VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES.
1872. John Russell, Michigan. 1876. Gideon T. Stewart, Ohio. 1880. Henry A. Thompson, Ohio. 1884. William Daniel. Maryland. 1888. John A. Brooks, Missouri. 1892.James B. Cranfill, Texas. 1896. ale Johnson, Illinois.
1900. Henry B. Metcalf, Rhode Island. 1904. George W. Carroll, Texas.
1908 and 1912. Aaron S. Watkins, Ohio. 1916. Ira Landrith. Tennessee.
The votes cast for the presidential candidates of the Prohibition party during this period are recorded as follows: 1872 5,607 1896 130.617 1876 9,737 1900 209,469 1880 9,678 1904 258,205 5,884 149,772 1908 253,231 1888 249.918 1912 207,828 1892 263,480 1916 221,329 The party may be said first to have at tracted general attention in 1884, when the wide popularity of John P. St. John, who had left the Republican party because of its refusal to adopt prohibition, first resulted in an appre ciable party vote and when votes were first cast for the party in almost every State of the Union. The fact that the vote nearly doubled in the next election created some political apprehension; but it remained practically sta tionary in 1892, and in 1896, owing to a split in the party and its desertion by those Pro hibitionists who advocated the free coinage of silver (among whom John P. St. John was a leader) the vote was cut in half. In 1900, how ever, under the leadership of Oliver W. Stew art and with John G. Woolley, who ranked among the greatest of American orators, as a presidential candidate, the vote largely increased again and in 1904 came practically back to its high point.
But a bitter factional fight breaking out in the party during the 1904 campaign and the gaining of control in the party management, immediately thereafter, by the faction which regarded the mission of the party not spe cifically to win political victory but to support prohibition as an abstract principle ended, in the minds of most political students, the pos sibility that the Prohibition party should ever become a considerable political factor.
It should be noticed that there have always been two schools of thought in the Prohibition party, one of which may be called the strictly political, which insisted always upon absolutely independent political action and refusal to give support to non-partisan measures of any sort; the other might be called a aco-operative" school, which, while retaining political organ ization, was always willing to join hands in non-partisan efforts of all kind.
No history of the Prohibition party is com plete without some notice of the large number of political ideas which had their first intro duction to the world in Prohibition party platforms.
The first of these is Woman Suffrage, for which the Prohibition party began to declare in 1872 and has declared in every one of its national platforms. Of equal importance is the direct election of United States senators, for which the Prohibition party declared in the platform of its first nominating convention in 1872. Prison reform, lower railroad rates, pos tal savings banks, parcel post, regulation of in terstate corporations, protection of government lands, civil service reform, cheap letter postage, are among the things for which the Prohibition party spoke before any othtr party gave them consideration. The tariff commission idea began with the Prohibition party, as did also the income tax; and the Prohibition party was the first to attack polygamy and the only political party that opposed the system of protected vice, for years so common in American cities.
It should be added that the Prohibition party built, in its entirety, the argument upon which the prohibition issues finally won. It is a popular error to suppose that the Prohibitionists were chiefly concerned with the moral aspects of the liquor problem. Their literature is strong upon that subject but they were the foremost students of the economic phases of the problem and as well of its relations to prac tical civics The latest writers the move ment have added almost nothing to the argu ment that was formulated by the Prohibitionists as early as 1888.