Eighteenth Amendment Research Articles

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of ProhibitionDanielOkrent. New York: Scribner, 2010.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Daniel Okrent. New York: Scribner, 2010. The Noble Experiment has - except for fiction and television - more or less faded from public consciousness. Unfortunately, its pernicious legacies of organized crime and, to a lesser extent, disrespect for the law, remain. Okrent not only captures Prohibition's atmosphere, but also explains the events through decades that brought it about. Americans, at least the men, were a hard-drinking lot. It less clear about women, because public drinking excluded them almost entirely. Their drinking was more likely to consist of various tonics marketed for female complaints; not for their high alcohol content. For workers, the post Civil War saloon, financed by brewers and distillers, was a masculine institution, enticing its patrons with free, salty, food that increased thirst. The result was too often disastrous for families, with extensive abuse of women, for whom neither law nor society offered protection. Thus, as reform movements burgeoned during the Nineteenth century, it was natural that alcohol abuse would become a target. First, temperance encouraged moderation; then came pledges for abstinence; finally, came the intrusive demand for prohibition. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (read prohibition, for temperance) became a powerful pressure group, well into the Twentieth century. Most powerful, though, was the Anti-Saloon League. During its heyday, it controlled state legislatures and governors, dominated Congress, and strongly influenced presidents. Okrent correctly calls it the most powerful special interest lobby of all time. The only thing approaching its power today is probably the National Rifle Association, but the NRA has not had the formidable obstacle that faced the ASL, which needed a new amendment. The NRA only had to reinterpret an existing one. Prohibition's bedfellows were strange. Almost entirely white, native born, rural, and Protestant, they ranged from Progressives to the Klan. The unholy (although explicitly Christian) alliance opposed immigrants, cities, Catholics, nonwhites and non-Anglo whites. As World War I drew near, it became explicitly anti-German, since the prominent brewers were German, as were many of the distillers. The WCTU infected school curricula with anti-scientific nonsense regarding the effects of miniscule amounts of alcohol, and the brewers retorted with pernicious nonsense of their own. Turning against their commercial cousins, they condemned distillers as the real villains, but alleged that beer was simply a wholesome food, liquid bread, that could benefit all from toddlers onward. The Eighteenth Amendment authorized prohibition. To enforce it, the Volstead Act came quickly, and took the most extreme form possible, outlawing even beer and light wine (except for sacramental purposes), and defining as intoxicating, anything with over .5% of alcohol. It did exempt fruit juices, such as cider, in order to secure the support of farmers who would not have accepted meddling with their traditions. Okrent associates the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a tax on incomes, with the movement for the Eighteenth. There needed to be a replacement for lost revenue from taxes on alcohol. He documents the extremism of both drys and wets. He vividly portrays the incompetence of the enforcement mechanisms that the Anti-Saloon League controlled, and the escalation in crime that came immediately from the quick and enormous profits that lawbreaking generated. …

Eighteenth Amendment in the Constitution of Pakistan: Success and Controversies

The paper is a critical analysis of the 18th Amendment in the Constitution of Pakistan. The Amendment made after months of deliberations and consensus of a committee represented by all political parties in the parliament has, as claimed by its authors, cleaned the Constitution with the later undemocratic additions and deletions. The paper examines how the Amendment has undertaken different issues concerning to the strength of democracy, institutions and federation of Pakistan. The paper observes the concerns, purposes and impacts of not less than all changes made in the Constitution in the domains of democracy, civil rights, strength of parliament, provincial autonomy, decrease in the powers of President, political parties, and appointment of election commission and judiciary. Having observed its achievements an overview of the controversies, which arose in the result of the Amendment, has been taken.

African American Women, Prohibition, and the 1928 Presidential Election

This article explores links that middle-class African American women drew between efforts to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment and the emergence of black Democrats in the 1928 American presidential election. Because of their longstanding interest in civil rights and temperance, middle-class black Republican women were uniquely positioned to make connections between phenomena that historians have typically analyzed separately, the repeal movement and the early stages of the voting realignment. They argued that Democratic success in repealing the Eighteenth Amendment would set a precedent for eliminating the Reconstruction Amendments. They also identified black opposition to prohibition as threatening to racial uplift ideology, a class-based anti-racist strategy that, among other proscriptions, demanded abstention from liquor. Black Republican women's decision to invoke this declining ideology and blend it with their constitutional observation undercut not only the broad appeal of their constitutional argument, but also their claims to represent African Americans in party politics.

<i>Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City Mark Edward Lender Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. By Michael A. Lerner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 351 pp. $28.95). In this enjoyable and learned volume, Michael A. Lerner cites the temperance movement as one of the most influential reform efforts in American history, and National Prohibition, the crowning achievement of the movement, as perhaps the nation's single most dramatic attempt at moral, political, and social reformation. Lerner is right on both counts; his perspective, however, is that of case study, and he explores the struggle to dry up the country through the singular lens of New York City. The author concedes the early successes of the temperance crusade. Progressives and other reformers had identified alcohol problems as serious threats to public health and social order, and the beverage alcohol business, frequently corrupt, enjoyed little public esteem. By 1920, when the Volstead Act became the law of the land, most of the country already was dry at the state or local level; furthermore, early data suggested that Prohibition indeed had produced declines in drinking-related health and social problems. Reformers therefore were optimistic about the likelihood of drying out New York, in spite of the city's long-standing antipathy to the temperance crusade. But the New York experience, of course, was hardly the victory drys had anticipated. In fact, Prohibition ran into trouble on virtually every front. Reformers had hoped to bring New York's teeming immigrant population over to the temperance cause, but, to the increasing exasperation of drys, most new ethnic groups clung stubbornly to their wet cultural norms and resented reform initiatives. The closing of landmark city watering holes, with a corresponding loss of jobs and revenue, drew protests on cultural and economic grounds. In addition, it gradually became apparent that New York drinkers were not necessarily consuming less, but had simply shifted their drinking to new venues. Eventually, these included illegal but quite accessible speakeasies as well as elaborate nightspots. Owners of some of these establishments, including Texas Guinan and Helen Morgan, became major celebrities, and their flouting of the dry laws enraged reformers while reinforcing a growing public perception of the Volstead Act as unenforceable. Worse, it also became obvious that the federal Bureau of Prohibition lacked the resources necessary for an adequate enforcement effort, and that state and local officials were only reluctant allies. Indeed, enforcement agents frequently became enmeshed in corruption scandals, lured by pay-offs from bootleggers and illegal clubs, even as massive numbers of Volstead cases threatened to overwhelm the courts. Lerner traces these developments in considerable detail, all of it supporting his observation that, far from uniting New Yorkers in a common reform cause, the Eighteenth Amendment instead "had polarized New York between irreconcilable dry and wet camps, one bent on enforcing Prohibition at any cost and the other set on rebelling against it" (page 59). This "irreconcilable" divide reflected more than a fight over whether or not someone could buy a legal drink. Rather, Lerner sees the bitterness deriving from a clash of competing cultural visions—perhaps the first true "culture war" of the [End Page 811] twentieth century. He carefully depicts the wet-dry conflict in New York as representing a wider conflict between an older, more homogeneous America, and an emerging nation that increasingly emphasized personal liberty, co-existence between the country's constituent populations, and a tolerance of different cultural norms. By the 1920s, drys certainly understood that New York, composed of multiple ethnic groups and combining any number of social, political, and cultural outlooks, was one of the greatest imaginable threats to their reform agenda. Lerner makes this case clearly and forcefully, repeatedly citing examples of wet and dry voices talking past one another, but understanding the gulf between their positions only too well. Perhaps there was room for compromise, but no willingness. While Lerner is on firm interpretive ground, his account of Repeal is less satisfying. He accepts reports that the results were beneficent, but given their feelings toward Prohibition, New York officials and media hardly would have said otherwise. Lerner might have taken a closer look. Other scholars...

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Eric L. Goldstein American Jewish History has long featured the work of younger scholars, not only as a means of encouraging new talent, but also as a way of bringing fresh, challenging ideas to our readers from the pens of those best versed in the most recent trends of historical analysis and interpretation. This tradition has continued in the last few volumes, with innovative studies by Daniel Kurt Ackermann, Lila Corwin Berman, Adam Mendelsohn, Devin Naar, and Annie Polland, among others. The inclusion of three articles by up-and-coming scholars in the current number, then, is not so unusual as to merit the designation "special issue," but it does provide us with an opportunity to take notice of where the field of American Jewish history is heading. Reflecting on the articles presented here by Marni Davis, Gil Ribak, and Libby Garland, one is struck by the way in which young scholars in the field today are questioning received narratives about Jews and their encounters with American life. In her study of Jewish responses to the American temperance movement, Davis reverses our linear, progressive understanding of Jewish integration into American society, demonstrating how Jews' role as alcohol entrepreneurs and their alignment with liberal antiprohibition forces helped them achieve success and acculturation during the nineteenth century, only to become festering public-relations problems for them after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. Gil Ribak's study of the 1906 New York City school riots also upends the conventional portrait of smooth, successful Jewish integration. Challenging the notion of a Jewish "love affair" with public education, he shows that Jews from eastern Europe often brought with them negative images of non-Jews that prevented their full embrace of the public school system for years after their arrival in the United States. Finally, Libby Garland's account of illegal Jewish immigration to the United States during the interwar years revises the standard periodization of American Jewish history, which usually defines 1924 as the end of the immigrant era. By casting her gaze on the arrivals of the "post-quota" period, Garland recovers a time when Jewish immigrants were understood as part of a criminal element threatening the well-being of the nation, hardly consistent with the "narrative of the good immigrant" that prevails today in Jewish historical consciousness. If these articles offer a more tumultuous portrait of Jewish adaptation to America than do previous accounts, they also demonstrate how the rising generation of American Jewish historians is increasingly integrating [End Page ix] its work into the larger field of American history. It is natural for the authors, for example, to situate the experience of immigrant Jews within the broader landscape of American political culture, gender norms, and ethnic and racial relations. Their articles seek to understand not only the interior life of Jewish organizations and communities, but also where Jews stood in relation to the non-Jewish world around them. Each of the articles also pushes beyond the American environment to engage with themes in the field of modern Jewish history, in Davis' and Garland's case by locating their subjects within transnational Jewish economic and migratory patterns, and in Ribak's case by putting the issue of Jewish-gentile relations at the center of his analysis. Based on the evidence of these three contributions, younger scholars are not only writing more complex and nuanced histories than their predecessors, but are addressing a greater number of audiences as well. [End Page x] Eric L. Goldstein Emory University Copyright © 2009 American Jewish Historical Society

"Physicians are not Bootleggers": The Short, Peculiar Life of the Medicinal Alcohol Movement

This essay seeks to chronicle the effort of physicians to secure the right to prescribe beer, liquor, and other alcoholic beverages to their patients for medicinal uses during the Prohibition era. A review of the medical literature and popular press from the period 1920-26 reveals that the physicians who lobbied for the right to prescribe alcohol and, ultimately, took their claim to the United States Supreme Court, were not uniformly antiprohibitionists attempting to circumvent the Eighteenth Amendment. Instead, this coalition of physician activists, led by John P. Davin and Samuel W. Lambert, included both supporters and opponents of prohibition. Their attitudes on the therapeutic value of beer and liquor also varied widely. Yet what united these men and women-and what defined their movement-was opposition to state interference with the practice of medicine and an increasing concern with the federal government's role in the regulation of their profession. The defeat of their efforts, presaging the passage of the Sheppard Towner Act in 1921 and the extension of veterans' health benefits in 1924, marked an important step in the development of antagonism between the medical community and the federal government during the mid-twentieth century.

MICHAEL A. LERNER. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2007. Pp. 351. $28.95

This book is not only a finely grained study of New York City as the chief bastion of wet resistance to the Eighteenth Amendment; it is the best history of prohibition enforcement in an urban environment yet written. Michael A. Lerner has a discerning eye for the effective anecdote (he opens with the mayor of Berlin innocently asking on a 1929 visit to Gotham when the prohibition law—already in force for nearly a decade—would take effect) and a gift for compelling historical prose. These qualities have already drawn popular interest to the book. Historians will be impressed by the thorough research supporting the smooth, if sometimes glib, narrative. Grounding his analysis in municipal archival sources such as the district attorney scrapbooks and magistrates reports, manuscript investigations and social surveys from the Committee of Fourteen and the Social Science Research Council, memoirs, and newspaper sources ranging from Variety to the Amsterdam News, Lerner provides a street-level view of the policing, politics, and culture of prohibition in New York. He is particularly thorough in laying bare the tensions between the understaffed, corruption-prone, and sometimes brutal federal Prohibition Bureau and a city police force unenthusiastic about prohibition enforcement. In turn, the police, compelled by the Mullan-Gage state law to crack down on prohibition violators, were undercut by judges and city officials hostile to prohibition until city representatives in Albany forced the repeal of Mullan-Gage in 1923. Lerner also provides a richly-textured analysis of New York's speakeasy and nightclub culture. He reveals ethnic and working-class drinking and club life, the festive climate of high-end nightclubs such as Texas A. Guinan's 300 Club, and the interracial encounters of Harlem nightlife. Supplementing studies by Lewis A. Erenberg, George Chauncey, and Kathy Peiss with extensive primary research, Lerner examines the transformative possibilities for recreational, sexual, gendered, and racial change embedded in speakeasy culture, as well as the persistence of exploitation, especially notable in the white practice of “slumming” in Harlem clubs.

Advertising sin and sickness: the politics of alcohol and tobacco marketing, 1950-1990

Temperance advocates believed they could eradicate alcohol by persuading consumers to avoid it; prohibitionists put their faith in legislation forbidding its manufacture, transportation, and sale. After the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, however, reformers sought a new method of attack - targeting advertising. In Advertising Sin and Sickness, Pamela E. Pennock documents three distinct periods in the history of the national debate over the regulation of alcohol and tobacco marketing. Tracing the fate of proposed federal policies, she introduces their advocates and opponents, from politicians and religious leaders to scientists and businessmen. In the 1950s, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and other religious organizations joined hands in an effort to ban all alcohol advertising. They quickly found themselves at odds, however, with an increasingly urbane mainstream American culture. In the 1960s, moralists took backstage to consumer activists and scientific authorities in the campaign to control cigarette advertising and mandate labeling. Secular and scientific arguments came to dominate policy debates, and the controversy over alcohol marketing during the 1970s and 1980s highlighted the issues of substance abuse, public health, and consumer rights. The politics of alcohol and tobacco advertising reflect profound cultural dilemmas about consumerism and private enterprise, morality and health, scientific authority and the legitimate regulation of commercial speech. Today, the United States continues to face difficult questions about the proper role of the federal government when powerful industries market potentially harmful but undoubtedly popular products.

KATHLEEN DROWNE. Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 189. Cloth $59.95, paper $21.95, CD $9.95

Historians will find much that is enlightening and entertaining in Kathleen Drowne's book. Drawing on Prohibition-era fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, and a host of others, Drowne compares the authors' portrayals of drink culture to those that appeared in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly analyses during and after the “dry decade” (1920–1933). “Collectively,” she argues, “the works of fiction addressed in this book offer a realistic, historically accurate picture of how different kinds of Americans responded to the legal, social, and cultural changes wrought by the passage of National Prohibition” (p. 5). Historians may be more skeptical about the reliability of such literary evidence than Drowne, whose training is in literary, not historical, analysis. Nevertheless, her study provides a gold mine of contemporary references to Jazz Age free spirits who gleefully drank spirits in open defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. Drowne focuses on what she terms the “culture of National Prohibition” (p. 13), in which a sense of rebellious playfulness found expression in the period's language, music, movies, and literature. She devotes chapters to the principal actors and settings of this national rebellion, including liquor providers, youthful consumers, drinking establishments, and house parties. The chapter on drinking in private homes is particularly informative. In the chapter's first section, “Cocktail Parties,” Drowne examines fictional portrayals of upper and middle-class drinkers, nicely complementing Catherine Gilbert Murdock's study, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870 to 1920 (1998). Even more intriguing are the sections featuring Harlem Renaissance writers such as Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes on “Rent Parties,” and Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston on “Good-Time Flats.” Drowne selects vivid passages from their earthy accounts of Harlem's flamboyant social scene and brings to light many overlooked aspects of African American drink culture in the 1920s.

Defining the “Undefended”: Canadians, Americans, and the Multiple Meanings of Border during Prohibition

Canada is a border nation. With over 75 percent of its population living within a hundred miles of boundary, border is a reality of virtually every Canadian's daily life. (1) Not only does it define citizenship, it contributes to how Canadians think, what they believe, and how they work. It should come as no surprise then that border is tied very closely to Canada's national identity, defining of which Seymour Martin Lipset calls the quintessential Canadian issue. (2) Even Canadian nationalists, quick to out that being Canadian means much more than simply being (and it does), concur that border plays an important role in shaping their identity. One of English-Canadian writers with greatest national and international reputation in 1920s was humorist Stephen Leacock who, not coincidentally, found much of his material in border and Canada's relationship with United States. He once observed, an odd chance forty-ninth parallel, an astronomical line, turned out to mean something. (3) But what? This question is not unimportant, even beyond ways in which it informs Canadian national identity, for it also helps to explain relationship between Canadians and Americans more generally. To that relationship border is central. Never was this more true than during America's noble experiment. Between 1920 and 1933, no issue in Canadian-American relations proved more contentious or more intractable than liquor problem. When Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January 1920, no longer could Americans make, sell, transport, or import any intoxicating beverage that contained more than 0.5 percent alcohol. They could, however, legally drink it, and thus it was left to Amendment's enforcement mechanism, Volstead Act, to insure that they didn't have access to it. Predictably, from Pacific to Atlantic, American dollars promptly headed north, and (usually) pure, unadulterated Canadian whisky, south. Canadian distillers, brewers, export houses, rumrunners, and bootleggers were more than happy to assuage parched throats of their American brethren. However, what was a boon to Canadian economy was bane to American diplomats and enforcement officials who sought help from their Canadian counterparts in stemming this illegal torrent of booze. Part of focus of this essay is to explore this problem and reasons for its intractability. Few decades were as important in shaping character of Canadian-American relationship than 1920s, for at least two reasons closely related toprohibition. First, beginning in 1920s, Canadian external affairs underwent a significant transformation. During William Lyon Mackenzie King administration, newly created Department of External Affairs made a concerted effort to define a Canadian foreign policy independent of British Foreign and Colonial offices. To do so meant Dominion had to face United States alone, without compromising its sovereignty. As a consequence diplomatic relationship between Canada and United States entered a new, formative stage. The second reason is increasing degree to which Canadians and Americans began to interact with each other in this period. The undefended border had always been a porous one. Yet during 1920s there was an extraordinary increase in pace and scope of what Marcus Lee Hansen referred to as mingling of Canadian and American peoples. (4) Its chief cause was automobile and ease with which travelers were able to cross border. By end of decade, four million American cars and twenty million Americans crossed border each year. The effect, according to one historian, was a turning point in cultural history of Canada, as Americans--in pursuit of liquor, scenery, and other things Canadian--brought with them other (sometimes less desirable) aspects of American culture. …

The “Public Sentiment Building Society”

The Anti-Saloon League of America was a Midwestern, church-based, social reform group founded in 1895, whose drive for national prohibition played a major role in the ratification and subsequent enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment. The purpose of this article is to expand the current model of public relations history by examining the ideas and methods that the League established in its first fifteen years to generate public sentiment for a dry, saloonless nation. Many of these concepts not only echo what are considered today to be basic principles of public relations, but they were conceived and implemented at the turn of the century by two Ohio men who did not define themselves in terms of public relations and publicity practitioners but in their roles as ministers in fulfilling what they considered to be their religious duty of eliminating liquor in the U.S. The article concludes that while there is still much to learn about public relations from those already labeled as “pioneers, “such as Edward Bernays or John Hill there is even more to mine from those people or organizations who sought to influence public opinion and generate change in the pursuit of a cause or an idea.

Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. x + 341. $49.95 cloth; $18.95 paper (ISBN 0-8078-2181-0; 0-8078-4493-4).

Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. x + 341. 18.95 paper (ISBN 0-8078-2181-0; 0-8078-4493-4). - Volume 16 Issue 1

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920. By Richard F. Hamm. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 341pp. $49.95 cloth; 18.95 paper

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920. By Richard F. Hamm. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 341pp. $49.95 cloth; 18.95 paper

Federal Criminal Law Doctrines: The Forgotten Influence of National Prohibition.

This book offers a close look at the development of legal thought during the era of prohibition and documents the impact of prohibition on law as an intellectual discipline. Kenneth M. Murchison examines changes in federal criminal law doctrines from 1918 to 1933 in light of recent historical scholarship on prohibition and its impact on American society. He identifies these federal doctrinal developments as an important but ignored legacy of prohibition and describes how these changes continue to effect contemporary law. In this detailed examination, Murchison considers a portion of the Supreme Court’s work prior to the New Deal crisis, a period insufficiently considered until now. Among the developments he discusses are those relating to the defense of entrapment, the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against double jeopardy, property forfeitures, and the jury trial guarantees for criminal proceedings. His analysis reveals a court less rigid, less consistently divided along modern ideological lines, and more tolerant of governmental authority than traditional wisdom would suggest. Thus, Murchison offers a framework for a revisionist view of the Supreme Court’s activities during this period. Exploring an important connection between the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, and the development of federal criminal law, this book documents what was arguably the nation’s first criminal law revolution at the federal level. Explaining the modern origins of doctrines that still inform federal criminal law, Murchison also provides a case study of how legal doctrine responds to changing social conditions. Federal Criminal Law Doctrines will add immeasurably to the work of historians and legal scholars alike.

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920.

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture--that is, their ideas about what law was and how it could be used. Originally published in 1995. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The drive for prohibition: A transition from social reform to legislative reform

One could justifiably claim that the American temperance movement is the oldest movement in U.S. history. Although the Eighteenth Amendment was won and lost within a thirteen year period, the temperance sentiment survived and exists today in organizations such as MADD, SADD and even the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union). This movement is distinguished by its duration as temperance sentiment and legislation can be traced to the colonial period. The temperance movement is also unique in the level of success it reached with a constitutional amendment and the fact that this success was overturned with repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920

American women and the repeal of prohibition

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal. Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal. While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative women have too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920.

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920.

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920

Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920