The same author tells us that the pseudo-scientific propaganda against drink was scarcely heard of during the Southern Prohibition campaigns. According to him they were conducted, and won, “... mainly by the devices of a methodist revival ...; by terrifying and rather coarse emotional oratory from pulpit and platform, interspersed with singing and praying; by parades of women and children, drilled for the purpose; by a sort of persecution, not stopping short of an actual boycott, of prominent citizens inclined to vote wet; ... and finally, by fairly mobbing the polls with women and children, singing, praying and doing everything conceivable to embarrass and frighten every voter who appeared without a white ribbon in his lapel.”
“It is these methods, gradually perfected in campaign after campaign, that have won for Prohibition so many victories....”[44]
The present writer has been told by eye-witnesses of the use of similar methods in imposing Prohibition upon the North-Western States.
The second accident which played into the hands of the Prohibitionists was a new piece of political mechanism, the direct primary.
The traditional American method of nominating candidates for office was the “convention.” Conventions might be self-appointed, called together by the force of some wave of enthusiasm. Normally they were routine assemblies representative of the established parties in the various political subdivisions of the country, states, counties, cities, &c. Such an assembly would be elected by the party voters, would formulate a “platform,” that is a declaration of party principles and purposes, and would also nominate candidates to stand for election on the platform. If a platform were adopted to which any delegate could not bring himself to support, it was his moral duty to “walk out” of the convention and separate from the party. Consequently it was the aim of the platform makers to set forth such principles as would retain in the party as many as possible of those who usually voted its ticket, and at the same time attract as many votes as possible from “independents” and voters enrolled in other parties. In such a system minorities of “cranks” were at a discount.
The convention system was changed as one of the results of the change in the typical American mood away from boundless self-confidence to exaggerated self-criticism. Part of the new self-criticism was directed against the leadership of the various political parties. With the touching American faith in legal mechanism as a corrective of conditions unrelated either to legal theory or practice, it was proposed to make nominations dependent upon preliminary elections or “direct primaries” in which the enrolled voters of the given party might express themselves independently of the party “bosses” (at least so it was naively hoped by those who fostered the scheme).
The failure of the direct primary to improve political conditions in general does not concern this study. But among its various effects, few of which its advocates had foreseen, it undoubtedly furthered the Prohibition movement by increasing the political importance of any organized group of “cranks,” i.e., people interested in one particular question of public policy to the exclusion of other matters. The Prohibitionists were an admirable example of such a group, but other active minorities, such as the suffragettes, have benefited enormously by the direct primary. In the first place, it proved well nigh impossible to get the average citizen to cast his vote in a direct primary, because in cases of contested nominations for minor offices the aforesaid average citizen knew little and cared less as to the whole matter. The cranks he regarded with an amused and contemptuous tolerance. He could not believe that the new nominating device could give power to such people. Hence the cranks of all sorts gained influence out of proportion to their numbers, and promptly brought that influence to bear upon candidates for office, and especially candidates for the minor offices, such as members of State legislatures. Under the convention system it was very hard to put Prohibition into a party platform, for such a course would have been immediately followed by secession on the part of many who were accustomed to vote the party ticket. But under the direct primary, a candidate for nomination knew that those who were cranks upon a certain matter would support or oppose him according to his attitude upon their pet subject without regard to his general fitness for office as compared with his opponents. Besides its immediate effect, the direct primary had an ultimate effect even more important in favour of Prohibition, inasmuch as it weakened the party as an organ of political thought. The convention had served as a forum for deliberation and protest. Deprived of this forum, the party names tended to become mere labels and the allegiance of the average voter to his party tended to become weaker as the party came to mean less and less. Accordingly, the voter became more inclined to throw over his party from time to time, and again the cranks gained in relative importance. Even had the direct primary accomplished the dethronement of the “boss” (which it has not), the result would have been dearly bought by reason of the enthronement of the crank.
Yet one more characteristic of the American contributed to the curtailment of liberty. We have already mentioned his naive reliance upon the imaginary power of legal enactment to overthrow long-established custom. This fallacious belief arose somewhat as follows:—
Patriotism (which is almost the religion of us moderns) is born of two parents, first, attachment to people and places dear to us from long association; second, attachment to a certain spirit which is the sum of the thought and action of the nation as a whole.
In America, the comparative shortness of our national history and the nomadic life of so many of our people have combined to give local attachments a slighter hold than in Europe. On the other hand, the national spirit is correspondingly strong. From the beginning, every effort has been made to define, and thereby to intensify it. The nation consciously dates itself from the Declaration of Independence and, after that, from the adoption of the Federal Constitution. So powerful have these formulas been that in America, more than in any other country, it is possible to use almost interchangeably the words “national spirit” and “national doctrine.”