Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1919)
The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution imposed a national ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of “intoxicating liquors.” It thus ushered in a fourteen-year period of Prohibition in the United States, which ended in 1933, when the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, was ratified.
The temperance movement began in the nineteenth century, when reformers, including prominently the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, tried to reduce the demand for alcohol by urging people to give up drinking. But in the early twentieth century the strategy changed, and reformers started to attack not the demand for alcohol but its supply. They supported state laws restricting the sale of liquor and shutting down saloons by 1919 a number of states and an even larger number of individual counties had adopted some form of Prohibition, and Congress had enough votes from “dry” state legislators to enact Prohibition.
In this climate, Congress was able...
