A hundred years ago, a nasty little Senate primary was playing out in Wisconsin. Governor John J. Blaine was challenging the sitting senator, Irvine Lenroot, and the fight was ugly, personal, and almost entirely about beer.

Blaine didn't hold back. He accused Lenroot of dodging accountability for his own Prohibition record, saying his opponent was hunting for a cyclone cellar to hide from his vote on the Volstead Act. He pointed out that Lenroot had voted for it back in 1919, while Wisconsin's other senator, Robert La Follette, had voted against it.

It wasn't only about beer, either. That same summer, Lenroot accepted a challenge to debate Blaine directly over another hot issue of the day, whether the United States should join the World Court.

Blaine beat Lenroot in the September primary, then went on to win the general election that November. One paper's headline put it about as bluntly as a headline can. Blaine elected, and his opponent Lenroot's political network, tied closely to the elder statesman "Magnus" Johnson, thoroughly beaten.

Blaine's Senate term ran from 1927 to 1933. By the time his own re-election came up in 1932, he lost his primary too, the same fate he'd handed Lenroot years earlier. He was headed out the door.

He used his final months in office to do something bigger than anything from that 1926 campaign. On December 6, 1932, he introduced the resolution that would become the 21st Amendment, formally proposing the repeal of Prohibition nationwide.

The path wasn't smooth. The Senate passed it 63 to 23 in February 1933. But the House had already rejected a similar measure on the opening day of that same session. Nobody was confident the votes were there.

Four days later, the House reversed itself completely and passed Blaine's resolution 289 to 121.

The actual bound resolution still exists, signed by Speaker John Nance Garner and Vice President Charles Curtis, official and permanent.

Ratification took the rest of the year. State by state, conventions voted, and by December 1933, it was over. One California paper put the whole thing simply on its front page. Prohibition ends December 5th.

A Wisconsin paper covering the House vote that February called Blaine exactly what he was by then. “The father of the repeal movement.”

He'd started his political life as one of the state's most combative dry-versus-wet campaigners. He ended it as the man whose name is still attached to the actual legal document that made beer legal again, nationwide, for good.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
The Post-Crescent, August 2, 1926
The Indianapolis Times, June 28, 1926
The Daily Worker, November 4, 1926
Wisconsin State Journal, February 20, 1933
The Times-Standard, December 1, 1933
Joint Resolution S.J. Res. 211, February 20, 1933