Twenty-first Amendment

In 1919 the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution outlawed the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors in the United States. Fourteen years later the United States adopted the Twenty-first Amendment to revoke the Eighteenth. The effect was to repeal nationwide Prohibition and to instead allow each state to decide whether to allow alcoholic beverages within its borders.

Prohibition had been the result of a social movement, largely by religious Protestants who believed alcoholic beverages were harmful to society. Once enacted, however, Prohibition resulted in other problems for society. Organized crime flourished to supply alcohol illegally to people who wanted it. Instead of collecting taxes on the sale of alcoholic beverages, government was now spending money to enforce the laws of

Prohibition and to combat organized crime. Law enforcement lacked sufficient resources to prosecute all the violations, so the Prohibition laws were largely unenforced. To raise revenue that it used to get from taxes on the sale of alcoholic beverages, the government had to raise other taxes, which was unpopular with many people.

In the 1930s the United States entered the Great Depression (1929–41). It was a poor economic time when jobs became scarce and national spending dropped. Repealing Prohibition would help the economy by adding jobs in industry for manufacturing, transporting, and selling alcoholic beverages. In the presidential election of 1932 the Democratic Party made the repeal of Prohibition part of its platform. The Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) won the election.

Congress proposed the Twenty-first Amendment near the beginning of 1933. legislatures to pass. State legislatures contained many conservative Protestants from rural areas who would vote against the Twenty-first Amendment for political reasons. State conventions would contain more regular citizens who could vote for Prohibition without hurting political careers. By December 1933 three-fourths of the states had called conventions that approved the amendment, officially repealing nationwide Prohibition.

Text of the Twenty-first Amendment

Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

The Twenty-first Amendment did not make alcoholic beverages legal nationwide. It just left the matter to the states. Many states continued Prohibition by enforcing their own laws. By 1966, however, all state Prohibition laws had been repealed too.