Prohibition Ends at Last!
The Prohibition of alcohol was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933. It was met by a wide range of emotions in America.
"Washington, Dec. 5 -- Legal liquor today was returned to the United States, with President Roosevelt calling on the people to see that 'this return of individual freedom shall not be accompanied by the repugnant conditions that obtained prior to the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment and those that have existed since its adoption.'
Prohibition of alcoholic beverages as a national policy ended at 5:321/2 P.M., Eastern Standard Time, when Utah, the last of the thirty-six States furnished by vote of its convention the constitutional majority for ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. The new amendment repealed the Eighteenth, and with the demise of the latter went the Volstead Act which for more than a decade held legal drinks in America to less than one-half of 1 percent of alcohol and the enforcement of which cost more than 150 lives and billions in money. Earlier in the day, Pennsylvania had ratified as the thirty-fourth State and Ohio as the thirty-fifth." --Excerpt from The New York Times on the day Prohibition was repealed. |
The 21st Amendment"Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited. Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress." - ------The 21st Amendment (www.albany.edu) |