Ken Burns tells a popular story about prohibition in America.
The historical evidence is much more disheartening
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I have the highest respect for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. He is America's storyteller: an unrivaled filmmaker whose creativity, passion and style shine through every story he portrays. My intention is not to bash anyone, but rather to start a conversation about how Americans as a society grapple with our own controversial history. Our identities are shaped by our collective past experiences and how we see ourselves in relation to them. Together, we constantly reframe and revise the past to make sense to us in the present.
It just so happens that the best place to start this discussion is with Burns and Lynn Novick's five-and-a-half-hour television miniseries Prohibition (Prohibition) (2011), which covers this most misunderstood chapter in US history, from the 1919 ratification of the 18th Amendment – prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or sale of liquor” – to its repeal by the 21st Amendment in 1933. Prohibition it deserves our attention because it reflects what we think we know about history, rather than actual history itself. It's what comedian Stephen Colbert called "truth" instead of the truth. The problems start within the first five seconds of the film. The filmmakers set the narrative tone for the entire series with an introductory note in bold white letters centered on a black background:
Nothing needs reforming like other people's habits. Fanatics will never know this, although it is written in golden letters in the sky. It is prohibition that makes anything valuable.
Mark Twain
Direct. Eloquent. Formal. Cursed. The context is clear: Prohibitionists are the bad guys, the "fanatics" who want to change other people's habits and are dumb enough to "never learn" the most obvious lessons by staring them in the face. The problem is, Twain never said that. Instead, it's a patchwork of disjointed excerpts, covering different works of fiction and nonfiction over the years.
"Nothing needs reforming so much as other people's habits" comes from Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894): Twain's small-town novel of race, slavery, and religion. "The fanatics will never know that..." was written in Twain's travel diary while in London in November 1896, as he extolled the virtues of "abstinence from alcohol". And "is the prohibition where does anything of value' came 11 months earlier, while in India, as Twain ruminated on Adam, Eve and the forbidden fruit during his visit to Allahabad.
When combined, they create a compelling framework for what we believe to be true of abstinence and the prohibition movement. In the 11 years since the TV series launched, no one seems to have noticed this. However, the slogan sets the stage for what is to come. Burns and Novick are gifted storytellers, and every story needs conflict – heroes vs. villains, good vs. bad. They have cast prohibitionists as evil, as is often the case when prohibition is remembered: hard-nosed bigots intent on dictating the "habits of other people" in a most undemocratic and un-American way.
The key to truly understanding the history of abstinence and the prohibition movement can be summed up in one word: traffic . Generations of social reformers and activists—both in the United States and around the world—focused not on alcohol in the bottle, nor on the "habits of others," but on what they called "trafficking": unscrupulous sellers who got people hopelessly addicted to drink for their own profit. The difference between the opposite drink and the circulation of the drink it is subtle, but extremely important. Booze is just the stuff in the bottle, but trafficking is all about profit and booty. Such as human trafficking, diamond trafficking, or drug and opioid trafficking.
“traffic” is mentioned only three times in a row Prohibition . In the opening minutes, 19th-century Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher – who inspired the modern abstinence movement with his series of sermons condemning alcohol in 1826 – declares that “like slavery, the traffic in liquor must be considered sinful". After that, the traffic – the subject was Prohibition – disappears from her documentary Food ordering .
Beecher's Six Sermons on Intemperance (1827) is often credited with the inaugural abstinence from alcohol, although not because it was "eloquent", as suggested by prohibition. Rhetorically, it was quite indifferent. Instead, they started an entire social movement by providing a plan of action: a boycott to undermine the movement that leads to profit. "Let the consumer do his duty," Beecher suggested to the abstinence advocates, "and the capitalist, finding his employment unproductive, will speedily discover other channels of useful enterprise." Instead of invoking biblical stories about drunken sinners, Beecher's sermons they mention repeatedly one verse in particular: Habakkuk 2:9-16: "Woe to him who gives his neighbor to drink, who puts the bottle in his mouth and makes him drunk too." From its inception, then, abstinence has been a movement for economic justice and community improvement, rather than a bunch of religious shenanigans, as it is more conventionally portrayed.
Prohibition was not about the contents of the bottle, it was against the predatory capitalism of the liquor trade
Prohibition articulates the conventional narrative, as Peter Coyote's voiceover proclaims that America's prohibition experience "will raise questions about the proper role of government" and "who is—and who is not—a real American." The context is clear: the "dry" are the bad guys and the "wet" are the true patriots, fully exercising their freedom to drink.
In building their case for the ubiquity of drinking in early America, Burns and Novick then line up some of the greatest leaders in US history. However, to paint them as pro-drinking patriots requires a very selective reading of the historical record. "For most of the nation's history, alcohol was at least as American as apple pie," explains its narrator Prohibition:
At Valley Forge, George Washington did his best to make sure his men had half a cup of rum each day and half a cup of whiskey when the rum ran out... Thomas Jefferson collected fine French wines and dreamed of a day when American vineyards would they could "make it"... Young Abraham Lincoln sold whiskey by the barrel from his grocery store in New Salem, Illinois. "The intoxicating liquor," he later recalled, "was used by all, no one renounced it." A young Maryland slave named Frederick Douglass said whiskey made him feel "presidential," confident "and independent."
In fact, each of these men—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglas, and many others—could justly be listed among America's great prohibitionists. But how is this possible? Simple: recognizing again that prohibition was not about the contents of the bottle, but was against the predatory capitalism of the liquor trade.
Did General George Washington make sure his men had booze at Valley Forge? For sure. But he also understood that the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania had—at the request of the local Native American tribes—a strict prohibition against trading in "white man's bad water" dating back to William Penn's Great Law of 1682. The fact that the early colonial Pennsylvania, which arguably escaped the bloody Indian wars that plagued the other colonies, is credited with the justice and fair play between colonists and natives embodied in Quaker prohibition.
When militias from across the colonies arrived at Valley Forge in 1777, they often supplemented their meager supplies by bartering liquor with local tribes in defiance of the Quaker ban. The backlash was so great that General Washington ordered his own prohibition against the liquor trade, ordering: All persons, whoever they may be, forbid the sale of liquor to the Indians. If any army supplier or soldier is found to be acting contrary to this prohibition, the former will be dismissed from the Camp and the latter will be severely punished.
Washington also required prohibition to maintain discipline in the ranks. Eleven soldiers in each brigade were charged "to seize such liquors as may be found in unlicensed liquors" and "to give notice to the inhabitants or persons living in the vicinity of the camp that an unconditional seizure shall be made of all liquors they shall purport to sell." in the future. During the Continental Army's military campaigns, any unscrupulous soldier (the army's civilian supplier) who "adulterated his drinks or made use of deficient measures" to get the soldiers drunk and make more money out of them would be court-martialed.
For how often liberty and libertarianism are invoked in discussions, it is notable that many of America's Founding Fathers – including Washington himself – were in favor of prohibition. Consider Thomas Jefferson – a famous vintner, as Burns and Novick rightly portray him. However, it was Jefferson himself who pushed for the first US federal prohibition law, more than a century before the 16th Amendment and a generation before the Beechers Six Sermons on Intemperance (Beecher's Six Sermons on Intemperance) .
Jefferson's Prohibition was met with almost universal approval by tribal leaders
In 1802, President Jefferson visited Chief Mihšihkinaahkwa, or "Little Turtle," of the Miami Confederacy, who traveled from present-day Ohio to explain how white settlers were violating treaty provisions and intoxicating natives to steal furs, their land and possessions. The "Little Turtle" addressed Jefferson:
Father: when our white brothers came to this land, our ancestors were numerous and happy. But, since their intercourse with the whites, and owing to the introduction of this deadly poison, we have become less crowned and less happy.
Moved, President Jefferson took the unprecedented step of asking Congress to ban liquor traffic in the vast "Indian Country" beyond state and territorial jurisdictions. The resulting update of the Act for the Regulation of Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes (1790) authorized the president to take such measures "as may appear expedient to prevent or restrain the sale or distribution of spirituous liquors among all or of any of the Indian tribes'. Bartering Indians' livestock, crops, clothing, weapons, or cooking utensils for whiskey was punishable by a $50 fine and 30 days in jail. Jefferson ordered Secretary of War Henry DeBorn to revoke the trade licenses of any white merchant caught dealing in liquor. And while it would be unevenly enforced, Jefferson's prohibition was met with almost universal approval by tribal leaders.
Admittedly, Washington and Jefferson's pro-prohibition stance is not widely known. On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln's abstinence was legendary. The outspoken Abe often recounted his "first abstinence lecture" when, in 1836 on a community bridge, a 6'4" young man of 27 was asked to lift an entire barrel of whiskey over his head. He did it with ease. When some whiskey rolled down his face, Lincoln spat it out, advising his impressed onlookers that "if you want to stay healthy and strong, keep [the liquor] from your lips."
His political opponent, Stephen Douglas, mocked his anti-alcohol stories in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. "He could beat any of the boys in a wrestling match or a road race," Douglass said of Lincoln and "could destroy more liquor than all the boys in town put together": a comment that was met with uproarious laughter from the crowd.
In fact, it was the mudslinger Douglas who charged that Lincoln had once been a "grocer" – an obvious hint that he sold whiskey in a sly way – intended to paint "Honest Abe" as a hypocrite. It didn't work: Lincoln flatly denied the baseless assassination characterization. And, some 160 years of historical research has yet to turn up any evidence that "Abraham Lincoln sold whiskey by the barrel" ... but that doesn't stop it from being presented as undeniable fact at Burns and Novick's Prohibition. Not valid. We do have evidence, however, that when Springfield legislators drafted the Illinois statewide "Maine Law" prohibition in 1854, Lincoln was instrumental in its passage.
Finally, Burns and Novick refer to "a young Maryland slave named Frederick Douglass [who] said that whiskey made him feel 'presidential,' self-assured 'and independent.' This is highly ironic, as this line "I used to think I was president" came from Douglas's "Anti-Alcohol and Anti-Slavery" speech delivered in Scotland in 1846. In it, Douglas explained how: In the southern states , masters induce their slaves to drink whiskey in order to prevent them from devising ways and means to gain their freedom. To enslave a man, it is necessary to silence or suffocate his mind... In no other way can this be so well accomplished as by the use of fiery liquors!
As a slave, Douglas drank as he was told. But as a free man, he became the most outspoken abstinence orator of his time. "All great reforms go together," Douglass liked to say: the anti-slavery movement, women's suffrage, and abstinence from alcohol—as Prohibition later rightly points out. All three of the above opposed the political, social and economic subjugation of man by man as Karl Marx would say. Ultimately, like Lincoln, Douglass vowed to "proceed throughout Prohibition."
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Douglas, one could add a number of great Americans to the "dry" side of the Catholic. Suffragettes such as Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth spoke out against the circulation of alcoholic beverages, as did abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Martin Delany. Civil Rights leaders Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida Buells and Booker TWashington? Native American leaders like Black Hawk, Red Jacket and Tecumseh, socialists like Eugene Debs. Democrats, including William Jennings Bryan, and famous Republicans, including Theodore Roosevelt, who took on corrupt vigilantes as New York's police commissioner and later fought for a prohibition plank in his 1912 presidential campaign.
Wait: if we add Roosevelt to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln – those are all four guys on Mount Rushmore we could put in the ranks of the Prohibitionists. If indeed an advocate raises questions about who was or was not a "real American," the Prohibition he might have mentioned that our most American of monuments actually honors four abolitionists.
From early on, the Prohibition introduces us to the author and former editor of New York Times Daniel Okrent, who was a regular on the award-winning Burns TV series Baseball (1994). In the PBS Preview of Prohibition , Burns and Novick explain how they struck up a conversation with Okrent, who was writing his book on the subject: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010). They decided to collaborate and the documentary was born Prohibition. Consequently, his thesis reflects his own Last Call , which Okrent himself colorfully poses: How a freedom-loving people, a nation built on individual rights and liberties, decides in a seemingly crazy moment that we can tell people how to live their;
Slow down. We need to unpack Okrent's false assumptions. First – as we have already seen – the prohibition movement was not about telling people how to live their lives. Second, it was not a "crazy moment," as the history of American prohibition stretches back centuries, possibly predating the republic itself. Third – and most importantly – let's focus on this self-image of Americans as a nation of freedom lovers, committed to individual rights and liberties. Perhaps what we perceive as "freedom" and "freedom" they are not the eternal truths, we perceive them to be, but in reality they are contested and constantly in flux. Perhaps the reason we don't understand the history of prohibition today is because we don't understand "freedom" today. Or maybe we don't understand how the prohibitionists understood freedom. If we really imagine ourselves to be a freedom-loving people, then “what do you mean by freedom? For whom? To do what? And to whom?" These are not trivial questions.
Freeing one group often means prohibiting another group from doing the opposite
In response to Okrent's question, New Yorker essayist and novelist Pete Hamill then appears on screen, arguing that “almost every part of the Constitution is about extending human liberty. Except for Prohibition, in which human liberty was curtailed” through the 18th Amendment.
Well no. This again is a triumph of truth over truth. The Constitution condoned slavery and the disenfranchisement of women and non-whites. Those who vociferously defended slavery, segregation, and serfdom consistently claimed to defend this Constitution.
This is why it had to be amended. We added the 13th Amendment (1865), which banned slavery. The 14th Amendment (1868), which prohibited the denial of equal protection under the law to any American citizen, including former slaves; the 15th Amendment (1870), which prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race. The 19th Amendment (1920), which prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on sex. The 24th Amendment (1964), which prohibited the revocation of voting rights due to a poll tax; and the 26th Amendment (1971), which prohibited the denial of voting rights based on age, 18 or older.
Freeing one group often means prohibiting another group from doing the opposite. In "extending human liberty" to blacks, the 13th Amendment expressly removed the perverse freedom of white Americans to own slaves. The fundamental question about "freedom" is always: who has the freedom to do what and to whom?
Just as the 13th Amendment declared that no one has the liberty to buy, sell, or possess other human beings for his own profit, the 18th Amendment (1919) said that no one has the liberty to enslave others through addiction for his own profit. of profit. The 18th amendment said nothing about "reforming the habits of others": it did not prohibit drinking. It prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages," meaning that it prohibited trafficking. No American has the innate right to subjugate another. The liquor trade – like slavery, misogyny and discrimination – was an obstacle to freedom. Removing this barrier would promote greater freedom for all, which was in harmony with the country's highest ideals – not contrary to them.
This is how prohibitionists understood what they were doing and why so many freedom-loving Americans supported them. They wrote books like Prohibition: An Adventure in Freedom (1928) or The Second Declaration of Independence. the one Proposed Declaration of Emancipation from Alcohol Circulation (1913) without a trace of irony. Advocates saw themselves as helpers of democracy and self-determination and defenders of the community's right to exercise sovereignty over its own affairs.
Interestingly, their opponents also saw them this way. When black American prohibitionist William E 'Pussyfoot' Johnson traveled to London in 1919 – where an anti-prohibition street riot would eventually cost him the use of his right eye – the Daily Mail sat down to interview this curious specimen. "Pussyfoot is no moral fanatic, no anemic prince of virtue, no cleaning-tyrannical old woman, no suburban Torquemada," the paper wrote. "It happens to be the business of his life's work to make the world soft for democracy."
The fault lies in a fundamental change in the way we understand freedom itself
Lest you think this is some radical "revisionist history", the US Supreme Court saw it that way too. In the lead up to the 18th Amendment, they ruled on many prohibition cases. In case of Crowley v. Christensen (1890), the Supreme Court found that “There is no inherent right in a citizen to sell in this manner alcoholic beverages by retail. It is not a privilege of a citizen of the State or a citizen of the United States.' The court was clear and unequivocal.
The Supreme Court had considered the "freedom to drink" argument directly in Mugler v. Kansas (1887), expressly holding that any purported right to drink alcohol is not inherent in citizenship. Nor can it be said that the Government interferes with or infringes the constitutional rights of any individual to liberty or property, when it judges that the manufacture and sale of liquor for general or private use is or may become injurious to society, and therefore, a business in which no one can legally practice.
So why is it so hard for us to wrap our heads around this? In the my book Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition (2021), I conclude that the error lies in a fundamental change in the way we understand freedom itself.
Before the Second World War, so-called neoliberalism was a fringe economic doctrine, based on the economic decision-making of the individual to promote his own well-being. Pioneering economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman argued that any violations of a citizen's economic liberties—the right to buy, sell, and consume—were necessarily violations of his political liberties as well. As these doctrines were brought into the mainstream with Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganomics in the US, for the last 40 years we have lived in a world where civil liberties and economic liberties have blurred together.
This is not the case in many non-Anglo-Saxon parts of the world – particularly continental Europe – where a firewall still exists between civil liberties and economic liberties. It also certainly wasn't the case in the US before World War II. This is a major twist in the fabric of US history, and the Prohibition era, and everything leading up to it, is on the other side. The conclusion is clear: we fail to properly understand the advocate not for anything they did then, but because we have change.
What drives Burns and her Ban Novick's way of being misled are the twin logical fallacies of history: hindsight bias – confidently overestimating our knowledge of a highly contingent past – and the narcissism of the present, in which we project our own contemporary beliefs back in time and onto other contexts where these do not necessarily apply. It wrongly assumes that the core issues of prohibition and freedom – and the narratives and identities we've built around them – are understood in the same way today as they were long ago, as opposed to being contested and constantly in flux.
The history of prohibition is always told as white people's history
It's not like Burns and Novick were crooks in their coverage of Prohibition. Their job – as America's storytellers – is not to break new ground in history, but to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and make the conventional wisdom of historians relatable to their viewers. These historians are getting it more and more wrong and have taken our history with them. Historians' analyzes have become overlaid with all sorts of latent biases – compounded over time – that obscure rather than illuminate the true historical record.
The most typical prejudices are based on race and gender. Women's empowerment activism was vital to both the abstinence and suffragette movements – for which they have since strongly criticized. But instead of being unfairly written into the history books, they have been written about as disenfranchised and disempowering Native American and African-American minorities. Worse, their plight was replaced by victim-blaming settler narratives: the claim of Black and Native susceptibility to drunkenness justified their submission to white rule, their leisure time in need of "discipline." Consequently, the history of prohibition is always told as white people's history.
Burns and Novick merely reflect the conventional wisdom of historians. All of the main characters featured in his entire miniseries Prohibition they are white. With the exception of a brief appearance by African-American historian Freddie Johnson (who talks about taking medical prescriptions for alcohol), all the experts in Prohibition they are white. The documentary merely reinforces historically dominant white narratives, in which o black and the pro-prohibition native they bypass in silence.
Again, this is not to write off Burns and Novick as filmmakers. They are sensitive to ensuring that their illustrations, images and videos reflect the diversity of this country – within the confines of the story being told. It is the story that is limited.
In fact, the person most aware of the power of racially dominant historical narratives may be Burns himself. In a recent one work, Burns and fellow American filmmaker Steven Ives recount the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which hundreds of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers were mercilessly slaughtered by 700 soldiers of the First and Third Colorado Cavalry. After recounting the brutal attack, Burns himself recounts the indigenous tribes' decades-long struggle to become the fact– and the National Historic Site – to be recognized as the Sand Creek Massacre. It had been "reframed as a 'battle' in the collective memory of many white Americans"—between two warring sides, rather than one—"and celebrated as a major event in Colorado's journey to statehood."
Acknowledging the massacre forces us to confront a shameful history and makes us stronger as a nation. "It's a powerful example of how our history can be mythologized, omitting shameful chapters and reinforcing insidious narratives," says Burns. "How we remember history is also part of our history." Actually.
This is not an accusation of deliberate deception by an iconic documentary. Actually, this story isn't about Burns at all. Ultimately, it's about the stubborn power of entrenched historical narratives, and the baggage that comes with them. Films, documentaries and dramatizations are how audiences engage with the past and how we see ourselves in relation to it. But they are not crystal reflections of what they were. Instead, they contain the accumulated biases – overt and latent – of generations of historians. That neither the critic nor the historian seem to have noticed or pointed out these glaring historical inaccuracies in the decade since prohibition. Its release only proves the point. This is all the more reason to scrutinize our own shared historical perceptions, misconceptions and understandings. That's what Burns would have wanted.
Finally – when it comes to her Prohibition – it's not that Burns failed the story. But rather that we historians have failed Burns.
Source: aeon.co