Chapter 3: The 1876 Election
Background:
1876 was a brutal election full of insults with a messy end that led to a near stolen election. With Reconstruction tensions taking up a lot of oxygen, Prohibition wasn’t talked about much. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was married to the college educated Lucy who had signed a pledge as a teenager not to drink. However she opposed the Prohibition movement, seeing temperance as something that you should persuade people to do and not mandated by the government. Tilden’s position on alcohol is not found from a cursory search. Since the last election, a lot of states had begun to adopt local option like the South had it, where county residents could decide whether to make their area wet or dry, or give local officeholders more discretion on offering liquor licenses. This would even happen in places where it had already been repealed (Connecticut) or voted down statewide (California). The party had also started to run more slates under their own ticket in several states and receiving mid-single digits in some and playing spoiler. Some races like the 1894 Connecticut governor election where Prohibitionist Henry D. Smith received 5.41% of the vote resulted in plurality wins which threw the result to the state legislature and showed the importance of the dry vote.
Platform:
Now having run a candidate and eager to become more than a statement, the new party platform in 1876 approached viability in a few distinct ways. While the first platform used almost half of its points talking about Prohibition, this one cut a lot of the words and summarized it into one point explicitly calling for legislation on the federal level to enforce temperance. It also eliminated the explicit call for labor reform to endear themselves to the moneyed interests which would come into play for the Prohibition movement later. As Neal Dow had found, wealthy industrialists who wanted a more sober and productive workforce were receptive to the cause. They then added more targeted planks and addressed several current issues. The first was a few more calls for the abolition of different things, starting with the vices of lotteries and gambling. The other was a more explicit opposition. The Utah War where the United States Army fought the Mormon Church had faded a bit because of the Civil War but in 1875, Brigham Young University was established and the issue of polygamy was on the rise. The Mormons already practiced abstinence from liquor and with Mormons being unpopular, the party worrying about being tied to them. Coupled with Prohibition’s own Quaker and Methodist roots, the platform calls to abolish of the, “foul enormities,” of polygamy. The platform also weighed in on other topical news items such as the appropriation of public lands to actual settlers only and a national law for observing the Sunday Sabbath and using the bible as a textbook. The most notable was a call for better treatment of prisoners. The party usually stood with reformed drunks and saw this as an extension. Plus, in 1876 Zebulon R. Brockway brought an Australian system to the United States and established the Elmira Reformatory. This took young felons and instead of harsh conditions, the prisoners received treatment and vocational training and stuck to a strict regimen of training, including on morals and ethics. The platform eagerly calls for this to be replicated nationwide.
Candidates:
President — Most of the following is taken from this thesis by James Screnar which goes into more depth: Green Clay Smith was born into a prominent family in Kentucky, wealthy but with an extremely strong military background on both sides. His father had served in the House and then in the state legislature. At only 15, Smith stepped into his parent’s legacy and became known as the, “Boy Soldier,” fighting in the Mexican-American War when he was only 15 years old. Returning to Kentucky, he became a lawyer and then entered the state legislature at the precarious time that the Civil War was about to break out. Smith sided heavily with Unionism and went to go serve in the Northern army. His position was vindicated in the 1861 elections which delivered large majorities to the Unionists and pushed Kentucky from its neutral state. Coming home in 1863, he became a Unionist congressman for three years, until he was sent to Montana as its second Territorial Governor. The biggest impediment was that travel was nearly impossible though without industry there was no reason to come, the population of the territory was cut in half between 1866 and 1870 while Smith was in charge and Native American raids were still frequent. Smith worked for more organization and centralization, from tax collection to an education system. After a few years, he left politics to, “give my life to the services of God,” and became a Baptist minister and Prohibition activist and traveled across the country to preach, even to the South.
Vice President — Gideon Stewart was a die-hard party loyalist since the beginning and was at the earliest convention in 1869 as both a lawyer and a newspaper editor sympathetic to the temperance cause. His first newspaper was the only daily Union paper in the top half of Iowa at the time. Originally from upstate New York, he attended Oberlin college in an area which, as I wrote about last chapter, was a hotbed of militant dry activity. The thrice-elected head of a central Ohio temperance group, he had been trying to organize a party for almost 20 years before it finally happened and was an anti-slavery advocate pre-Civil War. The corresponding chart shows his electoral history and he was consistently the Prohibition candidate for 30 years with varying degrees of success (there is a possible record of a run for State Supreme Court in 1869 but I could not confirm), being both the first and last Prohibition Party candidate for the Justice spot.
Results:
The Prohibition Party ticket would get 9,676 votes for president and be on the ballot in 18 states, still centering around the Great Lakes region. Smith being on the ticket may have helped in Kentucky where they received .31% of the vote, tying for second best with Connecticut. There was only county data for Michigan and Ohio but the sparse movement did not yet have a geographic concentration, though performance was low in the few rural areas.
The big question mark was Nebraska. The Prohibition Party website says that the ticket received a whipping 3% there, which was way above the national total. This is not entirely unbelievable. The temperance movement in Nebraska was founded at the beginning of 1872 and quickly rocketed up as they also took on the fight against excessive railroad charges which was a localized issue. There were reportedly 8,000 members of this Grange group and the ticket is said to have gotten 1,624 votes. The US Election Atlas site says that there were no 3rd parties on the ballot. While I respect both sources, a neutral third source of a historical encyclopedia pegs the national total at the exact amount that is only possible if the party did this well in Nebraska. Mark it with an asterisk and needing future study, but this would be an impressive performance if true. As the party began to get on more ballots and spread on more grassroots movement, it began maturing into a real force in presidential politics.
Deeper Dive — A New Face of Drinking for The Industrial Age
Just as the Prohibition Party was finding its footing, it suddenly found itself confronted against a new, and more sophisticated foe. Starting from America’s founding, the culture of drinking has been prevalent. Alcohol was distilled and so was much cheaper to drink than water and taverns were places of congregations, even where mail services would drop off letters. Many foreigners would note how drunk Americans were and it wouldn’t abate for awhile. Men would often drink during the workday and immediately after and one survey of Colonial Williamsburg in the 18th century estimated that each man drank an average of three pints of rum a week. The drink of choice was usually a spirit, as it was easy to distill and to distribute locally and as most beer was associated with British ale, it fell out of fashion early on.
This would change starting in the 1850s. After the failed 1848 Revolutions, liberal minded Europeans began to immigrate to the United States, including an influx of Germans. Germany had long been making beers, including passing a purity law all the way back in 1516! One of these immigrants was a clerk in St. Louis by the name of Adolphus Busch and when he was 21, he was a partner for a brewing supply business, according to the official company site. In the early 1870s, Busch invented the use of pasteurization which would treat it with heat to kill microbes and allow it to sit longer. Now able to distribute it, Busch and his company would push Budweiser nationwide and when it became available, people started to drink it. The chart below shows alcohol consumption habits per capita in the United States during this time period.
With these innovations in the second half of the 19th century, people rapidly turned to beer as their drink of choice and the growth was led by a few key players. There were several German companies in Milwaukee including Pabst and Anheuser-Busch was out of St. Louis. Small saloons began to shutter their business or sell out to the big players as they expanded and gained influence. This would go against some early Prohibition propaganda which vilified saloonkeepers as greedy and individual service places. While an original name for the party that was floated at the 1869 convention was the Anti-Dramshop Party, which was against saloons, later they would fight against the Rum or Beer Lobby. In fact, Prohibition sympathizers may have helped fuel the rise of beer, which had a significantly lower level of alcohol in it.
With that expansion came industrial opposition to new dry laws. In fact, the beer lobbying operation became so major that it created several of the tactics used for corporate influence campaigns to this day. Daniel O’Krent’s Last Call lists several specific examples. Outside of outright bribery, the liquor interest would pay for favorable op-eds. They also got heavily involved in ballot issues and local elections with anything regarding Prohibition and spent money to sign up favorable ethnic minorities to vote while simultaneously running against women’s suffrage which would lead to defeats. Later chapters will explore the factors that led to their downfall but the German beer companies found themselves more and more entwined into the political fabric of our political system. It also changed the face of drinking and led to divisions on demographic and regional lines that splintered support for Prohibition later into a referendum on urban vs. rural culture that would eventually lead to both the passage and the explosion of the 18th amendment in one fell swoop. But for now the seeds were planted as titans of industry displaced the local saloon owner and mobilized into a well-oiled machine.
References:
Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner, 2011.
