Prohibition history
The 21st Amendment.
The 21st Amendment repealed national Prohibition on 5 December 1933, when Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify. It is the only amendment to repeal another, and the only one ever ratified by state conventions rather than state legislatures — a route chosen specifically because the drys still controlled too many legislatures.
Why it happened when it did
Repeal was an economic argument that won a moral one. Through the 1920s the wet case was constitutional and cultural, and it lost every election it fought. After 1929 it became a budget line, and it stopped losing.
The arithmetic was brutal. Federal revenue collapsed with the Depression while relief spending rose; liquor excise had been a large share of federal income before 1913 and could be again within months. The brewing and distilling industries could put men back to work immediately, with plant that was still standing. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, bankrolled substantially by industrialists who expected liquor taxes to reduce their own, made exactly that case and made it loudly.
The Democratic platform of 1932 called for repeal outright. Roosevelt ran on it, won forty-two of forty-eight states, and the lame-duck Congress read the result correctly: the repeal amendment passed both houses in February 1933, before he had even taken office.
Ratification by convention
Article V allows Congress to send an amendment either to the state legislatures or to specially elected state conventions. Every other amendment in American history has gone to the legislatures. This one did not, and the reason was arithmetic rather than principle.
Rural districts were over-represented in most state legislatures, and rural districts were dry. The Anti-Saloon League’s whole strategy had been built on that fact for forty years. Convention delegates, by contrast, would be elected statewide on a single question, by an electorate that had just voted for Roosevelt.
It worked, and the margins were not close. Convention elections through 1933 returned wet delegates by overwhelming majorities in state after state — including in places that had ratified the 18th Amendment without a fight fifteen years earlier. Ten months from proposal to adoption is among the fastest ratifications on record.
South Carolina rejected it. North Carolina declined to hold a convention at all. Eight states never acted on it, which changed nothing: thirty-six was the number, and Utah supplied it on 5 December.
Section two, and why your state is different
| Section 1 | The 18th Amendment is repealed. |
|---|---|
| Section 2 | Transporting or importing liquor into any state in violation of that state’s laws is prohibited. |
| Section 3 | Ratification by state convention, within seven years. |
The second section did the lasting damage
Section 1 ended Prohibition. Section 2 built what replaced it, and it is the reason buying a bottle of wine is a different legal experience in Pennsylvania, Utah and Nevada.
By writing state liquor law into the Constitution itself, the amendment gave the states a power over alcohol that they have over almost nothing else — strong enough to survive challenges under the Commerce Clause that would sink an equivalent rule about any other product. Seventeen states responded by becoming the wholesaler, the retailer, or both: the control states, where the government literally owns the liquor stores.
The rest built the three-tier system, which separates producer, wholesaler and retailer by law and forbids any of them from owning the others. It was designed to prevent the return of the tied house — the brewery-owned saloon that the temperance movement had, not unreasonably, hated — and it is still the basic architecture of the American drinks trade ninety years later.
Dry counties are the other inheritance. Section 2 let states delegate the choice downward, and hundreds of counties across the South and Midwest took it. Mississippi stayed dry statewide until 1966, more than thirty years after repeal.
What happened to the bars
Not what the speakeasy proprietors hoped. Legal liquor came back with a licensing regime attached, and the new state control boards were in no mood to hand licences to people with padlock records and basements with one exit. A great many rooms simply closed, and the trade moved to restaurants, hotels and newly built taverns that could satisfy an inspector.
The word saloon did not come back either. Several states banned it outright in their 1933 licensing acts, which is why the American drinking room spent the rest of the century being called a bar, a tavern, a lounge or a cocktail lounge instead.
Of the bars operating today that claim continuous service from before 1933, only a small number can actually demonstrate it — and the ones that can are mostly the legitimate businesses that had been running liquor as a sideline rather than the speakeasies proper.
What repeal did not restore
It did not return the country to 1919. Fourteen years had rearranged American drinking permanently, and several of those changes are still in place.
Beer lost. Before Prohibition the United States had well over a thousand breweries, most of them local; a few hundred reopened, and consolidation did the rest, until by the 1970s a handful of national brewers made almost everything Americans drank. Mixed drinks won, because a generation had learned to drink spirits disguised and kept the habit. Women stayed in the bars, because the room that admitted them had replaced the saloon that did not.
And the criminal organisations that Prohibition had capitalised did not go out of business when their main product was legalised. They moved into gambling, narcotics, labour racketeering and the unions, with national structures, working relationships and political protection that had not existed in 1920. That is the single most expensive thing the experiment bought, and it was the hardest to undo.
Repeal Day
5 December is still marked, mostly by the drinks trade and mostly since the mid-2000s, when a deliberate campaign to revive it coincided with the cocktail revival. It is not a federal holiday and never has been.
It is worth noting what did not happen on the day. There was no national flood of legal liquor: most states had no licensing system ready, stocks were thin after fourteen years, and in much of the country the first legal drink took weeks or months to arrive. The photographs of crowds at bars on 5 December 1933 are mostly from the handful of cities that were prepared.