Prohibition, 1920–1933

This section collects primary records of national Prohibition from the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Statutes at Large, the Supreme Court, and the histories that federal agencies publish about themselves. It does not retell the period. Each record is its own page, with its citation and rights, and the prose below says only what those pages say. Where two federal pages disagree, the disagreement is stated.

The law

The records here begin with the text. The Eighteenth Amendment was proposed by S.J. Res. 17 of the 65th Congress; the enrolled copy at the National Archives carries Department of State stamps dated December 19, 1917, and NARA’s scope note says the amendment “was ratified January 16, 1919.” The ATF timeline gives January 19, 1919, and says Congress ratified it; the two federal pages differ and are kept apart here. The National Prohibition Act, H.R. 6810, is dated October 28, 1919 and is printed at 41 Stat. 305. The ATF timeline says the Act and the Amendment both became effective on January 16, 1920.

Page 305 defines the term at the center of the Act: “beer, wine, or other intoxicating malt or vinous liquors” means beverages containing “one-half of 1 per centum or more of alcohol by volume.” The Library of Congress photograph of a crowded bar on the night of 30 June 1919 shows wartime prohibition, which came before the Act.

Enforcement

The ATF timeline says the Act delegated enforcement to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, that a Prohibition Unit was created, that it became the Bureau of Prohibition in March 1927, that the Bureau moved from Treasury to the Department of Justice under an Act of May 27, 1930, and that its functions returned to Treasury after repeal. The FBI’s history article places the move to Justice in 1927. Those two federal accounts conflict, and the statutes have not been read here to settle it. The FBI article says the Bureau of Investigation supported Internal Revenue’s enforcement, and the IRS paragraph filed here says its Intelligence Unit dated from 1919.

The Bureau of Prohibition’s own papers in the National Archives, 1928 to 1932, are letters and forms rather than prosecutions: a Commissioner’s letter to the Wickersham Commission about a Chicago residence converted to a distillery, an agent’s memorandum listing a seized 600-gallon still, a Denver office’s reply to a Montana pastor, and memoranda recording allegations and counter-charges in Seattle and Tacoma. The allegations are unproved on these records, and the names in them are omitted. The Library of Congress photographs show the officials and the staged and actual enforcement of the period, with identifications that the Library itself marks as unverified or queried.

Seizures and rum-runners

The Coast Guard Historian’s article says that by 1922 the Federal Prohibition Commission counted hundreds of mother ships on “Rum Row,” that Congress funded a large expansion in 1924, and that the service had 320 cutters and destroyers by the end of Prohibition; its figures are the author’s and are not footnoted. The National Archives holds Coast Guard photographs of pursuits and patrols from 1923 to 1927, each described in the catalog’s own words and naming few vessels or people.

The Library of Congress holds a series of 1924 and 1925 photographs from the cutter Seneca. Its caption data is flagged “unverified,” and one title calls the Seneca a “rum runner,” which the other items in the series contradict. The same collections hold photographs of confiscated stills and whiskey, and of beer destroyed in Zion City, Washington and Philadelphia; most carry date ranges or inferred places, and each page says which.

The courts

Five Supreme Court opinions from 1922 to 1928 show how the Act reached the courts. Lanza (1922) held that a state and the United States could each punish the same act. Carroll (1925) allowed a warrantless search of an automobile on probable cause. One Ford Coupe (1926) held that the Act did not displace forfeiture under Revised Statutes section 3450. Sullivan (1927) held that gains from an unlawful liquor business are taxable income. Olmstead (1928) held that wiretapping without entering the premises was not a search or seizure. Each page gives the holding in two sentences and one short quotation from the stored text.

The district-court papers are ordinary case files: a 1921 indictment from Massachusetts for selling one-half pint, and an information and an order of destruction from the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The defendants are private individuals named only as the court files name them.

Repeal

The wet side and the dry side both appear in photographs from 1930 to 1932: a Chicago “Repeal the 18th Amendment” tire cover, a women’s organization for Prohibition reform, a petition said to carry more than 5,000,000 names, the Women’s National Committee for Law Enforcement at the Capitol, and three witnesses before a Senate subcommittee on amending the Volstead law. Photographers’ captions on some of these are not neutral, and the pages say so.

On 13 March 1933 the President’s message to Congress recommended modifying the Volstead Act; the Library of Congress photograph of 22 March 1933 shows the signing of a beer bill, which its record does not name. S.J. Res. 211 of the 72d Congress repeals the eighteenth article in its Section 1, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library holds the typescript draft of Proclamation 2065 of December 5, 1933. The ATF timeline says the Bureau of Prohibition’s functions, records and personnel then returned to Treasury as the Alcohol Tax Unit.

The National Archives adds pictures to these records. The Treasury’s lantern slides of about 1915 show the Internal Revenue Bureau testing whiskies and two moonshiners’ stills captured in a raid, and the Secret Service Division’s chief and staff, all before national Prohibition. Six Coast Guard photographs show the destroyers BEALE, SHAW, PORTER, HUNT, BURROWS and SEMMES, which the catalog describes as searching for or chasing rum-running vessels; two of the catalog dates fall in 1960 and 1961, long after that service, and three are blank. A Wickersham Commission exhibit photograph records a Chicago distillery seized on 25 September 1929, a case file of the federal court in Georgia holds a photograph of a still, and the Seattle investigative files hold a drawing of a still and a photograph of a shipping crate; the indictments and allegations in those files are not findings. Clifford Berryman’s cartoons in the Senate collection run from 1919 to the 1932 conventions, with a drawing of 30 April 1932 of two men labelled “Racketeer” and “Gangster” reading about Wall Street; those drawn after 1930 are cited without a stored copy. The New York Times Paris Bureau photographs, which the National Archives marks unrestricted while cautioning about copyright in the series, show repeal campaigning, beer arriving in Cleveland in April 1933 and a Los Angeles counter at repeal. Three Coast Guard frames of an illicit still in North Carolina date from 1948, after repeal, under the federal liquor tax laws.

Limits of this section

The Library of Congress items are marked no known restrictions on publication, and many repeat caption-card identifications that the Library flags as unverified. The Bureau of Prohibition correspondence records allegations by private persons, which this archive does not repeat. The Capone material that overlaps with these years is in the Capone section; this section does not add to it.