Webb-Kenyon Act

The prohibitionist movement's most significant legislation before national prohibition was the 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act. The passage of the Webb-Kenyon Act marked the political maturation of the prohibition movement and set the course for national prohibition. Prohibition forces overcame determined political opposition in Congress and constitutional objections to their measure. The idea behind the act was that the federal government should assist, or at least not interfere, with the operation of state laws that prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. This concept of concurrent power of state and federal governments was written into the Eighteenth Amendment and underlay the national prohibition enforcement act, the Volstead Act.

Federal courts’ interpretation of the commerce power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries seriously undercut the effectiveness of state alcohol prohibition laws by making it easy to import alcoholic beverages into prohibition states. The key Supreme Court ruling of Rhodes v. Iowa (1898) narrowly defined an earlier federal act (the 1890 Wilson Act), which had been designed to aid prohibition states by declaring that alcoholic beverages transported into any state should be treated as though they had been produced in that state, thereby stripping them of their federal commerce power protection. The Rhodes case determined that when transported into the state alcoholic beverages only lost their status as goods beyond state power when they were delivered to the consignee.

The result of Rhodes and related court decisions that followed was the creation of a thriving interstate commerce trade in beverage alcohol into prohibition states, effectively undermining the anti-liquor policy. Liquor sellers used standing injunctions against state laws to facilitate a vast trade. The interstate commerce commission in 1911 estimated that express companies delivered over 20 million gallons of intoxicating liquor into prohibition areas of the nation in the previous year.

Beginning around 1900, prohibitionists led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union sought federal laws to aid the prohibition states in enforcing their liquor policies. [Page 846]At first, the prohibitionists made little headway in Congress. Neither major political party endorsed their calls for federal assistance for state prohibition. But the growth of prohibitionist sentiment across the nation and the rise in the number of prohibition states especially in the solid Democratic South after 1907 aided the movement. When the Democratic Party gained control of Congress, prohibitionists were able to push a bill that both reflected their constitutional ideas of states’ rights and met the desires of their anti-liquor constituents. Persistent lobbying and political pressure paid off, resulting in the passing of the original bill and also the overriding of a veto of the bill by President William Howard Taft, putting in place the Webb-Kenyon Act as a result.