The right answer is (1) the inability of government to enforce the law.
Many reformers were motivated by conservative religious beliefs that led them to focus their energies on moral regulations such as the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Prohibition was the most ambitious social reform ever attempted in the United States. But it proved to be a colossal failure. The new amendment did not suddenly persuade people to stop drinking. Instead, it motivated millions of people to use ingenious—and illegal—ways to satisfy their thirst for alcohol. An even greater weakness of the new Prohibition law was that Congress never supplied adequate funding to enforce it. In 1920 there were only 1,520 Prohibition agents spread across the United States. Roosevelt ended Prohibition in 1933.
