Wickersham Commission

When President Hoover was elected, he had promised to have a study done on Prohibition to improve enforcement. In 1929, Hoover appointed George W. Wickersham as chairman of the commission to study the enforcement problems. Wickersham had been the Attorney General under President Taft. The focus of the commission was to study the enforcement of law in general, but the Eighteenth Amendment in particular. The commission made its report in 1931. The report noted that 15,370 distilleries and 1,140,063 gallons of spirits had been seized in 1929. This was just a small part of the illegal spirits on the black market. The commission concluded that the Volstead Act (the law enforcing Prohibition) could not be enforced without a huge amount of spending to support the law enforcement agencies. It was not helped by the fact that some States, New York in particular, refused to spend any money enforcing the Volstead Act. The Great Depression made it impossible for the Federal Government to increase the enforcement budget to the point that would be needed to make Prohibition work. Wickersham reported that it was an unfortunate situation with no apparent solution.

History had already proven that money and enforcement could not stop illegal spirits from being made. After the American Civil War, moonshining was rampant in the Appalachian Mountains because the high excise tax made it very profitable to sell moonshine. The government tried using the occupying army to stop the moonshiners, but had little effect. It was only when the government lowered the excise tax and made legal whiskey competitive in the market, that moonshining declined in the region. History repeated itself when the repeal of Prohibition happened in 1935, only then did moonshining and illegal distilling decline in America.