How Alcohol Prohibition Was Ended

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