Abstract
For many Americans in the 1920s, the adoption of national prohibition marked an experiment in government. To some, the public commitment to outlaw the traffic in alcoholic drinks was an intrusive and futile attempt to interfere with local conditions, customs, and the individual liberty of American citizens. Others considered the growth in public responsibility mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to be a necessary step toward reform and efficiency. At the state level, national prohibition represented a further administrative challenge. State governments were expected to cooperate with federal enforcement agents and to construct state-level enforcement mechanisms that would support and augment national efforts while customizing enforcement to local circumstances. Rarely in the early twentieth century did public policy traverse so dangerously the intersections between local, state, and national sovereignty and collide so dramatically with popular resistance. State-level prohibition enforcement in the 1920s prompted innovations in public-policy administration and outlined the limitations of government authority in the institutional network of modernizing America.