Chapter 5: The 1884 Election

13 min readJan 9, 2021

Background:

1884 was a golden opportunity for third parties with a message as both major parties settled on nominees with a few problems. The Republicans chose James Blaine who had chased and lost the nomination the last two cycles. Having been in office for about 20 years at this point, Blaine’s coziness with the ever-growing megacorporations made a lot of populists uneasy. He was charismatic but had a reputation as a backroom dealer, inviting the taunt against him of, “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine! Continental liar from the state of Maine!” A branch of former Republicans called Mugwumps split from the party over the spoils system and began to look for a new home. Democrats wanted to take advantage of this with a civil service reformer and found one in Democratic governor Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was a prosecutor from Upstate New York who fought with the Tammany Hall machine all the way through the convention. His clean-cut image immediately took a dent in it when it was publicly revealed in a local paper that he had a love child and had been paying money to the mother for 9 years now. Blaine supporters now had their own chant: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”

Though Prohibition was a rising priority for many, both parties would remain against it at their conventions, as I talk about later. Blaine has no statements that I could find but apparently was infamous for dodging on a position ever giving an answer during the campaign. Grover Cleveland had a strong affinity for the new and rising beer trend and was happy to go along with the very wet position of the Democratic party. An infamous legend says that he and a drinking buddy once tried to cut down to only four beers a day and quickly gave up.

During the last week of the election, James Blaine held an event for supporters in a New York City restaurant. IT was there that Reverend Samuel Burchard decried the other party as being the one of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” marking the Democratic party as full of Wets, Catholics, and the Party for the South during the civil war. A random attendee wrote this down and it was snatched by a Democratic operative there and rushed out to the press before it spread like wildfire. The anti-Catholicism point was the biggest but this was nothing new for the early Republican Party which was built on xenophobia and Prohibition led by Neal Dow’s Fusionist party. This issue had dogged Blaine for decades as he worked to improve the poor urban margins. The influx of Catholic immigrants, which were all over New York from Western New York to the city had caused a lot of backlash. As a political show vote 10 years earlier, Blaine had taken aim at President Grant by proposing a constitutional amendment that would have withheld federal funds from going to any school with a religious affiliation. It passed the House but narrowly fell short in the Senate and many said that he was very anti-Catholic already. But while the focus was not on the Rum portion, this was a clear sign that the Republicans believed that they would get the Prohibition vote. Unfortunately for them, it would not be so easy.

Convention and Platform:

The 1884 Prohibition Party convention was held in Pittsburg (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania with a total of 505 delegates from 31 states, more than double the 14 that attended in 1980. Former VP nominee Gideon T. Stewart brought the convention to order which was followed by a fiery speech that said liquor traffic was worse than slavery. Though other names were briefly nominated and subsequently withdrawn, there was only one real candidate for those present: former Kansas governor John Pierce St. John. St. John had recently left the Republican party when he could not convince them to add a Prohibition plank to the platform during their convention. St. John was nominated unanimously by acclimation and he accepted by wire.

There was another speaker present who would become crucial to the Prohibition Party’s rise. Frances Willard, the woman who led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, gave a speech at the convention. The WCTU was formed a little after the Prohibition Party and a lot of the leadership saw overlap within the same social circles and with the same goals. The two created a formal alliance in 1882 that would join forces in order to push Prohibition and women’s rights and the WCTU sent petitions to the major parties asking them to support Prohibition in their party planks. According to legend, the petition that was sent to the Republican convention was found on the ground covered in garbage. This academic paper talks a lot about the aligning goals and how their fortunes were tied together for many cycles: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244016684373. The Prohibition Party platform for 1884 once again spent a lot of time on the liquor traffic issue. Some populist issues were added back in after being missing for reforms to political appointments and labor wages, though both explicitly through the lens of Prohibition. Two of the last three points focus on women’s rights and called for civil and political equity of the sexes and for women’s suffrage saying that they would, “prove a powerful ally for the abolition of the liquor traffic.” Willard, hoping to make inroads in the South, worked behind the scenes to tone down the rhetoric of these points but it was still very progressive for the time.

Candidates:

President –

John P St. John was a celebrity of the Temperance movement. I talked about his upbringing through the year 1880 in the Deeper Dive section of the last chapter so I’m only going to write here what had happened since and I recommend you go back and read that if you would like to catch up.

As governor, St. John cemented himself firmly in the Progressive movement of the time, pushing Prohibition enforcement and siding with settlers in disputes against railroad companies. He also embraced equality on several fronts. While other Western states passed laws to discourage freemen escaping the South in the aftermath of the Civil War, he welcomed them with open arms. He also nominated the writer Core M Downs, a woman, to the Board of Regents in the first appointment of a woman to this post in the state and also possibly the nation. She was a prolific author of poetry and magazine articles and help the same views on St. John against liquor and for women’s suffrage. In a letter, he wrote her saying that those, “with narrow constructed brain[s]” may object.

One of those brains belonged to Democrat George W. Glick, who would run against St. John in the 1882. He opposed putting women in positions of power and was followed the party line on liquor, which meant that he was opposed to any efforts of prohibiting its flow. Kansas was still a Republican state and St. John was initially expected to win a third term. However, another candidate entered the ring that threatened this.

Charles Robinson had been a Free-Stater who pushed for equality of the races and genders and after passing a Constitution that extended non-voting citizenship rights to black Americans he was elected its first Governor back in 1861. After a scandal around a bond issuance, Robinson became the first, and only, Kansas governor to be impeached and while the Senate acquitted him he left after one term. He attempted to rehab his image by getting close to the Lincoln administration and would later join the state senate up to 1881 as a Republican, where his women’s suffrage amendment was voted down. Though Robinson agreed with St. John on social progress and populist economics, he was extremely opposed to Prohibition. He didn’t drink but thought it was impossible to enforce and when St. John did it made him uneasy.

That election led to defeat for St. John and the Republicans. He was the only GOP member to lose to a Democrat and Charles Robinson under the Greenback party would play spoiler in the race where he more than doubled the margin of victory. Downs would be pressured to resign from the Board of Regents the following year. This didn’t dim his star and he began t go on the national speaking circuit talking about prohibition and prairie populism for the next few years.

Vice President –

William Daniel was a pillar of politics in Maryland, joining the endless 19th century politicians nicknamed, “The Little Giant.” A lawyer who entered politics, he joined his local Whig organization and was elected to the state House of Delegates. He was a strict prohibitionist and was part of the first wave of the anti-liquor Maine Laws where he introduced a similar bill that was killed in the legislature in 1854. As the Whigs fractured into nothing, he became a member of the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings. He was committed to his twin issues, abolition of slavery and prohibition of alcohol and this seemed like a natural fit until he would become a Republican partway through the Civil War. This was a fairly common path trumpeted by old timer Prohibitionist advocates and the Know-Nothings made up a crucial bloc of votes for this interest, as I talked about in Chapter 1 when Neal Dow brought them together before the GOP existed in the fusionism that would become the Party of Lincoln. He moved to the state senate where he tried to pass local option for deciding to become a “dry” county, a tactic favored in the South, but that was also killed by the legislature.

Frustrated, he resigned from his position only a few years into his four-year term and went home to practice law, as well as writing a prohibition law for his district only that was still in effect through Prohibition. He would continue to argue on behalf of civil rights and was a chief drafter of the short-lived Maryland Constitution (1864–1867) that outlawed slavery and disenfranchised those who had left to fight for the South. While it was passed by only .62%, it only gave the franchise to white males and, to seize control from the slaveholding rural counties, reapportionment was given to only areas with white residents. It was overridden by the 14th and 15th amendments. In 1872, the first year the Prohibition Party held a convention to nominate a ticket, Maryland did not send any delegates but Daniel helped start the Maryland State Temperance Alliance in 1872 and was elected to be its first president. He would hold that title all the way up to being put on the ticket and instead became the Prohibition Party state chair. By the time he was on the ballot, half of the counties in Maryland, mostly rural, had adopted local dry laws.

Results:

The Prohibition Party share exploded. Now on more ballots, they came in 3rd place with 1.5% of the vote and over 150,000 votes. The party made inroads in the South and West but its core remained rural New England and an impressive 4.6% in Michigan.

For interactive versions of the maps below that you can hover over, visit this Tableau link: https://public.tableau.com/profile/noah7751#!/vizhome/HistoricalProhibitionPartyPresidentialPerformance/ProhibitionParty

Many Republicans decried St. John as a spoiler candidate who pulled from Republicans and cost them the victory. In the plot below, I have the Prohibition share on the x-axis and the margin change for the state from 1880 to 1884 on the y-axis. The color of the circle is the final presidential margin in 1884. While the margin changes were more than the Prohibition Party, the fact that the party did not do as well in the Democratic South means that it was more in Republican states.

There were several states where the Prohibition Party took in about 2% where the Republican Party did not see the same shift as others and instead moved slightly to Cleveland and the Democrats. Republicans were so incensed at St. John that they burned him in effigy. In Kansas, still dominated by Republicans, the state legislature took aim at St. John’s legacy as governor. One of the newly settled counties was named St. John county and they voted to change the name to its current iteration of Logan county. James Blaine himself blamed rain in upstate New York for depressing rural Republican votes in the critical state that decided the election but who was right?

Deeper Dive — Cope-ing With the Spoiler Effect

Breaking the 4th wall of writing for a bit, but this section comes easily thanks to the writing of current head of the New York Prohibition Party Jonathan Makeley, whose Twitter can be found here. He wrote up a whole paper on the 1884 election that broke down why John St. John’s campaign was the decisive spoiler in the most important swing state and I’m going to heavily paraphrase from it here before adding some additional commentary. His writeup is invaluable to this one and I highly recommend getting the full picture here: http://www.prohibitionists.org/Pdfiles/St_John_Paper-Spoiler_in_the_Election_of_1884.pdf.

The Burned-over District, depicted in red on this map, was the sites in Western New York that was the birthplace for religious revivals at the start of the 1800s, the most famous of which were the Mormons and the 7th Day Adventists. This wasn’t just religious in nature, as this region also spawned the Anti-Masonic party and was generally regarded as a hotbed of resentment or people looking for something new. Later on in the 20th century, the area would become a magnet for immigration and the new religious movements flamed out leaving the more well-established networks behind.

One of those was John Copeland, a Civil War veteran and Methodist preacher who pushed hard for the abolition of liquor. By the election, he had 34 created Temperance meeting camps stretching across this area and was an organic source of organization and messaging. Copeland would attract thousands of people by hosting famous Prohibition activists to give speeches. Copeland, though a Republican was a huge supporter of St. John and he welcomed going around the circuit. St. John made it one of his biggest focuses for the campaign, starting right after the convention and bringing along surrogates of both genders with him. John Copeland is on the record saying, “We intend to surprise the politicians with a snug 15,000 votes in Western New York alone.” He wouldn’t quite get there but did get an impressive 9,000 votes from the area. Makeley tracked down the site of these camps and plotted St. John’s final vote which is in the photo below.

This is incredible as you can see the larger support in places closer to downstate with 2 camps in Orange county. St. John also did poorly in a few western counties like Ontario and Seneca where there were no camps. The next excerpt is straight from Makeley’s paper:

While the Copeland circuit helped establish St. John firmly in Western New York, this would have a lasting effect on where the Prohibition Party would do better in the future. The chart below is taken from uselectionatlas and breaks up the state into 3 regions: Western NY, the Rest of Upstate, and Downstate, and then plots the Prohibition Party’s performance in each of these regions.

1892 would be an upswing, especially in New York City, and it was also when all Upstate results began to converge. Generally, the city was not even close to as receptive of the party as the rest of the state. Upstate New York still has a handful of small dry towns as well, but similar to Westerville, Ohio from Chapter 2, these regulations are slowly being repealed. I believe the city of Argyle was the most recent one to overturn the dry law in 2019. John St. John was, in all reality, the reason a Democrat was elected in 1884 but his soaring performance compared to 1880 and the alliance with the WTCU means that the Prohibition Party had established itself as a force to be reckoned with, and the major parties began to take notice.

Next Chapter ->

References:

https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/73113/PROHIBITION-PARTY-1884-VICE-PRESIDENTIAL-CANDIDATE-WILLIAM-DANIEL-POSTER

http://www.prohibitionists.org/history/votes/William_Daniel_bio.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Daniel_(Maryland_politician)

http://archives.dickinson.edu/people/william-daniel-1826-1897

https://www.robinsonpark1929.com/robinson-park

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1882_Kansas_gubernatorial_election

https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/encyclopedia/robinson-charles

https://books.google.com/books?id=n51AAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA395&lpg=PA395&dq=kansas+1882+governor+election&source=bl&ots=r2lEcl8Nkm&sig=ACfU3U311xPiXQCBTJC-BjQnsj2gHMwl7g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjizImLsv3tAhUpp1kKHZ-xAng4ChDoATADegQIAhAC — v=onepage&q=kansas%201882%20governor%20election&f=false

http://www.prohibitionists.org/History/votes/John_St_John_bio.html

https://www.kshs.org/p/john-pierce-st-john-papers-1859-1917/14120