Lessons of Prohibition

The three-part miniseries from Ken Burns, Prohibition, which concludes on Public Broadcasting on Tuesday and repeats locally Sunday, is a penetrating and meaningful look at a colorful and controversial piece of U.S. history. One thing that impressed me was the way Burns presented the complexities of an issue that from a distance seems fairly simple: to drink or not to drink?

The era now seems almost cartoonish, with a sense of Keystone Kops chasing lawbreaking but lovable bootleggers who supplied a public that went to speakeasies and ordered "tea" with a wink and a nod. Even bloodthirsty gangsters are seen as ersatz Robin Hoods who gave the people what they wanted. In a time when, in most places, any adult can walk into a store or bar and order just about any kind of alcohol concoction, the Prohibition era seems laughable. But as Burns shows, it was really an era when passions ran high and in many cases lives were on the line. 

It's not difficult to see how alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition are similar, though Burns didn't pursue that angle. "Our film is a history of the 18th Amendment," Burns told me in a telephone interview last week. "We were aware of marijuana use from the project we did about jazz. Marijuana was making one of its appearances in a subcultural world. We didn't have as widespread use as now. Alcohol abuse was a huge social problem in the United States."

But Burns does not live with his head in a hole. He went on: "But you can't help but see parallels with today: single-issue political campaigns, demonization of immigrants and African-Americans, the decay in social discourse, smear campaigns, warrantless government wiretaps, perpetual questions about the role of government. One of the connections that any intelligent viewer will make is, what about drugs today? In the criminalization of marijuana there are many, many parallels."

But alcohol prohibition lasted only 14 years at the federal level. Marijuana prohibition, which came in definitively at the federal level with the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937, seems to have lasted much longer. That's a matter of perspective. Prohibition starts off detailing issues around alcohol abuse and a preacher's published sermons railing against demon rum in the early 1800s. When you couple that with the fact that there are still dry counties in the United States where alcohol sales are illegal, it stretches the fight over alcohol use in this country much further. 

One lesson learned, if alcohol prohibition is a model for marijuana prohibition, is the tremendous and complex political action involved on both sides of the issue. I'm talking presidential politics. In the 1928 contest between Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat Al Smith, Smith was vilified for being a "wet" (anti-Prohibition) and a Roman Catholic. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, a lawyer who had been assistant attorney general in charge of prohibition enforcement under President Warren Harding, was one of the leading and most effective speakers against Smith. When Hoover won and didn't appoint Willebrandt attorney general, she left the Justice Department for private law practice. One of her first clients was Fruit Growers Ltd., which was marketing Vineglow, a grape concentrate that could be made into wine. 

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