ABSTRACT
A Republican member of the House of Representatives, Andrew Joseph Volstead of Minnesota, proposed the needed law. The US Congress passed the Volstead Act on October 28, 1919, in order to implement the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. The term "Volsteadism" came to mean the intolerable searches, seizures, and shootings by police who seemed to threaten intrusion into the private lives of law-respecting persons. In response to gangland shootings and widespread corruption of law enforcement officers, President Herbert Hoover created the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, chaired by George Wickersham, in 1929. The Volstead Act had unintended consequences not only for Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures but also for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The Volstead Act, according to its critics, also restrained religious liberty.
