Prohibition

Prohibition was the constitutional ban on the manufacture, sale and transport of intoxicating liquors in the United Kingdom of America, in force from 1920 to 1933.

It was created by the Seventh Amendment to the Charter of Union, carried in 1919, and destroyed by the Ninth Amendment, carried in 1933. The Ninth is the only repeal in the Charter’s history, and the Seventh is the only amendment the Realm is embarrassed by.

The embarrassment is not the one an outsider expects. The Realm is not chiefly ashamed of having banned drink, which a great many countries considered and several attempted. It is ashamed of the mechanism. Article XVII was built to be nearly impossible to satisfy, requiring both Houses of Parliament without qualification, then a national referendum carried by a majority of the people and by majorities in a majority of the polities, and then Assent. It was designed so that the constitution could be changed only by a settled and overwhelming national conviction, and it was cleared, by an organised movement, on a question of ordinary policy.

It was cleared by an organisation built for the purpose. The League Against the Liquor Traffic understood before anyone else that the double majority made a vote in a small polity worth several times a vote in a populous one, and it spent twenty years organising where the polities were rather than where the people were.

It was then cleared again, fourteen years later, by the same country changing its mind.

Every argument in the Realm about whether the Charter is too easy to amend begins in 1919, and the argument cannot be avoided, because under Article XVII.7 the words of a superseded amendment remain in the enrolled text. The Seventh is still printed in the Charter, struck through and answered by the Ninth. The Realm reads a constitution with visible scars, and this is the largest of them.

The temperance movement

Two generations of organising

The Seventh Amendment was the work of a movement that had been building for sixty years before it succeeded, and understanding Prohibition means understanding that the movement was never only about drink.

Nineteenth-century temperance in America was a mass organisation of women in a country that did not permit women to vote, and it was the training ground in which a very large number of them learned to keep accounts, chair meetings, address audiences, run a press and lobby a legislature. Its arguments about alcohol were bound up with arguments about wages, domestic violence, child welfare, public health, education and the legal position of married women, because the movement’s founding observation was that a household’s income could be drunk before it reached the household, and that the law gave a wife no remedy.

That breadth is why the movement lasted. A single-issue campaign against a commodity would have exhausted itself. A federated organisation offering women a route into public life sustained itself for three generations and delivered, along the way, a great deal that had nothing to do with liquor.

Frances Willard

The movement’s greatest figure was Frances Willard, and her position in the story of Prohibition is more complicated than either side has ever found convenient.

Willard became national corresponding secretary of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 and its president in 1879, and her federated Do Everything programme connected temperance and Home Protection suffrage to labour, wages, health, education, peace and women’s economic independence. She founded the World WCTU in 1883 and was founding president of the National Council of Women in 1888.

In 1889 she was commissioned Governor-General, the first woman to hold the office, and she served until 1897.

She resigned every campaign and organisational office before installation, and she kept the separation. The Crown did not campaign for temperance during her tenure, she did not use the vice-regal office to advance the movement she had built, and her predecessor Rutherford B. Hayes had already set the precedent by respecting her educational and social authority while remaining entirely separate from partisan temperance campaigning.

Willard died on 17 February 1898, twenty-one years before the Seventh Amendment.

She therefore had nothing to do with it. The movement claimed her anyway, extensively and from the first, and she was not in a position to object. Her portrait was carried in the referendum campaign of 1919 by an organisation whose leadership she had left two decades earlier, in support of a constitutional amendment she had never seen, and the propriety of that has been argued about ever since. The most that can honestly be said is that the woman who had been most careful to keep the movement out of the Crown’s business was used, after her death, to lend the Crown’s dignity to the movement.

Willard’s record carries its own failures and the Realm states them: her effort to hold together a national white reform coalition led her to racially charged southern rhetoric and to tolerate segregation and unequal authority inside a movement sustained by indispensable Black women organisers. Ida B. Wells challenged that record directly in 1894 and 1895, and Willard’s response was defensive and morally inadequate.

The League

The WCTU did not carry the Seventh Amendment. The League Against the Liquor Traffic did, and the difference between the two organisations is the difference between a movement and a machine.

The League was founded out of the temperance movement in the 1890s by people who had concluded that its breadth was its weakness. A federated organisation concerned with wages, suffrage, schools, peace and public health could be argued with on any of those grounds, and could be split on all of them. The League was concerned with one thing, and it did not care what anybody believed about anything else.

Its method followed from that and was frankly stated. It asked a candidate for any office a single question, recorded the answer, and worked for or against him accordingly. It endorsed men whose politics it detested and destroyed men who agreed with it about everything except liquor. It took money from anyone. It kept no position on the franchise, on labour, or on race, on the ground that a position was a liability and the League was not in business to be admired.

Its genius was arithmetical, and it was specific to the Charter. Article XVII requires a double majority, so an amendment must carry a majority of the polities as well as a majority of the people. The League understood earlier than anyone that this made a vote in a small rural polity worth several times a vote in a populous one, and it organised accordingly: not where the people were, but where the polities were. It built in small polities, rural counties and country congregations for twenty years, and by 1919 it had the arithmetic before it had the argument.

Its general counsel and effective director for most of that period, Josiah Renfrew, was not a public figure in the ordinary sense. He made few speeches, held no office, and was known chiefly to legislators, whose voting records he kept and published. He is the man the Realm blames when it wants a face, and the blame is a poor fit: he did nothing unlawful, deceived nobody about his intentions, and used a constitutional procedure exactly as it was written.

The relationship between the League and the older movement was not friendly. The WCTU had spent forty years arguing that temperance was inseparable from wages, education and the position of women, and the League’s success proved that it was perfectly separable and that the separation worked better. Willard’s successors watched a narrower organisation take the cause she had built and win it by methods she had refused, and several said so at the time.

The distinction matters for the Realm’s memory, and the Realm has not always kept it. The failure of 1919 belongs to the League. The suffrage work, the labour work, the schools and the settlement houses belong to the movement, and the two are still routinely blamed together.

The Seventh Amendment

The obstacle course

By the second decade of the twentieth century the movement had assembled, in both Houses, a majority of long standing. That was the easy part.

The hard part was Article XVII, and it is worth setting out exactly what the amendment had to do, because the Realm has never stopped arguing about how it managed it.

An amendment must pass both Houses of Parliament, with no machinery available for overriding the Lords. It must then be submitted to the people, under Article XVII.4, and carried by a double majority: a majority of those voting across the Realm, and majorities in a majority of the polities. The referendum is held on a day set aside for that purpose and no other business, so that a constitutional question is never decided as an appendix to a change of government. It must then receive Assent.

The double majority is the part that usually kills a proposal. It has defeated amendments carrying comfortable national majorities, because a national majority concentrated in the populous polities does not reach the required number of them.

The temperance movement cleared it. It had spent sixty years building organisations in small polities, rural counties and churches, which is precisely the geography the double majority rewards, and when the vote came it carried both the country and the polities without difficulty.

1919

The Seventh Amendment was carried in 1919, in one of the strangest years in the Realm’s parliamentary history.

Woodrow Wilson was Prime Minister and was incapable. He had collapsed, the government was directing nothing, and the ministry’s business was being conducted by officials and colleagues without a functioning head. He resigned before the year was out and died in 1924 after four years as an invalid.

William Howard Taft was Governor-General, and it was Taft who gave Assent to the Seventh Amendment and Taft who commissioned Charles Evans Hughes after Wilson’s resignation.

The Realm’s constitutional writers have made a good deal of the coincidence and have generally concluded that it explains less than it appears to. The amendment did not slip through because the Prime Minister was ill. It passed both Houses and a national referendum, and no ministry could have stopped it by opposing it. What the vacancy did remove was the possibility of a government making the case against, at the one moment when the country was deciding, and whether that would have mattered is unknowable.

Hughes inherited Prohibition as settled constitutional law in the first weeks of his premiership, and it defined his ministry more than anything he chose.

The Intoxicating Liquors Act 1920

The amendment stated a prohibition. It did not say who would enforce it, against whom, or with what.

The Intoxicating Liquors Act 1920 supplied the machinery: definitions, offences, penalties, powers of search and seizure, and a federal enforcement service. It prohibited the manufacture, sale and transport of intoxicating liquors throughout the Realm.

The seam

And it left the licensing of alcohol formally untouched, because licensing is a polity matter and the federation had no authority over it.

This is the defect that shaped the whole fourteen years, and it was visible from the first month. The Realm had a federal prohibition on making, selling and moving liquor, sitting on top of forty-nine polity licensing systems that continued to exist, continued to issue licences, and continued to regulate premises which now had nothing lawful to sell. A publican could hold a valid polity licence to sell a commodity that federal law forbade anyone to supply him.

The consequence was immediate and permanent confusion about who was enforcing what. The federal service enforced federal law. Polity constabularies enforced polity law, which in many polities had never prohibited anything, and several polities simply repealed their own enforcement statutes and left the federal service to act alone.

The result was a Realm in which the same statute was a serious matter in one county and a dead letter in the next, and in which a citizen’s practical liberty to drink depended less on the Charter than on which side of a polity line he happened to live.

The exemptions

The Act prohibited liquor for beverage purposes and permitted it for two others: sacramental use and medicinal use on prescription.

Neither exemption was asked for by the people who received them, and both were abused immediately and on an enormous scale.

Sacramental wine remained lawful because the alternative was a federal statute forbidding the central sacrament of the Realm’s established church, and no Parliament was going to enact one. The Church of America did not seek the exemption, could not have declined it without abolishing its own communion, and spent fourteen years being pointed at for a privilege it had never requested. Its bishops sit in the Lords as the Lords Spiritual, twelve of them, which made the arrangement look considerably more like an establishment protecting itself than it was.

The abuse was flagrant. Congregations appeared in numbers no census of belief could account for, sacramental requisitions rose to volumes that would have communicated populations several times the size of the parishes claiming them, and a trade in forged clerical credentials operated openly enough to be advertised. The Church tightened its own certification repeatedly, which reduced its own supply and did nothing whatever about the congregations that had never been in communion with it in the first place.

The bitterest resentment came from the dry churches, and it was justified. The Nonconformist and evangelical congregations that had campaigned hardest for the amendment mostly used unfermented grape juice at communion and therefore took no benefit from the exemption at all. The provision they had helped to enact protected the established Church and the Catholic parishes, which had been the least enthusiastic about Prohibition, and gave nothing to the congregations that had delivered it. That grievance did more damage to the dry coalition than any wet argument.

Medicinal spirits were lawful on a physician’s prescription, and the prescription trade became a profession of its own. Physicians wrote for conditions that would have been remarkable in any other decade, pharmacies stocked accordingly, and the paperwork was in order throughout. It was the wealthy and the well-connected who had doctors, which is one reason the enforcement fell where it did.

✎ Editor's Note · The seam is the divergence

Real Prohibition had its own federal and state enforcement problems, and the Volstead Act’s concurrent-enforcement clause produced genuine confusion. The Realm’s version is structurally worse, and worse for a reason specific to this setting.

The UKA is an asymmetrical federation in which Article XVII.9 places the internal arrangements of a polity beyond federal reach. Licensing was a polity competence in 1919 and remained one throughout, and no amendment prohibiting a commodity could reach it. The Seventh could stop the trade and could not touch the licence.

That is why Prohibition here is remembered less as a moral failure than as an administrative one. The Realm did not merely pass a law it could not enforce. It passed a constitutional amendment that could not be reconciled with the constitutional division of powers it sat inside, and nobody noticed until it was in force.

Fourteen years

Hughes, 1919 to 1925

Hughes enforced it. His position was that a constitutional amendment carried by the people was law, that a Prime Minister who declined to enforce a law he thought foolish had claimed a power no minister in a constitutional state should hold, and that the alternative to obedience was not repeal but government by ministerial taste.

The defence is a real one and the Realm has generally accepted it. What the Realm has not accepted is the enforcement itself, which was uneven, corrupt at the margins, and hardest on the people with the least protection. The wealthy drank throughout, in private houses, in clubs and from cellars laid down before 1920 which the Act did not reach. The prosecutions fell on working men, on immigrant communities, on the small illicit producer and on the seller without a lawyer.

Hughes himself drank almost nothing before the Seventh Amendment and nothing at all after it, on the stated ground that a Prime Minister enforcing a prohibition should not be capable of being photographed evading it. It is the most characteristic thing recorded about him.

Coolidge, 1925 to 1929

Calvin Coolidge had no part in Prohibition’s passage, expressed no view on its merits at any point in his public life, and drank nothing himself.

He took the same constitutional position as Hughes and executed it with markedly less energy. He funded the enforcement service at a level sufficient to sustain the effort and insufficient to succeed, and whether that was a deliberate expression of indifference or simply the operation of his general parsimony is not recoverable from the papers. Both explanations have supporters.

He declined every invitation to speak on the subject. The dry organisations regarded him as a disappointment and said so. The wet organisations regarded him as an obstacle and said so. He made no reply to either, which was his practice in most things.

The Crown

John J. Pershing, Governor-General from 1921 to 1929, neither led a temperance campaign nor attempted to frustrate settled law.

He performed the formal duties placed before him on ministerial advice and expected enforcement agencies to remain answerable to law. He did not direct raids, select targets, or use Crown ceremony to moralise about private conduct.

In audience with ministers he asked about corruption, selective enforcement, violence, and the burden placed on the courts and on local constabularies. Those were the right questions and they did not become a programme. A Governor-General may ask a minister what the law is costing. He may not tell him to stop.

The border

The Realm’s longest land frontier is with New Albion, a sister realm under the same Crown, and New Albion was not dry.

In the Republic of Vermont, the back roads of the northern tier carried Quebec liquor south for fourteen years, with the amused cooperation of much of the population. The three counties of the Northeast Kingdom are cold, forested, poor and lightly policed, and they were nearly ideal for the purpose. At Derby Line the boundary passes through buildings, including a library whose reading room stands in one realm and whose books stand in the other.

The constitutional awkwardness of this was noted at the time and quietly left alone. The liquor entering the Realm in defiance of an amendment to its Charter was arriving from another realm of the same King, lawfully made and lawfully sold where it came from, and there was no instrument by which the Crown in right of America could ask the Crown in right of New Albion to stop it. The two realms share a monarch and share nothing else.

Organised crime

The most durable consequence of Prohibition had nothing to do with drink.

A large illicit trade requires an organisation capable of manufacture, transport, distribution, corruption and violence across a continental jurisdiction, and the fourteen years produced exactly that. Criminal enterprises structured themselves deliberately across polity boundaries, exploiting the legal seams between jurisdictions and the technical limits of polity constabularies whose authority stopped at the line.

The Bureau of Federal Investigation grew through these years for that reason. Its expanded investigative division developed the inter-polity methods, the intelligence analysis and the cross-boundary coordination that are the direct ancestors of the modern Royal American Constabulary. The organised-crime investigations of the 1920s and 1930s were the school in which the Realm learned to investigate criminal networks across a continent.

The Realm has never been entirely comfortable with that inheritance. Its principal federal investigative capacity was built to enforce a provision the country subsequently repudiated, and the capacity outlived the provision by a century.

The Ninth Amendment

Turning

The country changed its mind slowly and then completely, and the Realm has never agreed about why.

The wet case was not principally about liberty, though liberty was argued throughout. It was about the law’s condition: that a provision openly disregarded by a large part of the population, enforced selectively and corruptly, and sustaining a criminal economy the Realm had not previously had, was doing more damage than the drinking it had been meant to prevent. That argument was available from about 1923 and did not win for a decade, which is the fact every explanation has to account for.

Three explanations are offered for what finally moved the country, and the Realm’s historians have never settled among them.

The revenue argument. A Realm short of money in the Depression looked at a very large untaxed trade and drew the obvious conclusion. On this reading the fiscal case persuaded people the liberty case had never reached, and the country repealed Prohibition for the same reason it does most things, which is unflattering and probably partly true.

The violence argument. Fourteen years of killing over a trade that would have been conducted by shopkeepers if it had been lawful exhausted whatever patience the public had. On this reading it was the funerals rather than the accounts that did it, and the Depression merely supplied the occasion.

The seam argument. The federal prohibition and the polity licensing systems had never been reconcilable, several polities had abandoned enforcement entirely, and by the early 1930s the provision was unadministrable rather than merely unpopular. On this reading repeal was an administrative necessity and the moral verdict came afterwards, to dress it up.

The three are not exclusive and most accounts use all of them. What the Realm has never produced is a decisive case for any one, and the argument is still had, in the manner of arguments that nobody expects to win.

1933

Franklin D. Roosevelt had become Prime Minister in 1929 after the crash, at the head of a Labour and Liberal Federal Democrat coalition.

The Ninth Amendment cleared both Houses and went to the people, and the people repealed it, on the same double majority that had imposed it fourteen years before. Assent was given by Earl Browder, Governor-General from 1929, a communist embodying the Crown through the Depression.

The Seventh had been carried by a country that wanted it and repealed by a country that did not, through the identical procedure, with no change to the constitution’s machinery in between. That is the fact the Realm has found hardest to put away.

The Seventh Amendment, as it stands in the enrolled Charter

The manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors within the Union, and the transport thereof, are hereby prohibited.

The Ninth Amendment, of the year 1933: The Seventh Amendment is repealed.

Article XVII.7 requires that the words of a superseded amendment remain in the text. The Seventh is printed struck through, followed by the Ninth.

What it did to the Charter

The Seventh Amendment did no lasting damage to the Realm’s drinking habits and permanent damage to its constitutional confidence.

Before 1919 the Realm believed that Article XVII was effectively proof against passing enthusiasms. The procedure was so demanding, and had been cleared so rarely and for such grave purposes, that the country had come to regard the difficulty itself as a guarantee. Six amendments in a hundred and thirty-six years, one of them entrenching emancipation and one securing the franchise for women, is a record that invites that conclusion.

1919 destroyed it. What the episode demonstrated was that the amendment procedure, designed to be almost impossible, could be cleared by a sufficiently organised movement on a question of ordinary policy, and that the constitution offered no protection whatever against being used for something it was not for. There is no clause distinguishing a grave constitutional question from a licensing matter. There never was one. Nobody had thought it necessary.

Two arguments have run ever since and both begin here.

Those who say the Charter is too hard to amend point to the double majority, to the absolute veto of an unelected House, and to a constitution untouched since 1989.

Those who say it is too easy point to 1919, when an organised temperance movement cleared every one of those obstacles for a question of ordinary policy, and the Realm spent fourteen years undoing it.

The Realm’s settled view, insofar as it has one, is that the procedure is about right and that 1919 was a failure of judgement rather than of design. It holds this view comfortably and has not been seriously tested on it in the lifetime of anyone now voting.

Afterwards

Alcohol returned to the position it had held before 1920, which is to say a polity matter, and it has stayed there. There is no federal drink law in the Realm beyond what commerce, revenue and transport require, and there are forty-nine licensing regimes which differ from one another considerably.

But the Realm did not return to exactly what it had before, and the difference is the most durable civil legacy of the fourteen years.

The monopolies

Several polities did not go back to free licensing at repeal. They went into the trade themselves.

The reasoning was practical and was made openly at the time. A polity that had just watched an illicit trade enrich criminal organisations for fourteen years was not eager to hand the lawful trade straight back to private hands, and a public monopoly answered several problems at once: it captured the revenue, it controlled the strength and the hours, it removed the profit motive from the point of sale, and it gave the polity a lever it could adjust without legislating.

The arrangements were not uniform, because nothing in this Realm is. Some polities took the wholesale trade only and left retail licensed. Some took retail in spirits and left beer and wine to shops. A few took the whole chain.

The State of Deseret has the strictest surviving version, licensing tightly and selling the stronger sorts through its own outlets, and it has built in consequence a soft drink culture of remarkable complexity assembled by people who do not drink. It is the arrangement most visitors notice, and most of them assume it is a religious provision. It is a repeal provision. Deseret’s liquor stores exist because of 1933, not because of 1847, and the same is true of every other polity that runs them.

Several polities also retain dry counties by their own law, and a few small jurisdictions stopped licensing in 1920 and simply never resumed.

The Realm therefore spent fourteen years and a constitutional amendment to arrive somewhere slightly worse than where it started: a criminal economy it had not had before, a federal investigative capacity built to fight it, and a patchwork of public liquor monopolies erected by polities that no longer trusted the private trade. The only thing it did not end up with was Prohibition.

Assessment

Prohibition is taught in the Realm as a constitutional episode rather than a moral one, and the teaching is unusually consistent for a subject of its kind.

The facts are not contested. The temperance movement was a genuine mass organisation with genuine grievances and a genuine record of achievement outside its central cause. The amendment was carried lawfully, twice over, by a procedure designed to prevent exactly this. The enforcement was uneven, corrupt at the margins, and fell hardest on those least able to resist it. The repeal was carried by the same procedure and by a country that had changed its mind for reasons more fiscal than principled.

What is contested is the lesson.

One reading holds that the episode proves the constitution worked. A country imposed a policy through the highest procedure available to it, discovered the policy was a failure, and removed it through the same procedure, in fourteen years, without a crisis, a coup, or a court being asked to save anybody from a decision they had made themselves. On this view the visible scar in the enrolled Charter is not an embarrassment but a demonstration.

The other holds that a constitution which can be used to settle a licensing question is not doing the work a constitution is for, and that the country was lucky the question was drink rather than something it could not have taken back.

Both readings are made by serious people and neither has won.

Chronology

Year	Event
1874	Frances Willard becomes national corresponding secretary of the WCTU
1879	Willard becomes president and begins the federated Do Everything programme
1889	Willard commissioned Governor-General, having resigned every campaign office
1897	Willard’s tenure ends
1898	Willard dies, 17 February, twenty-one years before the amendment her movement carried
1890s	The League Against the Liquor Traffic is founded out of the movement, single-issue and organised for the double majority
1919	The Seventh Amendment clears both Houses and the double-majority referendum. Wilson is incapable and resigns; Taft gives Assent and commissions Hughes
1920	The Intoxicating Liquors Act supplies the machinery, exempts sacramental and medicinal use, and leaves polity licensing untouched
1921	Pershing becomes Governor-General
1925	Coolidge succeeds Hughes and enforces without zeal
1929	The crash. Roosevelt takes office; Browder becomes Governor-General
1933	The Ninth Amendment repeals the Seventh, on the same double majority. Assent by Browder
1933 onward	Several polities decline to return the trade to private hands and establish public liquor monopolies
1933 to date	Alcohol is a polity matter, as it was before 1920

Trivia

In-Universe The Realm voted for Prohibition and then voted against it, through the identical procedure, with no change to the constitution's machinery in between. It cannot blame a legislature, a court or an elite for either decision, and that is the part of the episode it has found hardest to put away.
In-Universe The Seventh Amendment is still printed in the enrolled Charter, struck through and answered by the Ninth. Article XVII.7 requires that superseded words remain, so the Realm reads a constitution with visible scars and cannot tidy the episode away.
In-Universe The amendment prohibited making, selling and transporting liquor, and could not touch licensing, which is a polity matter. Polities went on issuing licences to sell a commodity federal law forbade anyone to supply, and several repealed their own enforcement statutes and left the federal service to act alone.
In-Universe Frances Willard, the movement's greatest figure, had been Governor-General from 1889 and had scrupulously resigned every campaign office before installation. She died in 1898, twenty-one years before the Seventh Amendment, and her portrait was carried in the 1919 campaign by an organisation she had left two decades earlier, in support of an amendment she never saw.
In-Universe The WCTU did not carry the Seventh Amendment. The League Against the Liquor Traffic did, by asking every candidate for every office one question and working for or against him on the answer. It endorsed men whose politics it detested, held no view on the franchise, labour or race, and took money from anyone, on the ground that a position was a liability.
In-Universe The League's genius was arithmetical. Article XVII requires a majority of the polities as well as a majority of the people, which makes a vote in a small rural polity worth several times a vote in a populous one. The League organised where the polities were rather than where the people were, and had the arithmetic twenty years before it had the argument.
In-Universe The sacramental exemption protected the established Church of America, which had not asked for it and could not decline it without abolishing its own communion. The dry Nonconformist congregations that had campaigned hardest mostly used unfermented grape juice and took no benefit at all, so the provision they helped enact protected the churches least enthusiastic about Prohibition. That grievance did more damage to the dry coalition than any wet argument.
In-Universe Congregations appeared in numbers no census of belief could account for, sacramental requisitions would have communicated populations several times the size of the parishes claiming them, and forged clerical credentials were advertised openly. The Church tightened its own certification repeatedly, which reduced its own supply and did nothing about congregations that had never been in communion with it.
In-Universe Deseret's liquor stores exist because of 1933, not because of 1847. Several polities declined to hand the lawful trade back to private hands after fourteen years of watching an illicit one, and went into it themselves. Most visitors assume the arrangement is a religious provision; it is a repeal provision.
In-Universe The Realm has never agreed why Prohibition ended. Revenue in the Depression, exhaustion at fourteen years of killing, and the simple unadministrability of a federal ban sitting on top of forty-nine licensing systems are all offered, most accounts use all three, and no decisive case has ever been made for any one.
In-Universe Charles Evans Hughes drank almost nothing before the Seventh Amendment and nothing at all after it, on the ground that a Prime Minister enforcing a prohibition should not be capable of being photographed evading it.
In-Universe Coolidge funded enforcement at a level sufficient to sustain the effort and insufficient to succeed. The dry organisations called him a disappointment, the wet organisations called him an obstacle, and he replied to neither.
In-Universe Liquor crossed into Vermont's Northeast Kingdom from Quebec for fourteen years with the amused cooperation of much of the population. It came from New Albion, a sister realm under the same King, lawfully made and lawfully sold where it came from, and there was no instrument by which one of the King's realms could ask another to stop.
In-Universe Assent to Prohibition was given by William Howard Taft in 1919. Assent to its repeal was given in 1933 by Earl Browder, a communist, who embodied the Crown through the Depression.
In-Universe The Realm's federal investigative capacity was built to enforce a provision the country later repudiated. The Bureau of Federal Investigation grew against inter-polity liquor networks, and its methods are the direct ancestors of the modern Royal American Constabulary's.
Real-World Prohibition arrives and departs on the same dates as in our own history, 1919 and 1933. The differences are procedural. Ours was ratified by state legislatures and repealed by state conventions, the only amendment ever done that way; the Realm put both questions to the whole electorate at a referendum, so the same voters imposed it and removed it.
Real-World The Volstead Act's concurrent-enforcement problem is real, but the Realm's version is structurally worse. Licensing was a polity competence beyond federal reach under Article XVII.9, so no amendment prohibiting the commodity could touch the licence, and the two systems ran side by side for fourteen years without ever being reconciled.