I really liked the fact that this documentary went deeply into the history of what led up to prohibition; the social normality of drinking alcohol and the slow change from 'temperance' (moderation not drunkenness) over to full abstinence, etc. The push toward alcohol prohibition was interrupted repeatedly, it was melded into other political issues like women's right to vote, and fused into the new version of US Christianity that had swept the nation. It was also part and parcel with deep racism and xenophobia - often aimed against the very migrants it was *claimed* to be there to help. Prohibition was supposed to stop poverty and make life safer, but it did the opposite - it destroyed the 5th largest industry in the nation (and other reliant jobs) creating mass unemployment at a time with no government unemployment system. It created organized crime (which is tied now to drug prohibition).The view of the local bar as being a center of commerce and community for the lower classes (who did not have private clubs) was not the view held by those who saw alcohol as the central evil of their era. But then they wanted easy answers... not accurate ones.People in that era were told (in the first mass political propaganda machine ever) that alcohol was the cause of all their social ills; that domestic violence, prostitution, poverty, gambling, and many other things were all due to the bottle. They were told that with no alcohol people could be made 'better' & society would be better. All would be well. Somehow few people questioned the information they were getting, but then they had not experienced that sort of propaganda before.There was a good discussion of the long era in which the prohibitionist movement grew, and of the sudden increase in alcohol production, and the result of the rise of groups that were against drinking or let alcoholics help each other stay sober.THE MISSING PART? However there was no discussion at all of *why* so many people in that era drank to excess, or why any substance (or other obsession) becomes the center of self destructive behavior. After all,you can't sell anything to people - including excessive amounts of alcohol, to people who won't swallow it down.The *why* of all substance misuse is nearly always tied into feelings of emotional pain and the desire to escape them; hopelessness, despair, trauma, and a desire to have a mental 'vacation'. Looking at things in this way is less popular than anger. It doesn't let people have easy answers to complicated problems, or give them people to vilify. It fails to let them 'off the hook' when it comes to looking at their entire way of life. Anything can be used this way, including ideologies and theologies.The fact is that nearly all the people in that era lived in abject poverty & had no real rights. There were no government enforced rights at all : no workers rights, no right to equal housing, there were no unemployment benefits or disability system. Child labor was common and sweat shops were normal. Jobs paid so little that you could starve to death while fully employed, working 12 hour days. People were worked extreme hours, in dangerous conditions, and could be fired for anything (including being too sick to come to work, having a kid to care for, or for refusing to do a thing that was wrong or even illegal). You could be fired for not going to the employers church (see the job requirements 'Dwight L Moody' met, when hired by a relative).Empires of money were made by people willing to do 'all the wrong things' for cash. The employees & employers knew this; and that all jobs were like that so you could not quit a job & find better treatment. Nobody was willing to say no to greed or on the job cruelty. After all, the entire prohibition movement came into being in a US shaped by men like Daniel Webster (who believed the poor were poor because of their inferiority, their race, their original nationality, and that the US should be CLASSIEST and keep voting a privilege of the wealthy... education too). It was not a good thing to be poor in a world shaped by folks like Webster.Read "The Jungle" for a look at US migrant life in the early 20th century. The migrants in it found the US was not the new wonderful world they had hoped for. It was terrible, dirty, and filled with poverty. They rapidly discovered that nobody could be trusted in the cities, that most US city people were con artists who preyed on each other constantly and had no ethics; that jobs were hard to get & easy to lose; that their family members died of poverty (the cold, starvation, lack of medical care) surrounded by people who COULD help but would not. At the end of the work day (or in despair over no work) many chose to disappear into a bottle. Knowing what they faced at home, men stayed at the bars, fearing going back to the pressures of their impoverished family. Yet nobody was campaigning to STOP the conditions that sent people off to drink in order to cope.It was easier to blame booze and ban it (and more satisfying as you could feel superior) than it was to go after the CAUSES of mass alcoholism and address them, by reeling in the abuse of power and addressing poverty.It still is easier to use the blunt instrument of the law to deal with the societal results of greed and cruelty, and it is still done everyday.

You know, it's OBVIOUS, that this was done by PBS. Within the first 5 minutes the term spousal RAPE is used! Hey I came here to learn about prohibition, sheesh! All the people contributing in the first episode are all liberals. I mean can we get some freaking balance in this stuff with PBS? They hurt themselves by being so liberal. Cases in point. They talk about all the political sides who supported temperance but they never use the word "liberal" and never use the word "communist" I mean you know what part I am talking about when they say "progressive" and "radical".Also, the old drunk looking dude makes the sly comment that now Jesus would be put in jail for turning water into wine. Hey smart guy, Jesus did not SELL the wine. Why did they have to go there? Looking at the credits while typing this John Lithgow, Tom Hanks, Sam Waterston, this program is loaded with liberals, are there any non liberal contributors in this? Look up Noah Feldman's wiki page, he is in most of this episode as a commentator expert, that guy is a poster child leading elitist liberal.For full disclosure, I am a drinker, non evangelical, and I happen to live in a Muslim country thats dry and break it's laws in much hazard to myself because I want a drink. I'm only putting this review out here to raise the case that PBS is not the unbiased network it has always said it is. It would serve it's own purposes better if it was truly open minded. Stop with the NPR "all things considered" treatment, talking down to us, you wont convince us that you are correct anymore. Interesting material, definitely done to entertain a liberal viewership which I guess is all PBS has left, it's a shame that all things were NOT considered. 6 of 10, I learned that the bible thumpers got us an income tax in an alliance with "progressives".I have about zero trust that this series will cover all bases or just focus on the lower class's drinks like beer. Lets see where they go with wine and hard liquor which the rich enjoy now. They mention Kennedy's (JFK) grandfather but lets see them mention his father Joe Sr, frankly I cannot see how they could NOT mention him, but it IS PBS so anything is possible when liberals write their own history.

When it comes to making full coverage documentaries, you can't beat the work of Ken Burns. "Prohibition" is another fine illustration of that.This five and one half hour mini-series, shown in three parts on PBS and available on DVD, never bogs down. That's pretty amazing right there. I would think it difficult to have that kind of running time and not have at least a couple spots where the story gets boring. It never does, and is a tribute to Ken's film making ability."Prohibition" describes how we got there, what it did to our country, and why the 18th Amendment, banning booze, became the only Amendment to be repealed. It was doomed to fail from the start, but nobody saw it at the beginning. It almost single-handedly brought about organized crime in America, a problem that has yet to be repealed.Ken Burns covers it all very well, and his good name in these documentary efforts never fails to bring in the big names for voice-over work. In this case, Tom Hanks, Patricia Clarkson, Adam Arkin, Jeremy Irons, John Lithgow, etc., etc..(Although it was never mentioned, I couldn't help but think of the parallels to modern day marijuana laws. When you have a product that millions of Americans want and you make it illegal, the money from that product goes to gangs that provide it, and with that, all the violence that goes along with those gangs. You can't legislate morality, as the 18th Amendment surely showed. And pot is much less harmful than alcohol.)Another great job by Ken Burns.

My favorite comment in this documentary is offered by Pete Hamill, American journalist, novelist and essayist, who said basically if you want people to brush their teeth, pass a law banning toothpaste. And then people will do everything they can to acquire toothpaste illegally, and they'll brush their teeth just to spite the law. The unforeseen consequence of Prohibition is that once you take away a person's right to do something that people have always done, people will feel the desire to want it much more intensely, in the same way if you deny a child all sweets, the kid will be sneaking chocolate inside his jacket sleeves. Hamill later says he doesn't drink, but he would probably take a swig in front of a government building if the law ever forbade him from doing it. Encouraging moderation is not the same as banning something completely.The other comment worth noting concerns repeal crusader Pauline Sabin who had been entrenched in republican politics prior to 1928. Republican congressmen would vote to adhere to the strictest of prohibition laws as laid out by the Volstead Act and then go to one of Sabin's parties demanding a drink. She concluded that the United States had become "a Nation of Hypocrites", which is the title of the third installment of Burn's documentary. Sabin becomes an unlikely hero who would sway the country against Prohibition and the eventual repeal of the 18th Amendment of the Constitution, the only amendment so dignified. Ironically, Daniel Okrent points out that today alcohol is somewhat harder to come by than during Prohibition because of liquor laws, underage drinking laws, etc. When alcohol was strictly forbidden, there was nothing in place to regulate it, except for raids on speakeasies and private distilleries.Based in part on Daniel Okrent's "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition", Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's "Prohibition" is a thoroughly entertaining, simultaneously humorous and "sobering" look at one of the strangest episodes in American legal history. The documentary is in three parts, the first chronicling the birth of the temperance movement which began in the 1820's almost a century before the ratification of the 18th Amendment. No question that alcohol was a problem for some people, mostly among the rural poor, but the temperance movement decided alcohol itself was the problem and vowed its eradication by the late 19th century. The first part ends with the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting not only the sale but importation of alcohol. Part two concerns the passage of the Volstead Act designed to enforce the amendment, and the immediate consequences of trying to stop people from drinking, and the antithetical results, such as lawlessness and bribery. The third and most sobering of the episodes chronicles many of the unintended consequences, such as the violence erupting in Chicago and the night club craze. The documentary ends with the movement for the repeal of the 18th Amendment.The unforeseen catastrophes of the 18th Amendment which were designed to heighten American morality and assuage drunkenness turned America into one of the most alcoholic-driven nations among the industrialized world. Americans drank more booze, partied more, got more drunk, and flaunted the law more often during Prohibition than at any other time in the nation's history since after the Civil War, even as compared to the present time. Possibly only the 1960's are somewhat comparable to the mayhem of the 1920's.The irony of ironies that the decade begun by the Temperance Movement's victory with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919 would be nicknamed the Roarding Twenties and the Jazz Age. This was not a decade known for drinking milk. This was a decade characterized by cocktail glasses in the hands of flappers dancing on tables to the evocative music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Men would be raising giant mugs of frothy beer in underground establishments called speakeasies. Only Prohibition allowed the likes of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano to become wealthy gangsters, almost movie stars by today's standards. The leaders of the Temperance Movement, particularly the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, were appalled when their daughters ran off to speakeasies and night clubs to partake of the forbidden fruit. Strangely, Prohibition helped usher in the Night Club culture of America which has continued unabated ever since. All the great night clubs famous for their booze, music, and dancing such as the Cotton Club and the Stork Club, were incepted when alcohol was supposed to be illegal.For some reason, I didn't think Prohibition permeated into so many aspects of American life during its enforcement from 1920 through 1932. People could open small businesses in their basements and make a fortune through bootlegging, and then be hauled away under the Volstead Act. The rise of the Chicago Gang syndicate became a prototype for similar syndicates across the country, all vying for their bootlegging territory. At one point, citizens were legally compelled to snitch on neighbors suspected of bootlegging. The story as presented by Burns/Novick is as compelling as any action thriller being produced today. A great movie of American history, with all the elements that make a great story. Essentially it's a legal thriller with sex, violence, and lots of booze. Lots of it.