Americans have long been in love with the Jazz Age, and who can
blame us? The Great Gatsby,. Al Capone. The Charleston. Louis
Armstrong. Flappers. Speakeasies. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said,
it was when the United States came into its own, and could
determine for itself “what was fashionable and what was fun.” We
may be easily drawn to romanticized images of the 1920s, but we
cannot let our collective fascination with bathtub gin,
gangsters, and jazz clubs cloud our vision of the Prohibition
era. There were very serious matters at the heart of the debates
surrounding the legislation that ushered in the period. With the
broadcast this October of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s three-part
documentary Prohibition, Americans will get a chance to rethink
that era’s meaning. What the film makes clear is that
Prohibition was the first of the many “culture wars” that would
divide the United States in the twentieth century. Before the
debates about abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, school prayer,
or the legalization of ma