Prohibition Ends: The Ban on Alcohol Concludes

America's thirteen-year experiment with banning alcohol ended on December 5, 1933, when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, reaching the three-quarters threshold needed to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. Bars that had operated as speakeasies the day before threw open their doors legally. President Franklin Roosevelt reportedly celebrated by mixing martinis in the White House. Prohibition had been sold as a moral crusade. The temperance movement, drawing support from Protestant churches, women's suffrage advocates, and progressive reformers, had spent decades arguing that alcohol was the root cause of poverty, domestic violence, and political corruption. The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act defined anything above 0.5 percent alcohol as illegal. The law achieved some of its goals. Alcohol consumption initially dropped by roughly 30 percent, and alcohol-related hospital admissions declined. But the unintended consequences overwhelmed the benefits. Organized crime syndicates, led by figures like Al Capone in Chicago, built empires on bootlegging. Speakeasies outnumbered the legal saloons they replaced. Enforcement costs ballooned while tax revenue from alcohol vanished entirely. Corruption of police and federal agents became endemic. The Great Depression delivered the final blow. With unemployment at 25 percent and government revenue collapsing, the economic argument for re-legalizing a taxable commodity became irresistible. FDR campaigned on repeal in 1932 and won in a landslide. The Twenty-first Amendment remains the only constitutional amendment that repeals a previous one, a permanent reminder that even well-intentioned social engineering can produce consequences worse than the problem it aimed to solve.