Eighteenth

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, proposed by Congress on 18 December 1917 and ratified on 16 January 1919, established national Prohibition by banning the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" within, and their importation into or exportation from, the United States. It took effect one year after ratification, on 17 January 1920. Section 2 granted Congress and the several states concurrent power to enforce the article, and Section 3 — a constitutional novelty championed for the first time — imposed a seven-year ratification deadline, a device the Supreme Court upheld in Dillon v. Gloss (1921). The amendment was the constitutional culmination of nearly a century of temperance agitation led by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874) and the Anti-Saloon League (founded 1893), reinforced by wartime grain-conservation arguments and anti-German sentiment directed at the brewing industry.

The amendment's bare text did not itself define "intoxicating liquors" or supply an enforcement machinery; that was furnished by the Volstead Act (the National Prohibition Act of 1919), passed over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, which fixed the threshold at 0.5 percent alcohol by volume and vested enforcement in the Treasury Department's Prohibition Bureau. The Eighteenth Amendment is notable as the only constitutional amendment to restrict the private conduct of citizens rather than the powers of government, and the only one ever to be repealed in its entirety. Its concurrent-enforcement clause produced jurisdictional friction between federal and state agents, and the Supreme Court sustained aggressive enforcement methods, controversially permitting warrantless wiretaps in Olmstead v. United States (1928).

In practice Prohibition spawned a vast illicit economy: bootlegging, speakeasies, and organized crime syndicates epitomized by Al Capone's Chicago Outfit, alongside widespread "rum-running" along the coasts and the Detroit River. Enforcement proved chronically underfunded, public compliance eroded, and tax revenue from legal liquor sales — badly needed after the Great Depression struck in 1929 — was forfeited. Mounting opposition, organized by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and reflected in the 1932 Democratic platform, led to repeal. The Twenty-First Amendment, ratified 5 December 1933, repealed the Eighteenth in full — the only such repeal in American constitutional history — and uniquely was ratified by state ratifying conventions rather than state legislatures under Article V, while its Section 2 returned regulatory authority over alcohol to the states.

For the FSOT US History section, the Eighteenth Amendment is a high-yield topic tested on several angles: its place in the Progressive Era reform sequence (alongside the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments), the distinction between the amendment and its enabling Volstead Act, the social consequences of Prohibition in the 1920s, and the mechanics of its repeal via convention ratification. Candidates should be able to date ratification (1919) and repeal (1933), identify the Twenty-First Amendment as the repealing instrument, and explain why Prohibition is the standard textbook example of failed national social engineering through constitutional means.