Volstead Act

The Volstead Act was the enabling legislation for the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”—that is, Prohibition. The act was named for its author, Andrew Volstead, a Republican congressman from Minnesota. The formal name of the Volstead Act, passed over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson on October 28, 1919, was the National Prohibition Act.

The Prohibition movement had begun in the nineteenth century when reformers, many of them motivated by religious beliefs and by the conviction that many of the nation’s social ills could be tied to drinking, tried to reduce the demand for alcohol by persuading people to give up drinking. Early in the twentieth century, these reformers shifted their focus to curtailing the supply of alcohol by supporting passage of state laws that restricted the sale of alcohol and that shut down bars and taverns. By 1914 numerous states were “dry,” meaning that they had adopted some form of prohibition; among them were Maine, Kansas, North Dakota, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Many counties throughout the nation also went “dry”; to this day, it remains illegal to drink Jack Daniel’s whiskey in the Tennessee county where it is distilled. Over the next five years the number of dry states continued to rise, and by 1919 the number of congressional representatives from dry states outnumbered those from “wet” states by a significant margin. Meanwhile, in 1917, Congress had approved a resolution containing the basic wording of the Eighteenth Amendment, which was in the process of ratification by the states.

During World War I, reformers were able to pass federal laws restricting alcohol, in an effort to preserve the morals of servicemen and to conserve grain for the war effort. One of their arguments was that the consumption of German beer was sapping the will of American servicemen to fight. Chief among these laws was the Wartime Prohibition Act of 1918, which is referred to in Title I of the Volstead Act; ironically, this act was not actually passed until after the armistice that ended the fighting went into effect.

The Wartime Prohibition Act law prohibited the manufacture and sale of all beverages—including beer and wine—that contained more than 2.75 percent alcohol. The Volstead Act, which in large measure was a revision of the Wartime Prohibition Act, was more restrictive, banning the manufacture and sale of “beverages which contain one-half of 1 per centum or more of alcohol by volume.” Wilson vetoed the bill because he believed that it was too severe in banning beer and because he objected to the continuation of wartime prohibition after the cessation of hostilities.

Prohibition was generally regarded as a failure, and throughout the 1920s calls rose for repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Those calls were answered in 1933 with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. The Volstead Act had been modified that year to allow the manufacture and sale of 3.2 percent beer, but the Twenty-first Amendment rendered the Volstead Act moot.