With Nebraska's ratification on January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment achieved the three-fourths majority of states needed to become law, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The amendment took effect a year later, on January 17, 1920, ushering in the era of speakeasies, bootleggers, and organized crime empires built on illegal booze.
Temperance campaigners, led by groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, had spent decades building the political coalition needed to outlaw alcohol nationwide, framing drink as the root of poverty, domestic abuse, and moral decay. World War I gave them an unexpected boost, as anti-German sentiment tainted beer brewers with names like Busch and Pabst, and grain conservation became a patriotic rallying cry.
When Nebraska's legislature ratified the amendment, it triggered a one-year countdown to nationwide Prohibition. Congress soon passed the Volstead Act to provide enforcement teeth, over President Woodrow Wilson's veto.
What followed was one of the great unintended consequences in American policy history. Rather than eliminating alcohol, Prohibition created a black market worth billions, empowering gangsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, corrupting police forces, and turning ordinary citizens into scofflaws who visited speakeasies by the thousands. The experiment was abandoned just fourteen years later, in 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed it, a rare instance of a constitutional amendment being wholly reversed.