Eighteenth Amendment

Eighteenth Amendment, amendment (1919) to the Constitution of the United States imposing the federal prohibition of alcohol.

The Eighteenth Amendment emerged from the organized efforts of the temperance movement and Anti-Saloon League, which attributed to alcohol virtually all of society’s ills and led campaigns at the local, state, and national levels to combat its manufacture, sale, distribution, and consumption. Most of the organized efforts supporting prohibition involved religious coalitions that linked alcohol to immorality, criminality, and, with the advent of World War I, unpatriotic citizenship. The amendment passed both chambers of the U.S. Congress in December 1917 and was ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states in January 1919. Its language called for Congress to pass enforcement legislation, and this was championed by Andrew Volstead, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who engineered passage of the National Prohibition Act (commonly referred to as the Volstead Act). The act was conceived by Anti-Saloon League leader Wayne Wheeler and passed over the veto of Pres. Woodrow Wilson.

Neither the Volstead Act nor the Amendment was enforced with great success. Indeed, entire illegal economies (bootlegging, speakeasies, and distilling operations) flourished. The public appetite for alcohol remained and was only intensified with the stock market crash of 1929. In March 1933, shortly after taking office, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which amended the Volstead Act, permitting the manufacturing and sale of low-alcohol beer and wines (up to 3.2 percent alcohol by volume). Nine months later, on December 5, 1933, federal prohibition was repealed with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment (which allowed prohibition to be maintained at the state and local levels). The Eighteenth Amendment is the only amendment to have secured ratification and later been repealed.

The full text of the Amendment is:

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 territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

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

Section 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.