What Was Prohibition? America’s Failed Experiment
At one minute past midnight on January 17, 1920, a small crowd gathered outside a former saloon in the small Illinois town of Collinsville. A photographer’s flash went off, and the chief of police smashed the establishment’s stock of whiskey and beer with a small hatchet, while a reporter from the Associated Press took notes. The smashed bottles and the chief’s hatchet were carried away in a wheelbarrow, and the small crowd — most of them supporters of the new law — went home. Across the country, similar scenes played out that morning. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had taken effect, and the United States had become, briefly, the most ambitious experiment in social engineering in the modern world.
The wider story of Prohibition and speakeasies is told in the parent section, and the underground bars that sprang up in response are described in how did speakeasies work. The longer-term consequences for American life are treated in Prohibition’s effects on American society.
A Century of Temperance
Prohibition was not a sudden 1920s phenomenon. It was the culmination of a temperance movement that had been building for nearly a century. The American Temperance Society, founded in Boston in 1826, was the first national organization to call for the moderation or abolition of alcohol. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, by Frances Willard (1839–1898), became the most powerful women’s organization in the country. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, by Howard Hyde Russell (1855–1946), became the most effective lobbying organization of the early twentieth century; the League’s leader, the Ohio lawyer Wayne Wheeler (1869–1927), is sometimes called “the dry boss of America.”
The movement’s most colorful early activist was Carry A. Nation (1846–1911), the Kansas woman who became famous in the early 1900s for taking a hatchet to saloon interiors. Nation was an embarrassment to many temperance leaders, but her tactics were a powerful symbol of the movement’s righteous anger. By 1913, more than half of the U.S. population lived in “dry” territory. By 1917, 26 of the 48 states had enacted statewide prohibition laws, and the stage was set for a federal amendment.
The Wartime Catalyst
The final push for federal prohibition came with World War I. The war gave the dry cause two powerful new arguments. The first was anti-German sentiment. Many of the largest American breweries — Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz, Miller — were owned by German-American families, and the wartime climate of hostility toward all things German made the brewing industry politically vulnerable. The second was grain conservation. The Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of August 1917 gave the federal government the power to prohibit the use of grain in the production of alcoholic beverages. The wartime Prohibition Act of 1918 banned beverages with more than 2.75 percent alcohol, effectively nationalizing the dry laws for the duration of the war.
The Eighteenth Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and ratified by the requisite 36 states on January 16, 1919. Its language was simple: “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” It would take effect one year after ratification, on January 17, 1920 — a date the wets grimly called “the thirsty-first.”
The Eighteenth Amendment was the first amendment to the Constitution ever ratified with the explicit intent of restricting, rather than expanding, the liberty of American citizens. It was also the only amendment ever to be repealed in its entirety by another amendment. The political coalition that had produced it was broad and unusual; the conservative politics of the era is treated in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
The Volstead Act
The Eighteenth Amendment forbade the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors, but it did not define the term or specify the enforcement mechanism. That was the work of the Volstead Act, also known as the National Prohibition Act, passed by Congress on October 28, 1919, over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The act was named for its sponsor, Representative Andrew J. Volstead (1860–1947) of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The Volstead Act defined “intoxicating liquor” as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol — a threshold so low that it covered not only whiskey, gin, and wine but also most beer. The act criminalized the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating liquors and set penalties of up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines. It also created the Bureau of Prohibition, an enforcement arm of the Treasury Department that would eventually employ about 1,500 federal agents, supplemented by thousands of local and state enforcement officers.
The bureau was overwhelmed from the start. The salaries of the agents were so low that corruption was endemic. The journalist Will Rogers (1879–1935) quipped that “Prohibition is better than any of my premises. I had nothing to do with it being put over but I enjoy seeing the great cities of America, that used to be wide open, now as dry as a prohibition convention in Texas.”
The Dry Coalition
The “drys” of the 1920s were a powerful political force. Their coalition included rural Protestant churches (especially Southern Baptist, Southern Methodist, and Scandinavian Lutheran), the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, business groups who believed alcohol hurt worker productivity, and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, which supported Prohibition as part of its nativist agenda.
The Wets Argue Back
The opponents of Prohibition — the “wets” — were equally broad. They included the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), founded in 1918 by a group of wealthy anti-Prohibitionists; the brewing and distilling industries; Roman Catholics, who saw Prohibition as an overreach of Protestant moralism; German- and Italian-American communities; and a growing number of middle-class women. The Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), founded in 1929 by the Republican activist Pauline Sabin (1887–1955), brought middle-class women into the anti-Prohibition movement; Sabin argued that Prohibition was destroying the rule of law and that repeal would protect women and children from the violence of the illegal liquor trade.
Early Effects and Repeal
The first effects of Prohibition were visible immediately. The consumption of legal alcohol fell by perhaps 70 percent in the first year. More than 1,000 American breweries closed their doors between 1920 and 1925. The legal distilling industry, centered in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, was effectively eliminated. The wine industry in California survived only because the Volstead Act permitted the production of sacramental wine for religious use and medicinal wine for medical use; doctors were writing an estimated 11 million prescriptions for medicinal whiskey a year by 1925. The illegal production, smuggling, and sale of alcohol rose to fill the gap, and the speakeasy appeared in every American city. The story of how the speakeasies worked is told in how did speakeasies work.
The campaign to repeal gathered strength through the late 1920s. The Twenty-First Amendment, the only amendment ever to repeal another, was proposed by Congress on February 17, 1933, and ratified on December 5, 1933. The first legal six-pack was sold in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 7, 1933, after the passage of the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. The first legal whiskey was sold in a Chicago hotel at 12:01 a.m. on December 5, 1933. The end of Prohibition was, in its own way, as historic as its beginning — and the long-term effects on American society are still being debated. That story is told in Prohibition’s effects on American society.