The anti alcohol, or temperance, movement was created in the early nineteenth century by physicians, ministers, and large employers concerned about the drunkenness of workers and servants. By the mid 1830s temperance had become a mass movement of the middle Class. Temperance was not, as is sometimes thought, the campaign of rural backwaters; rather, temperance was on the cutting edge of social reform and was closely allied with the antislavery and women’s rights movements. Always very popular, temperance remained the largest enduring middle-class movement of the nineteenth century (‘Leaven 1978, 1984; Tyrell 1979; Gusfield 1986; Rumbarger 1989; Blocker 1989).

The temperance campaign was devoted to convincing people that alcoholic drink in any form was evil, dangerous, and destructive. Throughout the nineteenth century, temperance supporters insisted that alcohol slowly but inevitably destroyed the moral character and the physical and mental health of all who drank it. Temperance supporters regarded alcohol the way people today view heroin: as an inherently addicting substance. Moderate consumption of alcohol, they maintained, naturally led to compulsive use to addiction. From the beginning, temperance ideology contained a powerful strand of fantasy. It held that alcohol was the major cause of nearly all social problems: unemployment, poverty, business failure, slums, insanity, crime and violence (especially against women and children). For the very real social and economic problems of industrializing America, the temperance movement offered universal abstinence as the panacea.

From roughly the 1850s on, many temperance supporters endorsed the idea of prohibition. after the Civil War the Prohibition Party, modeled on the Republican Party, championed the cause. Nineteenth-century prohibitionists believed that only when sufficient numbers of party members held office would prohibition be practical because only then would it be fully enforced. ‘

In the twentieth century a new prohibitionist organization - the Anti-Saloon League - came to dominate the movement (Odegard 1928: Timberlake 1963; Sinclair 1965; Gusfield 1968; Kerr 1985; Rumbarger 1989). The League patterned itself on the modern corporation, hiring lawyers to write model laws and organizers to raise funds and collect political debts.

The League put its considerable resources behind candidates of any party who would vote as it directed on the single issue of liquor. By expanding the numbers of elected officials beholden to it, and by writing laws for those legislators to enact, the League pushed through many local prohibition laws and some state measures. In 1913 the League finally declared itself in favor of Constitutional prohibition. Increasing numbers of large corporations joined the many Protestant churches that had long supported the League. Then, during the patriotic fervor of World War 1, prohibitionists mobilized the final support for a constitutional amendment. Among other arguments, prohibitionists claimed that in the United States the heavily German beer industry was sapping American will to fight.

By December 1917, both houses of Congress had voted the required two-thirds majority to send to the states for ratification a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale, transportation, import, or export of intoxicating liquor. In November 1918 Congress passed the War Prohibition Act, which banned the manufacture and sale of all beverages including beer and wine that contained mote than 2.75 percent alcohol. On January 16^th, 1919, Nebraska b›came the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, which was to go into effect in one year. In October 1919 Congress overrode President Wilson’s veto to pass a strict enforcement act of prohibition known by the name of its sponsor, Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, chair of the House Judiciary Committee. The Volstead Act defined as "intoxicating liquor" any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

At midnight on January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment took effect. The famous minister Billy Sunday celebrated by preaching a sermon to 10,000 people in which he repeated the fantasy at the heart of the temperance and prohibition crusades:

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent. (quoted in Kobler 1973, 12)

Prohibitionism was not, as is sometimes implied, a public health campaign to reduce mortality from cirrhosis of the liver or alcoholic admissions to state hospitals. As Joseph Gusfield (1968) has pointed out prohibitionists were utopian moralists; they believed that eliminating the legal manufacture and sale of alcoholic drink would solve the major social and economic problems of American society.

The many literary, photographic, and cinematic images of the Prohibition era capture some of the essential features of the period. Prohibition was massively and openly violated, and alcohol was readily available in most of the United States. New institutions and cultural practices appeared: bootleggers and speakeasies, hip flasks and bathtub gin, rum runners smuggling in liquor, and prohibition agents like Elliott Ness smashing down doors. Adulterated and even poisonous alcohol was sold and many people were locked up for violating prohibition laws. (For rich descriptions of the prohibition era, see Allen 1931; Lyle 1960; Allsop 1961; Sinclair 1964; Mertz 1970; Kobler 1973; Everest 1978; and Cashman 1981. Burn ham [1968] offers perhaps the only serious scholarly case for the success of prohibition. For the most recent evidence and discussions of its failures, see Miron and Zwiebel 1991; Morgan 1991; and Thornton 1991.)

Public opposition to prohibition began even before the Volstead Act passed, especially among labor unions, but organized opposition remained small and fragmented until 1926. Then one organization, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), took over the campaign for repeal. Headed by Pierre DuPont and other powerful corporate leaders, the AAPA gathered increasing numbers of wealthy and prominent supporters, including many former prohibitionists. Although prohibition would have been repealed eventually, the AAPA unquestionably accelerated the process (Kyvig 1979; Levine 1985; Rumbarger 1989).

Just as World War I had provided the necessary context for rallying popular support to pass prohibition, the Great Depression provided the necessary context for repeal. Prohibition’s supporters had long argued that it would ensure prosperity and increase law and order. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, prohibition’s opponents made exactly the same argument. Repeal, they promised, would provide jobs, stimulate the economy, in-crease tax revenue, and reduce t4e "lawlessness" stimulated by and characteristic of the illegal liquor industry.

The Depression also played a crucial role in undermining elite support for prohibition. To some extent, alcohol prohibition had originally gained the support of large employers because they believed it would increase worker discipline and productivity and reduce other social problems. The mass violations of national prohibition in the 1920s, followed by the Depression of the 1930s, raised a new specter: prohibition, many came to believe, undermined respect for all law, including property law. This "lawlessness," as people then termed it, frightened many of the rich and powerful - like Pierre DuPont and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. - far more than problems with worker efficiency (Leuchtenburg 1958; Kyvig 1979; Levine 1985).

On top of "lawlessness," the threat of revolt and revolution was in the air in the early 1930s. There were food riots in many cites, unemployed people formed militant organizations, mobs stopped trains and took over warehouses of food. Socialists and communists held rallies of tens of thousands, angry armies of marchers camped in front of the White House, and some wealthy people had machine guns mounted on the roofs of their estates (Leuchtenburg 1958; Piven and Cloward 1971, 1977; Manchester 1974).

Those with wealth and power increasingly supported repeal, in part because they felt the need to do something to raise public morale and show that the government was in some way responsive to popular pressure in a terrible depression. In 1931, Matthew Woll, vice-president of the American Federation of Labor and the sole lab or member of the AAPA board, told President Hoover’s National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission) that workers were losing faith in the government’s willingness to help them, and that prohibition was causing them further to distrust and resent government. By 1932 a number of influential leaders and commentators also had concluded that legalizing beer would make workers feel better about government and take their minds off their troubles. Senators were told, "Beer would have a decidedly soothing tendency on the present mental attitude of the working men.... It would do a great deal to change their mental attitude on economic conditions." Walter Lippman argued ",Beer would be a great help in fighting off the mental depression which afflicts great multitudes" (quotes from Gordon 1943, 104?. The Wickersham Commission explicitly pointed to the class resentment and lawlessness engendered by prohibition in its report to Congress:

Naturally . . . Laboring men resent the insistence of employers who drink that their employees be kept from temptation. Thus the law may be made to appear aimed at and enforced against the insignificant while the wealthy enjoy immunity. This feeling is reinforced when it is seen that the wealthy are generally able to procure pure liquors, while those with less means may run the risk of poisoning. Moreover, searches of homes. . . have necessarily seemed to bear more upon people of moderate means than upon those of wealth or influence. (1931. 54-5)

On November 16, 1932, the Senate voted to submit the Twenty-first Amendment - repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and returning to the states the power to regulate alcohol - to state conventions for ratification.

On March 13, 1933, a few days after he was sworn in as president, Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to modify the Volstead Act to legalize 3.2 percent alcohol beer to provide needed tax revenue. By April 7, beer was legal in most of the country. On December 5, 1933, Utah became the thirty-sixth state to pass the Twenty-first Amendment. National alcohol prohibition was repealed, effective immediately.

In late 1933 and in 1934, bills creating state alcohol control agencies sped through state legislatures. The model for most of the legislation had been written by a group of policy-oriented researchers and attorneys associated with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and with policy institutes he had created or financially supported (Levine 1985). Within two years of repeal nearly every state had an agency to supervise the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages, and alcohol had ceased to be a controversial and politically charged issue. The production, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages today is still largely governed by the alcohol control structures designed and implemented at that rime.