From Unpopular to Excluded: Prohibitionists and the Ascendancy of a Democratic-Republican System, 1888–1912

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.” 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. 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 prodemocracy reforms: the secret ballot and the direct primary. 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.” 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. 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. ⁶ But arguably the fact that voters repeatedly cast ballots from among the same two choices dovetailed with and exacerbated existing...