On This Day: Prohibition ends 14 years after alcohol was banned in America

DECEMBER 5, 1933: Prohibition in America ended on this day in 1933 - 14 years after alcohol was banned across the country.

Drinking was once again legalised after the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was ratified when Utah became the 36th state to endorse it.

The state, dominated by Mormon tee-totallers repealed the 18th Amendment after it allowed organised crime to flourish as the ban was almost impossible to enforce.

American drinkers, whose taste for alcohol had not been diminished by Prohibition thanks to the efforts of bootlegging gangsters like Al Capone, were delighted.

Pre-Prohibition brewing giants such as Budweiser began making beer again in March 1933 after the U.S. Congress sneakily redefined a prohibited “intoxicating substance” as one having more than 4% by volume.

A British Pathe newsreel reporting on incoming President Frankin D Roosevelt signing the Cullen-Harrison Act showed a bottling plant back at work.

This so-called beer bill, however, still barred the production, sale, transport and importation of wine and spirits.

The U.S. Supreme Court also could have thrown it out if its judges in Washington had examined whether the act was unconstitutional.

But Congress had already passed the 21st Amendment in February that would eventually render any judicial decision pointless.

And, since Prohibition was so unpopular by this point, it was only a matter of time before the requisite three-quarters of the then 48 states ratified it.

Michigan was the first to support the Amendment, the only one ever used to repeal another alteration to the Constitution, which was first adopted in 1787.

Previously, the Constitution had been amended to permit things such as freedom of religion (First), right to bear arms (Second) and the abolition of slavery (14th).

Prohibition was introduced following decades of ardent campaigning by the temperance movement, which formed in the 19th century.

The predominantly Protestant groups feared America’s largely Catholic and hard-drinking immigrants were fuelling a moral decline and could also slow industry.

By the early 20th century, they had persuaded some states, including Kansas and Mississippi to outlaw the alcohol trade within their own borders.

Finally, on December 18, 1917, Washington politicians passed the 18th Amendment prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”.

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They decided on an Amendment – rather than an Act, which could easily be repealed or altered with a simple majority in Congress – in the hope the ban be permanent.

It took until January 16, 1919 for the requisite 36 states to ratify it. Only two – Rhode Island and Connecticut – rejected it.

Yet, when Prohibition went into effect the following year, it quickly became apparent that it would be very difficult to enforce.

For one thing it did not ban personal consumption – only the manufacture and sale of alcohol, with the terms clarified in the Volstead Act.

So people, who had otherwise been law-abiding citizens and yet never supported Prohibition, could openly defy it and drink in illegal bars without fearing prosecution.

The alcohol ban created a $3billion-a-year untaxed bootlegging industry that was costly and almost impossible to police.

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Indeed, the Federal Government calculated that by 1933 people were on average drinking more than they had in 1919.

Capone alone controlled 10,000 speakeasies and ruled the bootlegging business from his Chicago headquarters.

Despite being given more and more money, the FBI were never able to stem the flow of alcohol smuggled from Canada, Mexico and the British colonies in the Caribbean.

And producers in these countries were more than happy to help defy Prohibition after seeing their profits rise.

When the U.S. Government complained to the British Colonial Office about this, its chief Winston Churchill refused to intervene, saying the alcohol ban was "an affront to the whole history of mankind.”

The crippling cost to the U.S. economy – which also included losing thousands of taxpaying brewery jobs – was ultimately what undid Prohibition.

It was simply untenable in the aftermath of the Great Depression, which had begun in 1929.

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So, standing on anti-Prohibition platform in 1932, Roosevelt won a landslide victory in that year’s presidential election.

But repealing the 18th Amendment did not end Prohibition entirely as it was now down to states whether the alcohol trade would be legalised.

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Mississippi, which made liquor illegal in 1907, was the last state to end Prohibition in after finally passing a law in 1967.

And today many counties across America - particularly rural ones across the Deep South - remain officially dry.