The temperance advocates, former abolitionists, and women who created the Prohibition Party in 1869 knew that “our movement must be one of gradual and moderate growth for a time.”Footnote ¹ They understood that their struggling minor party would be for people who “love purity more than popularity” because of the profound obstacles undermining any attempt to increase their ranks: fellow temperance advocates often dismissed the new party as a dangerous distraction from Reconstruction, Southerners were suspicious of a Northern-created organization with antislavery roots, and women, supposedly the antiliquor cause’s greatest supporters, remained ineligible to vote.Footnote ² Political culture worked against emerging parties. Americans traditionally viewed new parties as filled with crackpots until proven otherwise and assumed that votes cast for minor parties were wasted. And Prohibitionists had few financial resources. Only the strength of Prohibitionists’ convictions that the liquor problem was the nation’s most important political issue, that the Democratic and Republican parties were completely ill-fit to resolve this issue, and that political matters should be resolved through the party system rather than nonpartisan means, encouraged the steadfast loyalty of a few hundred thousand members.

But beginning in the 1890s, Prohibitionists declared that they now confronted a roadblock of hitherto unthinkable proportions. They protested against two procedural changes—the government-printed ballot and the abolition of nominating conventions—that were coupled to seemingly pro-democracy reforms: the secret ballot and the direct primary.Footnote ³ By granting to legislatures and election boards the prerogative to decide which parties’ nominees could and could not appear on ballots, state governments facilitated minor parties’ exclusion from elections and thereby renewed debates about the role of minor parties in American politics. Minor parties would drain their meager coffers and exhaust their members while attempting to get and stay on official ballots. Convinced that their party’s continued existence was at stake, Prohibitionists vowed to oppose the new institutional restraints and use every resource at their disposal to continue getting on ballots, thereby hoping to protect the ideal of minor parties as constituency-building organizations. Their party would be not only a “protest” but an organization whose “continuous existence in agitation and education . . . are only incidental advantages as the party moves forward to . . . capture the offices of this nation.”Footnote ⁴

The Prohibition Party’s ultimately futile campaign suggests the diverse barriers minor parties faced and, even more important, illuminates the subtle processes and muted debates underwriting a profound transformation in American politics: the ascendancy of a party system that was much less fluid and wherein Democrats and Republicans would dominate governance for the next century and a half. The conditions were disappearing wherein, for example, Republicans could succeed Whigs. By way of comparison: in the first eight decades of the United States, the Anti-Federalists, Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, National Republicans, Know-Nothings, and Whigs all had turns as the national major parties, whereas only Democrats and Republicans have controlled politics since the Civil War.

Scholars have consistently undervalued the ascendancy of a Democratic-Republican system even as they meticulously investigated Americans’ ancillary complaints about political representation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For example, scholars have carefully documented the ways in which Americans sought to provide democratic leaven to party politics through party realignment, independent voting, and nonpartisan organizations, but they have underconsidered how a fixed two-party system circumscribed the democratic capacity of these reforms.Footnote ⁵ Likewise, scholars have uncovered the interconnected causes behind a sharp decline in the number of voters showing up at early twentieth-century polls, including the elimination of ethnocultural incentives for partisan voting, restrictions on the eligible electorate, the ebbing relevance of local parties in the face of national issues, and the end of a spectacularly inspirational electioneering style. They have persuasively argued that Americans’ diminished party loyalty, in turn, set the stage for an administrative state that consolidated expert and middle-class control at the expense of the working class.Footnote ⁶ But arguably the fact that voters repeatedly cast ballots from among the same two choices dovetailed with and exacerbated existing problems of representation and communication. In the context of the Democratic-Republican stranglehold over the party system, not only the number of votes cast, but the very meaning of these votes, had changed; most voters cast ballots against what they did not want, rather than for what they did want, to the limited extent that they could communicate desires at all.Footnote ⁷ Procedural reforms may have contributed to Americans’ cynicism about parties and government because the changes they wrought hindered voting citizens’ already-constrained ability to convey their preferences to policymakers.Footnote ⁸

This article begins by comparing the experiences of three groups whose responses to the secret ballot’s invention anticipated future movements for resistance to and accommodation with the Democratic-Republican system: Prohibitionists, Populists, and Democratic and Republican urban bosses. The article then unpacks what Prohibitionists claimed was at stake with the new political order’s institutionalization; Prohibitionists aggressively critiqued Democrats’ and Republicans’ broad platform styles. Progressive reformers, however, put their faith in a second procedural adjustment’s ability to preserve mass democracy by making the major parties into less corrupt instruments: the direct primary election. Prohibitionists would eventually find it impossible to work with progressives, especially after activist-minded reformers began to tout the value of special-interest pressure groups—which Prohibitionists viewed as vehicles for consolidating Democratic and Republican control—as an alternative to party politics. When twentieth-century reformers accommodated their political strategies to the idea that Democrats and Republicans would govern, they lent prestige and support to this domination.

Once instilled, the Democratic-Republican system would persist for the foreseeable future. While many historians have emphasized the apparently robust quality of minor parties in the 1890s–1910s, especially noting their high-profile appearance in the 1912 presidential election, greater consideration of the quick disappearance of the Progressive Party and the inability of the Socialists or Prohibitionists to thrive suggests, in contrast, that even the advocacy of significant causes did not help new parties transcend procedural barricades.Footnote ⁹ While minor parties might continue to emerge, the threshold for their formation was getting higher and the likelihood of displacing a major party was getting lower.

It was under the guise of being the status quo that the Democratic-Republican system reorganized the political terrain. Most Americans accommodated to this system by doing nothing different, continuing to vote for the same party for which they had previously voted, and therefore could overlook the significance of having customary practices restricting minor parties superseded by formal restraints.Footnote ¹⁰ The ostensible neutrality of procedural requirements made the beginnings of this process still more difficult to discern. But minor parties turned out to be bellwethers; their ineligibility for ballots was the early product of a new political order that grossly undermined communication between voters and policymakers. And it also became a factor that made this transition almost impossible to uproot once in place; minor parties could no longer ably serve as constituency-building organizations for challenging the dominant position of either existing major party. With the new Democratic-Republican system deeply entrenched, most Americans dismissed Prohibitionists’ concerns as irrelevant, even if true, and instead focused on how to advance their interests through established political arrangements. Only gradually (and resentfully) would Prohibitionists formulate new strategies taking their own political impotence into account, abandoning a contingency-building role for a new identity as a protest party.

A NEW GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY OVER BALLOTS

Late nineteenth-century American politics is largely about the progeny that resulted when populist ideals were harnessed to rationalized methods.Footnote ¹¹ Nowhere was this tendency more apparent than in the movement for a secret ballot. A government monopoly on the printing and distribution of ballots displaced a decades-old practice wherein party workers distributed distinctive-looking one-party-only ballots outside the polls in what one historian has called an unseemly “auctioneering atmosphere.”Footnote ¹² Advocates argued that the secret ballot would undermine ballot distributors’ ability to know if voters had cast ballots as they had promised, and thereby render it impractical to threaten or reward voters, leaving such voters free to consider their vote independently.Footnote ¹³

Prohibitionists were initially optimistic about the secret ballot, which was of necessity government-printed and administered. They could never get their party’s ballots to every single polling site and the expense of the ballots was a great budgetary strain. In addition, partisans suspected that fear of public ridicule kept many would-be Prohibitionist voters from aligning with them. The Prohibitionists’ excited embrace of ballot reform dissipated only when the party confronted a problem rooted in the unprecedented power granted to legislators and election boards; these authorities set and interpreted the eligibility standards for which parties might become ballot qualified.Footnote ¹⁴ Prohibitionists sensed a conspiracy between Democrats and Republicans when legislators placed ballot eligibility standards just beyond the reach of minor parties. States typically required that a party have received 2 percent to 3 percent of the returns in the previous election, but it was not uncommon for the requirements to be higher. In Colorado and Nevada, for example, Prohibitionists needed to receive at least 10 percent of the vote from the previous election (which was very unlikely), and in Colorado the party would otherwise need to find five hundred registered voters prepared to take a binding, notarized oath that they would vote a party ticket if placed in the field. While the party had five hundred supporters, it would be very difficult to coordinate a mass oath-taking campaign, and such a campaign would also make the “secret” ballot a matter of public record.Footnote ¹⁵ In other states, the problem was that each party seeking to qualify on the basis of its past electoral record needed to nominate candidates for every general election, something that small parties often struggled to do. For example, Prohibitionists in Illinois jeopardized their standing when they failed to make nominations for a June 1891 judicial election.Footnote ¹⁶ And no longer could Prohibitionists draw upon their own printing and distribution resources to create an alternative ballot for voters.

Reasonably enough, incredulous political scientists have investigated the legitimacy of minor parties’ complaints about petition requirements, wondering whether “complaints about legal requirements are either attempted shields for inadequacy or evidence of unwillingness to think realistically.”Footnote ¹⁷ Was it really devastating when, for example, a Pennsylvania law passed in 1891 required local candidates to obtain signatures from voters numbering a modest 3 percent of the district’s past voting population, even when the legislation included the dramatic caveat that organizers could be fined or sent to prison if any of their petition signers turned out to be unqualified?Footnote ¹⁸ Nonpartisans seemed capable of continually mobilizing for campaigns. Early twentieth-century Pennsylvania Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) branches, for example, repeatedly led remonstrance campaigns that not only stifled the granting of liquor licenses but politicized the women involved; state WCTU membership numbers increased with the movement’s success.Footnote ¹⁹ Around the nation, a grassroots antiliquor movement banned saloons from towns and counties, renewing “no license” legislation on a regular basis. Prohibitionists themselves noted the opportunity that petition campaigns provided for informing public sentiment, with Chicago partisans concluding in 1891 that their canvassing “brought our ticket prominently before the people. They asked questions, and . . . a discussion was started that resulted in people’s thinking.”Footnote ²⁰ Overall, the antiliquor cause seemed to be building in popularity in the 1890s in ways that the Prohibition Party failed to capture. Perhaps Prohibitionists did not fully exploit the opportunity that petitioning requirements thrust upon them. Some partisans admitted that embarrassment made them reluctant to participate, and the perception that partisan canvassing violated middle-class propriety seems to have grown more acute over time.

The greatest problem, however, was that petitioning exacerbated the already significant disadvantages of being a new or small party, creating hardships that major parties did not share. While the work of cultivating popular support for a cause and the work of building a permanent party organization overlap, they are not totally identical. Parties need newspapers, buildings, endowments, and a means to identify and develop candidates; these are long-term investments that are not necessarily immediately profitable, and indeed might be set aside in the interests of mobilizing for a particular campaign. Prohibitionists bemoaned the extent to which their party newspapers were the few and often failing products of private enterprise, unsubsidized by much in the way of party printing contracts. Also, the party had little in the way of office space, finances were constantly a problem, and underinvestigated candidates routinely refused to accept nominations. Even before the Prohibition Party dropped off many official state ballots—there is little to suggest that the problem was substantial before the mid-1890s—Prohibitionist leadership identified how, in the long term, the expenditures required to be on ballots were a challenging distraction. If a party’s returns fell below the level for ballot qualification, then a petition campaign meant “a big expense and a great deal of needless labor.”Footnote ²¹ Because most laws required that petition signatures be from citizens in various parts of the state, mailing expenses alone could be prohibitive. For example, the Illinois state committee spent over two hundred dollars in 1898, trying to get congressional and senatorial nominees on the official ballot.Footnote ²² State Prohibition parties might use up their resources trying to get on the ballot and then have nothing left for the ensuing electoral campaign, and the national party was not financially secure enough to bale them out.Footnote ²³

As perhaps most prominently highlighted in the scholarship of Peter H. Argersinger, new eligibility standards for the government-printed ballot plagued the Populists for slightly different reasons than they did the Prohibitionists. Populists had strong momentum from 1892 campaign successes, and this momentum might have been harnessed to a petition campaign that increased grassroots enthusiasm. But Populists frequently used fusion, the support of a single set of candidates with another party or parties, to secure electoral victory. New procedures that used previous election results to determine ballot eligibility delegitimized this practice, instead declaring that the Populists had no recognizable previous election tally in such circumstances.Footnote ²⁴ For Populists, using fusion, traditionally their most reliable tactic for advancing the party’s agenda, would mean losing their legal right to appear on future ballots. Internal debates raged over whether or not fusion should continue to be part of the party’s repertoire.

It was Prohibitionists’ peculiar understanding of the relationship between morality and democracy that best explains why they never found fusion as appealing as did the Populists, and were thus less vulnerable to this particular basis for ballot exclusion. As articulated by Prohibitionists, their party’s political agenda was framed around a conviction that God bound Christians to act with absolute moral consistency. Prohibitionists believed that if they voted for any candidate who was soft on the liquor question, they would be implicated in the perpetuation of the liquor traffic and therefore partly guilty of every sin that every drunk person committed. In the effort to guard their immortal souls, Prohibitionists vowed to “be so clearly and so honestly committed to Prohibition, to its enactment into law and to the law’s vigorous enforcement, that [they would] deliberately prefer defeat with Prohibition to victory without it.”Footnote ²⁵ This refusal to engage in gradualism also created barricades between the Prohibition Party and other antiliquor organizations.Footnote ²⁶ The Prohibition Party remained uniquely immune to the attractions of soliciting high liquor license fees, new local option laws, or dry army canteens, accomplishments that other antiliquor organizations prized.Footnote ²⁷ Again, this attitude both preserved organizational integrity and made the party less popular than it might have been.

The trials of Prohibitionists and Populists, however, are not meant to suggest that minor parties were alone in suffering from the effects of a government-printed ballot. Within the major parties, local political bosses such as those of Tammany Hall noted that the government’s new authority to decide who would be recognized as the official voice of the party asserted the primacy of national and state party leaders.Footnote ²⁸ Government regulations recognizing the authority of state and national party committees over candidate selection thereby consolidated the control of party elites over the renegade local and county partisans who sometimes printed ballot variations, or “pasted” over official candidates’ names with new choices. Such practices had historically proven useful to local bosses who traded votes to a rival party’s national candidate in exchange for the opposing major party’s surrender of local offices (and hence government appointments to distribute among constituents).Footnote ²⁹ A uniform ballot also restrained bosses by making it impossible to propose alternative tickets after “official”—a category defined by the government—party nominations were closed. Even if partisans disapproved of the Democratic or Republican nominee, or if new information about the candidate came to light in the days between nomination and election, they would have no further opportunity to place an alternative party candidate on the ballot. In the past, distributing an alternative ballot at the polls on election day would have been a viable option for desperate individuals.Footnote ³⁰ The fact that bosses and maverick partisans—people not generally noted for discretion—did not more vigorously protest changes in the ballot might be interpreted as a sign of concern that staging resistance to this process of power consolidation was unlikely to result in victory, and might leave them alienated from increasingly powerful state and national leaders. Bosses were in the awkward position of being invested in the very same organizations that restricted their agency.

In comparison to the muted opposition of Populists and municipal bosses, Prohibitionists boldly protested when party officials in government restricted voters’ political options. In Pennsylvania, Prohibitionists deemed ballot reform to be “legislation to throttle reform.”Footnote ³¹ New York Prohibitionists proclaimed in 1894 that ballot reform was a conspiracy; it was “another attempt to . . . turn the State over to a perpetual division of spoils between the bosses of the two old parties.”Footnote ³² In Massachusetts, it was “designed to . . . disfranchise all voters who refuse to support the Republican and Democratic parties.”Footnote ³³ For all the ways that Prohibitionists, Populists, and local major party leaders similarly experienced potential exclusion and exclusion of their nominees from the ballot as a result of government’s control of printing and distribution, it was Prohibitionists who most vigorously conveyed their displeasure.

Perhaps the most surprising outcome was that Prohibitionists’ exclusion from ballots did not come faster or hit the party worse, a fact suggesting partisans’ remarkable tenacity. Yet the disappearance of the Prohibition Party from ballots did begin in earnest in 1892 when it did not appear in South Dakota or Arkansas.Footnote ³⁴ In the same year, Prohibitionists in some Illinois districts were unable to place the names of their candidates for the House of Representatives on the official ballot.Footnote ³⁵ In Nevada, Prohibitionists were too discouraged to nominate candidates in 1894, feeling “practically disfranchised” by extraordinary ballot qualification requirements.Footnote ³⁶ Utah failed to include the Prohibition Party in its first presidential election in 1896 and Mississippi’s state ballot dropped the party in the same year. Illinois lost its place on the state ticket and nearly all district tickets in 1896.Footnote ³⁷ Maryland lost its place on the ballot in 1903 because it failed to meet technical requirements for submitting paperwork, and struggled to regain a position in the wake of an interrupted voting returns record.Footnote ³⁸ There was no state ticket in Tennessee in 1904.Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps the best illustration of the gradual displacement of Prohibitionists—and the extent to which this exclusion could be misinterpreted as simple “unpopularity” if historians merely consult election returns—is exemplified by Montana’s state party. Montana had enacted the secret ballot in 1889, and the Prohibition Party did not appear on the ballot in 1896. No Prohibition Party candidates other than the presidential candidate appeared in 1900, and in 1904 the party did not appear on ballots. In 1908, Prohibitionists might have participated in a broad union of third-party candidates. The party was put to rest in 1912.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Montana Prohibition Party’s on-again, off-again standing on ballots, however, remains largely obscured in the historical record because some enthusiastic partisans continued to write in votes for the Prohibition Party presidential candidates in each of these election years. Yet “excluded” they were.

Ultimately, the Prohibition Party’s disappearance from official ballots was a disadvantage for which write-in votes could not completely compensate. Write-in voting required knowing the names of candidates, and state ballots at this time included many offices, sometimes into the hundreds.Footnote ⁴¹ In South Dakota in 1892, party leadership conceded that while “a small number will write the names of the electors on the blank space of the other tickets,” it remained the case that “it has not been generally known who the electors are.”Footnote ⁴² Some Prohibitionists attempted to combat the inherent difficulties of asking voters to correctly remember and spell candidate names by using “pasters,” small slips of paper bearing nominees’ names, but without much success. For example, in Arkansas, when the Prohibitionist ticket was excluded from the official ballot in 1892, the state party attempted to create returns by sending workers with pasters to polling sites. However, election judges then ruled that the names of the candidates were illegally attached.Footnote ⁴³

When the Prohibition ticket was not ballot-qualified and when write-in votes were unlikely to establish a return record for future qualification, some Prohibitionists confronted party-less ballots with a bold new approach. Most dramatically, a few party organizations encouraged voters to express themselves by withholding their participation from the electoral process rather than participate by voting for a major party. In Stockton, California, the city committee recommended that “prohibitionists abstain from voting at the coming city election,” given the absence of a Prohibition ticket in the field.Footnote ⁴⁴ By 1904, the editorial staff of the national Prohibitionist newspaper, The Citizen, would similarly assert that “if our opinion has any weight Prohibitionists will NOT vote in the [Tennessee] state election” because a vote for either major party candidate would “give assent to the continuance of present conditions,” namely, ballot exclusion.Footnote ⁴⁵

Prohibition Party vote returns diminished in a way that reflected struggles with ballot qualification, with no Prohibitionist presidential candidate receiving more than 2 percent of the national vote after 1892. Prohibitionists found this trend especially exasperating given the achievement of women’s suffrage in Colorado, Idaho, and Utah between 1893 and 1896, which theoretically should have enhanced the party’s vote. This is not to say that Prohibitionists were pointedly banned from participation, or that strenuous petition campaigns were the only factors in the declining returns of the party. Legislative successes by moderate antiliquor advocates made it difficult to cultivate a sense of urgency for partisan prohibition, and the rise of liquor industry organizations such as the National Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association (1893) and the National Wholesale Liquor Dealers’ Association (1896) led to vigorous lobbying for better industry practices as an alternative to antiliquor legislation. In addition, the party’s efforts to connect with Southern voters flailed pathetically, and there was extraordinary organizational infighting. But new ballot qualification requirements certainly played an important role in limiting the Prohibition Party’s strategic options.Footnote ⁴⁶

Increasingly desperate from the mid-1890s onward, Prohibitionists drew upon one of their precious remaining resources to frame the government-printed ballot as a problem not only for their political organization, but as a matter for universal concern: their reputation for being morally rigorous people. In their party press, in public debates, and in sidewalk lectures, they publicized the decline in alternatives to the Democratic and Republican parties and the persistent exclusion of minor parties from all levels of office-holding positions. They further argued that the impending exclusion of minor parties magnified problems inherent to perpetual dependency on the Democratic and Republican parties.

The Prohibition Party’s argument for why the major parties could never be conduits for truly democratic expression was grounded in a key premise: that the broad platforms of these parties inevitably obscured the voice of the people. Voting for a major party candidate with a broad party platform could never communicate both a voter’s sentiment and his or her degree of insistence upon a particular measure because it was impossible for elected officials and policymakers to discern which issues a voter supported; a vote for a dry-leaning Democrat or Republican could just as easily be interpreted as a vote for his position on the tariff, race relations, or a boundary dispute.Footnote ⁴⁷ National party leaders noted that “a Republican or Democratic ballot does not express the opinion of the voter on any public question of the day. It is impossible to tell, simply by looking at such a ballot, what the voter who casts it believes on any public issue before the people.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In comparison, Prohibitionists argued that their stance was clear: when someone identified as a Prohibitionist, “you don’t have to ask him where he stands. You know his political status, his position on a great moral issue. He stands for the overthrow of the liquor traffic in state and nation. And you cannot find a prohibitionist who holds any other views on this important subject.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In other words, policymakers would know both what this voter wanted and how much he wanted it. One possible indicator that many Americans shared the aspiration of Prohibitionists to precisely communicate their desire and intensity is suggested by the tendency of voters to mark their ballots with not one X by the chosen candidate but a series of Xs, as though to convey passionate sentiments that the structure of the ballot was otherwise incapable of recording.Footnote ⁵⁰ For themselves and for other zealous voters, Prohibitionists concluded that the absence of a single-issue, third-party choice to serve as a safety valve for the inherent limitations of the Democratic and Republican platform styles unacceptably compromised the ability of a voter to express himself to policymakers on prohibition or any other issue.Footnote ⁵¹

Similar fears about the capacity of elections to serve as the vehicle of communication between citizens and policymakers were raised by woman suffragists, farmers, and labor organizers such as those considered by Elisabeth Clemens in The People’s Lobby. Clemens describes these individuals’ “growing recognition that the party system itself was an obstacle to the expression and resolution of . . . grievances.”Footnote ⁵² In particular, citizens had great difficulty getting information about candidates’ policy positions, not to mention soliciting binding policy pledges outside nominating conventions. But where Clemens has explored the degree to which citizens created reforms that would better help them influence policy by making officeholders accountable, the specific concern of Prohibitionists was different: they feared that even well-intentioned officeholders would find it difficult to discern citizens’ desires. Prohibitionists did not doubt that some Democratic and Republican officeholders were honest men but argued that personal virtue could not compensate for limitations inherent in the Democratic-Republican system’s emerging style.

At the same moment that Prohibitionists developed this innovative justification for their party’s continued utility, the Populist Party’s leadership failed to prevent collapse. The question of fusing with the Democratic Party in the 1896 presidential election created factions within the party; some Populists expected their party to cooperate with a major party they viewed as sufficiently reformed, whereas others wanted to preserve the distinct character and organization of the Populists. Antifusionists optimistically posited that if they could only maintain their party institutions it would ultimately facilitate a Populist renaissance in the next generation.Footnote ⁵³ They argued that their policy ambitions, particularly moral revivalism and the elevation of producers, were not yet fulfilled and remained relevant concerns.Footnote ⁵⁴ But when most other policy ambitions were co-opted by the Democrats, it became difficult for Populists to justify their party’s existence. Under fusionist influence, local and state parties were increasingly reluctant to nominate straight-party tickets.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, they were greatly alarmed that new antifusionist legislation meant that their decision to nominate the same presidential candidate as the Democrats made their party legally extinct in several states. Populists would need to petition to secure ballot representation if they wanted to nominate candidates in future elections.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the end, Populists in most states fused with the Democratic party and thereby mortgaged the organization that might have made future claims on behalf of farmers and political reformers in exchange for the promise of some immediate gains. Fusion in 1896 set in motion a series of events that would lead to the disappearance of the Populist Party.

In contrast to the narrative of Populists’ extinction, there is a reason why the Prohibition Party is the longest-living minor party in American history, even if it was never the most successful. Prohibitionists drew upon their inventory of explanations for why the government-printed ballot was problematic to justify their party’s persistence as a distinct constituency. Because they had not committed legal suicide by fusing with other parties in support of joint candidates, Prohibitionists could continue to organize voters within a national party organization, sometimes struggling with petition campaigns and sometimes qualifying through previous voting records, persistently rallying despite decades of electoral defeat. But another procedural reform advanced by progressives would further erode the party’s precarious standing in the twentieth century.

THE END OF NOMINATING CONVENTIONS

Progressives largely agreed with Prohibitionists that the party system did not sufficiently manifest the electorate’s desires; the goal of the secret ballot was as yet unfulfilled.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, Prohibitionists and other reformers were divided as to what underlying factor so inhibited citizens’ ability to make their desires known, and what should therefore be considered an appropriate solution. Of particular concern for progressives was the possibility that an increased concentration of power within major parties left them vulnerable to attempts by corporate monopolists to hijack the nomination process of both Democrats and Republicans, leaving the voter with no satisfactory choice. Charles Evans Hughes, New York’s progressive governor, suggested that moneyed interests “are ever at work stealthily and persistently endeavoring to pervert the government to the service of their own ends.” He then affirmed that “all that is worst in our public life finds its readiest means of access to power through the control of the nominating machinery of parties” where backroom deals could have unsavory consequences for the general public.Footnote ⁵⁸ Seemingly, direct primary elections would assure that each party nominated candidates who actually represented the citizens of a given party. The logic here seemed to be that if only two parties would be viable contenders in electoral contests, then the internal procedures of these parties had best be as democratic as possible. This was a reform movement rooted in accommodation to the idea that the fixed two-party system was already an incontrovertible reality. The first statewide direct-primary election laws were enacted in Florida, Oregon, and Minnesota in 1901. Mississippi followed in 1902, and historians and political scientists often credit Wisconsin with being the first state to create a rigorous and supervised law in 1903. The overwhelming majority of states had such laws by 1910, and almost all states enacted direct-primary election laws within two decades.Footnote ⁵⁹

The idea of primary elections first emerged in the post-Reconstruction American South, wherein primary elections coordinated by the Democratic Party created a space for mass participation within what was otherwise one-party rule by Democrats.Footnote ⁶⁰ The very earliest versions of primary election laws appeared in a few scattered municipalities after 1890; in these cases, the results of the election were nonbinding resolutions conveyed to official nominating conventions. In fact, these early laws were so timidly designed—the matter of party nominations still considered so far beyond the regular subject of government regulation—that primary elections were not conducted at public expense, nor did the government fix a primary election date.Footnote ⁶¹ Twentieth-century reformers envisioned the direct primary election as a much more powerful tool, and some even hoped that it could unlock the previously misdirected potential of the secret ballot. In an 1898 pamphlet entitled “Primary Elections for the Nomination of All Candidates by Australian Ballot,” Wisconsin’s Senator Robert La Follette argued that because “in this country the laws, state and federal, are very certain to be made and executed by some political party,” and because “under existing conditions the nominees of the stronger political party, unless notoriously bad, are quite sure to be elected,” it was a critical precondition for democracy that the people, not politicians, chose the nominees.Footnote ⁶² Reformers worried that the loose connection between delegates and the voters they represented, and the strict discipline that leaders held over the mass of delegates, made convention leaders desirable targets for bribes. Primary elections, reformers implied, would soon eliminate control of elite cadres over parties because buying off an entire voting population in the age of the secret ballot would, theoretically, be more difficult than capturing the votes of a nominating convention.Footnote ⁶³

Prohibitionists initially joined in support for direct primary elections because they too hoped that the selection of major party candidates by mass democracy, rather than by party elites and corporate interests, would eliminate spoils. In turn, a political world without spoils would provide few incentives for voters to vote exclusively for Democrats or Republicans, thus creating an opportunity to attract voters to the Prohibition Party.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, Prohibitionists diverged from the broader reform movement when it became clear that lawmakers, overwhelmingly Democratic and Republican, were embedding regulations into primary election laws that completely abolished the convention system for nominating candidates. Regulations demanded that minor parties without a significant vote in the previous election must circulate petitions among vast numbers of voters to determine official nominees. Prohibitionists in Minnesota, for example, were horrified to find that not only major parties but minor parties would be subject to primary election laws, and that these laws would require that parties polling less than 10 percent of the previous vote nominate candidates by petition, rather than by convention.Footnote ⁶⁵ The government financed Democrats and Republicans in the selection of their nominees via the ballot box while requiring that minor parties scramble without dignity and take on additional expenses. Hence, primary elections not only expressed accommodation to the Democratic-Republican system but reified this system.

Prohibitionists declared that primary election laws were an “outrageous burden of expense which an old-party Legislature has put upon the minor parties in order to secure a place upon the ballot.” This legislation “made it practically impossible for the latter to nominate complete county and legislative tickets without so impoverishing their treasuries as to prevent an active campaign to elect the ticket named.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In Michigan, the state chair urged all Prohibitionists to support their primary ticket because in that state “a party that does not poll for its primary ticket 15 percent of its vote for secretary of state at the election . . . will lose its place on the official ballot at the November election.” He urged Prohibitionists to focus “your resentment at this palpable effort to compel you to vote a license party ticket”—that is, a Democratic or Republican ticket—“or be disenfranchised.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The Indianapolis newspaper Patriot Phalanx resolved that “most of the so-called primary election laws in various states should be named—Laws to squelch independents, to choke to death free speech, to suppress conscience and reform in politics, to render the two old parties immortal.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The problems with primary laws could be compounded by new fees intended to pass the financial costs for elections back to the parties. In Minnesota, for example, the state party did not nominate a complete state ticket in 1908 simply because it cost $50 for each name, and the party lacked the resources.Footnote ⁶⁹ Removing itself from the official ballot, in turn, meant that the party would need to undergo petitioning to reappear in the future.

Demonstrations of building public enthusiasm for the antiliquor movement lent poignancy to Prohibitionists’ frustrating experiences with primary election laws and ballot exclusion. The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), a nonpartisan pressure group that was the largest national antiliquor association by 1905, rose to prominence by leading grassroots temperance organizations in a series of local and county option campaigns.Footnote ⁷⁰ Prohibitionists, however, were left conflicted. On the one hand, the success of local option demonstrated the exciting existence of an untapped constituency. Some Prohibitionists compromised their earlier pronouncements against gradualist reforms, hoping that individuals participating in local option campaigns could eventually be corralled into the party. On the other hand, local option campaigns siphoned many antiliquor advocates away from party activism. It seems most likely that the seduction of prospective Prohibitionists into ASL campaigns dovetailed with the already-existent ballot exclusion problem to stall and impede party progress where it might have been anticipated. Declining Prohibition Party returns in states with significant county and local option campaigns—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Oregon—suggested that potential came to share Prohibitionists’ conclusion had been seduced away by the ASL.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet many of the states where the Prohibition Party’s returns not only declined but truly bottomed out—Alabama, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming—were states wherein local option campaigns were more sporadic, affirming that factors other than local option were also at play.

Unable to do much more than fume about the ASL threat, some Prohibitionists framed their strategies for the party’s future around the ballot restriction problem. Prohibitionists in an optimistic state of mind emphasized how ballot reforms might provide their party with a strategic advantage. National chair Charles Jones rallied his fellow partisans with the hope that, as Americans grew dissatisfied with Democrats and Republicans, they would have no choice but to become Prohibitionists because “it is almost impossible to organize a new political party. The state laws are so strict that the names of candidates can with difficulty be got upon the tickets at all.”Footnote ⁷² Merely surviving long enough might someday translate into victory. The party was not completely stifled—votes were cast in forty of the forty-five states in 1904, albeit with only five votes in Florida, and embarrassing triple-digit votes in ten other states—but it was also readily observable that the party’s ballot qualification status was dropping. Scattered evidence suggests that while the party appeared on thirty-nine of the forty-seven official state ballots in 1890, it appeared on only twenty-eight of the forty-eight states by 1908.Footnote ⁷³ Some other partisans therefore tackled ballot exclusion head on by challenging the constitutional integrity of regulations. In Minnesota, for example, the state Prohibition Party sued the Secretary of State in 1906 for the purpose of regaining standing. The court decided that the party was entitled to have a place on the ballot.Footnote ⁷⁴ Twentieth-century Prohibitionists found themselves in the odd position of desperately seeking an official record of electoral losses, because such confirmation of unpopularity seemed better than being an excluded nonentity. Prohibitionists were used to failure—they had been losing elections for decades—and were nothing if not feisty, and so they would prove easy to challenge and undermine but difficult to exterminate completely.

STRATEGIC ACCOMMODATION TO THE DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN SYSTEM

Reexamining recent procedural reforms, progressives and other good-government advocates came to share the conclusion of the Prohibitionists that secret ballots and primary elections did not adequately purify party politics. Troublingly, government-printed ballots actually compounded problems wrought by the abolition of the convention system. Government printing required that parties finalize nominations by a certain date in advance of the election, and major parties generally held their primary elections immediately before this date, and the combined effect further undermined the ability of citizens to organize the nomination of alternative candidates if they did not prefer their parties’ nominees. It became more difficult to bolt one’s party in an organized fashion such as the Liberal Republicans had done in the 1870s, or to work at cross-purposes with the national party machine as Tammany Hall had done, and so neither minor parties nor alternative forms of major parties were routinely available options for voters.Footnote ⁷⁵ In response, some frustrated political reformers developed administrative agencies as a means of circumventing electoral politics altogether.Footnote ⁷⁶

At stake in the ensuing debate between progressives, who sought to skirt partisan corruption, and the Prohibition Party, which was principally concerned with reforming the party system, was an incredibly important question: Was it more critical that government embody the interests of the people, or that it embody the people’s intent? To protect the people’s overall interests, many progressives increasingly argued, there were times when the most vital responsibilities of government should be removed from the influence of the parties for which people voted. Progressives increasingly assumed that the problems wrought when corporations and lobbies controlled the major parties—spoils, corruption, elitism, arbitrary loyalty—were inextricable from their concerns about the “party system.” The desire of progressives to assure that parties possessed an internal democratic integrity was gradually subsumed by their conclusion that the people’s interests needed to be measured in scientific ways by ostensibly objective experts.Footnote ⁷⁷ Administrative agencies run by experts could make decisions in the peoples’ interests while being buffered from corrupt political parties and the capricious whims of mass democracy.

Prohibitionists therefore diverged from many other reformers when they argued that the people knew their own interests perfectly well; citizens might draw on scientific and expert knowledge but could make reasonable judgments. The Prohibitionists’ own cause, liquor restriction, exemplified how the people would do right if they could. The people’s wish to eliminate the liquor industry, Prohibitionists argued, could be measured by their church membership, by the resolutions of church meetings, by citizens’ votes in support of local option, by employers’ reluctance to hire nonsober employees, and by widespread support for state amendments.Footnote ⁷⁸ Correctly or not, Prohibitionists suggested that “the great majority of voters are unalterably opposed” to the trade in liquor, that “the great mass of American citizens—are convinced that alcohol is dangerous,” and that “a very large number of the people—I think more than a majority—are opposed to the liquor traffic.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Twentieth-century Prohibitionists argued that, fundamentally, it was the remaining institutional blockades against majority rule and representative government—blockades embedded within the otherwise salvageable party system—that most explained why America nonetheless remained “wet.” Prohibitionists would not concede that parties were insufficient as a means of organizing politics; it was not the idea of a party system, but the legitimacy of Democratic and Republican rule that Prohibitionists sought to destabilize. Experimenting with strategies such as the conditional pledge and concentration campaigns helped Prohibitionists to challenge the cultural and institutional artifices upholding Democratic-Republican control while also illuminating the flexible capacity of the party system itself.

The conditional pledge strategy addressed the problem that some voters who wanted to vote Prohibitionist nonetheless planned to vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate, and that they did so for fear that a vote cast for a Prohibition Party candidate would result in the victory of the party least similar to that which most expressed their interests. Conditional pledges therefore committed an individual to vote with the Prohibition Party only if enough other people also pledged to promise electoral victory, or at least a great impact. The Prohibitionists’ first lively conditional pledge campaign was in 1903 in a single county in Pennsylvania, and Prohibitionists returned to the idea of a pledge throughout the first decade of the century. After Indiana had enacted a potentially threatening primary election law in 1907, Indiana’s state Prohibition Party initiated the first truly well-organized plan to collect pledges in 1908, arguing that “there is nothing underhanded or secret about this vote pledging” and that it was merely an attempt to collect on the promises of those individuals who argued that “If I believed you could win I would vote with you.”Footnote ⁸⁰ A small national campaign emerged in the same year.Footnote ⁸¹ The first enthusiastic national conditional pledge campaign was sponsored in 1910 by Clean Politics, a party newspaper with a national circulation, and by 1912 Prohibitionists boldly challenged themselves to gather an enrollment of seven million pledges.Footnote ⁸²

Concentration campaigns similarly acknowledged the wide power gap between major and minor parties while carving out a place for the latter.Footnote ⁸³ Gaining popularity after a brief test in Minnesota in 1902, one year after the state’s primary election law was enacted, these campaigns called for Prohibitionists to “mass the forces of the party in favorable states or districts for the purpose of actually electing a large number of public officials.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Prohibitionists would raise funds nationally and then direct these funds into a few carefully chosen districts wherein they hoped to yield a more authentic representation of their level of public support. Pleased by the results of concentration campaigns, Prohibitionists believed that they had “won victories in places by methods of concentration when it seemed to be well nigh impossible.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The party was particularly successful in districts in California and Illinois, electing several state representatives. Prohibitionists needed to “show our ability at practical politics by refusing to waste time or effort seeking things that would be of no use to us,” and by instead expending significant resources in areas where this work was more likely to bear fruit.Footnote ⁸⁶ In other words, it was better to have a victory in a few districts than a modest showing in several. The Prohibition Party eventually established a national Concentration Committee, led by former Minnesota chair W. G. Calderwood.Footnote ⁸⁷

But Prohibitionists were, after all, on the margins of political respectability, and many reformers believed that they could offer more sophisticated solutions to the problem of rationalizing democracy under a Democratic-Republican system. In particular, other reformers urged citizens to organize themselves politically through special-interest pressure groups, which they perceived as a complement to the party system. Classic historical accounts depict the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) as among the first of this new type of political organization, a type that built upon nonpartisan and lobbying organizational forms and grafted to these the bold political strategy of organizing voters to function as a balance of power in elections.Footnote ⁸⁸ Voters quickly embraced this new way of organizing themselves politically. The ASL first urged individuals to advocate the election of the best potential candidate for their party during primary elections, then they instructed voters to cast their ballots with whichever of the two major party candidates was the best situated on their single issue. In this way, the ASL asserted, the wettest candidates could be defeated. Achieving this modest goal required tight discipline among a group whose plurality was greater than the margin of difference between the two major parties, and whose votes thus were anxiously courted by politicians.

In 1913, Prohibition Party leaders irritated other antiliquor advocates and confused much of the party’s rank and file when they refused to endorse the ASL’s national prohibition amendment campaign. To many, the seemingly bizarre decision to withhold resources from a constitutional crusade—made more peculiar by the fact that the Prohibition Party’s national platform had previously endorsed such an amendment—merely indicated that Prohibitionists were petty individuals who did not want to contribute to an antiliquor movement they no longer led. ASL national superintendent Purley Baker would pointedly assert that “as we enter the final charge in this century-old war there are two things that no individual or organization can practice and hold an honorable place in the history of the struggle: One is the childish complaint that any are not having due credit for what is done, and the other is the narrow policy of non-cooperation.”Footnote ⁸⁹ This condescending reprimand undoubtedly expressed some truth about how the Prohibition Party felt toward the rival organization that had succeeded them as the movement leader. Frances Beauchamp, secretary of the national committee, complained in a private letter to party chair Charles Jones that “the League seems to have exercised a spell over the preachers. They are afraid to call their souls their own, — I mean the preachers, not the League. I don’t know whether the League possesses any such article or not.”Footnote ⁹⁰

The ASL’s organizational style also explains both its increasing popularity and the Prohibition Party’s anxiety. The ASL’s rapid growth was built on innovative tactics including the widespread use of professional organizers, paid lobbyists, and a small full-time staff to coordinate its quickly expanding network.Footnote ⁹¹ Prohibitionists suggested that at an ASL conference “the ‘delegates’ are only spectators.”Footnote ⁹² Supporters of the ASL participated by donating money and promising votes rather than by debating and setting policy. This made the ASL’s political style quite different from the relatively populist Prohibition Party, wherein chaotic conferences with many vocal delegates were the norm.

But what even more clearly assured the undemocratic character of special-interest pressure groups, Prohibitionists argued, was that they pretended to be an alternative to government through party politics while they really redirected the energies of reformers right back into the dominant parties that had eroded the party system’s democratic character in the first place. Pressure groups could never be stronger than or morally superior to the Democratic and Republican parties through which they worked, and it was foolish to pretend otherwise. Prohibitionists dismissed the ASL as “another attempt to solve the liquor problem, while leaving the liquor sellers and their allies in charge of the machinery of government.”Footnote ⁹³ Prohibitionists asserted that “it is the business of the Anti-Saloon League to keep alive the Republican and Democratic parties.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Even if liquor legislation or a federal amendment passed, Prohibitionists argued, antiliquor advocates would still need to create a party that favored prohibition to ensure enforcement. That would mean eventually turning back toward the Prohibition Party since both Democrats and Republications were unable to support this issue because it would disaffect a large segment of their current constituencies. The use of pressure-group strategy distracted Americans from this fundamental problem, left Democratic and Republican domination in place, and thereby enfeebled the ability of the people to seize government for themselves. The Prohibition Party would prefer that citizens express their intentions by electing Prohibitionists, giving these Prohibitionist policymakers a mandate to enact and enforce a national amendment.

Prohibitionists also grudgingly acknowledged that they were not always prepared to offer an alternative. The ASL seized upon the report of Pittsburgh’s county Prohibition Party, which nominated candidates from the major parties to “fill out” their nominations in 1914, even while declaring that they were “standing strictly for Prohibition and against allowing themselves to be swallowed by the old parties.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Prohibitionists were determined hold-outs, doing all that they could to avoid conceding the Democratic-Republican system’s legitimacy, and struggling to produce a practical alternative. But they were reaching their limit.