Description: This book introduces the intrepid temperance advocates who formed America's longest-living minor political party - the Prohibition Party - drawing on the party's history to illuminate how American politics came to exclude minor parties from governance. Lisa M. F. Andersen traces the influence of pressure groups and ballot reforms, arguing that these innovations created a threshold for organization and maintenance that required extraordinary financial and personal resources from parties already lacking in both. More than most other minor parties, the Prohibition Party resisted an encroaching Democratic-Republican stranglehold over governance. When Prohibitionists found themselves excluded from elections, they devised a variety of tactics: they occupied saloons, pressed lawsuits, forged utopian communities, and organized dry consumers to solicit alcohol-free products.
Brief description: Lisa M. F. Andersen is Assistant Professor of History and Liberal Arts at the Juilliard School, New York.
Review Quotes: "In this outstanding work of political history, Lisa M. F. Andersen provides the first comprehensive account of the Prohibition Party, the longest-living minor political party in American history. Her compelling analysis contributes significantly to our understanding of the political transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book will inspire every student of the era to think afresh about the major and minor political parties, the emergence of protest and reform, the roles of women in politics, the supposedly democratic legal changes of the Progressive era, the development of interest group politics, and the creation of twentieth-century administrative government." -- Richard L. McCormick, President-Emeritus and Professor of History, Rutgers University