Abstract:
On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing the manufacture or sale of alcohol, became law. Its enactment was the product of a vigorous lobbying effort, using methods strikingly similar to those currently employed by Christian Political Action Committees. The story of the prohibitionist victory, therefore, is instructive to students of the legislative process--particularly of single-issue lobbying today. Part A chronicles the century-long effort of anti-liquor advocates to secure prohibition legislation, culminating in the victory of the Anti-Saloon League; it also analyzes the forces behind Prohibition's success. Part B briefly recounts the life and death of the Eighteenth Amendment. The supplement contains a number of recent articles on the Moral Majority and Christian Political Action Committees, to provide a point of analogy.
Learning Objective:
This case can be used together with its supplement to sharpen students' thinking about what is and is not "new" in contemporary news. A current cliche is that special interest groups are an important phenomenon in American politics--implicitly, a novel one. The "Prohibition" case demonstrates how old "contemporary" techniques actually are.
