Ocala Evening Star, 16 January 1920, page 1: The Eighteenth Amendment takes effect at midnight

Front page of the Ocala Evening Star, Friday, 16 January 1920. The first column, “The Eighteenth Amendment,” has the deck “Bonedry Lid Already on the Country Will Be Nailed Down at Midnight.” It sits beside stories on the Sims inquiry, the League of Nations and Clemenceau.

The Associated Press story is datelined Washington, 16 January. It quotes the amendment’s prohibition of the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes, and says Congress had defined an intoxicating liquor as any beverage containing one-half of one percent or more of alcohol. It says the change would make little difference in daily life after the wartime ban in force since the previous July, that a case challenging the amendment brought by Rhode Island was pending in the Supreme Court, and that bonded whisky could be withdrawn only for medicinal and scientific uses.

The dispatch’s statement that the United States became “the first nation of the world” to put such a provision in its basic law is the wire service’s claim and is not verified here. Headline as read from the Library of Congress OCR text of the page.