Viewpoint Wiki - All Viewpoints, No Gatekeepers

This article traces the historical development of alcohol prohibition in the United States, from the temperance movements of the early nineteenth century through the enactment and repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. For broader context, see the main Prohibition page.

Organized opposition to alcohol consumption in the United States emerged in the 1820s alongside Protestant revivalism. The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, promoted voluntary abstinence and within a decade claimed over a million members. Early temperance advocates drew on evangelical Protestant theology, framing alcohol as a moral and spiritual danger rather than a political issue.

The movement's first legislative success came in Maine, where Neal Dow championed a statewide prohibition law in 1851 - the “Maine Law” - banning the manufacture and sale of liquor. Twelve other states followed with similar laws by 1855, though most were repealed or struck down within the decade. This early wave demonstrated both the movement's organizational capacity and the limits of its political durability.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874 under the leadership of Frances Willard, reframed temperance as a domestic protection issue. Willard's “Do Everything” policy broadened the WCTU's agenda to include women's suffrage, labor reform, and public health, substantially expanding the movement's coalition and institutional reach.

The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), founded in Ohio in 1893 and operating nationally by 1895, introduced a focused single-issue lobbying strategy distinct from earlier moral reform movements. Under the leadership of Wayne Wheeler, the ASL cultivated relationships with candidates from both major parties, endorsing or opposing them solely on their stance toward liquor legislation regardless of other positions. This approach proved effective at the state and local level, producing a steady expansion of dry counties and states in the years before federal action.

By 1913, nine states had enacted statewide prohibition, and hundreds of counties in wet states operated under local option laws. The ASL's 1913 national convention called explicitly for a constitutional amendment, shifting the movement's stated goal from state-level reform to federal prohibition.

The Sixteenth Amendment, ratifying the federal income tax in 1913, had indirect structural significance: it provided Congress a revenue source that could replace federal excise taxes on alcohol, removing a fiscal obstacle to national prohibition.

American entry into World War I in 1917 accelerated prohibitionist momentum through several converging factors. Wartime grain conservation arguments gave prohibition advocates an economic rationale beyond moral reform. Anti-German sentiment damaged the reputations of the major brewing families - Pabst, Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch - many of whom were of German descent. Congress enacted wartime prohibition measures in 1917 and 1918, restricting the production of distilled spirits and reducing beer alcohol content, establishing federal precedent before the constitutional amendment took effect.

Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment in December 1917. Ratification by the required three-quarters of state legislatures was completed in January 1919. The Volstead Act, passed in October 1919 over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, defined the enforcement mechanism, classifying as “intoxicating liquor” any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol and establishing penalties for manufacture, sale, and transport.

The Eighteenth Amendment took effect on January 17, 1920.

Enforcement of the Volstead Act fell to the Prohibition Bureau, housed initially within the Treasury Department. The Bureau was chronically underfunded relative to the scale of the enforcement task. At its peak it employed roughly 1,500 agents nationally, widely regarded as insufficient. Agent pay was low, and the Bureau experienced persistent problems with bribery and corruption.

Legal production and sale of alcohol did not cease entirely. Medicinal whiskey prescriptions, sacramental wine, and cider from home-grown fruit remained permitted, creating documented avenues for evasion. Physicians wrote millions of whiskey prescriptions annually; the number of rabbis and ministers registered to receive sacramental wine increased substantially after 1920.

Illegal supply networks developed rapidly. Bootleggers sourced alcohol through diversion of industrial alcohol, importation across the Canadian and Caribbean borders, and domestic distilling and brewing. Urban markets were supplied through elaborate distribution chains involving producers, transporters, and retail speakeasies. Estimates of the number of speakeasies operating in New York City during the 1920s ranged from 30,000 to 100,000, compared with roughly 15,000 licensed saloons before prohibition.

Organized criminal enterprises in major cities consolidated control over bootlegging operations. In Chicago, the North Side and South Side gangs competed for market dominance; the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of February 1929, in which seven men associated with the Bugs Moran organization were killed, marked a peak of visible gang violence in that city. Al Capone's Chicago Outfit became the most publicly prominent of these enterprises. Similar consolidation occurred in New York, Cleveland, and other major cities.

Rural and small-town enforcement patterns differed substantially from urban ones. In many areas of the South and Midwest, pre-existing cultural traditions of home distilling continued with limited disruption. Some rural communities that had voted for prohibition in the 1910s maintained comparatively high compliance; others did not.

President Herbert Hoover, a supporter of prohibition, appointed a National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement under former Attorney General George Wickersham in 1929. The commission's 1931 report documented widespread non-compliance, corruption within enforcement agencies, and jurisdictional difficulties in federal-state cooperation. The commission's individual members were divided in their conclusions; the final report recommended continued enforcement and modification rather than repeal, but several commissioners appended personal statements expressing skepticism about prohibition's viability. The report's reception in the press emphasized the documented failures rather than the formal recommendation.

The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), founded in 1918 and led in the 1920s by prominent industrialists including Pierre du Pont and John J. Raskob, argued prohibition had failed to achieve its stated goals and had produced significant collateral harms. The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, founded in 1929 by Pauline Sabin, countered the WCTU's framing and drew substantial membership from women who had originally supported prohibition.

The 1932 Democratic Party platform included a plank calling for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment - a significant departure from the party's previous equivocation. Franklin Roosevelt's landslide election victory in November 1932 was widely interpreted as including a mandate on the prohibition question, though it encompassed many other issues.

Congress passed the Twenty-First Amendment in February 1933. It was ratified in December 1933, the fastest ratification of any constitutional amendment, completed in nine months and thirteen days. The Cullen-Harrison Act, signed by Roosevelt in March 1933, legalized beer of up to 3.2 percent alcohol content before full ratification, effective April 7, 1933 - a date subsequently celebrated in brewing industry marketing as “New Beer's Day.”

The Twenty-First Amendment did not restore a uniform national regime. Section 2 explicitly preserved the right of states to remain dry, and a number of states did so for years or decades after federal repeal. Mississippi remained legally dry until 1966. Local option laws continued to produce dry counties and municipalities across the country; many persist into the twenty-first century.

Some historians argue that prohibition produced a net reduction in alcohol consumption that persisted even after repeal; others contend that documented compliance rates were too low for consumption effects to have been significant - see Prohibition Debate.

The relationship between prohibition and the growth of organized crime is contested: some scholars identify prohibition as a primary cause of criminal consolidation, while others argue that criminal networks predated and would have developed independently of the Volstead Act - see Prohibition Debate.

Whether the Eighteenth Amendment's ratification reflected genuine popular majority support or the disproportionate influence of a disciplined minority lobby is disputed among historians of Progressive Era politics - see Anti-Saloon League Viewpoint.

The role of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment in the prohibitionist coalition - particularly animus directed at German, Irish, and Southern European drinking cultures - is acknowledged in the historiography but its relative weight as a causal factor is contested - see Prohibition Debate.

1. Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner, 2010.
2. Hamm, Richard F. Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920. University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
3. Kerr, K. Austin. Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League. Yale University Press, 1985.
4. Kyvig, David E. Repealing National Prohibition. University of Chicago Press, 1979.
5. Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Harvard University Press, 2007.
6. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (Wickersham Commission). Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws of the United States. Government Printing Office, 1931.
7. Miron, Jeffrey A., and Jeffrey Zwiebel. “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition.” American Economic Review 81, no. 2 (1991): 242-247.
8. Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933. Ivan R. Dee, 1998.
9. Volstead Act (National Prohibition Act), Pub. L. 66-66, 41 Stat. 305 (1919).
10. Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified January 16, 1919.
11. Twenty-First Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified December 5, 1933.