How Alcohol Prohibition Was Ended :: essays research papers

You saved the very foundation of our Government. No man can tell where we would have gone, or to what we would have fallen, had not this repeal been brought about. -Letter to the VCL, 1933 This is a story about a small, remarkable group of lawyers who took it upon themselves, as a self- appointed committee, to propel a revolution in a drug policy: the repeal of the 18th Amendment. In 1927, nine prominent New York lawyers associated themselves under the intentionally-bland name, "Voluntary Committee of Lawyers," declaring as their purpose " to preserve the spirit of the Constitution of the United States [by] bring[ing] about the repeal of the so-called Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Ammendment." With the modest platform they thus commanded, reinforced by their significant stature in the legal community, they undertook first to draft and promote repeal resolutions for local and state bar asssociations. Their success culminated with the American Bar Association calling for repeal in 1928, after scores of city and state bar associations in all regions of the country had spoken unambiguously, in words and ideas cultivated, shaped, and sharpened by the VCL. As it turned out, this successwas but prelude to their stunnung achievement several years later. Due in large to the VCL"s extraordinary work, the 18tg Amendment was, in less than a year, surgically struck from the Constitution. Repeal was a reality. The patient was well. People could drink. Here is how it happened. Climaxing decades of gathering hostility towards salloons and moral outrage over the general degeneracy said to be flowing from bottles and kegs, the Cocstitution of the United States had been amended, effective 1920, to progibit the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors." the Volstead Act, the federal statute implementing the prohibitionamindmint, progibited commerce in beer as well. At first prohibition was popular among those who had suppored it, and tolerated by the others. But before long, unmistakable grumbling was heard in the cities. To meet the uninterrupted demand for alcohol, there sprang up bathtub ginworks and basement stills, tight and discrete illegal supply networks, and speakeasies: secret, illegal bars remembered chiefly today as where, for the first time, women were seen smoking in public. Commerse in alcohol plunged underground, and soon fell under the control of thugs and gangsters, whose organizations often acquired their merchandise legally in Canada. Violence aften settled commercial differences- necessarily, it might be said, as suppliers and distributors were denied the services of lawyers, insurance companies, and the civil courts. On the local level, widesspread disobedience of the progibition laws by otherwise law-abiding citizens produced numerous arrests. Courts were badly clogged, in large part because nearly all defendents demanded jury trials, confident that a jury of