"Prohibition" on PBS tonight at 8:00 (time in listing for my area)...n/t

[monmouth]

[rurallib]

1. Check thy local listings - ours starts at 7PM CT

Why is all the good stuff on at one time and then there are other nights when there ain't crap on?

[monmouth]

2. I'm on an awful underfunded PBS (out of Boynton Beach) and I'll be

lucky to even get it PLUS...The Jets are playing tonight...what to do, what to do???

[gejohnston]

3. record!

[rurallib]

5. Prohibititon will be on many times, no doubt

but then to me most pro football games are like watching grass grow.

[monmouth]

6. Normally for me too but this time some $ is on it...LOL...n/t

[TreasonousBastard]

13. It is not Schrodinger's football...

watching the game will not affect the score.

[Lionel Mandrake]

4. This series might be very good.

Ken Burns has done good work in the past, especially the Civil War series.

We've all been told that Prohibition (of alcohol) was a big mistake, that it didn't work, that it encouraged organized crime, etc. But have we really absorbed the lesson? Why do otherwise-intelligent people (mostly conservatives) refuse to apply these insights to other drugs?

[pokerfan]

7. My prediction

Lots and lots of extremely slow pans and zooms of old-timey still photographs.

And I intend to watch every minute. :)

[monmouth]

9. Me too. My parents had a really good time during those days..LOL....n/t

[Lionel Mandrake]

16. Your prediction came true for most of the first episode.

That might have something to do with the fact that there were no movies in the early 19th century.

The pace seemed awfully slow to me. I guess things will heat up during the 1920s (Monday night).

[Archae]

8. My Mom's mother was a "Flapper."

I have a photo of her in that outfit.

[monmouth]

10. My grandmother didn't speak to my mother for weeks because she

cut her hair in the "flapper" mode. Very short in the back and full on the sides. Great pics. here also...LOL. My mother taught me how to do the "Charleston"...I was known as the "little flapper."..

[Rhiannon12866]

17. My grandmother has old Thomas Edison records from that era.

When we were kids, we loved to play them on the old wind-up victrola. Your comment reminded me of a spoken aside on one of those records. It said: How is a flapper like a bungalow? Painted in front, shingled in back, and has no attic! :D

[Sisaruus]

11. My grandfather was a bootlegger for the NYC police departmernt

He carried a proactive pardon from the governor in case he accidentally was picked up by an unknowing cop. I will be watching tonight in his honor.

[Archae]

12. Ken Burns was on Rachel Maddow's show last Friday.

He said the "Anti-Saloon League" had political clout the Teabaggers could only dream of.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. I was pleased to learn that the Lutherans and Episcopalians were the only

Protestants not to advocate for Prohibition. :-)

[CottonBear]

18. I thought that was very interesting too!

OK, here's an Episcopalian joke: Where ever four or more are gathered there will always be a fifth. ;)

I come from a family of very dry Presbyterians. My grandmother and one of my aunts never had a drop of alcohol. My dad liked to have a cocktail after work but he never drank or smoked in front of his mother!

The Lutherans must have not have liked the anti-German aspect of the prohibition movement.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

20. Part of the reason for the Lutherans' and Episcopalians' objections was the

fact that unlike other Protestants at the time, they used real wine for Communion. Many of the other Protestants used (and some still use) grape juice instead.

Some of the anti-alcohol Protestants claimed that the word translated "wine" in the New Testament really means "grape juice," but in fact,

1. The word used always means "wine" in non-Biblical contexts

2. Grapes are harvested in the fall. Passover (which is when the Last Supper is described as taking place) is in the spring. There was no refrigeration in ancient times, so no way to have unfermented grape juice in the spring in a climate with warm winters.

[CottonBear]

21. Thank you! Now I know why we Presbyterians always used grape juice for communion.

I was always confused about that. I never could get a good answer to my questions about this (among other things) when I was a child. When I went to church with my Catholic or Espicopalian friends, there was always wine as part of the communon ritual.

[dimbear]

15. The main takeaway for me was that it passed to punish the Huns for WWI.

What with all the rich German brewmasters.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. My German-American grandmother was in her teens during those years

From what she used to say, being German after the U.S. entered World War I was like being Muslim after 9/11. She lived in a German-American neighborhood in Minneapolis, and young toughs (proto-freepers?) used to go through the neighborhood looking for reasons to attack people. She didn't tell of anyone being lynched. but she told of one incident in which anyone heard speaking German was forced to kneel on the sidewalk and kiss the American flag.

Minnesota never banned the teaching of German (a few banned the teaching of any foreign language), but 27 states did. Interestingly, before World War I, Germans were like Latinos are today, a huge minority found in every major city and many rural areas with their own newspapers and magazines (no TV or radio or movies with sound in those days, of course), their own churches (both Catholic and Protestant), and even bilingual education in some cities (although not in Minneapolis.)

People with recent ties to England,Scotland, and France were the worst offenders when it came to being anti-German, so much so, that when we were planning our family trip to Europe in 1967, my grandmother (who was paying for most of the trip after selling her house) did not want to go to London or Paris, but my father convinced her that it would be a shame to miss those cities.

She was pleasantly surprised at how friendly everyone in England was. (Of course, they thought of her as American, not German.) She never did like France, though. probably because she couldn't speak the language. My father and I had both studied French, and we found people to be friendlier, even with our mangled French.

By the way, he propaganda against Germans was crude and vicious--and mostly lifted straight from British propaganda--and mostly proved to be untrue after the war. Because of this, the first reports of the Holocaust 20 years later were first dismissed as more exaggerated propaganda.

Ironically, it was the way the Allies assigned Germany sole blame for World War I and forced it to pay crippling reparations that led to the rise of the Nazis.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

22. Two interesting aspects of this documentary

One was pointing up how much Americans used to drink. Even the Puritans drank mostly beer, which made sense in an era when drinking water wasn't dependably safe.

Another was the underlying assumption, common today, that people were poor because they drank (today we might say because they used drugs), not because their employers didn't pay them enough or they couldn't find jobs. Remember how some of the Prohibition advocates were claiming that the slums would disappear if booze was illegal.

[El Supremo]

23. I just want to know if they will draw any conclusions about the legalization of marijuana. n/m

[Lydia Leftcoast]

24. I wonder if that's the subtext

because the War on Drugs has certainly spawned an organized criminal class of its own, just as Prohibition did.