How Dry We Were: The Repeal of Prohibition
During a 1928 congressional hearing on national prohibition, Pauline Morton Sabin, niece of the Morton Salt founder and wife of the chairman of the board of Guaranty Trust Co., listened as Ella Bolle, president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, roared "I represent the women of America." Sabin leaned back and thought, "Well lady here's one woman you don't represent." Sabin knew the evils of alcohol, but she also knew that until national prohibition became law most people practiced temperance; prohibition had spawned a hip-flask society that disrespected the law and corrupted America's youth. So in order to protect American homes, children, and the Constitution, Sabin founded The Woman's Organization for National Prohibition Reform(WONPR). Sabin's WONPR then joined with The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), the original anti-prohibition group, to spearhead the drive to do what seemed impossible--repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.
The twentieth century dawned in the United States with the bright light of an idea that burst into a reform movement that eventually captured both political parties--Progressivism, the belief in the perfectibility of mankind. President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, led America into World War I to make the world safe for democracy; meanwhile, other progressives sought to make America safe for sobriety.
Alcohol prohibition enjoyed a long tradition on the American scene. Maine became the first state to legally ban alcohol in 1851, and several states passed similar laws during the next sixty years. Then in 1913, the Anti-Saloon League set their sights on a national ban through passage of a constitutional amendment. Only an amendment, they argued, would permanently solve the problem because any national prohibition law passed by one congress could be overturned with a simple majority vote by some future congress. An amendment required a three-quarters majority of all the states. Taking advantage of the War Prohibition Act, which banned the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages containing more than 2.75% alcohol content, the anti-alcohol lobby pushed through Congress their holy grail--the national prohibition amendment.
The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. To enforce the law and set a maximum alcohol content for beverages, Congress enacted the Volstead Act, which proved more severe than most people expected. The wartime anti-alcohol act had allowed people to drink light beer and wine, and many previous state prohibition laws had banned only hard liquor. Assuming national prohibition would follow these precedents, many beer and wine drinkers had favored passage of the amendment. Even some breweries favored the new amendment since it would eliminate competition from the liquor distillers; therefore, the brewers and many other Americans were shocked at the passage of the Vostead Act, which decreed .05 percent as the maximum alcohol content. A Literary Digest poll taken in 1922 found 40 percent of respondents favored light wines and beer; the poll also revealed 62 percent of working men favoring more lenient enforcement of national prohibition. The overzealous Volstead Act sowed the seeds of repeal. Rather than just "wets," against prohibition, and "drys," for prohibition, the Volstead Act created a large middle group that David Kyvig, in his excellent book Repealing National Prohibition, labeled "moists." These fence straddlers eventually decided prohibition's fate.
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