From Temperance To The 18th Amendment And The Politics Behind It

Prohibition didn’t rise because America suddenly forgot how to party. It rose because a lot of powerful groups saw alcohol as the key that unlocked the problem they cared about most, and they were willing to align long enough to win.

We sit down with Dr. Sean Beieburg to trace the long runway from the 1850s temperance movement and state prohibition waves to the national shock of the 18th Amendment. Along the way, we map the coalition that made Prohibition feel inevitable at the time: women’s rights activists focused on domestic abuse and household finances, Progressive Era reformers convinced government could engineer social good, business leaders thinking about workplace safety and liability, “good government” crusaders targeting saloon-based machine politics, and World War I era nationalists pushing anti-German sentiment and wartime resource arguments. It’s a civics story about incentives, not just morals.

Then we get into the constitutional mechanics and the fine print that changed everything. We explain why federal prohibition is different from state bans, how the Anti-Saloon League operated as a ruthless single-issue interest group, and why critics like Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge warned that nationalizing a morals issue would damage federalism and trigger backlash. We also break down the Volstead Act, the meaning of “intoxicating liquors,” and the political logic behind exemptions for sacramental wine and home cider. If you want a clear, historically grounded guide to Prohibition, the 18th Amendment, and the politics of enforcement, this conversation delivers.

Subscribe for more U.S. constitutional history, share this with a friend who thinks Prohibition was just a footnote, and leave a review if you want us to keep building these deep-dive civics episodes. What part of the Prohibition coalition surprised you most?

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Transcript

Welcome And Prohibition Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in Year. Today, I feel like we should have a drink as we talk about this, but it is a work day and it is 1:30. So probably not the best use for time. Today we're talking about the rise of prohibition and the 18th Amendment with Dr. Sean Vineberg. Dr. Beinberg, my family is Irish Catholic. And I mean, prohibition as a Catholic, we still got sacramental wine, but what like why does the why does anybody care about prohibition, about whether people at this time are having a drink at their local watering hole?

Who Backed Prohibition And Why

How It Became A Federal Amendment

Volstead Act And What Counts

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Right. So prohibition, uh, we could we should also distinguish between the sort of the national implementation of prohibition, like Al Capone, Tommy guns, that kind of stuff, and the broader, the broader desire for a government constraint or reduction of drinking, which has much older roots. So if you read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which is published in 1857, 1859, he has this funniest section where he's complaining about these weird laws that are happening in Maine. So in the 1850s, New England, uh again, we think of New England as either very progressive or very secular or earlier very Catholic. But New England has still got a chunk of old school Puritan descendants who maybe they might not have Calvinist theology anymore. They still have a lot of those ideas. They certainly have the social reform angle. And so there is a statewide movement in the 1850s to eliminate to eliminate or reduce alcohol consumption. And it grows out of the temperance movement, which is basically a voluntary reform concern. And so there's a wave of prohibition in the 1850s that mostly gets repealed or struck down by courts. And then you have a second wave in the 1880s, particularly as new states are entering the Union in the plains areas. So, like South Dakota, for example. And then you get a third wave in 1903-ish, basically, which is trying to have it in more states. But now, and again, constitutionally, this is a very easy thing at the state, because the states have under the police powers authority to regulate health, welfare, safety, and morals. And as I'll talk about in a second, there are people that think prohibition checks one or all of those boxes. So the state level, as a constitutional issue, state prohibition, not that interesting. At the federal level, they will get interesting. So why is there support like why okay? So the state can do this. Why would they want to? Is the Liz question. And particularly, why does prohibition pass so I mean it's only a handful of states in the first two waves, but it's pretty popular. It's half the states by you know in the that third wave. The question is like, what who wants this? I I sort of when I have told people this, I always invert the question and say, who doesn't want it? Prohibition looks really weird to us today, but it's wildly overdetermined then. So who wants prohibition? The main group are women's rights activists that view this as a way to suppress, at the very worst, spousal battery and domestic abuse. The more moderate version is your husband has just come out of the factory and is drinking away what little earnings he has. So it's making it much harder to sort of steward the family's finance. So women's rights groups, it's not on, it's not surprising, one of the largest prohibitionist groups, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, right? So they're very committed to this. Progressives who have the view that you know the power of government can be used to advance the social good, right? So they're gonna say, ah, alcohol is bad for various reasons. So they're sort of invested in this. Some of them even is the testing ground for other sorts of social policies. Both racists and folks who don't like racism are for prohibition for different reasons. Racists in the South will say quite horrible things, in effect, saying alcohol makes our black southerners do crazy things, and so we need to basically have a way to constrain them. So we want to take alcohol away. Then they'll quietly rig up gerrymanders of like, well, white people could still drink. But Huey Long gets in trouble. This is jumping ahead a little bit, but gets in trouble when he talks to Al Smith and says why he wants prohibition, and it's a version of this, and Al Smith apparently, and then keep in mind Huey Long is drunk while he's endorsing prohibition to Al Smith. Uh and Al Smith, who's at this point the head of the Empire State Building Corporation, so he has like an office on the top, threatens to have Huey Long thrown out uh and not down the elevator. So racists basically want to say, look, we we want to keep this out of the hands of black Southerners. Skeptic, skeptics of racism, you know, some of the folks that are later affiliated with like the NAACP, they're interested in it, A, because they think kind of along the grounds of this will help, you know, black workers don't have a ton of disposable income. And so this is a way to sort of help them save money. So, you know, they have a sort of a version of the women's group, which is like this will help sort of social uplift for the, you know, the working class. They also have a version, a vision of it with the federal version of prohibition that says maybe we can actually make the 14th and 15th amendments stick if we can make this 18th amendment stick. I'll come back to that argument in a second. Okay. Business people are for prohibition because states are starting to modify their liability regimes, where if you and I are factory workers and I cut your arm off, under the old legal doctrines, you get to sue me if we're both factory workers. Joke's on you. I'm also a poor working staff who can't pay you anything, right? So they're starting to reallocate the responsibility to the employers to create a safe workforce. Well, if you're an employer and you've got a bunch of fancy machinery that's going to cut people's arms off, you want to make sure your workers are paying attention and alert. So they're for prohibition. Good government progressive reformers are convinced prohibition or excuse me, are convinced alcohol and saloons are a way to basically run evil machine politics. Like you can sort of organize all the dirty politics around the saloon. So they're for prohibition. So basically everybody is for prohibition except for, and then you even have a split, and then religious folks uh are for it, rural folks are for it because they think this is, you know, this is bad, this is immoral, or and or this is like foreign culture, right? Particularly beer. They're more okay with hard cider, but particularly beer. Well, jumping ahead a little bit, jump to World War I. German stuff doesn't look very popular. So like nationalists and warfighters are for it. They also want to impose prohibition because they don't want to use a bunch of grain that they need for the war effort for distilling alcohol, right? So like Hawks are for it. Theodore Roosevelt is for it. So who is against it? Some of many of the Catholic leaders that basically are concerned this is effectively a cultural attack against them, and eventually, sort of states' rights nerds who don't want it at the federal level. And that's basically it. Pretty much everybody else is for it. So the question is not like why prohibition? The question is like who was really against it? And it was not nearly uh as many as you would think. So that's state prohibition. So how does it get to the federal level? Well, obviously, alcohol is a good one, you can ship it across state lines. So you would think the most natural thing would just say, ah, we'll just make it illegal under federal law to ship it across state lines or to ship it across state lines into a state that doesn't want it. Right? If you and so that way, if you're in New York and you want to let the liquor flow, great. But New York can't send liquor to Massachusetts. And so this would seemingly be a system that everybody wins. And so they experiment with this with the law that they propose that the Anti-Saloon League, which is the chief lobbyist group, proposes. And then they say this is a way to protect states' rights. It was like, oh, I guess that makes sense. Okay. This gets you prohibition plus states' rights. And then they say, ah, but what if we had a national amendment? What? That's a slightly different proposal. And so this gets you to federal prohibition, which because the the states are pushing this aggressively, and the Anti-Saloon League, I think many scholars would say is the most effective interest group in the history of the United States. They run an incredibly tight ship. They are because one of the problems interest groups have today is like they got they get sucked into the broader. Like, if you're the NRA, you are actually more powerful if you only care about guns, and you will protect a pro-gun Democrat and oppose an anti-gun Republican. Right? If you are the Sierra Club, you are most powerful if you are protecting pro-environmentalist Republicans and attacking anti-environment. Like, but so the anti now interest groups get sucked into like, well, the NRA is just a conservative group. The Sierra Club has to comment on economic issues or racial issues or whatever, right? Like they're coalitional. The Anti-Saloon Link says, no, we don't care what we will work with racists, we will work with the NAACP, we will work with communists, we will work with libertarians. We don't care. The one issue that we care about is prohibition. And they build an incredibly impressive machine. And so they're able to basically say, we have pick whatever percentage of the electorate in your state. We will mobilize them because this is the only one issue they care about. And so they are able to dominate American politics for a few years in a way that no interest group has ever come close, probably in American history. Maybe the next closest would be like the grand army of the Republic Union veterans, like shaking down the feds for more generous, like war pensions. Like that's probably the only equivalent. They are so powerful. And so they're able to push through support for a federal amendment. That is much more controversial because now you have a split between people who might say, like, I'm for prohibition, but I don't want strong federal power. Or interestingly, people who say, I'm for prohibition, and people will not like having a regime foisted on them from if you're a New Yorker, you might be willing to tolerate moderate prohibition where like we're gonna clamp down on distilled liquor or something like that, right? But do you want to have no beer because they said that in Kansas? No. And so you're gonna start hating your neighbors. And so they're the actual one of the uh prohibition party candidate in 1912 says this will destroy prohibition if we actually nationalize it like this, because it will cause a backlash. And so you see, Elihu Root, we've talked about a bunch of times, is one of the chief opponents of this. And he says this will destroy federalism. He even tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn the amendment as itself unconstitutional, which is a wild argument. Interesting. So there is so but that's how prohibition basically gets built. It gets built. The chief sponsor of it is a guy named Morris Shepherd in Texas. So originally they always call it the Shepard Amendment for a few years, but it's mostly the progressives that are pushing it, a little bit more so. Southerners push it a little harder than Northeasterners do. But it's it's overdetermined. It's just most folks uh are for it. And so that's what gets you the 18th Amendment. Harding, who's a senator, gets them to agree to this section where it says if we can't get it in seven years, it expires. This is what will eventually kill the ERA. They put the same language in the ERA in the 70s, because they're thinking that the state legislators will block it. But it turns out the anti-saloon league can push them around too. So even state legislators, you know, by the time that the prohibition is getting pushed through, about three-fifths of the states, federal prohibition, about three-fifths of the states have it banned, but they're all uh taking it out themselves at the state level, even before the federal one goes into effect. Because there's a lag of a few years, which then gets you to the Volstead Act, which is not the 18th Amendment per se, but it's what mostly implements it. Uh the Volstead, and note that the 18th Amendment does not create a federal power for prohibition, it creates a mandate. It's very unusual in that it doesn't say Congress shall have power to do this. It says the uh importate the alcohol for beverage purposes is stopped. And then it has some strange language on how it's implemented, and we'll talk about that with the fall of prohibition, the interaction of the states and the feds in pushing it through. But the Volstedt Act is what implements it. There had also been some folks who thought that prohibition because it says intoxicating liquors. Liz, what is an intoxicating liquor?

SPEAKER_00 13:53

One that gets you drunk.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

So that's how many folks would argue. But at the time, there were many people who said that it only referred to hard alcohol. And so there were some people that thought that it was a term of art. And so, in fact, there were even some brewers that thought, aha, we can like wipe out, you know, wipe out gin and vodka in the harder liquors. And so they thought this was a way to basically wipe out their competitors, a few of them. And then they passed the Volstead Act, and it says basically the loose definition. If it has like 0.1% or some really small number of alcohol by volume, it's liquor and the feds will construct will go after it. And so then you had people say, oh, oh, that was a mistake. Maybe we didn't really want that for the Volstead Act. But the Anti-Salutin League was able to keep the Volstead Act protected for quite a while. So that's the rise of prohibition.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

That's so interesting. So I do want to go back to this because I always, my students always thought it was interesting that during Catholic Mass, you receive you the you know, the blood of Christ is wine. So why was the Catholic Church allowed to still have a quote unquote intoxicating substance in church?

Backlash Fears And Rule Of Law

SPEAKER_01 15:08

So Wheeler, Wayne Wheeler, who's the head of the Anti-Saloon League, uh, is a again, he really is one of the most impressive, like effective political operators in American history. And he basically just wants to get the amendment through and he wants that 0.1 ABV. He's willing to negotiate for other things if he can get those things. And so he puts in two exceptions. So one, he doesn't want to cause complications fighting the church, fighting the Catholic Church, bad optics. Uh, not only that, many Jewish synagogues use it, use a sacramental line as well. So he basically was like, I don't want to fight the Catholic Church, I don't want to fight. So, like, you can have this exemption. This will end up being a problem when some groups will use this as a way, some less than scrupulous uh religious officials will use this as a way to uh order a little more than their congregation might require. But even then, Volstead or um uh Wheeler doesn't want to touch that. The other wrinkle is what if you basically are a farmer and you just want to throw like some of your apples in a still and make some cider? That is a gray issue in the Volstead Act. So it says for purposes of basically home generated cider, whether it's intoxicating is a question of fact to be tried before a jury, which creates a de facto legalization of farmers. So it buys them off. Uh like, hey, I want to, you know, I want to drink from some of my extra apples. The feds won't bother you with that. Some of the states do, but the feds don't. And so Wheeler is very good about like just more or less buying off what he thinks are gonna be the veto players. So so that's your answer to your question. So you know now, culturally, Catholics are still more likely to have come from cultures where social drinking is also a thing. So it's not like we're like, oh, well, I can drink in church, so we're good. This will cause, when we talk about the fall of prohibition, one one of the complications. But I I would be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about Henry Cabot Lodge. We talked about the Lodge bill many podcasts ago, which was the effort to have federal, basically federal supervision, not micromanagement of federal observers, basically, for Southern Poles. And it fails, and he basically gets frustrated. Lodge, by this point, 30 years later, is like the old man of the Senate. And Lodge opposes the 18th Amendment. And he says, look, I'm against this on federalism and states' rights grounds. Morals issues are part under our constitution. That's a state issue. But he also says, you do not understand this will cause a backlash. This will both empower the federal government and it will weaken it because people will lose faith in it when they feel like the federal government is like forcing them to do something that they hate. And so Lodge is one of the chief opponents in the U.S. Senate. Lodge and Root. Again, uh, these are some of Theod Roosevelt's old cronies we've talked about. William Howard Taft is another one. William Howard Taft is ferociously opposed to the 18th Amendment, which is really awkward for him because later he will be appointed to the Supreme Court and he will have to enforce it. And Taft does. Taft is one of the most zealous enforcers because he takes the perspective of, look, I lost. I took an oath to the Constitution, I'm on the Supreme Court. You idiots did this. Which is also the perspective that Calvin Coolidge will take as a governor. And he'll the people in Massachusetts a few years later will say, oops, we didn't want that. And they will try to repeal their state law. And he will say, look, I don't like prohibition, but like this is the law. I took an oath to the Constitution, so deal with it. Same thing that the guy in New York, Nathan Miller, who had also been in so there's this. So in my book about prohibition, I have this like section where I'm very sympathetic. So there's a few people who say, Prohibition is a mistake. Please, please, please, please, please, please don't do this. And they do it. I'm like, well, my job is to enforce the law, and to their credit, it's not like it's not a good move for Coolidge to tell Massachusetts voters, like, yeah, I'm going to keep clamping down on your prohibit or on your alcohol, or for Miller in New York. And they suffer politically for it. There's there's other characters like that, but they're the most famous ones. So the prohibition puts people who care about the rule of law in a really tough position, which partly partly helps explain why prohibition will have trouble in a few years. And spoilers for a future podcast: Prohibition is repealed by another amendment.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

I don't know if that's a spoiler. If that's a spoiler, I think that you should be reading your constitution more often. Dr. Beinberg, thank you. And again, our next podcast will be on the follow-up prohibition.