PROHIBITION

PROHIBITION was a tool to which temperance reformers repeatedly turned during more than a century's efforts to change American drinking habits. The first attempts to ban alcohol consumption through government action appeared on the local and state levels during the 1830s. Local prohibition has flourished on and off ever since.

During the early 1850s, twelve states and territories followed the example of Maine by enacting statewide prohibition laws. Most of these, however, were struck down by the courts or repealed. After the Civil War, new organizations were formed to advance the prohibition cause: the Prohibition Party (1869), the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (1874), and the Anti-Saloon League (1893). During the early years of the twentieth century, many localities and states adopted prohibition. During the same period, per capita alcohol consumption rose, buoyed by the rising popularity of beer, which increasingly replaced distilled liquor in American drinking preferences. Rising consumption had two results. On one hand, it motivated prohibitionists to focus their efforts toward a national solution to a problem they perceived as intensifying. On the other hand, it persuaded brewers, who had previously cooperated politically with distillers, that their beverage enjoyed enough popular support to be spared by a federal prohibition law, and thus disrupted the liquor-industry coalition. The Anti-Saloon League's nonpartisan lobbying and balance-of-power approach was rewarded in 1916 by the election of a dry Congress, which approved a proposed prohibition constitutional amendment in December 1917. Three-quarters of state legislatures ratified within the next thirteen months, and national Prohibition came into force one year later, on 16 January 1920. World War I contributed to Prohibition's triumph by eliciting a spirit of sacrifice, restricting liquor production and sales, and discrediting German American antiprohibitionists, but most states ratified after the war's end.

The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating beverages and called for concurrent enforcement by the state and federal governments. The amendment's federal enforcement legislation, the Volstead Act, defined "intoxicating" as one-half of 1 percent alcohol by volume. Personal possession and consumption were therefore not proscribed, but Prohibition encompassed a wider range of alcoholic beverages than most Americans had expected. At the same time, the mechanics of concurrent state and federal enforcement were left vague. Prohibition's impact varied among beverage types and social classes. Beer, predominantly the drink of the urban working class, suffered most, and the more easily transported distilled liquors regained a larger place in American drinking patterns. Nevertheless, per capita alcohol consumption declined from its pre-Prohibition peak. Enforcement created political problems, both when it worked, by flooding courts and jails, and when it did not, as speakeasies replaced urban saloons. Federal support for enforcement was inadequate, and federal-state cooperation was consistently problematic. Nevertheless, Prohibition retained considerable popular support until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Leadership for the antiprohibitionist cause was provided during the 1920s by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, an upper-class lobby formed in 1918, but its ideological arguments, based upon opposition to centralized federal power, held little popular appeal. Mass support came late in the decade, primarily from the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, led by upper-class women. The needs of the depression produced powerful new arguments for repeal, to generate liquor-industry jobs and government tax revenue. The Democratic Party became repeal's political instrument. After the Democrats' overwhelming victory in 1932, Congress submitted to the states a new constitutional amendment repealing the Eighteenth, and within ten months elected state conventions had ratified the Twenty-first Amendment. The states resumed primary responsibility for liquor control. A few states retained their prohibition laws after federal repeal; the last, Mississippi, abandoned its law in 1966. Per capita alcohol consumption did not regain the level of the pre-Prohibition years until the 1960s.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blocker, Jack S., Jr. American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Kerr, K. Austin. Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Kyvig, David E.. Repealing National Prohibition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.

Jack S.BlockerJr.

See alsoAlcohol, Regulation of ; Speakeasy ; Temperance Movement ; Volstead Act .