibiting one other group from doing its reverse
Responding to Okrent’s query, the New York essayist and novelist Pete Hamill then seems on display screen, claiming that ‘just about each a part of the Structure is about increasing human freedom. Besides prohibition, wherein human freedom was being restricted’ via the 18th Modification.
Properly, no. This once more is a triumph of truthiness over fact. The Structure condoned slavery and the disenfranchisement of girls and non-whites. Those that loudly defended slavery, segregation and subordination constantly claimed to be defending that Structure.
This is the reason it wanted to be amended. We added the thirteenth Modification (1865), which prohibited slavery; the 14th Modification (1868), which prohibited denying equal safety underneath the legislation to any US residents, together with previously enslaved folks; the fifteenth Modification (1870), which prohibited denial of the correct to vote primarily based on race; the Nineteenth Modification (1920), which prohibited denial of the correct to vote primarily based on intercourse; the twenty fourth Modification (1964), which prohibited the revocation of voting rights because of a ballot tax; and the twenty sixth Modification (1971), which prohibited denial of the correct to vote primarily based on age, 18 and over.
Liberating one group usually means prohibiting one other group from doing its reverse. In ‘increasing human freedom’ for Black folks, the thirteenth Modification fairly explicitly took away white People’ perverse freedom to personal slaves. The basic query about ‘freedom’ is all the time: who has the liberty to do what and to whom?
Just because the 13th Modification proclaimed that nobody has the liberty to purchase, promote or personal different human beings for their very own revenue, the 18th Modification (1919) stated that nobody has the liberty to enslave others via dependancy for their very own revenue. The 18th Amendment stated nothing about ‘reforming different folks’s habits’: it didn’t outlaw consuming. It banned ‘the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’, which is to say it prohibited trafficking. No American has the innate proper to subjugate one other. The liquor site visitors – like slavery, misogyny and discrimination – was an obstacle to liberty. Eradicating that obstacle would promote higher freedom for all, which was in live performance with the nation’s loftiest beliefs – not against them.
That is how prohibitionists understood what they have been doing, and why they have been supported by so many freedom-loving People. They wrote books like Prohibition: An Journey in Freedom (1928) or The Second Declaration of Independence; or, a Prompt Emancipation Proclamation from the Liquor Visitors (1913) and not using a trace of irony. Prohibitionists noticed themselves as enablers of democracy and self-determination, and defenders of the group’s proper to train sovereignty over their very own affairs.
Apparently, their opponents noticed them that approach, too. When the colorful American prohibitionist William E ‘Pussyfoot’ Johnson travelled to London in 1919 – the place an anti-prohibitionist road riot would in the end declare the usage of his proper eye – the Every day Mail sat all the way down to interview this curious specimen. ‘Pussyfoot isn’t any ethical fanatic, no anaemic prince of advantage, no puri-tyrannical previous girl, no suburban Torquemada,’ the newspaper wrote. ‘It simply so occurs to be his enterprise job of labor in life to make the world mushy for democracy.’
The fault lies with a basic shift in how we perceive freedom itself
Lest you suppose that is some radical ‘revisionist historical past’, the US Supreme Courtroom noticed it that approach, too. Within the lead-up to the 18th Modification, they dominated on quite a few prohibition circumstances. In Crowley v Christensen (1890), the Supreme Courtroom discovered that ‘There is no such thing as a inherent proper in a citizen to thus promote intoxicating liquors by retail. It’s not a privilege of a citizen of the State or of a citizen of the USA.’ The courtroom was clear and unambiguous.
The Supreme Courtroom had addressed the ‘freedom to drink’ argument immediately in Mugler v Kansas (1887), roundly figuring out that any alleged proper to drink alcohol
doesn’t inhere in citizenship. Nor can it’s stated that Authorities interferes with or impairs anyone’s constitutional rights of liberty or of property when it determines that the manufacture and sale of intoxicating drinks for common or particular person use as a beverage are or could turn into hurtful to society, and represent, due to this fact, a enterprise wherein nobody could lawfully interact.
So why is it so troublesome for us to wrap our heads round this? In my book Smashing the Liquor Machine: A World Historical past of Prohibition (2021), I conclude the fault lies with a basic shift in how we perceive freedom itself.
Before the Second World Battle, so-called neoliberalism was a fringe financial doctrine, premised on the financial decision-making of the person to advertise their very own wellbeing. Pioneering economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and later Milton Friedman argued that any infringements of a citizen’s financial liberties – the correct to purchase, promote, and eat – have been essentially infringements upon their political liberties as nicely. As these doctrines moved into the mainstream with Thatcherism within the UK and Reaganomics within the US, for the previous 40 years we’ve lived in a world the place political liberties and financial freedoms have blurred collectively.
That’s not true in lots of non-Anglo Saxon elements of the world – particularly continental Europe – the place there’s nonetheless a firewall between political liberties and financial freedoms. It was additionally definitely not true within the US previous to the Second World Battle. It is a main distortion within the material of US historical past, and the Prohibition Period, in addition to the whole lot main as much as it, lie on the opposite aspect. The conclusion is obvious: we fail to correctly perceive prohibitionism not due to something they did again then, however as a result of we’ve modified.
What leads Burns and Novick’s Prohibition astray are historical past’s twin logical fallacies: hindsight bias – confidently overestimating our data of a extremely contingent previous – and the narcissism of the current, wherein we venture our personal up to date beliefs again in time and to different contexts the place they don’t essentially apply. It falsely assumes that the core problems with prohibition and freedom – and the narratives and identities that we’ve constructed upon them – have been understood the identical approach right this moment as they have been approach again when, versus being contested and always in flux.
Prohibition historical past has all the time been informed as white folks’s historical past
It’s not as if Burns and Novick went rogue in overlaying prohibition. Their job – as America’s storytellers – is to not break new floor into historical past, however to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, and make historians’ standard knowledge relatable to their viewers. These historians have gotten it more and more incorrect, and have taken our historical past with them. Historians’ analyses have been overlaid with all method of their very own latent biases – compounding over time – which obscure somewhat than illuminate the true historic document.
Essentially the most telling biases are primarily based on race and gender. Ladies’s empowering activism was essential, each to the temperance and to the suffragist actions – for which they’ve been roundly vilified ever since. However somewhat than being unjustly pilloried within the historical past books, equally disenfranchised and disempowered Native American and African American minorities have merely been written out of them. Even worse, their plight was overwritten by colonisers’ victim-blaming narratives: claiming Black and Native susceptibility to drunkenness justified their subordination to white dominance, with their leisure needing to be ‘disciplined’. Consequently, prohibition historical past has all the time been informed as white folks’s historical past.
Burns and Novick merely replicate historians’ standard knowledge. All the fundamental characters profiled in your entire Prohibition miniseries are white. Excluding a cameo by the African American historian Freddie Johnson (who talks about acquiring medical prescriptions for alcohol), the entire consultants in Prohibition are white. The documentary merely reinforces the traditionally dominant white narratives, wherein Black and Native prohibitionism are handed over in silence.
Once more, this isn’t to slake Burns and Novick as filmmakers. They’re delicate to make sure their depictions, photographs and movies replicate the range of this nation – inside the bounds of the story being informed. It’s the story that’s circumscribed.
In reality, the individual most keenly conscious of the ability of racially dominant historic narratives could also be Burns himself. In a latest project, Burns and fellow US filmmaker Stephen Ives recount the Sand Creek Bloodbath of 1864, wherein tons of of peaceable Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers have been mercilessly slaughtered by 700 troopers of the First and Third Colorado Cavalry. After chronicling the brutal assault, Burns himself narrates the decades-long battle by Native tribes to have the event – and the Nationwide Historic Website – be recognised because the Sand Creek Bloodbath. It had been ‘recast as a “battle” within the collective reminiscence of many white People’ – as between two belligerent sides, somewhat than one – ‘and celebrated as a key occasion in Colorado’s journey to statehood’.
Acknowledging the bloodbath forces us to confront a shameful historical past, and makes us stronger as a nation. ‘It’s a highly effective instance of how our historical past will be mythologised, omitting shameful chapters, and reinforcing insidious narratives,’ Burns says. ‘How we bear in mind historical past can be part of our historical past.’ Certainly.
This isn’t an accusation of wilful deceit by an iconic documentarian. In reality, this story isn’t actually about Burns in any respect. Ultimately, it’s concerning the cussed energy of entrenched historic narratives, and the bags that comes with them. Motion pictures, documentaries and dramatisations are how the general public engages with the previous, and the way we view ourselves in relation to it. However they aren’t crystal-clear reflections of what was. As a substitute, they include the gathered biases – overt and latent – of generations of historians. That neither critic nor historian appears to have observed or known as out these obvious historic inaccuracies within the decade since Prohibition’s launch solely proves the purpose. That is all of the extra cause to scrutinise our personal shared historic conceptions, misconceptions and understandings. It’s what Burns would need.
In the end – in terms of Prohibition – it isn’t that Burns failed historical past; however somewhat that we historians have failed Burns.
