The Eighteenth Amendment, enacted in 1919, prohibited alcohol. Fourteen years later, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Fine.
It’s no small task amending the Constitution; it takes two thirds of Congress, and three fourths of the state legislatures. And yet, a mere fourteen years went by before the country totally reversed what it had done in 1919. That mystifies me.
Can anyone here imagine Congress repealing the draconian drug laws it has enacted over the past two decades? I think we would all be shocked if a Senator or Representative were to stand up and say “Well, we have record numbers of people in prison, many for non-violent crimes, and we haven’t made much of a dent in the problem. Maybe we should think about legalizing it, or at least reducing the penalties.” Yet that seems to be pretty much what happened in 1933 when the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Common sense prevailed. And even more amazingly, Congress admitted it had been wrong.
Maybe I’m making incorrect assumptions here. Maybe the drug war isn’t a very good analogy for Prohibition (I’ve even read claims that Prohibition was sucessful in reducing the nation’s overall alcohol consumption.). But it seems to me that the government made a 180-degree turn in 1933. There was enough support in 1919 to enact a Constitutional Amendment. Had there been a complete reversal of public opinion by 1933? Does Congress respond to public opinion? And what happened to the Prohibition movement? Normally, when a political movement loses, it dusts itself off and gears up for another the fight. But the Prohibition movement seems to have simply given up. There are no serious political figures that I know of who support alcohol being made illegal. So what’s the deal?
There was a major change in public opinion. It clear that prohibition wasn’t working (it may have reduced consumption, but it make drinking fashionable to people who didn’t drink before), at least not the way the proponents of it claimed it would. People still continued to drink, and the government was spending millions trying to stop it. Once the Depression hit, there was also the argument that a small tax on liquor would be a good way to raise funds.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Free coinage of silver is pretty much dead, as is McCarthyism. Movements fade as the conditions that create them change.
Earl of Sandwhich, part of your answer lies in a minor nitpick with your factual assumptions. There is actually a second way of amending the Constitution:
Const., art. V (emphasis added). Every amendment except one has been ratified by state legislatures rather than conventions. The one exception is the 21st amendment.
The temperance movement grew up as a primarily religious impulse in the 19th century, marshaled significant organizational and political resources in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and capitalized on the religious revival that followed World War I in order to enshrine their agenda in the Constitution. Many politicians privately opposed prohibition, but the temperance lobby was visible, vocal, and well-organized, and their opponents were not. Congress proposed the 18th amendment, and heavily-lobbied legislators across the nation ratified it.
Prohibition as a social experiment was largely a failure. Far from inspiring a teetotaling society, it simply drove social drinking underground, and thereby turned ordinary and otherwise law-abiding citizens (including many politicians) into criminals. It drove liquor sales from legitimate businesses onto the black market, and fueled the growth of organized crime.
The failure was soon evident, but opposing or repealing Prohibition was still politically risky. But when public sentiment in favor of repeal eventually surfaced out in the open, Congress gave it a hearing, and came up with a novel solution: it submitted the question not to the career politicians who populated most state legislatures, but rather to conventions elected for the sole purpose of voting on whether the 18th amendment ought to be repealed. Many “wet” candidates, who had no interest in a long-term political career, let alone in serving in any legislature, and were thus not worried about the dwindling temperance lobby, ran for election as one-time-only delegates to these one-time-only conventions. And the people, voting by secret ballot, elected them. The convention method of ratification furnished the political cover necessary for repeal, and the 21st amendment was ratified in 1933.
By most accounts, there was indeed a major shift in public opinion in the intervening years between Prohibition (and its enforcement legislation, the Volstead Act) and its repeal. The enactment of Prohibition, heavily influenced by the Anti-Saloon League and religious groups, had caused some…side effects…that was not anticipated by the public at large.
According to this site, annual per capita consumption of alcohol did decline from 2.6 gals to 0.97. The catch was, according to public and literary perception at least, the increased organized crime activity (Chicago being one of the more notorious locales) and corruption of government by those interests. Enforcement was also difficult and generally ineffective. The notoriety of Al Capone, who derived support from bootlegging, drew national outrage and media headlines.
By the Great Depression, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, a powerful group of businessmen and influential citizens which now included the Rockefellers, got their argument. Prohibition, they argued, was depriving people of jobs and government of taxes. The AAPA were elite industrialists mostly who saw the entire affair as sheer idiocy that took away their leisure and increased their taxes while trampled over their rights. There was also a shift away from Victorian values and more toward individualism as mass media, anti-Prohibition literature, and the consumer economy of mass production arose. Wealthy women’s groups, for example, now campaigned for repeal and individual freedoms, unlike just a mere decade or so ago when they clamored for “protection of the home and family.” FDR campaigned on the promise to amend the Volstead Act. Election of 1932 saw the AAPA lavishing funds to elect anti-Prohibition congressmen and senators. The lower classes never liked Prohibition in the first place, being ones most affected. Senators were told that repeal could even soothe the agitations of workers, now in the throes of the Depression and most susceptible to socialist influence.
The end result of course was a public opinion strongly against Prohibition, now led by a power elite capable of doing something about it. The Depression Congress first amended Volstead, then passed the Twenty-First Amendment. To circumvent state legislatures still controlled by rural Protestant “dries,” ratifying conventions were used in each state with delegates directly elected. Ratification, thus, came easily when there were easily 70+ percent majorities for repeal.
Here’s a decent site describing the issue as well as well the site I linked above.
As for the Prohibition movement, it temporarily went away due to public sentiment. But, neo-temperance came about in the 1960s and remains to this day. They have, by evidence of the “noble experiment” as Hoover described Prohibition, mostly accepted that total prohibition was impractical. Prohibitionists had their victory and saw very little improvement from it. Neotemperance now focuses on “responsibility” and “stability”, words that impose a less harsh standard but still imply a certain stigma to alcohol consumption and attacks “alcohol abuse.”
I guess the new movement for “prohibition” focuses on the drugs now. Alcohol has become more or less an accepted facet of society, as social drinking holds very little negative connotation with it.
The article How Alcohol Prohibition Was Ended, by Richard M. Evans has an interesting analysis of how the convention process to repeal the amendment was successfully managed. The campaign was a one-of-a-kind political masterpiece and is worth some attention.