The 21st Amendment, for a number of reasons, remains unique within the pantheon of textual modifications to the Constitution. For one thing, it is one of a vanishingly small number of amendments – alongside the 13th and the 26th – to have been proposed and ratified both within the same calendar year and within one full year of its approval by Congress, namely between April 10th and December 5th, 1933. In terms of the latter, it progressed to ratification at about the same speed as its immediate predecessor, taking about eight months to reach the mandated three-fourths threshold. But whereas other amendments managed to achieve such a rapid pace while still appealing to the state legislatures for formal approval – and thus having to contend with state legislative timetables – the 21st Amendment is thus far the only one of its kind – pursuant to the terms of Article V of the Constitution – to have been ratified by state conventions summoned for that purpose. Perhaps most notable of all, however, is its very simply stated purpose. The 21st is the only amendment whose primary purpose, at the time of its proposal, was to invalidate an existing amendment to the Constitution. The amendment being invalidated was the aforementioned 18th, the purpose of which, recall, was to prohibit, “The manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes.” If the 18th Amendment, therefore, was effectively the Prohibition Amendment, then the 21st could be fairly described as the Anti-Prohibition Amendment.
As a practical matter, of course, the prohibitory regime that the 18th Amendment inaugurated never really functioned as its supporters originally intended. The culmination of decades of grassroots organization and lobbying on the part of dozens of pressure groups and countless high-minded activists, a federal ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages undeniably represented a tremendously impressive achievement. The “Drys” of the contemporary Temperance Movement had managed to transform themselves from a series of local lobby groups and social reformers into one of the most powerful non-partisan forces in contemporary American politics, and they remained exceptionally influential even after having secured their crowning achievement in 1920. But in terms of stopping people who wanted a drink from actually getting their hands on one, the 18th Amendment and its enforcing legislation were truly a dismal failure. The problem, of course, was that the commodity being prohibited was something which had already been widely available – either by retail purchase or home manufacture – for several centuries as of the early 1920s and around which American culture had developed a whole host of habits and traditions. While it might have been politically expedient, therefore, on the part of public officials in 1918 to come out in favor of a federal ban on the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages – largely out of fear for the tremendous political pressure which the Drys would bring to bear otherwise – no constitutional amendment was going to stop Americans of all stripes from seeking to slake their thirst. The amendment seemed to anticipate this by failing to make consumption unconstitutional as well, but in so doing – doubtless out of a keen sense of the impossibility of universally policing private behavior – its authors effectively admitted that theirs was fundamentally a doomed errand.
Indeed, at the outset – given adequate resources – it was relatively easy to circumvent the intended effects of the 18th Amendment. As the text thereof made a point of explaining, its prohibitory measures would not take effect until, “After one year from the ratification of this article [.]” Since this allowed for a year-long grace period during which manufacture and sale would remain legal in all jurisdictions where it had not already been banned by the states, anyone concerned with their inability to get their hands on a drink thereafter was perfectly free to buy up as much surplus as they could afford and store it away for later consumption. In an attempt to meet the resulting demand – and doubtless to provide some cushion for the restructuring that was to follow – distillers and breweries also stepped-up production, their end goal being to make and to sell as much alcohol as possible while it still remained legal to do so. But while Americans of all income levels doubtless tried to take part in this sudden spate of hording, most of the nation’s legal liquor supply ended up in the hands of a wealthy few. As the aforementioned grace period eventually lapsed, however, and demand for drink remained high, a variety of new vectors emerged by which comparatively less fortunate Americans were able to wet their whistles at will.
Rum-running was perhaps the most obvious means by which certain enterprising citizens sought to get their hands on intoxicating liquors. While the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was no longer legal in the United States after January of 1920, it remained perfectly permissible in neighboring Mexico and Canada, the result of which was an increase of production in those countries accompanied by the rapid emergence of a vast network of alcohol-trafficking smugglers. Given the often exceptionally rugged terrain which continues to characterize much of the American republic’s northern and southern border regions, the close connections which also continue to exist between certain border communities, and the sheer number of ports of entry in the continental United States, the overall success of such endeavors was almost guaranteed to be quite high, especially if the aforementioned smugglers sought out the right distributors and very deliberately invested their profits. As for the former, organized crime made for a blindingly obvious solution. Not only were organizations that already did business in areas like prostitution and illegal gambling in need of a steady supply of intoxicating beverages in order to keep the customers of their existing venues in the proper state of mind, but they were also already possessed of the resources, wherewithal, and political connections to ensure that whatever alcohol actually made it into the country was properly transported and stored with minimal law enforcement interference. And as for the latter, of course, it didn’t take a genius to conclude that customs agents and border guards being paid government wages could be made to forget just about anything if appropriately compensated for their trouble. An honest man, to be sure, might foul up the works now and then. But even if that meant the sacrifice of perhaps one shipment in fifty, the sheer amount of profit to be made would more than offset the occasional loss.
If demand remained higher than smuggling alone could supply, of course, one could always resort to manufacturing alcohol domestically. This would be illegal, naturally, and require its own share of thoughtful precautions. Running unlicensed distilleries and/or brewing operations would naturally call for a staff of experienced chemists and technicians, not to mention access to the proper equipment, facilities, raw materials, and transportation. Protecting the resulting enterprise from either rivals or government scrutiny would also seem to necessitate the hiring of drivers, guards, and lookouts, as well as a small handful of individuals willing to shoot, or be shot at by, people looking to threaten their livelihoods. Provided such thing could be secured, however, and costs kept as low as possible, there would still remain a tremendous profit ceiling notwithstanding the inherent dangers. Kept to a smaller scale, of course – for the purpose, say, of personal consumption rather than retail sale – many of the cited costs and hazards would fall away. Particularly adept members of the nation’s business community sought to make this latter course as easy as possible by continuing to actively sell many of the basic ingredients necessary to manufacture alcohol at home. Mashbills, for example – being the mix of grains brewers and distillers combine with water and then heat prior to fermentation – were still perfectly legal to buy and sell, while companies like Fruit Industries Ltd. – a front for the California Vineyardist Association – made millions of dollars retailing fruit juice concentrates that could be very easily converted into cheap, potent wines. Eventually, the federal government attempted to restrict these practices as well, but not before millions of American succeeded in fulfilling their own personal desire for drink.
At the bottom rung of the ladder – in terms of cost, prestige, and palatability – were the various “substitute alcohols” devised by the least well-heeled of America’s dedicated drinkers. The cheapest and most widely available was undoubtedly the “canned heat” product known as Sterno, a kind of jellified alcohol that could be ignited in its original container and used to heat chafing trays or buffet dishes. Strained through cheesecloth, muslin, or even an old sock, an alcoholic liquid could be extracted from canned Sterno which, when mixed with fruit juice, produced the beverage know as “squeeze.” Because the original product had been denatured, of course – through the addition of substances like pyridine or denatonium – squeeze was always poisonous, if not necessarily deadly. Worse off were those who sought a shorter route to intoxication by simply consuming the liquid alcohol still being made for industrial use. As an antiseptic, a basic fuel, and an essential component of most practical applications of organic chemistry, ethyl alcohol was never an intended target of the 18th Amendment or the Volstead Act (1918) and continued to be manufactured in facilities across the United States. In order to ensure that the resulting output did not find its way into the hands of illicit retailers, however, the United States government also mandated that all commercial ethanol be purposely contaminated to make it either unpalatable or poisonous. At first, this took the form of a series of relatively mild additives which the chemists hired by the nation’s unlicensed manufacturers were able to easily remove. In response, the Treasury Department then demanded the addition of even more volatile substances, including the particularly hazardous combination of methanol, pyridine, and benzene commonly known as methyl alcohol. The result was predicably disastrous, with some ten thousand people dying and countless more suffering serious nerve damage over the course of the 1920s.
The federal government took no responsibility for these deaths, of course, any more than it did for the emergence of the aforementioned smugglers, bootleggers, or their various criminal compatriots. And yet, in spite of this inflexible attitude towards what was plainly an unenforceable constitutional provision, hundreds of federal officials were themselves guilty of imbibing. As described by bootlegger George Cassidy (1892-1967) in a series of Washington Post articles published in the fall of 1930, numerous Congressmen and Senators had been receiving regular shipments of alcohol from men like him since almost the moment Prohibition came into force a decade prior. Indeed it was his estimation that some eighty percent of the present makeup of Congress drank on a regular basis notwithstanding their public positions. Once these kinds of statistics began to circulate, public attitudes began to change. With the Great Depression now in full swing, there was a clear and present need on the part of both the American people and their political representatives for some manner of straightforward and effective financial and psychological relief. Jobs were disappearing, farms were being foreclosed on, people’s savings were being wiped out, and still there seemed to be no end to it. But the President, citing principle, refused to offer his fellow Americans more than indirect assistance while agents of the federal government continued to pursue a demonstrably pointless war against the one vice that might have granted the suffering some modicum of solace.
The 18th Amendment had made the production and sale of alcohol unconstitutional, of course, but what had been the result of attempting to enforce this misguided provision? Year after year over the course of the 1920s, alcohol had entered the country illegally, had been manufactured illegally, and had been sold illegally, all thanks to the efforts of smugglers, bootleggers, and various other types of criminals who reaped tremendous profits and consequently strengthened their own ability to influence the nation’s political and judicial processes. And all the while, as the poorest Americans actively poisoned themselves or became the victims of organized crime, Senators and Congressmen reclining in their cloakrooms and offices and toasted themselves and each other with the finest alcohol the taxpayer money could afford. If this was the reality of Prohibition in the United States – if hypocrisy and death was to be the legacy of the movement for temperance – then why not just repeal the damn thing and let the chips fall where they may? Not only could the American people – circa 1930 – really use a little self-medication, but the tax revenues to be levied from the renewed sales of alcohol would doubtless go a significant distance towards lessening the spiraling crisis within which the nation seemed to be trapped. And once the various breweries, and distilleries, and dedicated drinking establishments began to reopen, thousands of jobs would be created from coast to coast. Indeed, upon reflection, there seemed to be few downsides to repeal at all. Naturally, the Drys would disagree with having the measure that they had worked for generations to see implemented torn down after only a decade. And in certain regions of the country, the pro-temperance lobby remained a formidable political force. But as disregard for the 18th Amendment became more and more widespread amidst the rise to power and prominence of numerous domestic criminal cartels, more and more Americans had less and less reason to care. It was plain to any honest observer that Prohibition hadn’t worked. Was the federal government going to acknowledge this, or would it persist in its destructive hypocrisy?
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