National Prohibition came into force in 1920, but the campaign started in the 1800s, and several states had their own laws in place decades before the national law.
Still, you're right, it's bootless to argue the history here - it's the future of fuel that's important.
Whether people like the idea or not, something is going to have to replace gasoline in the foreseeable future, and at the moment the most viable option is some form of biofuel.
Bio-ethanol, as has been pointed out already, has issues because it displaces food production. Methanol, however, can be produced from the waste of crops (cereal stems, leaves, branches etc), so food production is supplemented, not displaced, and methane is easily produced from animal wastes and landfill sites.
In my own area, a number of pig and chicken farmers are net electricity producers, purely because they flush their animal sheds into a tank, and pump the fermentation gases into generators, and we have a history in the UK of re-tuning petrol cars to run on methane (in fact, the current UK speed record for a production bus is held by one running on bio-methane).