Nullary Sources

Ken Burns has a new miniseries out, Prohibition. It’s a collaboration with Lynn Novick on, unsurprisingly for people in the United States, prohibition in the United States. The first part aired yesterday, and the second and third air today and tomorrow.

Burns wrote a piece for USA Weekend about the social climate of the 1910s and 1920s, with an emphasis on how it was a similar situation to the one in the country today:

It was World War I of all things that put the movement over the top. Suddenly, the country found itself at war with Germany. And who ran America’s breweries? Men with names like Schlitz, Pabst and Busch: German-American immigrants. Amping up its rhetoric, the Anti-Saloon League equated beer with treason.

By now Prohibition had ceased to be about finding a reasonable solution to a real problem. In their zeal to overhaul society, its leaders had turned the movement into an exercise in demonization.

The war was only the final straw. The virulence of Dry rhetoric had in fact been mounting for years. For anyone whose ideal of America was small-town, Protestant and white, the era’s demographic changes must have been frightening. They saw cities populated by Catholics with their foreign pope, Jews with their strange customs, tenements where no one seemed to speak English.