Prohibition

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Narrator

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious. Mark Twain. (somber music) -

Narrator

One snowy evening in January of 1826, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Litchfield, Connecticut, rode out to visit a parishioner in need. The young man had been among his very first converts to Christ, Beecher remembered, always most affectionate and kind. But something was wrong, his wife was weeping. "What is the matter?" Beecher asked her. She said that her husband's fondness for drink had overcome his love for her and for God. Beecher had heard the same sad story from parishioners again and again. Jobs lost, life savings swallowed up, wives and children beaten and abused. All because of alcohol. Now, he resolved to do something about it. -

Narrator

Like slavery, the traffic in ardent spirits must come to be regarded as sinful. Let the temperate part of the nation awake and reform. -

Narrator

The impassioned sermons Lyman Beecher wrote and delivered on successive Sundays echoed sentiments that had been heard for at least half a century in America. But Beecher was so eloquent, and the scourge of alcohol had become so pervasive, that when those sermons were published, it set in motion events even he could not have imagined. For the next 100 years, Americans would argue fiercely over what to do about the age-old problem of drunkenness. The battle would eventually result in an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Prohibition. It was meant to eradicate an evil. Instead, it would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers. (ragtime music) It's this question of, "How much can we tell "other people about how to live their lives? "How much can we regulate society? "Can we really fix all the problems that we see around us?" It's the great example of what happens when different groups have different ideas about what kind of behavior is acceptable. (ragtime music) -

Narrator

Prohibition would pit the countryside against the cities, natives against newcomers, protestants against Catholics. It would raise questions about the proper role of government, about individual rights and responsibilities, about means and ends, and unintended consequences, and who is, and who is not, a real American. (ragtime music) How the hell did that happen? How does a freedom-loving people, a nation that's built on individual rights and liberties, decide in one kind of crazed moment, it almost seems, that we can tell people how to live their lives? Virtually every part of the constitution is about expanding human freedom, except prohibition, in which human freedom was being limited. When people cross the line between our essential character as Americans and some other superseding vision of what we should be, then we get in trouble. (ragtime music)