Ken Burns' Prohibition: Bootleggers, Organized Crime + The Glamorization of Getting Blitzed

KB: Actually New York was ONE of the wettest cities in the country. It was New Orleans that was THE wettest city in the country. It took a Prohibition agent, Izzy Einstein, thirty nine seconds or something like that, before his cab driver reached under his seat and offered him a swig from his flask. For a metropolitan city, Los Angeles was particularly dry. It didn't get a reputation until much later.

SI: That's interesting. In our random and very unscientific Squid Ink survey about Prohibition, we discovered that nine times out of ten when you bring up the subject someone has a family story about the era.

KB: We found that, too! Everyone had a story! Even if it was "My grandmother was in the women's Christian Temperance Union." We interviewed Justice John Paul Stevens before he resigned from the Supreme Court. He said his mother told him, "Lips that touch wine shall not touch mine."

SI: Um, yeah. Those aren't the kind of anecdotes we heard...

KB: ...it was more like "behind this wall was where we'd hide our booze."

SI: Indeed. Another Squid Ink finding: Watching 5 ½ hours of archival footage of beer kegs being smashed, "medicinal" whiskey being procured from pharmacies and folks knocking back illegal cocktails at a speakeasy seems to have an odd effect. Can you guess what that is?

KB: Yes. It's a reaction we get all the time. "Let's have a drink!" We did a family and friends screening, three or four hundred people in New York city in June, and we served alcohol afterwards. People walked out saying, "I AM THIRSTY."

SI: On view in the fascinating treasure trove of old-timey photographs that are part of your documentary are the many ways folks smuggled liquor on their person including a woman who kept her firewater in a walking stick with a hollow center...

KB: ...or with a garter or stuck underneath the seats of their roadsters or in the door panel of their car or in a carved-out book. We are a pretty inventive culture. I didn't mind the setting in the woman's garter. I thought that was a pretty interesting place to keep your booze.

SI: Were cocktails better back in the day?

KB: [laughs] I think cocktails are in the hand of the beholder so the answer, I imagine, is yes. There was certain amount of excitement about doing something that was illicit. There's been a whole new interest in the Prohibition era and mixology and drinks and we've met folks that have written in a scholarly fashion about these things.

SI: Have you heard of The Varnish?

KB: I have heard of it but I haven't been there.

SI: Again, Mr. Burns, research!

KB: I'm a dull boy. I'm just working all the time.

SI: Did you get the feeling that Prohibition could happen again?

KB: It was such a huge mistake. But it also remains as a kind of cautionary tale, does it not? Whenever this group or that group comes along and goes, "Hey, we've got the solution. We need an amendment to the constitution for THIS..." people kind of go, "You know what? I don't think so."

SI: Because?

KB: People thought Prohibition was going to be the magic bullet, that it was going to solve everything, that there would be no more slums. The evangelist Billy Sunday said, "Heaven will forever be for rent." I just thought, "Are you kidding me? Did you really believe that this is going to happen? You didn't think about the unintended consequences that you were going to create?"

SI: Besides the enhanced need for a drink those were...?

KB: It created organized crime. Prohibition has left us, but organized crime hasn't. I think people would take a few steps back and say, "Jeez, I wonder what the unintended consequences are here?"

SI: Throughout the 5 ½ hours of Prohibition, you can help think about how liquor being illegal resonates with the issue of legalizing marijuana.

KB: Or the Tea Party or the current immigrant thing. There's lots of stuff. There's not such a direct correlation with marijuana. Alcohol has been drunk by every culture since there were human beings and drugs have been a sub-cultural event. Probably if you just legalized it and regulated it you'd also have to spend a lot of time thinking about those unintended consequences that will inevitably happen. Whenever you push something down there, it's going to come out there.

SI: There is a shocking statistic in the first episode: By 1830, the average American over 15 years of age drank 88 bottles of whiskey a year. That makes it sound as if everyone was hammered 24/7.

KB: I think most men were. Per capita they were drinking as much as three times as they were now. But women weren't drinking. So it was six times as much. You had somebody like John Adams, the second president of the United States, drinking hard cider at breakfast and lunch. People stopped in the factories to have drinks. Once you add distilled spirits, you have a much bigger social problem. Let's not kid ourselves: It's a social problem now. We don't mean to make fun of it. A large section of our population suffers from that addiction. Having said that, what we tried to do was use it as a political wedge, a political cudgel, to apply the solution to 100% of the population. It not only did not work, it was an abysmal failure and left us with many horrible legacies.

Check back in later today for a Prohibition-era cocktail courtesy of Eric Alperin, co-owner of The Varnish in historic downtown Los Angeles...