What was prohibition?

Prohibition was the nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States from January 17, 1920 until December 5, 1933. It was created by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified on January 16, 1919, and enforced by the Volstead Act, which Congress passed over President Woodrow Wilson's veto on October 28, 1919. The Volstead Act defined intoxicating liquor as any beverage with more than 0.5 percent alcohol, banning beer and wine along with hard liquor.

Prohibition was the culmination of a long temperance movement that grew out of nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant churches and reform organizations such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893. Reformers blamed alcohol for poverty, domestic violence, crime, and political corruption, and saw banning it as a moral and social good. World War I gave the movement extra momentum because grain was needed for food rather than brewing, and many large American breweries were German-owned.

Prohibition reduced overall alcohol consumption sharply at first but did not eliminate it. Bootleggers smuggled liquor from Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico, while moonshiners produced illegal liquor in rural areas, sometimes with deadly impurities. Speakeasies, or hidden saloons, sprang up in every major city. Estimates put the number of speakeasies in New York City alone at more than 30,000 by the late 1920s.

Organized crime grew rich and powerful from bootlegging. Al Capone in Chicago controlled an empire worth an estimated 100 million dollars a year, and gang violence including the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre of February 14, 1929 horrified the public. Federal enforcement was thin, with only about 1,500 prohibition agents nationwide.

The economic costs of lost tax revenue and enforcement spending grew large during the Great Depression. By the early 1930s, public opinion had turned against the experiment. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on repeal. Congress passed the Twenty-First Amendment in February 1933, and Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify it on December 5, 1933, ending prohibition. The Twenty-First Amendment is the only constitutional amendment that has repealed an earlier one.