Prohibition Party

AuthorJeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

Page 141

The Prohibition Party was established in 1869, ostensibly in response to a growing concern among Americans that the sale and consumption of liquor contributed to crime and immorality. In fact, although PROHIBITION was always the top issue, the party's platform emerged as one of the most progressive of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it was one of the first parties to make women's suffrage a key platform point.

After the Civil War, the liquor industry in the United States grew rapidly, even though 13 states were officially pronounced "dry." John Russell, a Methodist minister from Michigan, began organizing a national group in 1867, and, in 1869, the group met in Chicago to adopt a political platform and plot out a campaign strategy for the 1872 presidential election. The original platform placed a heavy emphasis on the evils of alcoholic beverages, but it had a surprisingly broad scope. It advocated strong government support of public education, increased accountability of government agencies, and a liberal immigration policy. The right to vote was to be guaranteed to all citizens, native or naturalized, regardless of race, color, sex, or "former social condition." The emphasis on alcoholic drink stemmed not so much from a moral opposition to liquor as from a pragmatic one. Alcohol abuse, said the Prohibitionists, led to chronic illness, job loss, spouse and CHILD ABUSE, and impoverishment. The best way to reduce social ills, they maintained, was to eliminate alcoholic consumption.

Russell was on the Prohibition Party's first ticket, as vice president; the presidential candidate was James Black, a lawyer and activist from Pennsylvania. The ticket drew only about 5,000 votes from six states. It drew only a few thousand more votes in the 1876 and 1880 elections, but it won the support of groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League. In 1884, a ticket headed by the former Republican governor of Kansas, John P. St. John, won more than 153,000 votes. The 1888 ticket, which was headed by Fisk University founder Clinton B. Fisk, won nearly 250,000 votes.

John Bidwell, a rancher and former military officer from California, won more than 271,000 votes in the 1892 presidential election, the most ever won by any Prohibition candidate. Over the next quarter century, the Prohibition Party continued to draw respectable figures...

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