Eighteenth Amendment
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.
From the 1790s to the early 1830s, Americans drank increasingly large amounts of whiskey and other distilled alcoholic beverages.1 Heavy consumption of hard liquor offended many social reformers, including Protestant churchgoers, who viewed drunkenness as a source of crime, family strife, illness, immorality, poverty, and workplace injuries.2 Concerned about alcoholism’s effects on society, small groups of farmers and Protestant Christians formed some of the first temperance societies in the early nineteenth century.3 These societies urged Americans to abstain from drinking distilled alcoholic beverages but did not initially call for “teetotalism” —that is, total abstinence from all alcoholic beverages.4
Temperance societies adopted a stricter approach toward alcohol consumption in the 1830s, urging Americans to abstain entirely from drinking.5 For instance, the American Temperance Society, which Christian clergy founded in 1826, initially called for Americans to refrain from drinking “ardent spirits.” 6 However, by the late 1830s, the society advocated for total abstinence from all alcoholic beverages.7 The society communicated this abstinence message through its writings and lectures, gaining more than a million members nationwide.8 Partly as a result of the temperance movement, Americans’ drinking declined during the mid-1830s.9
In addition to advocating for abstinence, some pre-Civil War temperance leaders called for Congress or the state legislatures to prohibit the liquor trade.10 For example, Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister who co-founded the American Temperance Society, advocated for a ban on the manufacture and sale of liquor to foster individual morality and social order.11 Answering calls for reform, at least fourteen states adopted prohibition laws in some form by 1855.12 However, as the nation became embroiled in disagreements over the issue of slavery, Americans’ interest in the temperance movement waned, and many state legislatures repealed or weakened their prohibition laws.13
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Footnotes
- 1
- Mark Edward Lender & James Kirby Martin, Drinking in America: A History 46 (1982).
- 2
- Id. at 44. See also 1 Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society 3–11 (1835), https://archive.org/details/permanenttemper00socigoog/page/n17/mode/1up?view=theater (last visited June 13, 2023) (outlining negative individual and social consequences of excessive alcohol consumption); Lyman Beecher, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance 5–23 (1828), https://archive.org/details/66350990R.nlm.nih.gov/page/n10/mode/1up (describing intemperance as “evil” ).
- 3
- Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 64–67. As early as the late eighteenth century, some Protestant religious groups, including the Methodists and Quakers, advocated for Americans to abstain from drinking distilled alcohol alcoholic beverages. Id. at 64.
- 4
- Id. at 68, 70. In 1831, President Andrew Jackson and former Presidents James Madison and John Quincy Adams signed a statement encouraging all U.S. citizens—and, in particular, young men—to stop drinking hard liquor “to promote the health, the virtue, and the happiness of the community.” James Madison: Temperance Statement, July 1831, Nat’l Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-02-02-2380 (last visited June 13, 2023).
- 5
- Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 69.
- 6
- 1 Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society, supra 2, at 11–12. The group was originally called the “American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.” Id. at 12. See also Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 68–71.
- 7
- 2 Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society 24 (1856), https://www.google.com/books/edition/Permanent_Temperance_Documents_of_the_Am/jbdJAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 (discussing the national temperance movement’s shift toward advocating for total abstinence in the 1830s); Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 68–71. In 1833, a bipartisan group of Members of Congress formed the Congressional Temperance Society, which met in the hall of the House of Representatives. See 1 Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society, supra 2, at 257.
- 8
- See sources cited supra 7.
- 9
- Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 71–72.
- 10
- E.g., Beecher, supra 2, at 73 ( “The commerce therefore, in ardent spirits, which produces no good, and produces a certain and an immense amount of evil, must be regarded as an unlawful commerce, and ought, upon every principle of humanity, and patriotism, and conscience, and religion, to be abandoned and proscribed.” ). Beecher also acknowledged that prohibition laws would likely be ineffective unless “public sentiment” turned against the liquor trade. Id. at 62–63; Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 79.
- 11
- Beecher, supra 2, at 73.
- 12
- Clark Byse, Alcoholic Beverage Control Before Repeal, 7 Law & Contemp. Probs. 544, 560 (1940). Beginning in the 1820s, a few states enacted the “local option,” which allowed local governments to prohibit the sale of liquor. Id. at 558. As one commentator noted, the term “prohibition” was “really a misnomer, for most laws [at the time] did not completely prohibit the manufacture or sale of intoxicating beverages” but allowed certain businesses to sell alcoholic beverages for “medicinal purposes” and allowed individuals to import or produce beer or wine for personal use. Id. at 560 n.120.
- 13
- See 55 Cong. Rec. 4510 (1917) (listing states that repealed their prohibition laws around the time of the Civil War); Lender & Martin, supra 1, at 85.