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Prohibition Party

Founded in 1869, the Prohibition Party campaigned for laws to limit or ban the sale and manufacture of intoxicating liquors. The party nominated candidates for office, but only found real success with local elections. The party's first presidential ticket was nominated in l872, with a platform advocating woman's suffrage, civil service reform, and direct election of United States senators, qs well as national prohibition.

The strength of the Prohibition party in Presidential campaigns never exceeded 250,000, but its aggregate vote at State elections reached nearly 300,000; while it never secured a majority for its candidates except in small localities, it has frequently held the balance of power in the most important States, withstanding desperate attempts to break down or seduce its following. The results of its agitation were differently interpreted, some believing that they had been positively hurtful to the Proibition movement and others that they had greatly advanced its best interests in general as well as in detail.

In the nineteenth-century Prohibition Party, American women ascribed new gendered meanings to party work traditionally performed by male partisans, and also drew upon their gendered roles as women, mothers, and wives to create new partisan strategies. The political culture that sustained a remarkable departure from traditional Democratic and Republican practices. Women's contributions to the Prohibition Party declined in the early-twentieth century.

Calls for temperance and prohibition existed before the United States was a nation. In 1826, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was organized in the city of Boston. Ironically, the Washington Temperance Society was formed in April 1840 at a tavern in Baltimore, Maryland by reformed drinkers. Repeated attempts to pass local and national prohibition laws were made during the mid-1800s through the early twentieth century.

As a third-party challenger, J. Frank Hanly ran as the Prohibition Party presidential nominee during the 1916 election. For Hanly, his candidacy in 1916 served as the culmination of decades of advocacy for making Indiana, and the nation, dry as a desert. In an op-ed for the Jasper Weekly Courier, Hanly wrote: "Personally, I have seen so much of the evils of the liquor traffic in the last four years, so much of its economic waste, so much of the physical ruin, so much of its mental blight, so much of its tears and heartache, that I have come to regard the business as one that must be held and controlled by strong and effective laws."

To Hanly, the sale of alcohol equaled slavery in its immorality, and akin to his political hero, viewed his indictment of alcohol as righteous as Lincoln’s position on slavery (at least on the surface).

Over the next eight years, Hanly dedicated himself to his cause with a near-religious fervor. He wrote and published pamphlets calling for stricter laws for state liquor trafficking and for nation-wide prohibition. He also formed an organization called the Flying Squadron Foundation that routinely gave speeches throughout the country in defense of outlawing alcohol. He also founded a prohibitionist newspaper, the National Enquirer (not to be confused with the supermarket tabloid).

In June 1916, Hanly abandoned the Progressive Party, and declined the nomination for governor. Later that summer, he received the Prohibition Party nomination for President of the United States. Hanly would gladly accept this charge only after the party decided to abandon a plank in their party platform supporting “initiative, referendum, and recall” elections, which Hanly saw as anathema to his limited government views. The party acquiesced to Hanly’s demands. Hanly stood for women’s suffrage, an eight-hour work day, environmental protections, and military preparedness in line with the Monroe Doctrine alongside its desire to end the liquor trade. Hanly only captured 221,302 votes, or only 1.19 percent of the popular vote. They neither secured the one million votes they campaigned on, nor picked up a single electoral vote.

After the election Hanly remained an active prohibition proponent. He played a key role in lobbying for the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which mandated prohibition across the United States. In April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War I on the side of the Allies. Most historians agree that this international conflict was vital to the prohibition movement. The need to ration and regulate materials such as food and oil on the home-front provided the window of opportunity for the drys in Congress to usher in legislation that ensured national prohibition, created and regulated by the federal government. The drys argued that one way to conserve food would be to disallow brewers from using grains in their breweries and distilleries.

On December 18, 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment. The constitutional enactment of national prohibition in 1920 and its progressive aim of uplifting American society only lasted until 1933. Public opinion evolved in those thirteen years from supporting national prohibition to denouncing the attempt at legislating morals. Prohibition has generally been ridiculed in American history as a failure.