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“Cold Water Comfort”
St. John, "I shall neither withdraw form the canvass nor assume a neutral position."
In
this cartoon, the Prohibitionist Party nominee for president, John St.
John, pours a bucket of cold water on James G. Blaine, the Republican
nominee, and the notion that the temperance candidate will withdraw from
the race. On his knees in supplication, Blaine grasps at "An
Appeal to the Prohibitionists: Mr. St. John, please dodge out of
the pres[idential race]." St. John's resolute refusal in the
caption is depicted comically in the illustrated scene.
The 1884 presidential election was
accurately predicted to be as close as the 1880 contest had been.
The narrow margin of victory enhanced the importance of minor
parties, like the Prohibition Party, which drew most of its voters from
Republican ranks. As the
Republican standard-bearer, Blaine did not want to alienate either
temperance advocates or their opponents, many of who were from German or
Irish immigrant families. Therefore,
he and other Republicans insisted that prohibition was a local issue.
When a proposed state constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of
alcohol appeared on the ballot in his home state of Maine in September
1884, Blaine did not vote on the issue. The reference in the
cartoon to "dodge" is a dig at the Republican nominee for
dodging the temperance issue. That the name of Blaine's campaign
biographer was Mary Abigail Dodge (his wife's cousin) was a happy
coincidence.
In 1884, St. John, the former governor
of Kansas, was the most well-known and articulate candidate that the
Prohibition Party had ever fielded.
Worried
Republican
operatives tried to convince St. John to drop out of the race.
When he refused, they engaged in a smear campaign against him.
St. John
had married at 19 years of age, fathered a child, and then divorced at
his wife’s request. Each
of the St. Johns married someone else shortly afterward.
John
St. John paid for his
boy’s education, provided lodging in his home when the young man read
law, and secured him a government position.
During the 1884 campaign, however, Republicans claimed that St.
John had ill-treated his first wife, and then abandoned her.
Blaine partisans also tried to bribe the Prohibition candidate to
drop out of the race.
A
furious St. John
not only continued campaigning, but concentrated his efforts in upstate
New York, an area of the key
electoral state where Blaine was vulnerable on the temperance issue.
The Democratic Party secretly funded the Prohibition Party’s
campaign there. (The
Republicans were clandestinely financing the campaign of Benjamin
Butler, the Greenback-Labor
candidate, hoping he would draw
votes away from the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland.) As
the presidential campaign heated up in the late summer and early fall,
artist Nast contributed three cartoons to Harper's Weekly,
including the featured one, focusing on the Blaine-St. John
struggle.
In the November election, the
Prohibition vote in New York proved to be one of the leading factors in
Blaine’s slim loss to Democrat Grover Cleveland. Prohibitionist
St. John received over 25,000 votes, most of which were probably
from wayward Republicans, and the Democratic candidate carried New York
by a slim plurality of 1,149 votes.
New York’s 35 electoral votes proved to be the Democrat’s
margin of victory in the Electoral College tally of Cleveland's 219 over
Blaine's 182.
John Pierce St. John was born in 1833 in
Franklin County, Indiana, the son of an alcoholic farmer.
Young St. John received little formal education and, beginning
when he was twelve years old, had to work to support himself.
He labored in several occupations over the next 14 years until he
was admitted to the Illinois bar. During
the Civil War, he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Illinois
143rd Regiment of the Union Army.
After the war, he practiced law in Independence, Missouri, before
moving to Olathe, Kansas, in 1869.
St. John served as a Republican in the
Kansas Senate during the 1873-1874 term.
A supporter of women’s rights and an avid advocate of the
government restriction of alcohol, he was elected governor of Kansas in
1878 as a Republican. During
his first administration (1879-1881), he used his oratorical skills and
political stature to persuade voters to adopt an amendment to the state
constitution that banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol for
consumption. St. John won
reelection in 1880 and spent his second term trying primarily to ensure
an effective enforcement of the prohibition on alcohol. Kansas voters denied him a third term in 1882 because of
traditional opposition to third terms, reaction against prohibition in
some quarters, controversy over his alleged support of railroad
corporations, and opposition from political foes.
Prohibition, however, remained the law in Kansas.
Animosity over St. John’s defeat--the
first for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Kansas--led to his
split with the Republican Party. Thereafter,
he dedicated himself to promoting the cause of prohibition on the
lecture circuit. As seen in
this cartoon, the National Prohibition Party nominated him in 1884 for president of the United
States. St. John ended his affiliation with the Prohibition Party
in 1896, although he remained a temperance advocate for the rest of his
life. After retiring from the political arena, his financial
speculations in mines and real estate were unsuccessful.
In his final years, he once again became popular as a spokesman
for prohibition, having regained the respect of the Kansas public.
He died in Olathe in 1916.
Robert C. Kennedy
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