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More Information...
Publisher: Kent State University Press, 2000.
Soft Cover, 274 pages, 6 x 9.
Item #1308
Employing previously unexamined archival evidence, historian David E. Kyvig uncovers the little-known but broad-based bipartisan movement to repeal Prohibition led by the Association Against the Prohibition Movement and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. These organizations and their allies amassed political power, particularly within the Democratic Party. In the midst of the Great Depression they engineered a complicated, yet very democratic process of formal constitutional change, in the end achieving the only amendment reversal in U.S. constitutional history. Enjoying wide public support at first, upheld by both federal and state governments, and, most importantly, embeded in the Constitution, the Eighteenth Amendment seemed impervious to change. Prohibition repeal required nothing short of a political earthquake -- a near-total reversal of congressional and state dry law endorsement, more than simply shifts it ethnic power and cultural taste.
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