Yet this is a tricky subject for a documentary - let alone one that extends over three nights and runs 5 ½ hours, as Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “Prohibition’’ does. It doesn’t faze them, though. The series presents an often-engrossing look at a unique cultural moment in America, when high-mindedness was in the saddle yet lawlessness was never so pervasive. “Prohibition’’ starts Sunday on Channel 2, continues Monday, and concludes Tuesday.
The ’20s marked the birth of modern mass media, which means there’s a lot of material to be drawn on: newsreels, radio broadcasts, tabloid front pages, let alone countless photographs for Burns to pan over in his trademark fashion. Yet the era’s familiarity threatens to make any examination of it seem cliched and/or tired. And a serious treatment is really asking for trouble. Show all the blazing tommy guns and shuttered breweries you like, but underlying the battle between dries and wets was a set of conflicts far harder to present visually: country vs. city, native vs. immigrant, evangelical vs. secular. Those conflicts are inherently abstract, yet they defined Prohibition - and some of them remain as vexing today as they were 90 years ago.
Or 190. Sunday’s episode, “A Nation of Drunkards,’’ looks at the 19th-century and early 20th-century roots of Prohibition. “For most of the nation’s history, alcohol was at least as American as apple pie,’’ narrator Peter Coyote says, and many people were not pie-eyed about this. A lot of them were female. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was one of the champions of a dry America - the other was the Anti-Saloon League - and an irony of the prohibition movement (considered so illiberal today) was the extent to which it empowered women.
How empowered? For one thing, the federal government’s chief enforcement officer during Prohibition was Mabel Walker Willebrandt. For another, there was Carrie Nation, at the turn of the century, with her “hatchetations.’’ Axe in hand, Nation went after saloons the way Lizzie Borden is alleged to have gone after her parents. “I tell you, ladies,’’ Nation exulted, “you do not know what joy you will have until you begin to smash, smash, smash.’’
