Prohibition Outlasted by Its Namesake Party

When repeal came, most of America was ready to celebrate the demise of Prohibition, the 13-year era of supposed dryness and morality that instead nearly doubled the number of watering holes in New York City and made gangster Al Capone a multimillionaire.

By its end, even many onetime supporters had switched viewpoints, and what little nostalgia remained centered mostly on what fun the speak-easies were.

Of course, not everyone feels that way. Meet Earl Dodge, national chairman and five-time presidential nominee of the Prohibition Party--the oldest minor party in the land. The party still promotes a national ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

Don’t clear out your wine cellar just yet. The party has a mailing list of fewer than 1,000. “I’m realistic enough to think that the only way I’ll get to the White House is on a public tour,” says Dodge, 66. But after he was nominated in June--at a convention held in the dry town of Bird in Hand, Pa.--he’s ready again to lose to the likes of Bush and Gore.

At its height, the Prohibition Party drew a couple hundred thousand votes in presidential elections. One of its big success stories hailed from Los Angeles. During his tenure in Congress from 1915 to 1921, party member Charles Randall managed to get a wartime anti-alcohol measure passed by attaching it to a popular agriculture bill. Dodge gratefully says that by voting Randall in, Los Angeles paved the way for Prohibition.

When it became law in 1920, Prohibition was the product of an amalgam of political, social and financial interests. Manufacturing industries supported it as a way to get employees to be more productive and to reduce injuries in the workplace. It had become a women’s issue, because drinking by the working man was widely seen as hurting the American family. So the suffrage movement, with much internal dissent, largely supported Prohibition; the conservative Prohibition Party in turn made the liberal cause of women’s suffrage one of its two key planks.

At the same time, the temperance movement was linked to nativist, anti-immigrant sentiments. The Ku Klux Klan was a supporter. Many beer hall owners and beer manufacturers were German; during World War I, anti-German sentiment ran high, as did resentment of such new immigrants as Italians, whose culture included an appreciation of wine. In parallel, temperance’s main support came from rural areas and small towns--where most Americans still lived--that resented the growing populations and political power of those pools of immorality, the big cities.

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Certainly, the Prohibition Party itself has always gotten its most unwavering support from rural fundamentalist Protestants. Its comprehensive platform (introduced with the phrase, “with faith in the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ . . . “) calls for an end to abortion and legalized gambling, and for stricter laws on pornography and divorce. It wants prayer back in school, Bible readings back at public meetings.

But Dodge is too politically astute to dwell on the moral and religious issues. While his party still draws largely from evangelical Protestants, he eagerly points out that it has had a handful of Roman Catholic members, an atheist or two, even a Jewish member. Dodge prefers to frame the party’s anti-alcohol stance in public health terms. Cirrhosis rates fell to historic lows during Prohibition, he says. They rose again afterward.

Prohibition did reduce drinking, historians say, but largely along socioeconomic lines. By criminalizing the manufacture and sale of alcohol, the 18th Amendment mainly served to raise its price, not reduce its availability. Much of the working class no longer could afford it. The middle and wealthy classes could, buying their booze through illegal channels run by racketeers.

After Prohibition was in place, though, the Prohibition Party’s fate was sealed. Even temperance supporters figured the battle was over and the party was no longer needed. Membership dwindled and the party’s role was largely forgotten by history books, overshadowed by the more mainstream political efforts of the Anti-Saloon League and Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Despite his meager mailing list and lack of funds, Dodge sees the day--not far off, within the next 20 years--when temperance will rule again.

Maybe not in the form of an amendment, he says. Maybe more like tobacco, with popular opinion weighing in against the health risks. Maybe restrictive local laws, and some state lawsuits against the industry.

After all, the Prohibition Party started in 1869, about 50 years before Prohibition was passed. It’s now been more than 60 years since that era ended, and from his office in Denver, where he also runs his mail-order business in political memorabilia, it looks to Dodge like people are growing sick of that demon drink.