The Eighteenth Amendment.

On 18 December 1917 Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, forbidding the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors." By January 1919, forty-six of the forty-eight states had ratified the amendment; only Rhode Island and Connecticut had not. Despite the rapid ratification of the amendment, however, many industrial states never adopted state Prohibition, including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The opposition of new immigrants to the Prohibition measure proved its undoing in the large cities that rejected state or municipal liquor bans between 1917 and 1919: Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and Saint Paul. In states where Prohibition was unpopular, the state governments assumed the position that the measure was a federal law, and left its enforcement to the federal government. Altogether, the cost to states for enforcing Prohibition was only a quarter...