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 It remains the only amendment to be repealed.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.
The pressure for temperance was not something that came into being in 1919, and there had been a temperance movement active in various states. Norman H. Clark says that the efforts started in an era few can imagine today, with saloons associated with debauchery and degradation: "It was a place where addiction enslaved many a man, insulating him from the lifestyle of decency and responsibility by sinking him into a blurred phantasmagoria of whores, drug fiends, pimps, thieves, and gamblers" (Clark 2). 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, ...