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‘Prohibition’ Returns — in October

The documentary filmmaker tackles a different kind of ‘Civil War.’ 

By Jim Waltzer 

Add Comment | Comments: 1 | Posted Sep. 15, 2011

All those bottles of booze bobbing in the tide that flings each new episode of Boardwalk Empire ashore present the perfect imagery for 1920s Atlantic City. Indeed, the waterways of Absecon Island provided an ideal route for illegal alcoholic beverages to reach the resort, as rumrunners out-dueled the Coast Guard to keep local speakeasies well stocked.  

Flouting the law and the ill-advised federal Volstead Act that created the era of Prohibition was hardly confined to the seashore. The nationwide battle between bootleggers and G-men played as a dramatic struggle for America’s soul in the wake of World War I. But the soul-stylers never really had a chance. Too many Americans liked to drink and didn’t like to be told how to live their lives. A new breed of “businessman” kept the spigots flowing: the modern mobster — colorful, irresistible, lethal. 

Matchless documentarian Ken Burns captures this volatile, surreal scene in his new miniseries Prohibition, which premieres Oct. 2, 3 and 4 at 8pm on PBS. The three-part, five-and-a-half-hour film explores both the forces that produced the U.S. Constitution’s 18th Amendment (which outlawed booze, precipitating enforcement standards set by the January 1920 Congressional act sponsored by Minnesota representative Andrew Volstead), and those that led to its undoing. Along the way, we meet a gallery of rogues, redeemers, and reactionaries. 

“People’s idea of Prohibition is rain-slicked Chicago streets with Model Ts careening around the corner with machine guns blasting, and that is part of our story,” says filmmaker Burns, whose epic Civil War series changed the artistic landscape for documentaries. “But the story we’ve chosen to tell is much bigger than that, and begins a hundred years before Prohibition went into effect.” 

Part One of the new series examines that “century-long effort” that saw concerned women (typically with husbands prone to drop a week’s wages at the saloon) “join forces with the clergy . . . to push through this amendment to the Constitution,” says Burns. “They wanted it enshrined [in the Constitution] like the abolition of slavery. Everyone knew that no amendment had ever been repealed.” 

Not so, this time. Prohibition’s run lasted for 13 years before being watered down by Congress in March 1933; the 18th Amendment spiraled down the drain altogether late that year. America had the Depression on its mind, and needed a stiff drink. 

Hindsight tells us that the well-intended, if fanatical, bid to rid the country of alcohol abuse flew in the face of a post-WWI explosion of hot jazz and rising hemlines, as well as the American birthright of self-determination. It was, in the words of one commentator on the Prohibition series, “a preposterous idea.” 

For Nucky Johnson and his minions, however, it turned out to be a capital idea. The boss man, treasurer of Atlantic County and king of Atlantic City, enriched his personal treasury with “enormous” sums of bootleg income, state and federal investigators substantiated years after the fact, when the bill finally came due for Nucky, who had made law enforcement and ordinary citizens complicit in his operation. When the game was on, Federal Revenue Agents didn’t have a chance. 

As the nation’s wettest locale, Atlantic City lay claim to being its premier convention site. What better way to loosen wallets than by loosening inhibitions? Meanwhile other towns, too, made hay with the lawmakers’ shortsightedness, spawning a new order of crime kingpins such as New York’s Arnold Rothstein, “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lanksy. Chicago had a guy named Capone. 

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