Prohibition Party (1869–)

The Prohibition Party, founded in 1869, has existed longer than any third party in American history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it played a key role in agitating for the enactment of laws prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor, which succeeded first in a number of states and then in the ultimate failed national experiment at prohibition instituted by the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919.

The party also was in the forefront of the fight for women's suffrage: The prohibition movement received much of its motivation from women who regarded alcohol consumption by men as a threat to family life. And the Prohibition Party survived the repeal of Prohibition by the Twenty-first Amendment ratified in 1933 to maintain the support of tens of thousands of American voters for years after.

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Yet the party, though still technically in existence, has lost most of its relevance as the consumption of alcoholic beverages has become an accepted fact of life and a huge industry in the United States. Even though the party broadened its platform to a range of social conservative views—including, according to its website, opposition to abortion, commercial gambling, the “homosexual agenda,” and commercial pornography—its support base has gone from minor to minuscule.

As late as 1948, the Prohibition presidential nominee pulled down 103,900 votes nationally. When Earl F. Dodge in 1988 ran the second of his six consecutive contests as the party's presidential candidate, he collected 8,004 votes. By 2000 Dodge—a marketer of campaign buttons—was on the ballot only in his home state of Colorado and received just 208 votes.

Efforts to wrest the 2004 nomination from Dodge resulted in a split of what little was left of the party. Both factions were on the ballot only in Colorado, with dissident leader Gene Amondson taking 1,944 votes on the Concerns of People line and Dodge receiving 140 votes on the Prohibition line. In 2008, the party was on the ballot in three states—Colorado, Florida, and Louisiana—and received 653 votes.

The party's more recent performance contrasts sharply with the party's beginnings. Its organizing convention in Chicago in September 1869 attracted approximately 500 delegates from twenty states. For the first time in U.S. politics, women had equal status with men as delegates. By a narrow majority the convention decided to form an independent party, and three years later the new party put forth its first national ticket.

For all but one election between 1884 and 1916, the party's presidential candidate received at least 1.0 percent of the popular vote. The party's best showing came in 1892, when its presidential nominee, John Bidwell, received 270,770 votes (2.2 percent of the popular vote) in the election won by Democrat Grover Cleveland.

The temperance movement succeeded in gaining prohibition legislation in numerous states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its efforts were capped in 1919 by passage of national prohibition legislation (the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, repealed fourteen years later by the Twenty-first Amendment). The achievements of the temperance movement were due as much to independent organizations, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League, as to the Prohibition Party, which had limited success at the polls. These organizations allowed active Democrats and Republicans to remain in their parties while working for prohibition.

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