There is plenty of evidence that Americans could drink heavily, in the early days of the republic. After the imposition of a tax on distilleries, the Whiskey Rebellion broke out because whiskey had become a common currency on the frontier. De Tocqueville noted that every single business transaction, meeting, etc. tended to occasion a drink. Davy Crockett campaigned for his first election in Tennessee by walking the roads with a jug of whiskey and a plug of chewing tobacco, offering first the whiskey- so the voter could take a drink- and then the tobacco, because the voter would have had to spit out what he was already chewing to take the drink.

However, the Industrial Revolution did present new opportunities for drinking, with wages being paid in cash and saloons likely in operation between the factory and the home. And, with men being the typical wage earners, it was seen very much as a specific danger to the family. A family was the normal vocation for a woman, but even an abusive alcoholic husband still would have almost complete legal control of it. There was therefore a strong feminine viewpoint; with groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and songs about children being sent down to the saloon to retrieve their father before he drank up the week's pay. Temperance was also therefore often folded into the progressive agenda of women's suffrage and equal rights.

There was strong support in many places for limits on alcohol, even some state bans on the sale of it. But politicians who were progressive in some ways but not "dry" could usually count on votes from progressive temperance voters. However, when Wayne Wheeler became president of the Anti-Saloon League, that changed. Wheeler was the first person to use single-issue advocacy, and he gave politicians a simple choice: sign on to the ASL's agenda, or the ASL would support your opponent in the election. The ASL would also have parades of young girls, dressed in white, holding temperance signs, sending the clear message that alcohol destroyed everything beautiful and good.

If Wheeler and the ASL were united, all of the opposition of brewers and distillers, denominations like the Lutherans and Catholics, Jewish congregations, were not. The 18th Amendment and the Volsted Act pretty much sailed through. When the US went into WWI, limits on alcohol had been imposed for the war effort, so some restrictions and bureaucratic machinery were already in place.

What Wheeler and the temperance groups failed to consider was that, though most Americans knew alcohol was a problem, most didn't think they had a problem with it themselves. There had been a political victory, but there was not really strong public support for it. The result was massive non-compliance. Worse, drunkenness went from being something thought disgraceful to something thought rather endearing and funny ( watch the Thin Man films sometime) . The almost exclusively male saloon was replaced by the speakeasy, where women also drank, and female alcoholism grew. And of course much of the huge money that came from sales of alcohol went to criminals, like Al Capone, and those criminals became powerful.

There is some evidence that Prohibition did actually cause a drop in overall drinking. But very quickly, it was widely seen as a mistake. As Franklin P Adams wrote in 1931, in response to a glowing report by a government commission:

Prohibition is an awful flop.

We like it.

It can't stop what it's meant to stop.

We like it.

It's left a trail of graft and slime,

It won't prohibit worth a dime,

It's filled our land with vice and crime.

Nevertheless, we're for it.

When the Depression hit, in 1930, there was increased and more organized opposition. Why not let the poor working man have his beer? became a common question. And, it was noted, sales of alcohol had been a very important part of the economy before, and would help to boost the economy again. In 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty First.

Okrent, Daniel. (2010) Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribners