Prohibition in the United States

Prohibition refers to the years 1920 to 1933, during which the United States banned the manufacture, import, transport and sale of alcoholic drinks nationwide under the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The culmination of a century of temperance campaigning, it reduced drinking but fuelled smuggling, illegal bars and organised crime, and it was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment on 5 December 1933, the only amendment ever passed to cancel another.

The dry cause grew out of the temperance movement of the early nineteenth century. Maine banned the making and sale of liquor in 1851, and other states briefly followed. After the Civil War the campaign revived through the Prohibition Party (founded 1869) and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874). Kansas wrote prohibition into its constitution in 1881, and the activist Carrie Nation, arrested more than 30 times, smashed saloons there with a hatchet. From around 1900 the Anti-Saloon League, whose political operator Wayne Wheeler became known as the "dry boss", led the movement. Supporters, mostly evangelical Protestants, blamed saloons for drunkenness, domestic violence and corrupt machine politics; opponents, the "wets", were strongest among Catholics, German Lutherans and the brewing industry.

America's entry into the First World War in April 1917 tipped the balance. German Americans, a major force against prohibition, were sidelined, and saving grain for the war became a new argument. Congress sent the Eighteenth Amendment to the states in December 1917, and it was ratified on 16 January 1919 when the 36th state approved it; only Connecticut and Rhode Island never ratified. In October 1919 Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce it, overriding the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The country went dry on 17 January 1920.

Drinking itself was not a federal crime, and the law allowed some home-made wine and cider as well as alcohol prescribed by doctors. Liquor poured in from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, and the Detroit River border proved especially hard to police. Illegal bars, or speakeasies, flourished: by 1925 New York City alone had somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000. Home stills, "bathtub gin" and moonshine were common, and when the government required poisons to be added to industrial alcohol, as many as 10,000 people may have died from drinking it. Bootlegging gave criminal gangs, such as that of Al Capone around Chicago, a lucrative new trade, although historians disagree over how far overall crime actually rose. Cirrhosis deaths and arrests for drunkenness did fall, and studies suggest consumption dropped by perhaps 10 to 20 per cent.

Opposition grew through the 1920s. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, founded in 1918, became the largest of some forty repeal groups. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, governments badly needed the tax revenue alcohol had once provided, and a federal commission's report of 1931 documented widespread evasion. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on a platform promising repeal, and Democrats made large gains.

In March 1933 Roosevelt signed the Cullen–Harrison Act, legalising beer of 3.2 per cent alcohol by weight. On 5 December 1933 Utah became the 36th state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, ending national prohibition. The amendment left alcohol policy to the states: 18 kept prohibition for a time, the last, Mississippi, until 1966, and many dry counties remain today.

Our 1920 and 1930 maps show the United States during the Prohibition years, with its long borders with Canada and Mexico across which much illegal liquor was smuggled.