On this day in 1933: Congress strikes the first blow in the fight to kill Prohibition

Source: The Telegraph
Dominic Selwood
20 FEBRUARY 2017

In January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade, “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”. It came into force exactly a year later, with the National Prohibition Act – usually known as the Volstead Act – setting out the detailed guidelines.

Prohibition had not come out of the blue. The Temperance Movement had been building strong support among the many churches since the early 1800s. Massachusetts was the first state to introduce anti-alcohol legislation in 1838, but it was short-lived. Maine did so more successfully in 1848.

Prohibition was not a success. Organised crime set up large smuggling operations across the Canadian and Mexican borders, as well as managing illegal shipping routes from the Caribbean. Domestic bootleggers began distilling vast quantities of homebrew, and medicinal and denatured alcohol were cut and washed for resale – sometimes with fatal consequences. All these products were pumped out through mob-controlled speakeasies and illicit drinking dens. In the space of only a few years, prohibition had given a new breed of gangsters undreamed of wealth and geographic reach. From this solid foundation, organised crime then diversified into narcotics, gambling, prostitution, and finance.

Law enforcement agencies and organised crime gangs battled it out on the streets of American cities. The state’s highpoint came in 1932 when Eliot Ness and his Untouchables from the Bureau of Prohibition succeeded in securing Al Capone’s imprisonment for income tax offences. However, by this stage the tide had turned, and the whole violent experience of prohibition had killed off much popular support for the Temperance Movement.

In April 1933, the new president, Franklin D Roosevelt, signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which legalised beer and wine up to 3.2% ABV. But a framework of far more swingeing reforms was already in place. On 20 February, Congress had proposed the Twenty-First Amendment, aimed at repealing the Eighteenth Amendment completely and ending prohibition. It was finally adopted on 5 December 1933, and the Eighteenth Amendment was junked in its entirety – the only constitutional amendment in U.S. history to have been ditched wholesale. Prohibition was a failed 13-year experiment, whose main legacy was a sophisticated nationwide criminal infrastructure.