by Timothy Egan
I reached for an Irish whiskey — two fingers, neat, as my uncle used to say in trying to teach me how to drink — just after finishing “Last Call,” Daniel Okrent’s haunting and entertaining book on Prohibition. The drink was necessary, in part, because his gallop through one of the most otherworldly episodes in American history made me shudder at the parallels to this age.
We are about to get a full immersion in that great moralistic experiment from 1919 to 1933, a generator of crime not just vast and organized, but vertically integrated from street thugs to judges. “Prohibition,” the latest story from the history factory of filmmaker Ken Burns, is set to run on PBS stations in October. It was co-directed by Lynn Novick and is a “first cousin” to the book, in Okrent’s words.
The obvious echo will be about drugs. You will hear “if only” in many variants this fall — as in, if only the most popular of illicit substances were brought out of criminal shadows to be legalized and taxed.
But the film and book are much more instructive on the political fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the increasingly unpopular Tea Party.
Burns has made that general comparison. “This is a story about a single-issue campaign that metastasized,” he said, when I first heard him talk about “Prohibition” last year. Initially, I didn’t see it that way. Still, after finishing Okrent’s book during a summer of insanity in Congress, I found his conclusion less of a reach.
Consider how a country with such an appetite for drink could arrive at the point where it would amend the Constitution to outlaw daily private behavior. A hundred years ago, as Okrent notes, average consumption of alcohol per adult was about 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor a year, or 520 12-ounce bottles of beer. (It is less today by about 15 percent.)
Okrent asks the obvious question a modern reader brings when trying to understand this social engineering nightmare: “How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World?”
Read more:
I reached for an Irish whiskey — two fingers, neat, as my uncle used to say in trying to teach me how to drink — just after finishing “Last Call,” Daniel Okrent’s haunting and entertaining book on Prohibition. The drink was necessary, in part, because his gallop through one of the most otherworldly episodes in American history made me shudder at the parallels to this age.
We are about to get a full immersion in that great moralistic experiment from 1919 to 1933, a generator of crime not just vast and organized, but vertically integrated from street thugs to judges. “Prohibition,” the latest story from the history factory of filmmaker Ken Burns, is set to run on PBS stations in October. It was co-directed by Lynn Novick and is a “first cousin” to the book, in Okrent’s words.
The obvious echo will be about drugs. You will hear “if only” in many variants this fall — as in, if only the most popular of illicit substances were brought out of criminal shadows to be legalized and taxed.
But the film and book are much more instructive on the political fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the increasingly unpopular Tea Party.
Burns has made that general comparison. “This is a story about a single-issue campaign that metastasized,” he said, when I first heard him talk about “Prohibition” last year. Initially, I didn’t see it that way. Still, after finishing Okrent’s book during a summer of insanity in Congress, I found his conclusion less of a reach.
Consider how a country with such an appetite for drink could arrive at the point where it would amend the Constitution to outlaw daily private behavior. A hundred years ago, as Okrent notes, average consumption of alcohol per adult was about 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor a year, or 520 12-ounce bottles of beer. (It is less today by about 15 percent.)
Okrent asks the obvious question a modern reader brings when trying to understand this social engineering nightmare: “How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World?”
Read more:
