Prohibition

Americans had campaigned against drinking for nearly a century. The American Temperance Society was founded in 1826; the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874; and the Anti-Saloon League in 1893, which became a powerful political force. Reformers blamed alcohol for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. Women were central to the movement, seeing alcohol as a destroyer of families, and many Progressives embraced prohibition as part of their effort to improve society through government. Reformers also associated alcohol with cities and immigrants.

Between 1905 and 1917, many states passed laws banning the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Temperance advocates then pushed for a national ban. Congress approved the Eighteenth Amendment in December 1917, during World War I, and enough states ratified it in just thirteen months.

The amendment banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” for beverage purposes, beginning one year after ratification. Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce it.

According to the National Archives, consumption did fall: alcohol use dropped by about 30 percent, arrests for drunkenness declined, and illegal liquor became expensive. But enforcement proved extremely difficult. Bootlegging became rampant; by 1925 New York City alone had somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 speakeasies. Neither federal nor local authorities would commit the resources needed — Maryland never passed a state enforcement law — and organized crime grew rich supplying illegal alcohol. Speakeasies also became part of the decade’s new nightlife, where young women and men mixed in ways that defied older social rules.

By the early 1930s, with the country in the Great Depression, support for Prohibition had collapsed. Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment in February 1933, sending it to state ratifying conventions instead of legislatures, and it was ratified on December 5, 1933. The amendment returned control of alcohol to the states, some of which remained dry.

Herbert Hoover called Prohibition an experiment “noble in motive and far reaching in purpose.” Its failure is often cited in debates over whether government can — or should — legislate personal behavior, including comparisons to the modern war on drugs.