The only constitutional amendment ever passed to cancel another one ended Prohibition
On the last evening before a wartime alcohol ban took effect in 1919, Boston's grand hotels ran dry of gin by late afternoon. Respectable families crowded trams and trains, lugging parcels that plainly held bottles. The next day was nicknamed the Thirsty First, and a far longer national drought was still to come.
Americans once drank on a scale that alarmed reformers: in 1830 the average person got through about 1.7 bottles of hard liquor a week, roughly three times the 2010 level. Temperance societies spread from 1789, when some 200 Connecticut farmers formed one, and the American Temperance Society counted 1.5 million members by 1835. Maine banned liquor outright in 1851, and a dozen states copied it before that law was repealed.
The later push came from a broad Protestant coalition, above all the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and, after 1900, the Anti-Saloon League, who blamed saloons for drunkenness, violence at home and political corruption. When the United States went to war with Germany in 1917, the German brewing families who led the opposition lost influence. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919 by 46 of the 48 states, and the country went dry a year later. Congress passed the enforcement law, the Volstead Act, over President Wilson's veto.
The ban had gaps. Sacramental wine stayed legal, and federal law never outlawed owning or drinking alcohol, only making, moving and selling it. Enforcement lacked resources, and by 1925 New York City alone may have had anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasies. The results are still argued over. Deaths from cirrhosis, hospital admissions for alcoholic psychosis and arrests for public drunkenness fell, yet homicide peaked during those years, and historians disagree about whether crime overall rose.
By the late 1920s, with the Depression looming, critics argued the country was forfeiting tax revenue and that rural values were being forced on cities. In March 1933 Franklin Roosevelt legalised weak beer, and on 5 December the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, the only time one amendment has been passed purely to undo another.
Source: Prohibition in the United States
