Prohibition in the United States

Based on Wikipedia: Prohibition in the United States

In 1830, the average American drank nearly two bottles of hard liquor every single week. That's three times what Americans consume today. The country was, by any reasonable measure, swimming in booze.

Ninety years later, the United States would attempt something no major nation had ever seriously tried: banning alcohol entirely. The experiment lasted thirteen years, spawned organized crime empires, transformed American politics, and remains the only constitutional amendment ever passed specifically to undo another one.

This is the story of how a nation tried to legislate sobriety, and what happened when it failed.

The Roots of a Crusade

The movement to ban alcohol didn't spring from nowhere. It grew from a peculiarly American collision of religious fervor, women's rights activism, and genuine public health concern.

Americans had been drinking heavily since colonial times, but the early republic treated drunkenness much like gluttony: a personal failing, not a systemic problem. If you drank too much, that was your moral weakness. The alcohol itself wasn't to blame any more than food was responsible for overeating.

This attitude began shifting in the late eighteenth century. Benjamin Rush, one of the most prominent physicians of his era and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, published a treatise in 1784 arguing that excessive alcohol consumption was a disease, not merely a character flaw. This was a revolutionary idea. Rush wasn't calling for prohibition. He believed in moderation. But by framing heavy drinking as a medical condition rather than simple wickedness, he planted a seed that would grow for over a century.

The first temperance organizations appeared soon after. About two hundred farmers in Connecticut formed an association in 1789. Similar groups sprouted in Virginia and New York. By the 1830s, these scattered efforts had coalesced into a genuine movement. The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, claimed one and a half million members by 1835. Women made up between thirty-five and sixty percent of its local chapters.

That female involvement wasn't accidental. It was central to the movement's character.

The Women's War

To understand Prohibition, you have to understand the women who drove it.

In nineteenth-century America, women had almost no legal recourse against abusive or alcoholic husbands. They couldn't vote. They had limited property rights. If a husband drank away the family's income or beat his wife in a drunken rage, she had few options. Divorce was difficult, shameful, and often economically catastrophic.

For these women, alcohol wasn't an abstract moral issue. It was the substance that transformed their husbands into monsters and left their children hungry.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, became the movement's most effective grassroots organization. The WCTU's approach was clever. They knew women couldn't vote, so they focused on education and moral persuasion. Their theory was simple: reach the children, shape their attitudes toward alcohol, and eventually create a generation that would vote the country dry.

Frances Willard, the WCTU's second president, developed what she called the "Do Everything" doctrine. Under her leadership, the organization expanded beyond temperance to embrace women's suffrage, prison reform, and labor laws. Prohibition became a gateway to broader political engagement for women who were otherwise shut out of public life.

Then there was Carrie Nation.

Nation took a more direct approach. In 1900, she walked into a saloon in Kansas, which had already banned alcohol in its state constitution, and began smashing bottles with a hatchet. She was arrested over thirty times. She was fined repeatedly. She kept doing it. Nation recruited other women into her Prohibition Group, and while her vigilante methods were extreme, they captured public attention in ways that polite advocacy never could.

The image of a middle-aged woman destroying a saloon with a hatchet became a symbol of the movement's moral fury.

The Saloon Problem

To the dry crusaders, saloons weren't just places where men drank. They were engines of corruption.

After the Civil War, as American cities industrialized rapidly, neighborhood saloons multiplied. These establishments served as social clubs for working-class men, places to escape cramped tenements and grueling factory work. They offered free lunches, though the food was deliberately salty to encourage more drinking. They provided a sense of community.

They were also tied directly to political machines.

Most saloons were financed by breweries and contractually obligated to sell only that brewery's products. The brewing industry had a massive financial stake in keeping the taps flowing. Brewers backed politicians who opposed temperance laws. Saloonkeepers organized voters. In many cities, the line between the local political boss and the local saloon was blurry at best.

For Progressive Era reformers, this was intolerable. They saw saloons as the visible manifestation of everything wrong with industrial America: corporate power corrupting democracy, immigrants refusing to assimilate into Protestant moral norms, and working-class men choosing drink over their families.

The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, channeled this outrage into the most effective political pressure group America had yet seen. Unlike earlier temperance organizations that got distracted by other causes, the League had a single focus: ending the legal sale of alcohol. They didn't care about candidates' positions on anything else. If you were dry, they supported you. If you were wet, they opposed you.

This single-issue intensity gave them enormous power.

The Great Experiment Begins

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was proposed by the Senate on December 18, 1917. The timing was no accident.

America had just entered World War One against Germany. The major American breweries were owned by German immigrants: Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz. Anti-German sentiment ran high. Drinking beer became vaguely unpatriotic. Congress had already passed a temporary Wartime Prohibition Act, supposedly to conserve grain for the war effort, though the armistice ending the war was signed just ten days before the act passed.

The amendment sailed through Congress with a sixty-eight percent supermajority in the House and seventy-six percent in the Senate. Forty-six of the forty-eight states ratified it. On January 16, 1919, it became part of the Constitution. By its own terms, the country would go dry exactly one year later.

Congress then passed the Volstead Act, which spelled out what Prohibition actually meant in practice. The act defined "intoxicating liquors" as anything containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. This was stricter than many Prohibition supporters had expected. Beer and wine advocates had hoped those beverages might be exempted, but the Volstead Act banned nearly everything.

There were exceptions. Religious use of wine remained legal, which meant that prescriptions for "sacramental wine" mysteriously skyrocketed. Doctors could prescribe alcohol for medicinal purposes, creating another loophole. Private ownership and consumption were not federally prohibited, only manufacture and sale, though many states went further and banned possession outright.

The federal government, having banned an industry that had employed hundreds of thousands of people and generated substantial tax revenue, now had to figure out how to enforce the ban. This is where the problems began.

The Enforcement Disaster

The Volstead Act gave enforcement responsibility to the Treasury Department's newly created Prohibition Bureau. The bureau was understaffed from the start. At its peak, it employed only about three thousand agents to police an entire nation.

Consider the scope of the task. America has thousands of miles of coastline and land borders. It had an entire industrial infrastructure built around alcohol production. It had tens of millions of citizens who wanted to keep drinking. And it had perhaps three thousand federal agents to stop all of them.

The results were predictable.

By 1925, New York City alone had somewhere between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand speakeasies, the name given to illegal bars. That's just one city. The actual number is impossible to know because, by definition, these establishments didn't register with authorities.

The black market for alcohol created opportunities for criminal organizations on a scale previously unimaginable. Before Prohibition, organized crime in America was relatively small-time: local gambling, prostitution, protection rackets. Prohibition offered something far more lucrative: a mass consumer product that the entire legal economy had abandoned.

Bootlegging operations ranged from small-scale moonshiners in Appalachian hollows to sophisticated smuggling networks that brought Canadian whiskey across the Great Lakes and Caribbean rum through Florida. Criminal syndicates built empires on illegal alcohol. Names like Al Capone became nationally famous.

The violence associated with these organizations was substantial. Rival gangs fought over territory. Bootleggers killed competitors. The homicide rate in the United States reached its first-half-century peak during Prohibition and dropped immediately after it ended.

Yet here's where the history becomes complicated.

What Prohibition Actually Did

The conventional narrative holds that Prohibition was an obvious failure that accomplished nothing except empowering criminals. This narrative is too simple.

Alcohol consumption did decline during Prohibition. How much is disputed. Some researchers estimate it fell by thirty to fifty percent. Death rates from cirrhosis of the liver, one of the clearest medical markers of heavy alcohol use, dropped substantially. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined. Arrests for public drunkenness fell. Industrial absenteeism, much of which had been alcohol-related, decreased.

These are not trivial outcomes. If your goal was reducing the damage alcohol caused to individuals, families, and workplaces, Prohibition produced measurable results.

The question of crime is more complicated than it first appears. Some historians, like Kenneth D. Rose and Georges-Franck Pinard, argue that claims about Prohibition-era crime increases are "rooted in the impressionistic rather than the factual." The problem is that reliable national crime statistics simply don't exist for this period. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports didn't begin until 1930, the year before Prohibition ended. We're left comparing incomplete local data and newspaper accounts, which may reflect what got reported rather than what actually happened.

What we can say with confidence is that Prohibition created a new category of crime: the entire business of manufacturing, transporting, and selling alcohol. This employed tens of thousands of people in illegal activity who would otherwise have been working in a legal industry. Whether Prohibition increased total crime or merely shifted legal economic activity into illegal channels is genuinely uncertain.

The Coalition Cracks

By the late 1920s, the political coalition that had created Prohibition was falling apart.

The wet opposition had always included wealthy Catholics and German Lutherans, groups who saw Prohibition as an attack on their cultural traditions by rural Protestant moralists. These groups had been politically marginalized during World War One, when anything German was suspect. But as the war receded, their influence recovered.

More importantly, the promised benefits of Prohibition weren't materializing as hoped. Yes, some public health indicators improved. But the crime, the corruption, the speakeasies, the obvious inability of the government to actually enforce the law, all of this undermined the moral authority of the dry cause.

Then came the Great Depression.

Starting in 1929, the economy collapsed. Unemployment soared. Tax revenues plummeted. And suddenly, the wet argument about lost tax revenue from legal alcohol sounded very different than it had during the prosperous twenties. Legalizing beer and liquor wouldn't just reduce crime. It would create jobs and generate taxes at exactly the moment when both were desperately needed.

Franklin Roosevelt, running for president in 1932, made repeal part of his platform. He won in a landslide.

The End

On March 22, 1933, less than three weeks after taking office, Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act. This law legalized beer with an alcohol content of 3.2 percent by weight and wine of similarly low strength. It was a half-measure, but it signaled where things were heading.

The Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the Eighteenth, was ratified on December 5, 1933. Prohibition had lasted thirteen years, ten months, and nineteen days.

It remains the only time in American history that a constitutional amendment has been passed specifically to repeal another amendment. The Constitution has been amended to expand rights, to change procedures, to adjust the structure of government. Only once has it been amended to admit that a previous amendment was a mistake.

The Complicated Legacy

What should we make of Prohibition?

The easy answer is that it was a well-intentioned disaster, a lesson in the folly of trying to legislate morality. This interpretation has become so dominant that "prohibition" itself is now a byword for futile government overreach.

But the easy answer isn't quite right.

The temperance movement identified a real problem. Nineteenth-century America really did have a serious alcohol problem. The damage to families, to public health, to workplace productivity was genuine and substantial. The women who crusaded against alcohol weren't naive puritans. Many of them had watched husbands drink away their families' futures. Their anger came from lived experience.

Prohibition did reduce alcohol consumption and its associated harms. The question is whether those benefits justified the costs: the crime, the corruption of law enforcement, the disrespect for law that comes when a widely violated statute stays on the books, the expansion of federal power into personal choices.

Different people weighed those trade-offs differently. Many former supporters of Prohibition eventually concluded the costs outweighed the benefits. Others maintained to the end that the noble experiment had been worth trying.

What Prohibition demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than any other episode in American history, is that social engineering is hard. You can pass a law. You can even put it in the Constitution. But you cannot simply legislate away demand for something that millions of people want. If you try, you create black markets. You create criminals. You create enforcement apparatuses that may cause more harm than the original problem.

This doesn't mean all regulation is futile. Alcohol consumption today is far lower than it was in 1830, not because of prohibition, but because of changed social norms, education, and moderate regulation. The temperance movement's long campaign to change attitudes about drinking arguably accomplished more than the constitutional ban ever did.

The lesson of Prohibition isn't that government should never regulate intoxicants. It's that how you regulate matters enormously. Policies that work with human nature, that acknowledge demand while trying to reduce harm, tend to work better than policies that simply declare certain desires illegal and expect compliance.

Thirteen years, one constitutional amendment, one repeal, and America learned something important about the limits of law.

The free lunch counters in the old saloons served salty food to make customers thirsty. The Prohibition movement promised to quench a different kind of thirst: for a sober, orderly, moral society. In the end, they discovered that some thirsts can't be legislated away.