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PROHIBITION

By the onset of the Great Depression, national prohibition was beginning to stagger. The ban on alcoholic beverages was ignored by a sizeable minority of Americans and disliked by many more. Nevertheless, both politicians and the general public assumed the dry law to be permanently embedded in United States public policy because of its status as a constitutional requirement. Not the least of the unexpected consequences of the Depression was the creation of circumstances in which national prohibition was overturned.

THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT AND THE VOLSTEAD ACT

Advocates of temperance concluded during a century-long crusade that the only workable solution to the problem of alcohol abuse was government-enforced elimination of beverage alcohol. The movement to prohibit drinking attracted a broad base of support from women, churches, employers, urban social and political reformers, and rural nativists. Eager to avoid the backsliding that had followed earlier local and state liquor bans, members of the temperance movement began in 1913 to seek a constitutional amendment on the assumption that, once approved by the necessary two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states, it could never be repealed. Prohibitionists benefited from the wartime atmosphere of 1917 and 1918 and achieved ratification in January 1919 of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the manufacture, transportation, sale, import, and export of intoxicating beverages. The widespread support for the liquor ban was reflected in its approval by more than two-thirds of each house of Congress and then by forty-five state legislatures. Before prohibition took effect one year later, Congress adopted the Volstead enforcement act, which defined as intoxicating any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol (thus including beer and wine as well as distilled spirits). Alcohol prohibition appeared to be both absolute and unshakeable.

PROHIBITION IN PRACTICE

During the 1920s most Americans observed prohibition most of the time. Alcohol consumption dropped by nearly two-thirds, according to the best estimates. Resistance was concentrated in ethnic communities where recent immigrants saw no harm in drinking, and among the urban upper classes who were able to afford the high price of bootleg liquor and inclined to regard it as culturally sophisticated to ignore the dry law. Other citizens, both urban and rural, took advantage of Volstead Act loopholes allowing the personal use of wine fermented from natural fruit juices and the prescribing of spirits for medicinal use. Despite the less than complete observance of the dry law, not to mention a wave of films and novels depicting drinking as widespread and fashionable, its constitutional status kept prohibition firmly in place. Its advocates frequently gave prohibition credit for the unprecedented prosperity of the 1920s. In the 1928 presidential campaign Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith talked of ending prohibition while Republican Herbert Hoover defended it as "a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and farreaching in purpose" (New York Times, February 24, 1928, p. 1) Hoover's landslide victory was taken as evidence of continuing support for the liquor ban.

PROHIBITION CRITICS

Arguments against prohibition predated the autumn 1929 economic collapse. Opposition to the dry law came most prominently from the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). The AAPA complained that giving federal and state authorities the power to control an individual's choice of drink was putting too much power into the government's hands. Furthermore, the liquor ban was producing alarming enforcement practices, including warrantless searches of automobiles, wiretapping of telephones, and gun battles between prohibition agents and bootleggers in which innocents had been killed. The WONPR, worried that prohibition was causing a breakdown of respect for law and the Constitution, echoed these concerns.

THE PRICE OF PROHIBITION

Economic hard times focused attention on the costs of alcohol prohibition, which the AAPA claimed had totaled more than $300 million in enforcement expenses and $11 billion in lost tax revenues by 1931. Enforcing the law increased police costs, jammed federal and state courts, and dramatically expanded the prison population. During the 1920s federal criminal cases more than quadrupled, to more than 85,000 per year; most involved Volstead Act violations. By 1930 two-thirds of those found guilty received only fines, but still federal prisons bulged with twice the number of inmates for which they were designed, and an overflow resided in state and local jails. Not only did taxpayers bear prohibition's considerable direct costs, the AAPA complained, but the outlawing of the liquor trade, once the nation's seventh-largest industry, also eliminated many legitimate jobs and did away with liquor taxes, an important source of government revenue. Ending prohibition, antiprohibitionists argued, could eradicate the federal budget deficit, create employment, and ease the Depression. Temperance advocates responded that the AAPA consisted of wealthy businessmen simply trying to reduce their income taxes. The economic cost of prohibition was unintentionally underscored in 1931 by the successful federal prosecution of the nation's most notorious bootlegger, 32-year-old Alphonse Capone of Chicago. Like many other ambitious young immigrants who found few opportunities open to them in legitimate business or even organized crime (gambling, prostitution, loansharking), Al Capone turned to bootlegging. He prospered in a business that, as he pointed out, satisfied a public demand, and targeted (albeit violently) only rival bootleggers, not paying customers. Despite a great deal of effort, federal prohibition agents were unsuccessful in thwarting him until they apprehended him not for Volstead Act violations, but for income tax evasion. Capone's conviction served as a reminder that bootleggers were not paying taxes on income from an illegal trade, while the government was spending a great deal to enforce prohibition.

INVESTIGATING PROHIBITION

Upon taking office in 1929, President Herbert Hoover appointed a presidential commission to study prohibition and the general problem of crime. By the time the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement released its report in January 1931, the U.S. economy was in shambles. Commission chairman George Wickersham and his ten colleagues called for continuation of the liquor ban, but their individual statements revealed skepticism as to whether the law was enforceable, at least at an acceptable cost. Seven of the commissioners indicated that they actually favored immediate or eventual adoption of the Swedish system of licensing responsible drinkers to purchase controlled amounts of alcohol from state dispensaries.

PARTISANSHIP ON PROHIBITION

Despite the Wickersham Commission report, Hoover continued to defend prohibition. The 1932 Republican Party platform pledged continued enforcement of the law, but it also gave tepid support to a qualified proposal for a constitutional amendment that would allow states to exempt themselves from national prohibition. Hoover was widely perceived as the candidate of an alcoholic as well as economic status quo. The Democratic Party struck a different pose. Alfred E. Smith and his supporters, including Democratic National Chairman John J. Raskob, a leader of the AAPA, demanded that the party platform endorse repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had avoided the issue throughout his career, grudgingly agreed. The party convention embraced a platform plank calling for immediate and unqualified repeal more enthusiastically than it supported Roosevelt's nomination. When Democrats swept to a landslide victory in November 1932, the party position on repeal, one of its clearest contrasts with the Republicans, was given partial credit.

REPEALING PROHIBITION

Congress acted on a prohibition repeal amendment even before Roosevelt took office. The Seventy-second Congress, meeting in a lame-duck session from December 1932 until March 1933, was unable to agree on measures to deal with a collapsing economy, but it did adopt by more than a twothirds margin in each house a constitutional amendment overturning the Eighteenth. Congress heeded AAPA and WONPR demands that the proposed amendment not be sent for ratification to state legislatures, where dry sentiment was thought to be still strong; instead, ratification was entrusted to specially elected state conventions. When he took office on March 4, Roosevelt quickly called the Seventy-third Congress into session. One of his first proposals for improving the economy and public spirits involved revising the Volstead Act to allow the manufacture, sale, and taxation of beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content. Promptly adopted, the Beer Bill made weak beer legal beginning April 7, 1933. To many Americans, the worst of prohibition was over. With breweries immediately hiring twenty thousand workers and the federal government receiving $4 million in tax revenue during the first week of sale, the return of beer was hailed as a step toward economic recovery.

Despite the unprecedented requirement of state ratifying conventions, the repeal amendment moved forward rapidly. Most state legislatures quickly agreed to offer voters one slate of convention delegates pledged to support the new amendment and another committed to retaining the Eighteenth. The electorate left no doubt as to its preference. Between April and November thirtyseven states held delegate elections, and nationwide 73 percent of voters expressed a preference for prohibition repeal. Only South Carolina, by a 52 percent margin, favored retaining the alcohol ban. When the final state conventions were held in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Utah on December 5, 1933, ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment was completed.

Repeal increased legal employment and largely wiped out the illicit liquor trade. During the 1930s alcohol consumption remained well below preprohibition levels—some Americans had learned to do without liquor during prohibition, and others found it difficult to afford in the depressed economy. But the end of prohibition was one of the events of 1933 that reduced social discontent and raised spirits.

See Also: ASSOCIATION AGAINST THE PROHIBITION AMENDMENT (AAPA); CAPONE, AL; LAW ENFORCEMENT.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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DAVID E. KYVIG