‘Prohibition’ gives lie to era’s myths

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Updated: November 10, 2011 5:48PM

Windy citizens: We know all about da Chicago Way, right? Our town’s rich history of prohibition-era boozin’, bootleggin’ and general mayhem defined by the likes of Al Capone and Eliot Ness?

Well, filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have a few things to say about our beloved lore.

Eliot Ness, to begin with, “is a PR invention.” So said Burns last week while he and co-producer Novick stopped in town to attend preview screenings of their new film, “Prohibition.”

The three-part, six-hour masterpiece premieres on WTTW-Channel 11, at 7 p.m. Oct. 2 and continues at 8 p.m. Oct. 3 and 4.

“People have always seen the need to tell Al Capone’s story as a parable about good vs. evil, even though that’s a fiction,” Burns told me.

“Eliot Ness had nothing to do with catching Al Capone,” Novick added. “He raided a few old breweries and busted up some stale beer. Then, after he retired, he wrote a book in which he just made stuff up.”

But the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — the 1929 shootout that left seven gangsters dead on Clark street — everyone is pretty much clear on that, right?

“Well, everyone always assumes it was Al Capone — it’s good mythology — but there’s actually no evidence to support that theory,” Novick said.

“But the important thing is, everyone assumed that he did,” Burns said.

Please don’t read this column and walk away with the idea that the documentary “Prohibition” is largely about flappers, speakeasies and mobsters like Scarface — though there’s certainly plenty of that.

“Prohibition” is a tour of late 19th and early 20th century America as seen through the eyes of women whose families were being destroyed by the ills of alcoholism. The story chronicles what happened when they decided to do something about it and introduces us to all the magnificent characters who were affected by their utopian vision of society, from the temperance movement through the passage and repeal of the 18th Amendment.

You’ve got the pioneering female activists who prayed outside dusty saloons to beg for their closure and the various men who felt called by God to help eradicate the sinful liquid. You’ve got the working-class men who needed a few drinks to cope with hardscrabble lives and — once the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920 — the men who were more than willing to provide the spirits whose consumption created a nation of criminals and hypocrites.

Throw in discrimination toward immigrants and African Americans, the collaboration between religious groups and the Klu Klux Klan to turn the country “dry,” a woman’s movement that gained so much power and momentum that they gained voting rights — and women, again, rose up to eventually end the failed “Noble Experiment” — and you’ve got quite a yarn.

That alone would be plenty, but Novick and Burns go way further and put prohibition in all the context that make sense to us today: the different cultures of rural and urban dwellers; the different drinking habits of the native-born and new-immigrants; the entitlement attitude of wealthy power brokers who support legislation in great part because they assume that they won’t really be affected by it.

And in the middle of the epic drama there is, of course, Chicago.

Between the deeply nuanced portrait of Capone — quite the Robin Hood figure to many, according to interview subjects who told of his great generosity — and interviews with Chicagoans who lived through the era, we learn that while our city was by no means unique in its thirst for alcohol or distribution-chain brutality, it certainly took the cake in the corruption department.

“Complete corruption!” squealed Novick. “In exchange for campaign contributions, the mayor decided he wouldn’t enforce prohibition!”

She said it as if she couldn’t begin to imagine such a thing.

But I assured her and Burns that, ahem, long ago that was the Chicago Way.