3. Geography and Demography Allowed a Prohibitionist Minority to Impose Its Will on an Anti-Prohibition Majority
Mississippi’s legislature voted for the Eighteenth Amendment on January 8th, 1918, and The Magnolia State became the first to ratify Prohibition. Ratification by a total of 36 out of America’s then 48 states were needed for national Prohibition to go into effect, but geography and demography made the prohibitionists’ task relatively easy. As a rule of thumb, the cities were overwhelmingly against Prohibition, while the countryside was for it. However, most of the country’s big cities – and most of the population for that matter – were concentrated in relatively few states.
That made it possible for Prohibition’s advocates to completely write off America’s twelve most urbanized states – the Pennsylvanias, New Jerseys, and even the Connecticuts – and still achieve ratification with victories in the less populous and more rural states. It was an early twentieth-century version of Red America losing a popular vote to Blue America, and still winning an election. Prohibition was also helped by the era’s shockingly unequal apportionment of legislatures. Today, we take “one person, one vote” for granted. It was not always so, and it certainly was not so in the early twentieth century when Prohibition was ratified.