The return of alcohol in the United States
Another factor which the temperance movement didn’t anticipate was the change in the roles played by women in society in the 1920s. The introduction of the speakeasy and the creation of new cocktails, coupled with jazz and all the other trimmings of the Roaring Twenties led to women joining men in nightclubs, bars, and saloons. Women of the younger generation, their right to vote secure, took up the habits of clubbing, drinking, and smoking. The flapper girl became a symbol of the age. The moralists in the temperance movement recoiled in shock, but their protestations fell on deaf ears. The fun of illicit consumption ensured that prohibition was dead.
Still, it remained the law of the land, and the federal government and state governments spent fortunes to enforce it, or at least give the appearance they were attempting enforcement. Even before the eighteenth amendment was ratified anti-prohibition organizations – the antithesis of the temperance movement – were lobbying against prohibition. More than forty such organizations existed by 1928, basing their arguments for repeal on everything from personal liberty to the loss of the revenue stream from lost taxes to the healthfulness of drinking beer and wine. During the depression, it was the tax argument which carried the most weight. The federal government needed the money.
On March 4, 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as President of the United States. On March 22, he amended the Volstead Act, exempting beer of up to 3.2% alcohol content by weight (about 4% by volume) to be produced and sold in the United States. Light wines were also allowed to be sold and consumed. Although many states hesitated to allow beer and wine within their borders, particularly in the religion dominated Deep South, Prohibition was no longer a federal law. Hundreds of local breweries across the country had not survived the 13 years of the nation being totally dry, but many were soon back in business.
The repeal of Prohibition via the twenty-first Amendment used a mechanism in the Constitution which had never been used to that time. Up until then, states had voted to ratify amendments in their legislatures. The writers of the twenty-first Amendment, supported by both Houses of Congress, specified that the amendment would be ratified by the states in ratifying conventions. The writers, (at the urging of FDR) used this method, which is authorized and described in Article V of the Constitution, to circumvent state legislators in the pockets of temperance movement organizations. As of 2018, the 21st Amendment remains the only Amendment to the Constitution so ratified.
Proposed by Congress in February, 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified by December 5, and put in force on December 15. Besides being the only amendment to be ratified in the manner described, it is also the only amendment repealing an earlier amendment to the Constitution. It was a severe blow to the international temperance movement, but not a fatal one, as several of the organizations returned to the level from whence they came, focusing their efforts on the control of the consumption of alcohol on the local and state level in the United States, through the moral condemnation of alcohol, taught to youths in the schools.