Agents dump booze into the gutter in this 1922 image from the New York Daily News. Prohibition, the new documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, tells the true story of the rise, rule and fall of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was called the “Noble Experiment,” but it was in fact one of America’s most notorious civic failures, an object lesson in the challenge of legislating human behavior. Look for Prohibition Sunday—Tuesday, October 2–4 on LPB. The episodes will air each evening at 7 pm with an encore broadcast at 9 pm. (Prohibition is a production of WETA-TV in Washington D.C.)

October 2011. How New Orleans Drank its Way through Prohibition: And other not-so-surprising details about the Big Easy speakeasies

The Noble Experiment, the United States’ dalliance with institutional temperance from 1920 until 1933, was a hard sell in southeast Louisiana. The Louisiana legislature ratified the Eighteenth Amendment in 1918 by a vote of 21 to 20 in the state senate and 69 to 41 in the house.

The nation was soon to be in Prohibition’s grip. Joy Jackson’s 1978 article “Prohibition in New Orleans: The Unlikeliest Crusade” in Louisiana History offers this anecdote from the August 9, 1918 Times-Picayune:

The adoption of the ratification resolution was the signal for a great demonstration by the prohibitionists, the shouts of joy and noise over the “dry” victory continuing for more than a minute.

When the demonstration ceased, Mr. Evans of Madison shouted:

“Now, Mr. Speaker, I move that the House take a recess in order to give the prohibitionists time in which to ‘get tight’ and celebrate their victory.”

This brought on another demonstration that threw the House into an uproar.

While the Anti-Saloon League claimed ratification as a victory for the people of Louisiana, the new law was given little more than lip service in New Orleans, which at the time boasted some five thousand bars. Still, New Orleanians prepared for the worst when the law went into effect January 1, 1920. Jackson’s article quotes another Times-Picayune reporter’s account of 1919’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

How many bottles of  champagne and other  wines,  and how  many  barrels of  beer were  consumed during the night… is beyond calculation.