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1 1 (June 26, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govemax0001 and id is 1 raw text is: L a Congressional_______ ftResearch Service The Eighteenth Amendment and National Prohibition, Part 3: Temperance Movements June 26, 2023 This Legal Sidebar post is the third in a seven-part series that discusses the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Prior to its repeal, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes within the United States. Section 2 of the Amendment granted Congress and the state legislatures concurrent power to enforce nationwide Prohibition by enacting appropriate legislation. The Eighteenth Amendment was partly a response to the Supreme Court's pre-Prohibition Era Commerce Clause jurisprudence, which limited the federal and state governments' power over the liquor traffic. As such, the Eighteenth Amendment's history provides insight into the judicial evolution of the Commerce Clause, which operates as both a positive grant of legislative power to Congress and a limit on state authority to regulate commerce. Additional information on this topic will be published in the Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. The Temperance Movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries From the 1790s to the early 1830s, Americans drank increasingly large amounts of whiskey and other distilled alcoholic beverages. Heavy consumption of hard liquor offended many social reformers, including Protestant churchgoers, who viewed drunkenness as a source of crime, family strife, illness, immorality, poverty, and workplace injuries. Concerned about alcoholism's effects on society, small groups of farmers and Protestant Christians formed some of the first temperance societies in the early 19th century. These societies urged Americans to abstain from drinking distilled alcoholic beverages but did not initially call for teetotalism-that is, total abstinence from all alcoholic beverages. Temperance societies adopted a stricter approach toward alcohol consumption in the 1830s, urging Americans to abstain entirely from drinking. For instance, the American Temperance Society, which Christian clergy founded in 1826, initially called for Americans to refrain from drinking ardent spirits. However, by the late 1830s, the society advocated for total abstinence from all alcoholic beverages. The society communicated this abstinence message through its writings and lectures, gaining more than a million members nationwide. Partly as a result of the temperance movement, Americans' drinking declined during the mid-1830s. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10987 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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