On December 5, 1933, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, providing the three-quarters majority needed to repeal the 18th Amendment. Prohibition, in effect since January 1920, had failed to curb drinking while fueling organized crime empires built by figures like Al Capone. Legal liquor sales resumed that evening in cities across the country amid widespread celebration.
The irony of Utah, home to the heavily Mormon and famously teetotaling population, casting the decisive vote was not lost on contemporaries. Delegates at the state's ratifying convention pushed it through anyway, recognizing that Prohibition had become a national embarrassment rather than a moral triumph.
Within hours, breweries that had spent thirteen years making 'near beer' or diversifying into ice cream and cheese scrambled to restart production. Anheuser-Busch sent a team of Clydesdale horses pulling a beer wagon down the streets of St. Louis, a publicity stunt that became an enduring American image.
Prohibition's repeal didn't end American ambivalence about alcohol — many states and counties kept local bans for decades afterward, and some remain dry today. But it marked a rare instance of a constitutional amendment being wholly reversed, an admission that the noble experiment of banning liquor had instead handed a fortune to bootleggers and corrupted police departments nationwide.