the repeal of Prohibition itself. Clark notes that the passage of the Volstead Act creating Prohibition came after a century of experience with local regulation. It was also adopted at a time when a majority of the people in the states wanted this act to go through, though it is not clear whether they all understood that all alcoholic beverages would be banned. Clark also points out that such a law was a reform and not an experiment and that it was meant to improve the quality of American life. Clark says that Prohibition became a social movement when public drunkenness became a social problem, and he finds deep reasons for this development:
The purpose of Prohibition was to protect the values sheltered by the American nuclear family. The origins lay in the slow articulation of deep anxieties: that the new world of industrialism, opportunity, and social turmoil. . . was a moral frontier, that it demanded new patterns of interpersonal relationships, and that these new relationships were threatened by the unrestricted use of distilled spirits (Clark, 1976, 13).
Kobler shows what many other observers of the period show--that the law against alcohol was widely ignored, that it produced a business for organized crime to thrive on, that it corrupted law enforcement in many places, that it was expensive and deadly, and that it came to an end as public sentiment changed and demanded that the law be changed as well. Though Roosevelt had opposed the idea of repeal, he came out for repeal in his acceptance speech in 1932. A poll conducted by Literary Digest showed that a majority of Americans wanted the law repealed. once Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment, the states followed suit and ratified it rapidly:
Even the most sanguine wets were astounded by the speed with which the states acted on the Twenty-first Amendment. By early December, 1933, thirty-five of them had ratified it--one short of the needed three-quarters. ...