PROHIBITION

Prohibition (United States)



Prohibition (United States)

Introduction

National Prohibition, which by means of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned the manufacture, sale, transportation, and importation of beverage alcohol in the United States as of 16 January 1920, marked the high point of a generation-long effort to dismantle the U.S. liquor industry and the culture of drinking it supported. Although Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption and helped root out the “old-time” saloon that temperance advocates had long opposed, popular enthusiasm for National Prohibition declined for several reasons, including widespread defiance of the liquor ban (especially in cities); the surprisingly stringent definition of illegal intoxicating beverages contained in the Volstead Act, the legislation that implemented the Eighteenth Amendment; the underfunded, inept, and venal enforcement of the Volstead Act by federal agents; and lax support for Prohibition from Congress and state governments. After thirteen years of National Prohibition, ratification of the 21st Amendment on 5 December 1933 repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and ended the “dry reform.” This paper discusses the history of prohibition and the causes that led to it.

Discussion

In the late nineteenth century, a group of Americans began to campaign for the moral reform of society through a reduction in the consumption of intoxicating substances. In most cases, these individuals had close ties to evangelical movements in American Christianity of the period. After the turn of the century, temperance views became increasingly influential, and by 1919 they became law when the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and the Volstead Act made the production, possession, consumption and sale of alcoholic beverages illegal. During the 1920s, the era of Prohibition, these legal changes had a profound impact upon American culture, in both the rise of organised crime in major cities for the trafficking of illegal liquor, and vocal opposition from American liberal writers and social critics. Gradually the temperance movement lost influence, and in 1933 Prohibition ended when the Twenty-first Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, making alcohol legal once more. (Thornton, 2005)

The Coming of National Prohibition

The drive for a Prohibition amendment to the Constitution began in earnest in 1913 following a string of state prohibition laws and the passage that year of the Webb-Kenyon Act, a federal statute that barred interstate shipments of liquor that violated the laws of dry states. Dry strategists realized that state prohibition was an impossibility in the area from Massachusetts to Maryland and in other “wet” strongholds across the nation. (Twenty-one states remained wet when Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917.) Yet drys were encouraged by the possibilities of federal-state cooperation exemplified by Webb-Kenyon. National constitutional Prohibition was fashioned to outflank the wet states with national authority while safeguarding the states' rights sensibilities of many drys by stipulating that the states and the national government would concurrently enforce Prohibition through legislation of their own choosing. (Asbury, 1999)

Relentless lobbying by the Anti-Saloon League of America (ASLA) and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) combined with the crisis atmosphere of ...