Prohibition was instituted with a constitutional amendment--the Eighteenth Amendment--in 1919. This was the first constitutional amendment to have a time-limit on ratification, having a seven-year period for that process. It remains the only amendment to be repealed. To a great extent, Prohibition would be a social experiment that was perceived as a failure. The amendment prevented the transport or sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, and yet traffic in alcohol did not stop and became the basis for the development of an organized criminal empire that would live beyond the repeal of Prohibition itself. Prohibition can be seen as a failed attempt on the part of government to legislate morality. Sociologists, political scientists, and other scholars have argued over the meaning of this failed experiment ever since, and historians have treated the era in different ways according to their particular interests, the aspect of prohibition on which they concentrate, and the information they gather about the era. An analysis of a variety of sources shows how historians may treat the facts of a given event in different ways according to their own inclinations and as they build on the work of earlier writers.
Ruth Bordin writes about the development of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s and the course taken by that organization over the next three decades. Bordin's analysis depicts the beginnings of the progressive movement that would culminate in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, though the story told by Bordin stops well short of that era. What she does show is first that the WCTU provided the basis for the women's movement that would follow and organized women in a political way that had never been achieved before. This also demonstrates a part of the organization of that segment of the population that would support the beginning of Prohibition, and prohibition was a goal of the WCTU. The Ant...