As a modern man, schooled in the idea that prohibition was a failure (and that the prohibition of some drugs is just as much a failure as the prohibition of alcohol was), I have a natural tendency to view those who stood against it as heros who were vindicated by its repeal.
But that might be overstating the situation, at least for some.
“Former Senator Joseph Bailey of Texas put it more crudely but also more frankly: handing the federal government authority over liquor control, he said, would establish a precedent that would in time guarantee that ‘there will not be a square foot of territory in the United States where it will be unlawful for negroes and white people to intermarry’. ” (–Last Call by Daniel Okrent).
States-rights was an argument that southern Democrats used for two generations to help protect the post-Tilden racial settlement in the south, and states-rights opposition to prohibition was no different.
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[...] its reluctance to repeal, wasn’t very supportive of federal prohibition, for reasons like this: prohibition would give too much power to the federal government, and Loving v Virginia would be [...]