18th amendment definition us history

18th amendment definition us history

The Impact and Legacy of the 18th Amendment in US History

1. Introduction to the 18th Amendment

In 1919, when the 18th Amendment was accorded the grateful commendation of President Wilson and the approval of most Americans, for the fundamental social invention that it was, it seemed inevitable that the days of drinking in an individualistic land were over. These heady hopes led most Americans into exaggerations of the capability of formal law to determine personal behavior. The 18th Amendment, weak as it was, very quickly could not even reduce the gross volume of drinking in most urban centers. Restarting the public bar, the first tempting target where easy control might have been hoped for; delays in tightened law enforcement; wickedly poor drafting for legal instruments that disallowed alcohol abuse; virile opposition to Prohibition; and the still undreamed of stubbornness of parts of the nation to retain a drinking life set off a chain reaction of social and political explosions. This being the case, most thinkers in the field of social control have believed that the essential impact was a negative one and that all of the consequences have been unfortunate.

When the 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919, there was at once no workable agreement as to what this complex document would really mean when put to the test. It was to be, for a time at least, an exhibition of the capacity of a free society, with the best of intentions to achieve the impossible. The noble experiment failed entirely in large sections of the land; with the operation of social laws so divergent, it bred frustration, but within a decade of its greatest failure, this cannot overlook what it helped do. The positive achievements of Prohibition linger on and are of the first importance. One of these is an essential change in human consciousness about drugs; another is the development of American attitudes toward alcoholic beverages that seem likely to protect members of the family unit and other individuals from distractions that have greatly disturbed human society for too many centuries.

2. Prohibition Era: Causes and Context

With the turn of the century, the idea of legal prohibition of alcohol was in the air and accompanied by social changes. New territorial states of the U.S. – Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi – included the requirements for people’s total abstinence from alcohol. The explanation is common for all; in these states, the Baptist Church was particularly strong and that the Great Religious Awakening, which began in 1790, had swept through these territories.

In 1920, the United States passed a generations-long prohibition of alcohol. Where did the ban come from, and how did it foster a culture of black market and organized crime? The roots of law fueling the gangster era were manifestly coarse. It was less about public health or state governance and more about repression of certain groups and the expression of patriotism. The prohibition of alcohol sales was found incorrectly, or correctly, depending on one’s axis, to appropriate the prefix – Prohibition – from the national laws Prohibition Act of 1920, which set up the following: the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the territory of the United States was prohibited. The same document gave permission to drink alcohol if an individual used it according to religious doctrines, used strictly for scientific, medicinal needs.

3. Enforcement and Consequences of the 18th Amendment

Ultimately, a large force of Prohibition enforcement agents was formed to deal with the smuggling along the shoreline and into the ports of our country. The agents worked with several different enforcement arms – White caps (the enforcers who patrolled the coasts for smugglers), revenue cutters, and customs officers and police of frame and sloop Yankee speedboats. But it became increasingly difficult to control the sale and flow of bootleg liquor. Upon the theme of prohibition, there were few voices against the attempt to prevent the manufacture of liquor in factories and distilleries. But when it came to purchasing alcoholic beverages, the situation was very different, and the law was actively defied. To put this into context, of the millions of arrests under the Eighteenth Amendment, about 80 percent were for violations that related to the purchase or consumption of alcoholic beverages. Indeed, some of the cases appeared to be like the three-year legal adventure in Philadelphia known as the one-pound beer case, in which the government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring the defendant to trial and, by winning the case, secure a conviction, even though the quantity defendant had possessed was simply a single, one-pound stone jug-container, not a real jug or can of beer. With the multiplying counts of many citizens being guilty or accused of violating Prohibition, many policemen functioned with considerable discretion and discretion, even if tempted by payoffs from the many violators. In places where Prohibition was anathema, municipal judges often overtly acted with bias towards those arrested. Such was the case in Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia, where Magistrates John W. Enloe, E.M. Leverette, and Rector everlastingly treated rumrunners with exceptional leniency, causing much consternation on the part of the Enforcement Officers. Although Philadelphia and New York City operated under stricter guidelines than Portsmouth or Norfolk, city police and local judges took bribes as well. For example, when it was evident that Padden was selling beers to prisoners in the Kensington Police Station, Officer Brown extorted good sums of money from a dozen of the accused.

A great deal of effort was devoted to making the nation both “dry” and to enforcing Prohibition. Over time, however, it became clear they were fighting a losing battle. By 1927, it was common knowledge from coast to coast that Prohibition was not working. Over time, the Coast Guard, which had been weak in 1919, developed into a much larger and effective organization. But even by the late 1920s, two-thirds of all illegal shipments continued to flood into the northeastern United States in a steady stream of liquor and beer. Meanwhile, the enforcement agencies, and there were some 30,000 in New York City alone, frequently engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the rum-runners. A great many of their efforts were unsuccessful, in part because they were chronically undermanned. Copies of the unofficial records of the Transit Police in Brooklyn, where they found evidence of the production and sale of liquor, are replete with stories of nighttime raids with blood-chilling, instead of blood-curdling, cries, at several scores of cellars, lofts, vacant stores, garages, schooners, and motor boats.

4. Repeal of the 18th Amendment and Legacy

There was a great wealth of public opinion against prohibition. Now that the law had been either repealed or its effects blunted by concurrent resolutions in legislatures, the millions who drank and who saw nothing particularly wrong in taking a drink could act freely on what they deemed to be their rights. With repeal came the earnest struggle to restructure the pending liquor trade. It took one hundred and forty words to pass the 18th Amendment and to create Prohibition, but forty sections were needed to repeal it. The twenty-first amendment had many supporters in Congress who felt the 18th Amendment should never have been written. In the early months of 1933, Congress reviewed and edited for ratification the most extensive and extensive return to laissez-faire in the Nation’s history. You should remember that ‘Prohibition’ did not prohibit the drinking of alcoholic beverages.

The 18th Amendment was an experiment that failed, and it left a divide in the United States of ‘wets’ and ‘drys’ that still exists today. In the 1928 Democratic Platform, plank 50 suggested stopping the enforcement of the 18th Amendment. The 21st Amendment, ratified on December 5, 1933, repealed the 18th Amendment and was a landmark in US history. It was the first amendment that repealed another amendment. A lesson had to be learned from the years from 1920 to 1933. Many were appalled that the 18th Amendment was even necessary. Changes were apparent in all aspects of enforcement of the 18th Amendment. There were no organized protests when the 18th Amendment was repealed.