Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution the Senate voted similarly the next day. The Volstead Act set the starting date for nationwide prohibition for January 17, 1920, which was the earliest date allowed by the 18th amendment. The act was conceived and introduced by Wayne Wheeler who was a leader of the Anti-Saloon League, a group which found alcohol responsible for almost all of society's problems, and were also responsible for many campaigns against the sale of alcohol. The law was also heavily supported by Judiciary Chairman at the time, Andrew Volstead from Minnesota and was named in his honor. The act in its written form
Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution the individual. In his important study both of the Eighteenth Amendment and its repeal, Daniel Okrent identifies the powerful political coalition that worked successfully in the two decades leading to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment: Five distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up this unspoken coalition: racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (whose ranks included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Adherents of each group may have been opposed to alcohol for its own sake, but used the Prohibition impulse to advance ideologies and causes that had little to do with it. If public sentiment had turned against Prohibition by the