The Eighteenth Amendment
Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors in the United States. It was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 and remains the only constitutional amendment ever repealed.
The temperance movement had been a major force in American public life for nearly a century before Prohibition. Religious revivals, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Anti-Saloon League built a coalition that gradually moved state and federal policy toward restricting alcohol. By the time the United States entered World War I, more than half the states had already adopted some form of prohibition. The wartime emphasis on conserving grain and the suspicion of German-American brewers added political weight to the cause. Congress proposed the Eighteenth Amendment in December 1917, and the states ratified it in January 1919.
The amendment took effect one year later. It reads: "After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited." Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, commonly called the Volstead Act, to enforce it. The amendment did not ban consumption itself, only the commercial supply chain.
Prohibition's consequences arrived quickly. Bootlegging became a major industry. Organized crime expanded into the alcohol trade, building the financial base that would persist long after repeal. Speakeasies flourished. Federal enforcement was overwhelmed by the scale of illegal commerce. Tax revenue from legal alcohol disappeared at the moment the Great Depression made every dollar matter. Public opinion turned. The Twenty-First Amendment was proposed and ratified in 1933, the only time an entire constitutional amendment has been repealed. The Eighteenth Amendment is remembered now as a cautionary case study in the limits of national social policy enforced by constitutional command. It is also a reminder that the Constitution is amendable in both directions. The same process that wrote Prohibition into the founding document took it out again fourteen years later.