Prohibition
in the United States was a national ban on the sale, manufacture, and
transportation of alcohol,
in place from 1920 to 1933. The ban was
mandated by the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead
Act set down the rules for enforcing the ban and defined the
types of alcoholic beverages that were prohibited. Private ownership
and consumption of alcohol was not made illegal. Prohibition
ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first
Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, on December
5, 1933.
The
introduction of alcohol prohibition and its subsequent enforcement in
law was a hotly debated issue. The contemporary prohibitionists
("dries") labeled this as the "Noble Experiment" and presented it as a victory for public morals and health. The
consumption of alcohol overall went down by half in the 1920s; and it
remained below pre-Prohibition levels until the 1940s.
Anti-prohibitionists
("wets") criticized the alcohol ban as an intrusion of
mainly rural Protestant ideals on a central aspect of urban,
immigrant and Catholic everyday life. Effective enforcement of the
alcohol ban during the Prohibition Era proved to be very difficult
and led to widespread flouting of the law. The lack of a solid
popular consensus for the ban resulted in the growth of vast criminal
organizations, including the modern American
Mafia, and various other criminal cliques. Widespread disregard
of the law also generated rampant corruption among politicians and
within police