Amendment XVIII – Prohibition
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.
The Eighteenth Amendment, enacted in 1919, was one of four “Progressive” Amendments passed and ratified in quick succession. Although the American involvement with alcohol and with temperance movements had been present from the beginning of the country’s history, Prohibition rode to easy victory in an alliance with other elements of the Progressive Movement in the early twentieth century. The Sixteenth Amendment, permitting the income tax, freed the government from dependence on the tax on liquor. The direct election of Senators, through the Seventeenth Amendment, made the Senate more amenable to electoral pressure for temperance. Although the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was ratified in 1920, it reflected a general acceptance of woman suffrage (and temperance support) already present in the states, many of which allowed women to vote even before the Nineteenth Amendment came into effect.
Businesses supported the amendment to ensure a more reliable workforce, while prejudice against German-Americans and their breweries during World War I helped make Prohibition a patriotic cause. The amendment passed through both Congress and the states with amazing speed. There were no committee hearings in Congress, and debate took less than six hours, most of it centering on the time limit for ratification. The states ratified the amendment within a month.
The only problematic element of the amendment was Section 2, granting Congress and the states concurrent enforcement powers. Under its Section 2 powers, Congress enacted the Volstead Act in 1919 over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. The act defined “intoxicating liquors” as any drink with an alcohol content higher than .05 percent, a strict definition that prohibited even the intake of beer. It permitted exemptions for industrial, medicinal, and sacramental uses, and the act also contained a possession exemption for personal use within one’s own private dwelling.
In the 1920 National Prohibition Cases, the Supreme Court ruled that, under the Supremacy Clause, states could not enact legislation that conflicted with congressional enactments regarding Prohibition. Because the states had been the engines of much Progressive legislation, the Progressive Movement assumed that the states would actively enforce the amendment, federal law, and their own state laws. The unexpected and widespread reluctance among the states to enforce Prohibition, along with the concomitant development of organized crime and the loss of tax revenues after the start of the Depression, led to a national scandal.
Those behind Prohibition saw a ban on the sale of ‘intoxicating liquors’ as a crusade against a moral evil. But the big winners were the mob. In an age when individual freedom is all, it comes as something of a shock to reflect that in the world’s most prosperous and dynamic country the prohibition of alcohol lasted for almost 14 years. Today we often think of Prohibition as a deluded experiment. In fact, the campaign to prohibit alcohol had been deeply rooted in Anglo-American society for some two centuries. The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, for example, was founded in 1826, and by the following decade as many as a million Americans belonged to an anti-alcohol group of some kind.
Far from being repressive authoritarians, Prohibition’s largely Protestant champions – a large proportion of whom were high-minded middle-class women – were the do-gooders of the day. Often deeply religious, they saw Prohibition as a kind of social reform, a crusade to clean up the American city and restore the founding virtues of the godly republic. Many were involved in other progressive campaigns.
The campaign for Prohibition was gathering momentum. This was the heyday of progressive reform: to a generation of Protestant reformers, using the power of the state to regulate the anarchy of the industrial city and improve the lot of ordinary workers seemed only natural and reasonable. Outlawing alcohol, which they associated with disease and disorder, fitted nicely into this agenda.
Once the United States entered the first world war, Prohibition became identified with patriotism – not least because German Americans, with their brewing traditions, were often against it.
By December 1917, with the war in full swing, both houses of Congress had approved a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. In January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified by 36 states, and that October, the Volstead Act – passed over President Woodrow Wilson’s attempted veto – gave the federal authorities the power to stop the manufacture, sale or importation of “intoxicating liquor”.
Now prohibition was law. Unfortunately for its advocates, however, the federal government was never really equipped to enforce it. By the time the Volstead Act came into force, the heyday of progressive reform had already passed.
Americans with a taste for liquor were determined to get hold of a drink one way or another. Illegal drinking dens had long flourished in big cities; indeed, the word “speakeasy” probably dates from the late 1880s.
When the Michigan state police raided one Detroit bar, they found the local congressman, the local sheriff and the city’s mayor all enjoying a drink.
The big winners from Prohibition were, of course, the nation’s gangsters. The law had only been in operation for an hour when the police recorded the first attempt to break it, with six armed men stealing some $100,000-worth of “medicinal” whisky from a train in Chicago. From the very beginning, criminals had recognized that Prohibition represented a marvelous business opportunity; in major cities, indeed, gangs had quietly been stockpiling booze supplies for weeks. Legend has it that the first gangster to grasp the real commercial potential of Prohibition, though, was racketeer Arnold Rothstein, whose agents had been responsible for rigging the baseball World Series in 1919. Establishing his “office” at Lindy’s Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, Rothstein brought alcohol across the Great Lakes and down the Hudson from Canada, and supplied it – at a handsome profit – to the city’s gangsters.
By far the most celebrated gangster of the day, though, was Al Capone, a New York-born hoodlum who controlled much of the Chicago underworld in the mid-1920s. Living in splendor in the city’s Lexington hotel, he was said to be raking in some $100m a year from casinos and speakeasies. To many people, he seemed a real-life Robin Hood, opening soup kitchens for the unemployed and giving large sums to charity. “I’m just a businessman,” he used to say, “giving the public what they want.”
The idea of prohibition lives on. Alcohol is not, after all, the only drug to have been prohibited by law; many people who regard Prohibition as bizarre and misguided think nothing of outlawing marijuana.
According to a research study, 71 percent of evangelical Christians believe there is a moral decline in our country because too many laws legislating morality have been struck down. That means that there are professed religious citizens who believe, at least to some extent, that laws regulating moral behavior are the best way to produce morality in people.
Legislating morality doesn’t actually change people.
Scripture teaches that holiness (morality) is something that God works in our lives from the inside out, not the other way around (Romans 12:1-2, Ephesians 4:21-24).
God doesn’t look at the outward appearance but at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7) If the outward appearance is going to be right, the heart has to be right first. Scripture tells us God does care about the outward. He does care about our actions and the kind of lives we live, but a heart can’t become righteous through externally imposed regulations.
I’m not saying we should promote lawlessness and allow people to rob and murder as they wish with no repercussions. And yes, I recognize there is an inherent moral quality in declaring some things legal and illegal based on their impact on society, even if all people may not agree on where that moral standard comes from. But we need to evaluate whether laws are producing morality and change in people. They are not.
The Constitution affords rights to all citizens of our nation of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom to practice their respective faiths or not practice any faith at all. People have a right to live in ways you disagree with. Legislating morality is about preserving our own comfort and history has shown, time and again, that it doesn’t work.
It’s interesting that, when political activists talk of promoting moral values, they are rarely referring to universal ethics. What they strive to legislate instead are, more accurately, social customs — many of which seem arbitrary and sometimes even harmful, but which have been retained and perpetuated by cultural reinforcement alone, often through the teachings of religions. Devout religious believers consider their doctrines to be stipulations of fact. But to accept a faith’s teachings as fact, one must first adopt the faith itself.
It is perhaps because of this difficulty of convincing others, by reason alone, of deeply held traditional beliefs that political force is so often sought to enforce these conventions. That feeling of powerlessness to persuade others, rationally, to accept one’s own deeply held moral beliefs, tempts some to resort to legal force — which is, after all, a standing threat of physical force.
It is because legislation amounts to a codified threat of physical force and punishment that makes the legislation of non-universal “opinion morals” ethically wrong.
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