(HOST) This week we observe the seventy-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment – which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment. And if you think that’s just dull Constitutional legal history, think again. Here’s commentator and executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council Peter Gilbert to explain.
(GILBERT) Seventy-five years ago this Friday, with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment, Prohibition – and the Eighteenth Amendment – were repealed. It is the only time a Constitutional amendment has repealed another amendment.
Prohibition had been promoted since shortly after the Civil War. It was fueled in significant part by anti-immigrant sentiment (against Irish and Italian Catholics in particular) and by World War I anti-German passion, which Prohibition advocates intentionally linked to beer.
Prohibition supporters saw alcohol as the primary source of virtually all social ills. Historian Peter Carlson writes that when it went into effect, evangelist Billy Sunday predicted that "slums will soon be a memory," prisons will be turned into factories and jails into storehouses. And he exalted that – quote – "Hell will forever be for rent."
Would that human folly and vice were so easily defeated! The effect of Prohibition was not what had been anticipated: even though they were illegal, the number of drinking establishments increased dramatically. In 1925, Variety Magazine pointed out that the Times Square area of New York City had 2,500 speakeasies, where before Prohibition there had been only 300 bars. Total alcoholic consumption may have declined nationwide, but lawlessness, violence, and unhealthy, furtive drinking increased dramatically, and organized crime and a black market economy grew exponentially.
By 1933, a good deal of popular opinion had swung the other way, but members of Congress who wanted to repeal Prohibition were concerned that the temperance lobby still had enormous clout in state legislatures. So the challenge was how to get the repeal of Prohibition ratified by the states. The US Constitution says that three-fourth of the states need to ratify constitutional amendments proposed by Congress; that can be done either by their legislatures or by state conventions. Every other amendment – before and since – has been ratified by state legislatures, but when Congress voted the Twenty-First Amendment, it said that the amendment needed to be ratified by the necessary number of state conventions called specifically for that purpose. Political problem solved.
Prohibition lasted from early 1920 until December 5, 1933, when the State of Utah ratified the Twenty-first Amendment. The nation-wide dry spell that had lasted nearly thirteen years was over. Two years later, two alcoholics from Vermont, Bill Wilson, from East Dorset, and Bob Smith, from St. Johnsbury, started an organization whose twelve step program has proven far more effective than Prohibition ever was – Alcoholics Anonymous.
And in 1999, Time Magazine named Bill Wilson one of the top twenty Heroes and Icons of the twentieth century.