6/11/2018
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Torrent Ken Burns Prohibition Rating: 3,8/5 9746reviews

Tune in a documentary about the Civil War and you expect it to resonate in the present, since the racial issues that emanated from the era of slavery are still very much with us. But a program about Prohibition?

Torrent Ken Burns Prohibition

Flappers in speakeasies and biddies beating temperance drums: hardly seems a recipe for modern-day relevance. Yet you can hear history talking directly to the Americans of 2011 all through an absorbing five-and-a-half-hour documentary by Ken Burns and that runs for three nights, beginning on Sunday on PBS stations. Especially now, the story of America’s disastrous experiment with banning alcoholic beverages seems made for Santayana’s phrase about learning from the past or being condemned to repeat it.

The template that Mr. Burns first used more than 20 years ago in his landmark series on the Civil War gets a boost from the availability of plenty of film to augment the slow pans of still photographs. O Rappa Perfil 2009 Rar. Green Day American Idiot Download Zippy.

Ken Burns talked about his latest PBS film series [Prohibition], and he responded to telephone calls and electronic communications. Ken Burns has been making films for more than thirty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of.

The generals of wartime are replaced by an impossibly colorful cast of characters: the hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation; Wayne Wheeler, the master manipulator behind the Anti-Saloon League; showboating gangsters like Al Capone. And, more subtly, the divisions explored in “The Civil War” — North/South, black/white — are replaced by others just as sharp (and still familiar today): native-born versus immigrant, rural heartland versus the cities. Industrialization and the concurrent influx of immigrants only fueled the problem, as drinking customs from various countries took hold in cities, and brewers and distillers set up shop to meet demand. The temperance movement, which had turned Maine dry as early as 1851, kept gaining strength, but, as the program notes, the “wet” forces were slow to mobilize because they thought money made them immune to a national prohibition: the federal government relied too heavily on ever to allow such a thing. The ratification of the 16th Amendment — the income tax — in 1913 changed all that, and in January 1919 the prohibiting the manufacture, sale or importing of alcohol was ratified.

Then a whole new set of problems descended. “To pass a law, in the real world, means nothing,” Noah Feldman, a legal scholar, notes in Part 2, “A Nation of Scofflaws” (a word whose origin is one of countless interesting tidbits in this program). “To enforce the law means everything.” Photo. During the Great Depression marchers in Detroit carried signs reading, “Beer for Taxation, Jobs for Millions.” Credit Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University Just how the amendment was to be enforced (eventually defined in the Volstead Act) was left vague and, more important, underfinanced, so that a relative handful of law enforcement agents were charged with stopping a practice engaged in by millions of Americans.

And, of course, one man’s ban is another’s opportunity. “In less than two hours, liquor will be declared illegal by decree of the distinguished gentlemen of our nation’s Congress,” Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) says in an early episode of the HBO series raising a glass. “To those beautiful, ignorant bastards.” That fictional series, set in New Jersey in the Prohibition years and full of real-life characters, makes pretty interesting companion viewing to Part 2 of the Burns/Novick program. Nucky, of course, runs a criminal enterprise built on booze, and “Prohibition” describes vividly just how often the new law was defied, and by how many. Police officers wouldn’t enforce it.

Gangsters flouted it (with Capone so brazen that he held news conferences). Even members of Congress kept right on drinking. Burns and Ms. Novick, commendably, don’t beat you over the head with the obvious lessons for those today who would legislate personal behavior; they largely let the story of Prohibition speak for itself. The message isn’t simply that an amendment based on restricting rights (rather than on guaranteeing them, as the others do) was doomed to fail. It’s that such overzealous meddling can have all sorts of unintended consequences.

Chicagoans celebrating the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Credit John Binder Collection “In just four months,” Mr. Coyote relates, “15,000 Midwesterners developed a severe neurological disorder called jake leg, the result of drinking an illicit fluid, Jamaica ginger, laced with a chemical used to thin paint.” Other consequences were less serious. There was, for instance, a run on sacramental wine, which was not restricted.