Volstead Act

The Volstead Act was the federal law that implemented the Eighteenth Amendment, creating the structure for the system of concurrent enforcement laid out in that amendment. The scheme set out in the Volstead Act never worked as planned, and federal enforcement of beverage alcohol prohibition was a failure. Nevertheless, this failed effort dramatically expanded the federal government's role in anticrime efforts.

While both Congressman Andrew Volstead and Anti-Saloon League lobbyist Wayne Wheeler claimed to have written the original text, it is beyond dispute that the measure was an Anti-Saloon League proposal. The league called for a federal prohibition law on the day after the last needed state ratified the prohibition amendment. The process to create this law began by collecting various laws of the prohibition states and taking what prohibitionists thought their best features and placing them in federal law. It reflected what the Anti-Saloon League thought was important in such a law: a federal standard that would guide the states, which were expected to do most of the policing of prohibition. But Congress weakened the original prohibitionist proposal.

The Volstead Act had three sections. The first section implemented the system of wartime prohibition. It went into effect the day the act was passed over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, October 24, 1919, which was long after the fighting in World War I had ended. During the war, the federal government had outlawed the manufacturing of alcoholic beverages. The first section of the Volstead Act was designed to make demobilization less tumultuous by keeping beverage alcohol from being manufactured and sold. The third section laid out the regulations for the production and distribution of alcohol for industrial production. Fearing the diversion of industrial alcohol for illegal drinking, the law constructed a system of tight control over the production of alcohol to be used in industry and required its denaturing to render it unsafe for consumption. It was the second section of the act that mattered the most, for here was the basis of national prohibition policy.

The national prohibitory law closely resembled earlier state prohibition laws. It outlawed the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, delivering, bartering, and possession of any intoxicating liquor, except as authorized in the act. Congress wrote two important exceptions into the act, one allowing the home fermentation of fruit juices and another allowing possession of alcoholic beverages in one's home for personal use of one's family and guests. For medicinal and sacramental use of alcohol, the act set out a detailed permit system that regulated the production and distribution of alcohol and the withdrawal from federally bonded warehouses (the pre-prohibition tax system required all liquor to be stored in federally controlled facilities) of existing liquor stocks. It set out a clear and workable permit system for [Page 836]church officials, doctors, druggists, manufacturers, and common carriers involved in this very truncated legal liquor industry.

To curtail the illegal sale of intoxicants, the Volstead Act banned solicitation of alcohol orders and prohibited liquor advertising. To further penalize liquor sellers, it instituted a system of barkeeper's tort, which allowed private parties to collect civil damages from the sellers of liquor to intoxicated persons. It also allowed to be condemned as a common nuisance any building or vehicle used in any aspect of the illegal trade and granted limited search and seizure powers to government agents (Congress stripped far greater powers from the original prohibitionist proposal). The existing tax on alcohol was left in place but only to be used as a penalty after someone was found to be illegally manufacturing or selling intoxicating beverages.

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