thesis statement about the 18th amendment

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The first amendment, interpretation & debate, the eighteenth amendment, matters of debate, common interpretation, the dark side of the noble experiment, good and bad reasons for and against alcohol prohibition.

by Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University

by David A. J. Richards

Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law

By its terms, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquours” but not the consumption, private possession, or production for one’s own consumption. In contrast to earlier amendments to the Constitution, the Amendment set a one-year time delay before it would be operative, and set a time limit (seven years) for its ratification by the states. Its ratification was certified on January 16, 1919, and the Amendment took effect on January 16, 1920.

To define the prohibitory terms of the Amendment, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, better known as the Volstead Act, on October 28, 1919. The Volstead Act charged the U.S. Treasury Department with enforcement of the new restrictions, and defined which “intoxicating liquours” were forbidden and which were excluded from Prohibition (for example, alcoholic beverages used for medical and religious purposes). President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the bill, but the House of Representatives overrode the veto, and the Senate did so as well the next day. The Volstead Act set the starting date for nationwide prohibition for January 17, 1920, which was the earliest day allowed by the Eighteenth Amendment.

The Amendment was in effect for the following 13 years. It was repealed in 1933 by ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment. This was the one time in American history that a constitutional amendment was repealed in its entirety ( see discussion of the Twenty-First Amendment to the United States Constitution ).

In his important study both of the Eighteenth Amendment and its repeal, Daniel Okrent identifies the powerful political coalition that worked successfully in the two decades leading to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment:

Five distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up this unspoken coalition:  racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (whose ranks included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Adherents of each group may have been opposed to alcohol for its own sake, but used the Prohibition impulse to advance ideologies and causes that had little to do with it.

The Eighteenth Amendment must be understood in its historical context, namely, “between 1913 and 1919, in the greatest burst of constitutional activity since the Bill of Rights, amendments establishing the income tax, direct election of senators, Prohibition, and woman suffrage were engraved into the nation’s organic law.” The Amendment establishing the income tax (1913) removed the leading practical obstacle to Prohibition, namely, that taxes on alcohol had been a significant source of government revenues theretofore, and ending this business would eliminate taxes that had been historically important to raising revenues for the public business. With the income tax constitutionally established, Prohibition was now financially feasible, and the coalition supporting it could achieve its ends without facing this obstacle. Whether its ends were justifiable or worth the price paid for its enforcement is debated and will be discussed later ( see the Twenty-First Amendment ).

Further Reading:

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010). 

Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

In his important study of the passage and repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, Daniel Okrent identified the powerful political coalition that worked successfully in the two decades leading to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment:  

[F]ive distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up this unspoken coalition:  racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (whose ranks included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Adherents of each group may have been opposed to alcohol for its own sake, but used the Prohibition impulse to advance ideologies and causes that had little to do with it.

Racism was unashamedly blatant. According to Okrent, “it was a familiar characterization, and its reach extended beyond the boundaries of the old Confederacy. Frances Willard herself [a leading progressive advocate of temperance] had adopted the imagery, asserting that ‘the grogshot is the Negro’s center of power. Better whiskey and more of it is the rallying cry of dark faced mobs.’” Both Prohibition and the suffrage amendment had been “linked in the holy advocacy of politicians who regarded both as expressions of moral virtue” (like William Jennings Bryan), and “had become politically welded to one another, not because of moral congruence,” but because of political convenience. With the nation at war with Imperial Germany, populists and nativists joined in moral condemnation of the beer-drinking culture of German-Americans, yet another component of the coalition that carried the Amendment to ratification.

What is all too conspicuous in the coalition supporting the Eighteenth Amendment is not only blatant racism against people of color, but also a racism of ethnic hatred against German-Americans and the more recent immigrants to the United States—the so-called “hyphenated Americanism” against which Theodore Roosevelt inveighed. These groups did not share either the religion (Catholic Italian-Americans and Jews) or the drinking habits of the dominant American Protestant majority that felt increasingly at threat. In effect, the drinking habits of these Americans became a proxy for American racism and religious intolerance, in a way that echoes and anticipates what the Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman acknowledged as the basis for Nixon’s War on Crime: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black . . . but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt these communities.”

The Eighteenth Amendment did not, in my judgment, arise from a sober secular reflection on how to deal with the harms of alcohol abuse, which it may have aggravated, but from sectarian and highly idiosyncratic perfectionist Protestant ideals. America, a nation of immigrants, remains, as our contemporary politics shows, vulnerable to sometimes irrational fear of new immigrants of different ethnicities or religions from the dominant majority.  

America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was at a vulnerable transitional moment away from the anti-racism of the Reconstruction Amendments to an increasingly racist culture (importantly supported both by American politicians and by the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)) attracted for this reason to European models of racist imperialism to its own version of imperialism. The North and South, which had fought a civil war ultimately over slavery and the cultural racism that rationalized it, buried its enduring ethical meaning as white men found common ground in racist imperialist ventures abroad.  The suggestion that the solution to civil war in a democracy is war abroad is as old as Athena’s patriarchal advice to democratic Athens in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia :

Never pluck the heart of the battle cock And plant it in our people—intestine war seething against themselves.  Let our wars rage on abroad, with all their force, to satisfy our powerful lust for fame.  But as for the bird that fights at home—my curse on civil war.

It was this increasingly racist and imperialistic American culture that supported our entering a European war among competing European imperialisms, World War I, which most Americans of that period probably did not want to fight and which, disastrously, set the stage for the even more catastrophic World War II. Those who resisted the unpopular war (which Wilson, as a presidential candidate, had promised not to enter) had already been unjustly prosecuted in violation of what we now regard as our better traditions of free speech; the Prohibition Amendment further demonized them by racializing and indeed criminalizing their ways of life, including the role beer and wine played in their ways of life. The dominance of such fear-ridden irrationalism in support of the Eighteenth Amendment—over any secular concern with how more effectively to lower the harms from alcohol abuse—discredits its normative legitimacy.  

Daniel Okrent, L ast Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010).

Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017).

Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).

There were good and bad—sound and unsound—reasons to favor enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, and there were good and bad reasons to oppose it.

The good reasons to favor enactment derived from recognizing that drunkenness and alcohol addiction were responsible (as they still are today, unfortunately) for countless personal catastrophes and widespread social pathologies. These catastrophes and pathologies include, among many other things, illnesses such as cirrhosis of the liver, accidental deaths and injuries, violence (including domestic violence), unemployability and poverty, and parental and other forms of personal irresponsibility and family abandonment. Honorable supporters of alcohol prohibition hoped that a nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transport of beverage alcohol would significantly reduce alcohol consumption, abuse, and addiction, resulting in fewer alcohol-related illnesses and accidents, and a reduction of alcohol-fueled violence and other social evils.

The bad and dishonorable reasons that some Americans favored the Eighteenth Amendment were rooted in racism, ethnic and religious bigotry, and nativism. These prohibitionists identified drinking and alcohol with blacks, Catholics, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and, in the wake of World War I, Germans. Many of these prohibitionists hoped that enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment would make the United States less attractive and less hospitable to the kinds of people whom they deemed undesirable.

The good reasons to oppose the Eighteenth Amendment’s enactment had to do with concerns that Prohibition would fail, mainly because the law would be widely defied and difficult to enforce. Some opponents accurately predicted that Prohibition would be a boon to criminals who would handsomely profit from a black market in alcoholic beverages and deploy some of their earnings to corrupt law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges. Some even foresaw that lax or selective enforcement of Prohibition, together with corruption of public officials, would bring the legal system into disrepute and erode respect for the authority of law generally.

The bad reasons to oppose enactment, though few Americans of the time opposed it for these reasons, had to do with the doctrinaire libertarian belief that people have a right to drink, and even to get drunk, and that law therefore has no legitimate authority to forbid the production and sale of alcoholic beverages or other intoxicants, even for the sake of ameliorating the social ills resulting from its widespread abuse. Although, as I say, this type of libertarianism seems not to have been a major factor in debates over enactment and later repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, it has in the years since the emergence of what Robert Bellah labeled the ideology of “expressive individualism” in the late-1960s, come to play a dominant role in how many people think back on alcohol prohibition, and it certainly informs the way in which many think about substance abuse policy today.

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Opposition to the eighteenth amendment in the house of representatives.

Henry J. Manwell , The Graduate Center, City University of New York Follow

Date of Degree

Document type, degree name.

Liberal Studies

Thomas Kessner

Subject Categories

United States History

Prohibition, Opposition, Repeal

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution forbade the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the Nation. The National Government was to enforce Prohibition in every state of the union. Before there was consideration of the Amendment, the Temperance Movement in the United States was a constant factor in American life. From Colonial times on, there were groups promoting temperance and abstinence from alcohol.

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century two important groups had formed to promote the Temperance Movement- The Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League. In period prior to the First World War, there developed a movement toward national Prohibition. Prior to that point Temperance groups focused on individuals abstaining from alcohol or on local communities banning its manufacture and sale.

By 1917, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was being debated in Congress. The Senate passed it with very little discussion, and the House of Representatives took up the matter in December, 1917. While debate was fairly short, several points were advanced that presaged the ultimate failure of the Amendment. These are its unenforceability, the lack of state control over the alcohol industry and the impossibility of legislating sober living. These points were also prominent in the ratification debates in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The Amendment ultimately failed and was repealed in 1933. Those who have studied the process for the Amendment and its failure indicate that it failed because it was imposed by the government. The vast majority of the population did not want it. This thesis validates those points.

Examination of the votes against the Amendment showed that many congressmen cited its ultimate unenforceable nature and the lack of popular support for the Amendment as problems. These very elements were the causative factors in the Amendment’s failure. Congress was forced into passage of the Amendment by the efforts of the Anti-Saloon League which controlled a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives. However, when the opposition is studied, the majority of those opposing the Amendment were from the larger states. Thus, the smaller states ultimately forced the majority of the population into accepting bad public policy.

Recommended Citation

Manwell, Henry J., "Opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives" (2018). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2679

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Course: US history   >   Unit 7

The nineteenth amendment.

• 1920s urbanization and immigration
• The reemergence of the KKK
• Prohibition
• Republican ascendancy: politics in the 1920s
• The presidency of Calvin Coolidge
• 1920s consumption
• Movies, radio, and sports in the 1920s
• American culture in the 1920s
• Nativism and fundamentalism in the 1920s
• America in the 1920s
• The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. It declares that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
• The amendment, which granted women the right to vote, represented the pinnacle of the women’s suffrage movement, which was led by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
• In their decades-long struggle for female enfranchisement, women’s rights advocates met with strong opposition from anti-suffrage activists.

The women’s suffrage movement

Opposition to women’s suffrage, what do you think.

• For more on the Seneca Falls Convention, see Sally McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 10.
• Corrine M. McConnaughy, The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2-3.
• For more on the anti-suffrage movement, see Anne Myra Benjamin, Women Against Equality: A History of the Anti-Suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920 (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Publishing Services, 2014).
• For more on the women’s rights movement, see Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996).

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Eighteenth Amendment. Reason, analysis, and the cause of the Ammendment.

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The Role of 18th Amendment in Democracy of Pakistan

• Ruqia Abdul Majeed Teacher
• Dr. Shabana Akhtar Assistant Professor

After the 2008 elections, an elected democratic government gave Pakistan another chance to consolidate its fragile democracy. The years (2008- 2018) have seen significant constitutional amendments with far-reaching effects A total of eight constitutional amendments have been made in 2008 and 2018, including the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, twentieth, third, twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth. All these constitutional amendments played a role in restoring the parliamentary structure of the 1973 constitution. The 8th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution were introduced during the military rule, most of which were unanimously repealed by Parliament. The most significant and historic achievements of the amendment between 2008 and 2018 were the empowerment of the provinces, the empowerment of the legislative branch, the creation of an independent election commission, the establishment of caretaker governments, and the military to combat terrorism. The establishment of courts was to allow delimitation inclusion of constituencies and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa before the 2018 general elections. The constitutional amendments in constitution, 1973 of Pakistan, specially, the 18th constitutional amendment has played big role for democratization during 2008-2018 in Pakistan which has strengthened democracy and paved the way for the supremacy of the parliament at same time. Democracy is a system of government that supports the broad participation of the people in government and also promotes the views of citizens to smooth society. Democracy is the government of the people. The system of democracy is the one of the best democracies in the word. The people of Pakistan are not unawareness about the system of democracy in Pakistan. In the constitutional history of Pakistan, there have been many civilian and military dictators who have refused to work under the constitution and run their own governments because parliament is the basic institution of democracy. Parliamentary democracy in Pakistan has collapsed four times. The political aspirations of the military generals the various constitutional models and the ThirdAmendment to the 1973 Constitution (8th and 17th) distorted parliamentary democracy by denying parliamentary autonomy and the rights of the people. After the transfer of power from the military to civilian rule in 2008, it strengthened parliamentary democracy, provincial autonomy, and the judiciary, and the role of democracy in ensuring the independence of the Election Commission and a solid state. After coming to power under the PPP, the government restored the parliamentary spirit of the Constitution through the 18th Amendment. After days of deliberation and consensus by a committee representing all parties of Pakistan in Parliament, the 18th Amendment has cleared the Constitution by removing undemocratic additions and deletions. 

Akram Mehmish ‗‘Understanding the concept of Democracy in Pakistan

‗‘ P1-3 Published on November 26, 2017. Published in

'‘ https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2017/11/26/understanding-theconcept-democracy –in-Pakistan /‘‘

Arshad, Javed Rizvi ‗‘ Democracy of Pakistan Root Causes of weak

demarcation system in Pakistan‘‘ published in Sir Syed University

of Engineering and Technology.

Dayo Abdullah ‗‘ Decade of Democracy of Pakistan‘‘ published on

December 2018, P 3-9.

Haroon ‗‘ Key Eighteenth Amendment Proposals ‗‘ in April 2, 2010

published in BBCUrdu.com, Islamabad P1.

Hussain Karamat Nazi ‗‘the constitution Islamic republic of Pakistan ‗‘

Published on 28th February 2012. P142.

Inayatullah, Sarah Inayatullah and Sohail '' The futures democracy of

Pakistan ‗‘ on (December 1997 published in

(The_futures_of_democracy_in_Pakistan_A_liberal_perspective).

James Anjam paul ‗‘The constitution of Pakistan ‗‘ October2014

publisher: Pakistan Minorities Teachers ‗‘ Association P 1-2

Mamoon Dawood ‗‘ A Brief History of Pakistan‘s Democratic Journey

(2008-2018)‘‘ on November 2018 published in

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153586 .

Mehboob Bilal Ahmed ‗‘two faces of Democracy ‗‘ on 12 April 2019.

(Ahmed Bilal April 12, 2019 p 1) published in Dawn newspaper.

Subhan Fazli ‗‘ 18th Amendment Provincial Autonomy: Challenges for

Political parties ‗‘ on January 2018 published in Baluchistan

study center university of Baluchistan Quetta .

Waqas M, Muquddas , Khattak ‗‘ Democracy in Pakistan: problems and

prospects in making informed choices ‗‘ on January 2017 p1

published in international journal of Social Sciences Management

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Pluralism, Fundamental Rights, Regional Peace

Conference and Research reports

Devolution: provincial autonomy and the 18th amendment.

Date: February 11, 2015

2010 marked a watershed in the structural reform of the Pakistani state. Not since 1973, when Pakistan’s constitution was framed, had such a significant and wide ranging institutional restructuring been undertaken by a democratically elected parliament. Faced with the challenge of ensuring democratic transition after a decade of military rule, political parties in Pakistan, led by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and its coalition allies, reset the concept and the implementation of federalism through the passage of the 18th Amendment.

From realising provincial autonomy to restricting presidential powers; from re-envisioning judicial appointments to selection of an election commission – the amendment cut across party lines in an attempt to address the challenges impeding democratic sustainability in Pakistan. Calling on more than three decades of experience with political wrangling, provincial grievances, and military rule, the amendment aimed to address some of Pakistan’s structural dichotomies as the country charted a new, more democratic future for itself.

ACLU Statement on Congress’ Latest Attempt to Ban TikTok and Restrict Free Speech Online

WASHINGTON — Over the weekend, the House of Representatives passed the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, which includes extremely concerning provisions that would functionally ban the distribution of TikTok in the United States, grant the president broad new powers to ban other social media platforms based on their country of origin, and further erode our right to share and access information without government interference.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the House of Representatives discussing the constitutional concerns with these provisions and vowing to hold members accountable if they pass this legislation. The Senate is now set to vote on the bill sometime this week.

“This is still nothing more than an unconstitutional ban in disguise,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU . “Banning a social media platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use to express themselves would have devastating consequences for all of our First Amendment rights, and will almost certainly be struck down in court. The Senate must strip these provisions from the bill.”

Another provision lawmakers are hoping to sneak through is the overbroad Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, which purports to regulate data brokers and protect Americans sensitive information, but could also sweep in journalists, whistleblowers, and other entities that are involved in generally publishing or transferring personal information. For instance, the vague language could be used to restrict the release of photos and documents regarding the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by United States service members, the content of communications among officials discussing those programs, or a news report on a Cabinet member’s health or a general’s extra-marital affair.

“The data broker provisions would impact the work of journalists and trample on our First Amendment right to access information,” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the ACLU . “Safeguarding our personal information from malicious forces — whether foreign adversaries, private companies, or our own government — must go hand in hand with preserving our right to express ourselves and access information online.”

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