Prohibition Amendment

10 Key excerpts on "Prohibition Amendment"

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  Repealing National Prohibition

  Second Edition

  • Hans P. Krings(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 ADOPTING NATIONAL PROHIBITION

  The crusade to abolish the use of alcoholic beverages through an amendment to the Constitution hit the United States like a whirlwind in the second decade of the twentieth century. In November 1913 the Anti-Saloon League of America first publicly appealed for a Prohibition Amendment. By January 1919, scarcely five years later, Congress had approved and forty-four state legislatures had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, which proclaimed:

  1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

  2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

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

  A tremendously significant social reform affecting the lives of millions had suddenly become part of the nation’s rarely altered basic law.

  Proponents of the so-called dry law faced little organized resistance as they marched to their triumph. Only brewers, distillers, and other commercial interests made strenuous efforts to block the reform. Individuals and groups offended by the challenge to their ethnic cultural traditions or by the limitation of their right to choose what to drink objected to the national liquor ban, but they lacked the channels and agents to give their protest focus and strength. New opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment began to form, however, in the midst of the prohibitionist victory in response to the law itself, the manner of its adoption, and the political assumptions upon which it was based. The reaction against this important constitutional innovation, therefore, can only be understood in light of the circumstances of national prohibition’s creation.

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  Marijuana Politics

  Uncovering the Troublesome History and Social Costs of Criminalization

  • Robert M. Hardaway(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Social commentators began to note the hypocrisy of politicians who defied the Prohibition laws in private while professing support in public. In more recent decades, U.S. presidents have admitted to using marijuana privately and yet have still publicly supported prohibition on cannabis.

  Today, criminalization of marijuana use deprives the government of untold billions in tax dollars that are diverted toward nonproductive criminal uses—as they were during Prohibition. Although it is impossible to precisely determine the effects of criminalization of drug use on the economy, the economic loss of billions of dollars—just when government programs such as Social Security and Medicare compete for scarce dollars from a deficit-ridden treasury—is staggering. The 18th Amendment was passed by the one of the largest majorities in American political history and prohibited the production, distribution, and sale of all alcoholic beverages, including wine and beer. In 1917, it was approved by a vote of 65–20 in the U.S. Senate and 246–95 in the House, and the consequent amendment was then ratified by 45 of the 48 states within 25 months (only 36 states were needed for ratification).4 When Prohibition’s enforcing legislation, the Volstead Act, was vetoed by President Woodrow Wilson for technical reasons on October 27, 1919, his veto was overridden by Congress by a vote of 176–5 in the House and 65–20 in the Senate.5

  The Origins of Prohibition

  The American temperance movement can be traced to a widely reported sermon against the sins of drunkenness—or intemperance—delivered by Reverend Increase Mather of New England in 1673. Ministers of such religious denominations as the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregational Church followed this call with their own intemperance sermons. Many church leaders demanded total abstinence from alcohol from all members of their congregations. Because such calls for voluntary abstinence had only limited effect among churchgoers and were widely disregarded by those outside the church, they were soon followed by demands for laws enacted and enforced by the state.

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  What Prohibition Has Done to America

  • Fabian Franklin(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  A law punishing drunkenness, which is a public nuisance, comes under the head I have been speaking of; a law forbidding a man to drink for fear that he may become a drunkard does not. And in fact the prohibitionists themselves instinctively recognize the difference, and avoid, so far as they can, offending the sense of liberty by so direct an attack upon it. It is safe to say that if the Eighteenth Amendment had undertaken to make the _drinking_ of liquor a crime, instead of the _manufacture and sale_ of it, it could not have been passed or come anywhere near being passed. There is hardly a Senator or a Representative that would not have recoiled from a proposal so palpably offensive to the instinct of liberty. Yet precisely this is the real object of the Eighteenth Amendment; its purpose and, if enforced, its practical effect is to make it permanently a crime against the national government for an American to drink a glass of beer or wine. The legislators, State and national, who enacted it knew this perfectly well; yet if the thing had been put into the Amendment in so many words, hardly a man of them would have cast his vote for it. The phenomenon is not so strange, or so novel, as it might seem; it has a standard prototype in the history of Rome. The Roman people had a rooted aversion and hostility to kings; and no Caesar would ever have thought of calling himself _rex_. But _imperator_ went down quite smoothly, and did just as well.

  In addition to its being a regulation of individual conduct in a matter which is in its nature the individual's own concern, Prohibition differs in another essential respect from those restrictions upon liberty which form a legitimate and necessary part of the operation of civil government. To put a governmental ban upon all alcoholic drinks is to forbid the _use_ of a thing in order to prevent its _abuse_. A Of course there are fanatics who declare--and believe--that _all_ indulgence in alcoholic drink, however moderate, is abuse; but to justify Prohibition on that ground would be to accept a doctrine even more dangerous to liberty. It is bad enough to justify the proscription of an innocent indulgence on the ground that there is danger of its being carried beyond the point of innocence; but it is far worse to forbid it on the ground that, however innocent and beneficial a moderate indulgence may seem to millions of people, it is not regarded as good for them by others. The only thing that lends dignity to the Prohibition cause is the undeniable fact that drunkenness is the source of a vast amount of evil and wretchedness; the position of those who declare that all objections must be waived in the presence of this paramount consideration is respectable, though in my judgment utterly wrong. But any man who justifies Prohibition on the ground that drinking is an evil, no matter how temperate, is either a man of narrow and stupid mind or is utterly blind to the value of human liberty. The ardent old-time Prohibitionist--the man who thinks, however mistakenly, that the abolition of intoxicating drinks means the salvation of mankind--counts the impairment of liberty as a small matter in comparison with his world-saving reform; this is a position from which one cannot withhold a certain measure of sympathy and respect. But to justify the sacrifice of liberty on the ground that the man who is deprived of it will be somewhat better off without it is to assume a position that is at once contemptible and in the highest degree dangerous. Contemptible, because it argues a total failure to understand what liberty means to mankind; dangerous, because there is no limit to the monstrosities of legislation which may flow from the acceptance of such a view. Esau _sold_ his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage which he wanted; these people would rob us of our birthright and by way of compensation thrust upon us a mess of pottage for which we have no desire.

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  Empirical Futures

  Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz

  • George Baca, Aisha Khan, Stephan Palmié, George Baca, Aisha Khan, Stephan Palmié, Stephan Palmi?(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  As we will see, alcohol prohibition was a pet project of descendants of the first immigrants—Anglo-Saxon Protestants from England—who sought to control the labor, behavior, and entry of subsequent immigrant groups. Leading up to and following World War I, WASP evangelicals, temperance activists, and organizations such as the Anti-Saloon League won legislative majorities at the county, state, and national level favorable to passing quite punitive laws against gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and narcotics. Indeed, no less than a constitutional amendment, the Eighteenth, forbade the manufacture and distribution of all alcoholic beverages. Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was put into effect in 1920 by the Volstead Act, which took the further step of defining as “liquor” anything with more than 5 percent alcohol, thus including beer and wine, unless intended for sacramental, scientific, or mechanical purposes.

  Not repealed until 1933, Prohibition created a bonanza for law-breaking entrepreneurs, many of them immigrants. Among these, a network of Italians, leveraged by connections to Old World organized crime, became notorious gangsters. In effect at least some of America’s “internal colonial subjects” (a concept distinct from “internal colonialism”) pushed back against the dominant culture, especially the most fervent enemies of vice: the WASP middle classes of the middling towns of the Middle West—the self-proclaimed “heartland” of nativist virtue. Advancing a geography of transgression that extended well beyond the great cities of immigration such as New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, mafiosi of the Prohibition era carved out smuggling corridors, bribed their way to political protection, corrupted local police, and propagated an ethos of risk and excitement across the land. Their legacy to future “rogue” entrepreneurs was a gangland infrastructure of locales and relationships well suited for pushing addictive activities and substances. Our present “war on drugs,” characterized by a uniquely harsh incarceration of drug users coupled with fantasies of eradicating foreign production—coupled too with an exceptionally high rate of both legal and illegal drug consumption—is, I believe, a result.

  This reading of U.S. history draws inspiration from Sweetness and Power, Sidney W. Mintz’s pathbreaking (1985) analysis of the role of another addictive substance, sugar, in the historical development of British industrial capitalism and imperial reach. What, he asked, werethe enduring consequences of capital’s insatiable quest for cheap labor as it articulated with the production of cheap commodities in satisfaction of laborers’ culturally constructed desires—their most intimate ways of “eating and being”? Like Mintz, I believe that tracing interactions between production and consumption for single, emblematic commodities such as sugar and alcohol has the potential to illuminate political economic and cultural processes of considerable importance. Many wonder, for example, why the contemporary United States, rather than pursue the unrealistic goal of “warring” against addictive substances, does not adopt a public-health approach similar to that of other countries, including England. Inthe spirit of Sweetness and Power, I consider this issue in relation to the particularities of U.S. industrial-capitalist and imperialist development as revealed through alcohol. With Prohibition, I propose, Americans lurched into an intense and paradoxical dialectic (we might nickname it “purity and the production

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  Prohibition's Greatest Myths

  The Distilled Truth about America's Anti-Alcohol Crusade

  • Michael Lewis, Richard Hamm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • LSU Press

    (Publisher)

  MYTH 3 THE Prohibition Amendment AND SUPPORTING LAWS SOUGHT TO BAN INDIVIDUAL DRINKING LISA M. F. ANDERSEN

  It was 1917, and Senator Thomas Hardwick, a Georgia Democrat, issued a challenge to his colleagues. No friend of

  prohibition himself, his patience tried after listening to senator after senator pontificate on how the so-called Prohibition Amendment would end drunken debauchery, Hardwick finally rose to point out a problem: the amendment’s text did not make alcohol consumption illegal. Was this simply an oversight? If

  the amendment were to include a ban not only on the “manufacture, sale, importation, exportation, and transportation” but also on the consumption of alcohol, he noted, then “ that is complete prohibition, practical prohibition.” Anything less than such a clear statement of the amendment’s aims would be “utterly and totally insincere and uncandid,” and Hardwick therefore proposed that consumption immediately be added to the list. 1

  Hardwick’s ostensibly helpful suggestion was what contemporaries called a “joker amendment,” one designed not to increase candor about the amendment’s purpose but instead to sink the Prohibition Amendment before it was launched. His colleagues were not amused by this showboating. Yet the confusion Hardwick

  pretended

  to feel is now rampant among modern Americans. Libertarians, for example, assume that the Eighteenth Amendment must have been about banning consumption when they use persistent Prohibition Era drunkenness as evidence that it is futile to legislate against human desires. Liberal reformers likewise assume that the Eighteenth Amendment was primarily an anti-consumption vehicle when they contend that prohibition’s overscrutiny of

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  Explicit and Authentic Acts

  Amending the U.S. Constitution 1776-2015, With a New Afterword

  • David E. Kyvig(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  12

  “WHERE THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES EXPRESS THEIR WILL ”

  Altering Established Constitutional Provisions and Practices

  T he national prohibition experience stirred unprecedented doubts about the wisdom of constitutional amendment and reservations about the process to change the fundamental terms of government. Throughout the 1920 s the Eighteenth Amendment fostered the impression that a measure, once installed in the Constitution, became immovable. Senator Thomas Walsh confidently wrote to a Montana friend and constituent in 1926 , “A sojourn of only a brief period about the corridors of the capitol would disclose that there was not the faintest ground for hope that any material alteration would be made in the law, or that the idea of repealing the amendment would be entertained at all.”1 Walsh’s viewpoint was widespread, and yet two separate movements to alter existing provisions of the Constitution were already gathering momentum.

  Unhappiness with the Eighteenth Amendment did not bring efforts at constitutional change to an end. Two amendments ratified within eleven months of each other in 1933 displayed the continuing vitality of the Article V mechanism. One, a superficially modest but actually quite important reform, bore little relation to the constitutional controversies of the previous decade. This so-called lame duck amendment sped up the transfer of power to newly elected presidents and legislators while it significantly reduced the potential of representatives who had been defeated for reelection to abuse authority. The other, an amendment repealing national prohibition, went to the core of the 1920 s discussions. Extraordinary in substance and unparalleled in process, prohibition repeal illuminated as never before the possibilities inherent in Article V.

  At the heart of both amendments lay the question of the degree to which citizens should control the legislative process. This issue always had been delicate for republican governments. The drafters of the Constitution favored choices made by indirectly elected elites well insulated from the public, but early-twentieth-century progressives preferred to put their faith in directly elected officials further checked by referendums. In the early 1930

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  Politics, Police and Crime in New York During Prohibition

  Gotham and the Age of Recklessness, 1920–1933

  • Francesco Landolfi(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  65

  But politicians couldn’t really understand the soldiers at the front; a newspaper reporter who returned from France noted in 1919 that any “American Soldier,” after coming back home from the battlefield, would have considered “the Prohibition Amendment as a distinct violation of his rights as an American citizen,” as if the “military control”66 kept existing even after the return to normal life. Moreover, from the draft examinations which had taken stock of 2,750,000 adult men, just 1,261 were rejected for alcohol addiction. Therefore, it followed that drunkenness shouldn’t be considered by the civil society or the Army as “a serious menace to the health of young men.”67 Between August and December 1917, 282 Representatives out of 435 and 65 Senators out of 96 approved the Eighteenth Amendment for the next ratification by the State Legislatures:68

  Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

  Sec. 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

  Sec. 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.69

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  Connecticut Bootlegger Queen Nellie Green

  • Tony Renzoni(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Arcadia Publishing

    (Publisher)

  And so, the stage was set for the enaction of national Prohibition, commonly referred to as the Volstead Act, which passed on October 28, 1919. U.S. undersecretary of state Frank L. Lyon announced on January 16, 1919, that the amendment had been ratified and would go into effect in exactly one year (January 17, 1920). The National Prohibition Act banned the “manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors”

  Volstead’s reign as the Father of Prohibition was short-lived, however, as he was defeated in the 1922 congressional primary by the walrus mustachioed Ole J. Kvale. During the primary campaign, Kvale implied, without outright saying, that Volstead was an atheist who was opposed to the Bible. The implication was enough for many voters to turn against Volstead.

  The Eighteenth Amendment banned the “manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors”—but not the actual consumption of alcohol. People were allowed to drink in their own homes, assuming they were not in the bootlegging business. Many historians believe that the term bootlegging originated during the American Civil War, when soldiers would smuggle liquor into army camps by concealing pint bottles of alcohol inside their boots or within their trouser legs.

  The Prohibition Act established the legal definition of intoxicating liquors as well as penalties for producing them. The legal definition of illegal liquor was “alcohol of no more than 0.5 percent alcohol content.”

  Herbert Hoover

  I do not favor the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment

  —Herbert Hoover, thirty-first president

  As a Presidential candidate in 1928, Herbert Hoover pledged his support of the Eighteenth Amendment, calling Prohibition “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive.”

  Jeanette Rankin. Library of Congress.

  Jeanette Rankin Jeanette Rankin (Montana congresswoman) voted for the Eighteenth Amendment. At the time, Rankin was the first—and at that time, only—woman in Congress. The National Prohibition Party

  In 1869, the National Prohibition Party was formed as a third political party. The main reason for the creation of the Prohibition Party was because some Americans felt that the existing Democrat and Republican Parties did not do enough for the temperance cause.

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  American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition

  • Kenneth D Rose(Author)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE American Women and the Prohibition Movement

  The ladies joining the drinking forces and organized to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment can never make drink decent nor themselves a moral force. The trend of a thousand years is in the opposite direction and it will continue in that direction.

  —Carrie Chapman Catt, 1930

  T he beginnings of a revolution in American feminist politics started off innocuously enough at a congressional hearing in 1928. At that hearing Ella Boole, president of the WCTU and avid supporter of prohibition, proclaimed, “I represent the women of America.” Listening to Boole was Pauline Sabin, a Republican national committeewoman and formerly a supporter of prohibition herself. Sabin recalled saying to herself, “Well lady, here’s one woman you don’t represent.”1 For a prominent Republican woman to express doubts about prohibition just ten years earlier would have been almost unthinkable. In those days, dry advocates were predicting that the passage of prohibition would herald the dawn of a new age and that by halting the “liquor traffic,” many of society’s other ills would also be eliminated, thereby bringing humanity to the verge of a new era. The claims made by prohibitionists, both male and female, were nothing less than millennial. The WCTU declared that “in the history of Christian civilization it [the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution] will rank with the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation.” When the Eighteenth Amendment was approved by a wide margin in 1919, many believed that their vision of a liquor-free world would soon be realized.2

  Prohibition, unfortunately, did not produce all the results expected of it, and produced other results that were both unexpected and unwelcome. These results included the growth of organized crime syndicates to supply illegal liquor (and an accompanying increase in violence), an epidemic of corruption among public officials, spiraling enforcement costs, a court system clogged with prohibition cases, class inequities in the law, and the willingness of persons of all

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  The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

  The Human Side of What the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act Have Done to the United States

  • Charles Hanson Towne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  “The United States ‘easily holds first place in the manufacture of statutory law,’ declared Mr. Emery in his speech. ‘A single Congress,’ he added, ‘usually receives some 20,000 bills. Many of the States consider not less than 1000. During the year 1921, 42 legislatures were in session. Judging from past years, Congress and the States annually enact an average of 14,000 statutes. The State and National legislation of a single year recently required more than 40,000 pages of official print.’

  “Certainly, it is time for a Congress on limitation of legislation.”

  The same paper has this to say, editorially, on “The Achilles Heel of Prohibition”:

  “National Prohibition has not been long on trial. The final effect of the fundamental change in our Constitution involved in the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment has not been, and cannot be, yet determined. All the evidence which we have seen, however, tends to show that the nation is better off materially and physically under Prohibition than under the system which permitted the sale of intoxicating beverages. Benefits to be derived from the elimination of the drink traffic did not wait upon our National experiment for demonstration. They have been obvious for centuries in the experience of peoples from whom alcohol has been barred by religious authority. There remains, however, a very serious problem confronting the defenders and advocates of national prohibition. It is the problem of maintaining the respect for law and order and that mental habit of ready acceptance of legal enactments which is one of the strongest bulwarks of applied democracy.

  “We do not doubt for a minute that the majority of the people of the United States are in favor of national prohibition. Even in great cities where the liquor interests have had their stronghold we suspect that the number of men and women who would vote for national prohibition, were it put to the popular test, is much larger than the ‘wets’ are willing to admit. We say this in order that this editorial may not be considered as an argument for the repeal of Prohibition Amendment by those who are working for such ends upon premises which we regard as distinctly unsound.

  “To say that there is a majority in favor of the amendment does not imply that there is not a large and active minority in favor of its repeal. The greatest problem confronting advocates of national prohibition lies in the fact that this large minority has not accepted the amendment with that good faith and willing spirit which we have grown to look upon as characteristic of the spirit of the losers in our political controversies. There have been great changes in our government prior to the enactment of the Prohibition Amendment, but almost invariably these changes, once effected, have been acquiesced in by their most ardent opponents. We are not speaking of individual violators, but of the public attitude towards the law.

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