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From Unpopular to Excluded: Prohibitionists and the Ascendancy of a Democratic-Republican System, 1888–1912

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2012

Lisa Andersen
Lisa Andersen*
Affiliation:
The Juilliard School
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 288 - 318
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

1. “The National Convention,” (Detroit) Peninsular Herald, 4 January 1872.

2. C. Augusta Morse, “Why Are We Enthusiastic?” Delaware (Ohio) Signal, 8 December 1880. Histories of the Prohibition Party include Blocker, Jack, Retreat from Reform: The Prohibition Movement in the United States, 1890–1913 (Westport, Conn., 1976)Google Scholar; Leigh Colvin, D., Prohibition in the United States: A History of the Prohibition Party and of the Prohibition Movement (New York, 1926).Google Scholar

3. This article uses the capitalized term “Prohibitionist” to describe members of the Prohibition Party, just as “Republican” would be used to describe members of the Republican Party. There were many advocates of prohibition policy who were not members of the party, and who might be described as “prohibitionist.” For a list of various states’ history of ballot access laws, see Winger, Richard, “Early Ballot Access Laws for New and Minor Parties,” in Others: ‘Fighting Bob’ La Follette and the Progressive Movement: Third-Party Politics in the 1920s, ed. Richardson, Darcy G. (New York, 2008), 359–88.Google Scholar

4. Isaac Funk, quoted in “Dr. Funk Never Said It”, The (New York) Voice, 3 January 1895.

5. Hays, Samuel P., “Political Parties and the Community-Society Continuum,” in The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. Nisbet Chambers, William and Dean Burnham, Walter (New York, 1967), 152–81Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, Okla., 2003)Google Scholar; Clemens, Elisabeth S., The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar; Key, V. O., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York, 1964)Google Scholar; Sproat, John G., “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

6. Kleppner, Paul, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893–1928 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Lawrence Kornbluh, Mark, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; McGerr, Michael, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Gidlow, Liette, The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920 (Baltimore, 2004).Google Scholar

7. Walter Dean Burnham suggests that the rise of split-ticket voting is another means by which voters expressed resentful feelings of frustration with their political options, in “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American Political Science Review (March 1965): 7–28.

8. There is some debate about the efficacy of nineteenth-century parties as vehicles for communication between voters and policymakers. Parties have been widely credited with integrating national political culture, articulating and channeling popular opinion, and building other important institutions for public discourse such as newspapers. Party conventions and platform construction could serve as quasi-public forums for political debate. Yet even high voter turnout would mean little if party leaders perceived their work to be fundamentally about distributing offices, or if there was massive electoral corruption. See Schudson, Michael, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar; Ryan, Mary P., Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997)Google Scholar; Chambers, and Burnham, , eds., The American Party Systems; Daniel Klinghard, The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880–1896 (New York, 2010).Google Scholar

9. On the 1912 election, see Gould, Lewis L., Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence, Kans., 2008)Google Scholar; Chase, James, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs—The Election That Changed the Country (New York, 2005).Google Scholar

10. My claims here synthesize and expand upon observations made about the solidification of a two-party system, and the simultaneous control of Democrats and Republicans over that system, made in Holt, Michael, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge, 1992), 27Google Scholar; Peter Argersinger, “The Value of the Vote: Political Representation in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History (June 1989): 65; Argersinger, “‘A Place on the Ballot’: Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws,” American Historical Review (April 1980): 304. It is not necessarily suggesting a conspiracy to note that Democratic and Republican Party strategists and politicians had little interest in illuminating the conditions underwriting their dominance, or that it benefited these groups if Americans assumed that the authority of Democrats and Republicans was the result the electorate’s policy preferences—a “natural selection” for the parties best able to lead. Although ostensibly independent of and even opposed to Democratic and Republican elites, reformers seem to have shared their hesitancy to discuss the terms by which a Democratic-Republican system became entrenched. It seems reasonable to note that doing so would have required reformers to draw attention to the limitations of their programs, and the occasional backfiring of reform endeavors, and might undo public trust in reformers’ leadership.

11. For examples of the wide range of arenas in which populism and rationalization mingled, see Skocpol, Diminished Democracy, on civic groups, and Mattson, Kevin, Creating a Democratic Republic: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park, Pa., 1998), on community centers.Google Scholar

12. Jerrold G. Rusk, “The Effect of the Australian Ballot Reform on Split Ticket Voting: 1876–1908,” APSR (December 1970): 1221. See also Bensel, Richard, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. On the widespread nature of this assumption, see Fredman, L. E., The Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform (East Lansing, 1968), 47.Google Scholar

14. Restricting candidates from the ballot was often urged on the basis of avoiding “unwieldy” ballots, rather than explicitly described as a way to disfranchise minor parties. See Michael Lewis-Beck and Peverill Squire, “The Politics of Institutional Choice: Presidential Ballot Access for Third Parties in the United States,” British Journal of Political Science (October 1995): 419.

15. “Colorado Getting into Line,” Voice, 17 July 1891; “Prohibitionists Practically Disfranchised in Nevada,” Voice, 1 November 1894. A similar bill was advanced in New York, one that would have required parties polling less than 5 percent of the previous election’s vote to get 3,000 voters to both sign a petition and take an oath before a notary. In Ohio, the state legislature enacted an 1898 law that compelled petition signers to similarly pledge to vote for the candidate of that party.

16. “Put Up a Prohibition Ticket,” The (Chicago) Lever, 24 March 1892.

17. “Legal Obstacles to Minor Party Success,” Yale Law Journal (June 1948): 1289.

18. Fredman, The Australian Ballot, 48.

19. Syzmanski, Ann-Marie, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham, 2003), 168–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. “The Baker Ballot Law,” Lever, 28 January 1892.

21. “Vote Your Ticket Straight,” Lever, 27 October 1892.

22. “Illinois Is Alert,” Lever, 18 August 1898; Untitled, Lever, 25 August 1898.

23. In 1907, the national party had less than $2,000 in its treasury; Randall C. Jimerson et al., eds., Temperance and Prohibition Papers (microfilm edition), series II, roll I, “Minutes of the Prohibition National Committee,” 20 November 1907.

24. Argersinger, Peter, Structure, Process, and Party: Essays in American Political History (Armonk, N.Y., 1991), 57.Google Scholar See also Argersinger, “‘A Place on the Ballot,’” 287–306.

25. Samuel Dickie (national chair), “Dickie’s Opinion,” Lever, 4 December 1890.

26. For example, Prohibitionists did not have a good working relationship with the National League for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic, the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, and other groups that would coalesce as the Anti-Saloon League after that organization’s founding in 1895. On the Prohibition Party’s brief consideration of fusion with the Populists, see Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 77–82.

27. On the accomplishments of the moderate antiliquor movement, see Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 100–118; Foster, Gaines, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002), 163–77Google Scholar; Pegram, Thomas, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933 (New York, 1999), 109–18Google Scholar; Hamm, Richard, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 123–54.Google Scholar

28. Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, 124–25; Klinghard, The Nationalization of American Political Parties. Urban political machines were simultaneously under attack by antiparty reformers, including Mugwumps. See Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton, 1995); McCaffery, Peter, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933 (University Park, Pa., 1993).Google Scholar

29. On Tammany Hall’s use of knifing techniques in 1888, see Fredman, The Australian Ballot, 29. Fredman argues that the egregious use of knifing, that is, the trading of candidates off one’s own party ballot, best explains the timing of the movement for a secret ballot. In most cases, the voter seems to have been unaware that his vote was not the straight party ticket. Alan Ware, “Anti-Partisan and Party Control of Political Reform in the United States: The Case of the Australian Ballot,” BJPS (January 2000): 12–15; Cobb Evans, Eldon, History of the Australian Ballot System in the United States (Chicago, 1917), 22–23Google Scholar; Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, 37. Cantankerous minor parties had similar problems. For example, two factions of New York’s Socialist Party both sought to file nominations under the party’s name and emblem in 1896, with the result that one faction gained an injunction against the other. A similar event occurred in 1899. Kuhn, Henry and Johnson, Olive M., The Socialist Labor Party During Four Decades, 1890–1930 (Brooklyn, 1969), 49, 66.Google Scholar

30. Evans notes that some states permitted the nomination of candidates by petition after the date by which candidates nominated by convention needed to be submitted to the government printer, in History of the Australian Ballot System, 32. However, it seems to have been the case initially that the time span between the date parties needed to submit to the printer and the date that the ballots were printed was prohibitively close. See also Reynolds, John F., The Demise of the American Convention System, 1880–1911 (New York, 2006), 130–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. “Pennsylvania Ballot Law,” Lever, 8 July 1891.

32. “Another Plan to Deform the Ballot Laws,” Voice, 8 February 1894. See also “An Evil Plot,” Voice, 31 January 1895.

33. Untitled, Voice, 1 March 1894. See also Massachusetts Prohibition State Committee, “To the People of Massachusetts” (n.p. [1892?]), Folder: Massachusetts Prohibition State Committee, box 4, George B. Hillard Papers, New York Public Library Special Collections, New York.

34. “Attempt at Disfranchisement,” Voice, 20 October 1892; “No Official Ballot for South Dakota Prohibitionists,” Voice, 3 November 1892; “South Dakota,” Lever, 10 November 1892; “Have They Been Disfranchised?” Voice, 17 November 1892; Mrs. N. C. Smith, “The Way They Do in Arkansas,” Voice, 5 January 1893; Untitled, Lever, 24 November 1892. Only two Prohibition nominees in Arkansas appeared on the official ballot in 1894, with the other party nominations needing to be cast as write-in votes. “Advancing Lines,” Voice, 23 August 1894. The first year in which South Dakota participated in a federal election as a state was 1892; the state participated in the 1896 election in some fashion, as indicated by a National Executive Committee gift of $150 for help with campaign expenses; Jimerson, “Minutes of the National Executive Committee,” 8 July 1896. The process of compiling a comprehensive list of which parties were excluded from official state ballots in any given year is extremely difficult. Consultation with most state historical societies and many secretary of state offices suggests that the maintenance of such historical records is not common practice; copies of ballots, to the extent preserved, are widely uncatalogued.

35. “To Illinois Prohibitionists,” Voice, 3 November 1892.

36. “Prohibitionists Practically Disfranchised in Nevada,” Voice, 1 November 1894.

37. “Chairman Stewart’s Appeal,” Lever, 22 September 1898.

38. “Maryland Prohibitionists, Attention,” New Voice, 22 October 1903.

39. “The Party’s Greatest Vote,” Citizen, 16 November 1904.

40. Consultation with staff, Montana Historical Society, June 2010.

41. On the short ballot reform, see Schudson, The Good Citizen, 171–73.

42. “South Dakota,” Lever, 10 November 1892.

43. Mrs. N. C. Smith, “The Way They Do in Arkansas,” Voice, 5 January 1893.

44. Prohibition City Committee of Stockton, California, “Disgusted Prohibitionists,” Lever, 16 July 1891.

45. “The Tennessee Situation,” The (Harriman, Tennessee) Citizen, 12 October 1904. Tennessee had the secret ballot but not the direct primary in 1904.

46. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum, 85–108; Coker, Joe, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (Lexington, Ky., 2007), 102–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 133–34; Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 100–153.

47. “A Remedy for Political Corruption,” Citizen, 14 June 1894; Untitled, Voice, 24 October 1895; Frank H. Arnold, “Why I Am a Prohibitionist,” Citizen, 4 November 1903; “Prohibition as a Cure,” Voice, 3 May 1894; Untitled, Voice, 6 June 1895; Untitled, Voice, 24 October 1895.

48. “What Will You [sic] Ballot Count For?” Lever, 29 October 1891.

49. “What Are You?” Lever, 3 September 1896.

50. Evans records incidents of such multiple markings in the context of investigating how courts decided what was or was not a legitimate mark, in History of the Australian Ballot System, 66.

51. This is not to say that there were no members of the Prohibition Party who favored a broad platform, even for the Prohibition Party itself. But these individuals’ failure to persuade fellow partisans was officially registered at the national convention of 1896, when the party declared a narrow plank preference and the convention turned into a large, theatrical mockery of the broad platform idea. Prohibitionists favoring a narrow platform actually left the Prohibition Party to found the very short-lived National Party. Broad platforms would remain out of most Prohibitionists’ favor for more than a decade, when the party got substantially more desperate. See Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 109–16.

52. Clemens, The People’s Lobby, 64.

53. Argersinger, Peter, Populist and Politics: William Alfred Peffer and the People’s Party (Lexington, Ky., 1974), 292–94.Google Scholar

54. Michael Kazin lays out these categories of the Populist legacy in the introduction to The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995), 3.

55. Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978), 273.Google Scholar Goodwyn includes a pithy description of the fusionist crisis (274–77) and describes the ensuing “deterioration of third party organization” (285).

56. Argersinger, Structure, Process, and Party, 57. See also Argersinger, “‘A Place on the Ballot,’” 287–306.

57. On the good government movement, see McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 63–65; Sproat, “The Best Men,” 243–71; Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, 118–37.

58. Charles Evans Hughes, quoted in Richard L. McCormick, “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” AHR (April 1981): 267.

59. Merriam, Charles E., Primary Elections (Chicago, 1908), 70.Google Scholar On the rise of direct primaries, see Reynolds, , The Demise of the American Convention System; Alan Ware, The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization and Transformation in the North (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

60. Sandy Maisel, L., Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process, 2nd ed. (1987; New York, 1993), 149Google Scholar; Schudson, , The Good Citizen, 156; Key, , Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949), 444–50.Google Scholar

61. Merriam, Primary Elections, 31, 35, 39; Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, 444–50.

62. Robert M. LaFollette, “Primary Elections for the Nomination of All Candidates by Australian Ballot: Address Delivered Before Michigan University, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 12, 1898” (n.p. [1898?]). This pamphlet is not paginated, but this quote is taken from the first page of the body.

63. McCormick, Richard L., The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 342–44.Google Scholar Reformers did not yet consider how the pursuit of a primary nomination by a candidate might encourage candidates to seek out financial assistance from the same “interests” that had previously bought up convention votes. Likewise many early direct election laws did not specify whether a candidate required a plurality or a majority for nomination by his party.

64. For an example of early enthusiasm in Indiana, see “A Chance Offered for the People to Rule,” (Indianapolis) Patriot Phalanx, 21 July 1904. For continuing if episodic enthusiasm, see J. Raymond Schmidt, “Evil System of Party Caucus,” Patriot Phalanx, 17 March 1911; “The Presidential Candidate,” The (Franklin, Pennsylvania) Vindicator, 1 March 1912.

65. See “The Legislature,” The (St. Paul) Backbone, April 1901; “A Fight for the Party’s Rights,” The (St. Paul) Backbone, May 1902; “Primaries and Petitions,” (Minneapolis) Public Weal, June 1906.

66. “The Legislative Plan,” (Minneapolis) Public Weal, 15 July 1906.

67. P. F. Paige (Michigan state chair), “Vital for Michigan,” Vindicator, 15 March 1912.

68. “Outrage Against American Citizenship,” Patriot Phalanx, 7 April 1916.

69. “Explains the Situation,” Patriot Phalanx, 6 February 1908. This might also have been a problem in Indiana; see “Whom to Blame?” Patriot Phalanx, 26 November 1908.

70. See Austin Kerr, K., Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League (New Haven, 1985), 60.Google Scholar Local option laws existed in thirty states, and by 1906 about 40 percent of the American population lived in areas wherein saloons were banned; Pegram, Battling Demon Rum, 111.

71. The connection between successful county and local option campaigns and declining Prohibition Party votes is made by Colvin, , Prohibition in the United States: A History of the Prohibition Party and of the Prohibition Movement (New York, 1926), 341Google Scholar; Blocker, Retreat from Reform.

72. “Prohibition Party: Has It a Future,” Patriot Phalanx, 16 September 1909.

73. The statistics on party returns are far more precise and reliable than those recording on what official state ballots the Prohibition Party actually appeared. In 1890, the Prohibition Party appeared on tickets in all states except for Nevada and several Southern states; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, 240–41. Regarding the number of states for which the Prohibition Party received returns in 1908, see Bliss, William D. P., ed., The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York, 1908), 974Google Scholar, for the claim of thirty-nine states. Funk and Wagnalls were members of the Prohibition Party, in addition to being publishing giants. Svend Petersen identifies forty states as receiving Prohibition Party returns; A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections (New York, 1963). Roger Storms, a Prohibitionist who wrote his party’s history, records that the 1908 presidential and vice-presidential candidates campaigned in twenty-eight states in 1908, and the current Prohibition Party historical society asserts that the party appeared on twenty-eight official state ballots in 1908. Roger C. Storms, Partisan Prophets: A History of the Prohibition Party (Denver, 1972), 32; http://prohibitionists.org/History/votes/votes.html (accessed January 2011).

74. Prohibition Executive Committee of Minnesota Minutes, 23 April 1906, Volume 1—Minutes, Prohibition State Executive Committee (Minn.) Records 1876–1956, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul; “We Won!” Public Weal, June 1906.

75. State parties continued to split, with one faction bolting, into the 1890s, but the practice declined in terms of national political campaigns. For further examples and comments on the scale of bolting practices, see Bensel, Richard, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York, 2000), 101–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76. On the split character of reform during this period, that is, the cultivation of mass democracy alongside the elevation of expert opinion, see Shudson, The Good Citizen, 166–67; Dean Burnham, Walter, “The System of 1896: An Analysis,” in The Evolution of American Electoral Systems, ed. Kleppner, Paul, et al. . (Westport, Conn., 1981), 166–69Google Scholar; Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, 128–30, 138–60; Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly (October 1964), reprinted in Bosses and Reformers: Urban Politics in America, 1880–1920, ed. Blaine A. Brownell and Warren E. Stickle (Boston, 1973), 155–56. Nancy Cohen attributes this split character to the persistent authority and changing meanings of liberal ideology in The Reconstruction of American Liberalism: 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, 2001), 217–56. On the growth of the administrative state, see Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State (New York, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77. On the prestige of expertise, see Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Sciences: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, 1977)Google Scholar; Cohen, , The Reconstruction of American Liberalism; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Percell, Edward A., Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky., 1972)Google Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

78. On the antiliquor movement in the early 1900s, see Pegram, Battling Demon Rum, 85–108; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 153–97; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 155–226; Clark, Norman H., Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Blocker, Jack, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston, 1989), 95–129.Google Scholar

79. “The Minnesota Legislative Plan,” Public Weal, 1 August 1906; Charles R. Jones, “The ‘Good Man’ Theory, or the Prohibition Ticket—Which?” Patriot Phalanx, 14 April 1910; “While We Wait,” Vindicator, 27 June 1913. See also “For Open Discussion,” Vindicator, 4 July 1913.

80. “A Fair Fight,” Patriot Phalanx, 11 July 1908. See also “State Conference Commends New Plan,” Patriot Phalanx, 9 December 1910; W. L. Overholser, “You Can’t Win,” Patriot Phalanx, 23 December 1910.

81. “A Serious Situation Faces the Committee,” Patriot Phalanx, 8 October 1908; “Commends Venango Plan,” Patriot Phalanx, 10 December 1908.

82. “National Meeting for Indianapolis,” Patriot Phalanx, 15 November 1912; Walter S. Haynes, “A Detailed Seven Million Plan,” Vindicator, 20 December 1912.

83. See J. Hohman, “Concentration,” Vindicator, 3 January 1913; Charles R. Jones, “National Chairman Jones’ Bulletin,” (Indianapolis) Clean Politics, 26 August 1909. Such concentration campaigns were not unilaterally endorsed. See “As to Calderwood’s Plan,” Patriot Phalanx, 29 December 1904.

84. “The Great National Convention,” Vindicator, 24 January 1913. See “The Man for the Hour,” Vindicator, 7 June 1912. Concentrating resources was considered in the late 1880s, though not as a carefully orchestrated campaign; see Jimerson, “Minutes of the National Executive Committee,” 23 June 1888.

85. At the 1913 national convention, E. L. G. Hohenthal presented a paper entitled “Concentration,” which was later published in Vindicator, 24 January 1913.

86. W. G. Calderwood (national secretary, state chair of Minnesota), “A Change in Policy,” Patriot Phalanx, 29 December 1904.

87. In 1914, concentration campaigns were run for Eugene Chafin for an Arizona senate seat, George Cleaver for state legislature in Oregon, William Ferguson for state legislature in Pennsylvania, and Charles Randall for state legislature in California.

88. The best source on the Anti-Saloon League is Kerr, Organized for Prohibition.

89. The speech given by Purley Baker was reprinted in P. A. Baker, “Report of the General Superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League of America,” (Westerville, Ohio) American Patriot, December 1913.

90. Frances Beauchamp to Charles Jones, 3 March 1914, Folder: Jones, Charles Reading—Correspondence, 1909–42, Charles Jones Papers, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor.

91. On the ASL’s internal organization, see Odegard, Peter, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (New York, 1928), 9–17Google Scholar; Kerr, Organized for Prohibition, 115–38. On the professionalism of special-interest groups generally, see Skocpol, Diminished Democracy.

92. “Anti-Saloon Convention,” (Minneapolis) Minnesota Patriot, November 1913. See also “Brubaker on Union,” Vindicator, 28 November 1913; “Non-Partisanism Fallacies,” Clean Politics, 5 August 1909; “League or Party? Question of Method,” Patriot Phalanx, 14 April 1910.

93. John Hipp (secretary, Colorado state committee), “The Correspondent,” Vindicator, 12 September 1913.

94. “Non-Partisan Fallacy,” Clean Politics, 5 August 1909. Peter H. Odegard, a contemporary and historian of the ASL, dismissed such accusations as “amusing”; Odegard, Pressure Politics, 81.

95. “Party Prohibs Endorse Old Party Drys,” (Westerville, Ohio) American Issue, April 1914.

96. Previous scholars have attributed the decline and stagnation of the Socialist Party to a rising standard of living, the appeal of Woodrow Wilson, World War I patriotism and suppression of dissent, factionalism, and Eugene Debs’s refusal to run in 1916. See Burbank, Garlin, When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910–1924 (Westport, Conn., 1976), 108–32Google Scholar; Esposito, Anthony, The Ideology of the Socialist Party of America, 1901–1917 (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Kipnis, Ira, American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Miller, Sally M., Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920 (Westport, Conn., 1973)Google Scholar; Fitrakis, Robert J., The Idea of Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. Scholars of the Progressive Party have explained its decline in terms of the absence of a compelling and unifying program, the party’s dependency on Theodore Roosevelt as its candidate, and the absence of local-level party organization. See Harold L. Ickes, “Who Killed the Progressive Party?” AHR (January 1941): 306–37; Pinchot, Amos, History of the Progressive Party, 1912–1916 (1958; Westport, Conn., 1978)Google Scholar; Milkis, Sidney, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence, Kans., 2009), 260–68.Google Scholar

97. Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red, 118. In 1912, Progressives initially attempted to run their candidates on Republican tickets, but Republicans were ultimately able to eliminate these pseudo-Republican candidates in every state but California.

98. Fitrakis, The Idea of Democratic Socialism, 12–13, 109; Lipset and Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here, 56–57, 265; “Legal Obstacles to Minor Party Success,” Yale Law Journal (June 1948): 1289–90. Lipset and Marks interpret the decision of the North Dakota Socialists to operate as the Republican Party as evidence that American federalism did not necessarily inhibit the Socialist Party’s growth opportunities.

99. James H. Shideler, “The La Follette Progressive Party Campaign of 1924,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (June 1950): 452; Richardson, Others, 207–8; Campbell MacKay, Kenneth, The Progressive Movement of 1924 (New York, 1972), 179–83.Google Scholar Socialists were already ballot-qualified in sixteen states and had the organizational capacity to run petitions in most others; Richardson, Others, 200–201.

100. Richardson, Others, 201; MacKay, The Progressive Movement, 181–82. Access to litigation as a means to illuminate election statutes can arguably be even more important for minor parties seeking ballot qualification than the statutes themselves; “Legal Barriers Confronting Third Parties: The Progressive Party in Illinois,” University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949): 499–523.

101. New York Post, 11 July 1924, quoted in MacKay, The Progressive Movement, 179.

102. http://prohibitionists.org/History/votes/votes.html (accessed January 2011). See also Petersen, A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections, which lists returns in thirty-two states, albeit some with single-digit vote tallies.