Twenty-First Amendment, Section 3:

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Congress proposed the Twenty-First Amendment on February 20, 1933, requiring state ratifying conventions to approve it within seven years in order for it to become part of the Constitution.1 On December 5, 1933, Acting Secretary of State William Phillips certified that the Amendment had been adopted by the requisite number of state conventions.2

The Twenty-First Amendment is the only Amendment to have been approved by state ratifying conventions rather than state legislatures. At the time of its proposal, many politicians believed that only state ratifying conventions should approve constitutional amendments that implicated individual rights and morals.3 In addition to seeking a ratification method deemed to better reflect the popular will, Congress may have also wished to bypass the temperance lobby, which remained powerful in state legislatures.4 According to this view, by specifying that specially selected state delegates would ratify the Amendment, rather than state legislators, Congress increased the Amendment’s chances of successful ratification.5

Footnotes

1

76 Cong. Rec. 4516 (1933); U.S. Const. amend. XXI, § 3.

2

See Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, 48 Stat. 1749, 1749–50 (1933).

3

Everett S. Brown, Ratification of the Twenty First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: State Convention Records and Laws 3 (2003).

4

Robert P. George & David A. J. Richards, The Twenty-First Amendment, Nat’l Const. Ctr., >https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xxi/interpretations/151 ( “[P]olitical prudence pointed in the direction of ratifying conventions as a way of leaving gun-shy legislators with their eyes on re-election out of the process and ‘off the hook.’” ).

5

See id.; Letter from the Women’s Committee for Repeal of the 18th Amendment to the United States Congress Regarding the Repeal of Prohibition (Jan. 25, 1930), >https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/letter-from-womens-committee-for-repeal-of-the-18th-amendment-to-the-united-states-congress-regarding-the-repeal-of-prohibition (advocating for submission of a repeal amendment to state ratifying conventions and noting that delegates would not be “running for a political office” and would therefore have “no political axe to grind” ); Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, 352 (2010). (stating that Congress’s submission of the Twenty-First Amendment to state ratifying conventions was “mindful of the complications of legislative schedules and the continued domination of state legislatures by rural minorities” ).