Why was alcohol prohibited?

Alcohol was prohibited in the United States from 1920 to 1933 because reformers believed banning it would reduce crime, poverty, family violence, and political corruption, while improving public health and worker productivity. The temperance movement had been growing in the United States since the early nineteenth century, when alcohol consumption per adult was roughly three times what it is today. Many Americans drank distilled spirits at breakfast and throughout the workday.

Religious leaders, especially in evangelical Protestant churches, came to see drinking as a moral failing that destroyed families and souls. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874 under Frances Willard, argued that alcohol was responsible for domestic abuse and the impoverishment of working-class wives and children. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 by Howard Hyde Russell, became a powerful single-issue lobby that worked with both political parties to pass dry laws state by state.

By 1916, twenty-three states had already adopted some form of prohibition. Reformers also linked saloons to political corruption, because urban political machines such as Tammany Hall in New York used taverns as recruiting grounds and polling places. Industrial leaders such as Henry Ford supported prohibition because they believed sober workers were safer and more productive on assembly lines. Progressive reformers expected that without alcohol, jails would empty, mental hospitals would close, and crime would fall.

World War I added new arguments. Anti-German sentiment ran high, and many large American breweries were owned by German immigrant families such as Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser-Busch. The federal Lever Act of August 1917 banned the use of grain for distilling spirits to conserve food for the war effort. Once the wartime ban was in place, momentum for a permanent constitutional ban grew quickly.

The Eighteenth Amendment passed Congress in December 1917 and was ratified on January 16, 1919, taking effect one year later on January 17, 1920. The Volstead Act, passed in October 1919, defined the ban and set up enforcement. The reformers' hopes were not fulfilled. Organized crime expanded, drinking continued in speakeasies, and tax revenue from legal liquor disappeared at a moment when the Great Depression made it badly needed. The Twenty-First Amendment repealed prohibition on December 5, 1933.