PROHIBITION PARTY

PROHIBITION PARTY, the oldest continuous third party in the United States, was founded in 1869 by temperance crusaders who broke with the Republican Party because they felt it was betraying its original spirit and aims. Men such as Neal Dow of Maine, Gerrit Smith of upstate New York, and James Black of Pennsylvania had backed the Republican Party during its early years because they saw it as an instrument of Christian reform. Although they were willing to let temperance take a back seat during the fight to end slavery, they expected prohibition to be the Republican Party's next great crusade. After the Civil War, however, Republicans increasingly focused on the economic issues favored by eastern business interests and even defended liquor sales because of the federal revenue derived from excise taxes on alcohol. When 500 delegates from nineteen states convened in Chicago to found the new party, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith declared, "Our involuntary slaves are set free, but our millions of voluntary slaves still clang their chains."

During its first several decades, the party was dominated by "broadgauge" prohibitionists who believed that the party could help remake the social order and argued that it should embrace a wide range of issues in order to win broad public support. The party's platform in the late nineteenth century included the direct popular election of U.S. senators, civil service reform, and suffrage for all of voting age regardless of sex or race. In these years, the party helped mobilize thousands of women into the political process for the first time. In addition, since party leaders often came from affluent colleges and congregations in the Northeast, the Prohibition Party brought a reform agenda to areas that were comparatively insulated from the Greenback and Populist movements of the period. The party's first presidential nominee, Pennsylvania lawyer James Black, garnered only 5,600 popular votes in 1872. By 1892, however, John Bidwell of California attracted over 270,000 votes, becoming the party's most successful presidential nominee. (Although the party has fielded presidential and vice presidential candidates in every election since 1872, it has never won any electoral votes.)

In 1896 the controversy over maintaining the gold standard or issuing unlimited silver coins temporarily divided the Prohibition Party, and by the early twentieth century, its leaders no longer envisioned replacing one of the nation's major political parties. Instead, they joined forces with other temperance organizations, and focused on persuading the major parties to support or adopt their position on prohibition. They achieved this goal in 1919 with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Popular support for the Prohibition Party fell off dramatically after 1919, although the party itself remained active in presidential politics. After the repeal of prohibition in 1933, the party increasingly came to be dominated by Protestant fundamentalists who felt alienated from modern American society and called for a return to the moral values of an earlier era. In the late 1970s, the party briefly changed its name to the National Statesman, but it reversed that move because it tended to confuse hard-core supporters. As the twenty-first century opened, the party's platform included the right to life, opposition to commercial gambling and the "homosexual agenda," the right to prayer and bible reading in public schools, opposition to the commercial sale of alcohol, and concern about the role of the United Nations and international trade agreements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kobler, John. Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Putnam, 1973.

Smallwood, Frank. The Other Candidates: Third Parties in Presidential Elections. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983.

Storms, Roger C. Partisan Prophets: A History of the Prohibition Party. Denver: National Prohibition Foundation, 1972.

Prohibition Party. Home page at http://www.prohibition.org/.

WendyWall

See alsoThird Parties .