Why Did Prohibition Last So Long?

Prohibition of Alcohol in America was introduced in 1920 with the 18th amendment of the constitution and was finally revoked in 1933. Prohibition was always considered a failure, due to the way it was policed, the fact the American people at the time liked to drink and the fact that alcohol was very easily accessible. Therefore the fact it lasted thirteen years, despite it being obvious within the first five that things were not working, seems incomprehensible. There are a number of factors which worked together to make prohibition last as long as it did. The most important being morale reasons behind introducing it at first, but the popularity of prohibition, the time it to repeal a law and the fact it …show more content…
A further example of how popular the prohibition law was is through Al Smith’s election campaign in 1928. Al Smith was a committed ‘wet’; someone who was anti prohibition and one of his policies when running for president was to stop prohibition. This caused a major split in the Democratic Party and amongst America as a whole. The country and Party split north and south over it with the South fervently voting to keep prohibition and the north looking for the law to be relaxed. Hence, due to no side really getting the upper hand and the South and WASPs strongly for it, there wasn’t enough public demand for it to be repealed hence nothing was done. Such was the strong feelings for prohibition in Mississippi they kept the law as a state law until 1966.

In addition to this, the fact that there was no clear majority either way it took a long to eventually change the law due to the way the constitution is set up. It took a very considerable time for clear groups to emerge as strongly anti prohibition too, many people grumbled about it but few were actually decisive enough to go about trying to change it back. It wasn’t really until the 1928 election and AL Smith that groups started to emerge strongly against prohibition with strong political backing. From then on it took another five years to build up the support behind the motion, so that the government under Roosevelt wanted to revoke the