Getting a brief jump on his rivals, Sen. Alan Cranston of California launched a long-shot bid for the White House thirty years ago this week in the marble-columned Senate Caucus Room — the same place that George McGovern had announced his antiwar candidacy more than a […]

Twenty years before his death on this day in 1944, legendary newspaper editor William Allen White, a man who advised Presidents and rubbed shoulders with some of the world’s greatest statesmen in a career that spanned five decades, waged one of the most fascinating and […]

Thirty-six days after winning the governorship during this week in 1942, death cruelly intervened and denied the Wisconsin Progressive Party one of its greatest electoral achievements in the party’s twelve-year history. While Minnesota’s neighboring Farmer-Labor Party went out with barely a whimper and most of the country’s […]

Claude A. Watson, the Prohibition Party’s candidate for president, was unable to vote for himself on this day in 1948. Watson and his wife had requested that absentee ballots be mailed to them in Winona Lake, Indiana, where they were attending a church convention, but had […]

Crusading labor lawyer Vincent Hallinan, the Progressive Party candidate for president, challenged GOP presidential standard-bearer Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson to a public television debate on the war in Korea on this day in 1952. Speaking at a rally in Brooklyn, the Progressive Party nominee […]

The American Party’s Thomas J. Anderson called Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter “a wild man and phony” on this day in 1976. Speaking at a news conference in Merrillville, Indiana, the 64-year-old Anderson — a longtime member of the John Birch Society and one of nearly […]

Farrell Dobbs, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for President, predicted that Republican Thomas E. Dewey would capture the White House on this day in 1948.  Dewey was leading President Truman by double digits in most public opinion polls at the time. Speaking at a press […]

“A Toast to Glory: The Prohibition Party Flirts With Greatness” is now available for Amazon Kindle. Darcy Richardson’s latest work is an examination of the 1932 Prohibition Party’s efforts to recruit a major-name candidate to serve as their Presidential nominee. For much of its history, […]

With a clenched fist and a fiery denunciation of all forms of discrimination, civil rights activist Margaret Wright of the Watts section of Los Angeles accepted the presidential nomination of the tiny People’s Party during this week in 1976.  Famed pediatrician and best-selling author Benjamin Spock, […]

The late Harry Browne, waging the first of two consecutive campaigns as the Libertarian Party’s nominee for the presidency, criticized Texas billionaire Ross Perot as “a political welfare queen” on this day in 1996. Browne, who qualified for federal matching funds during both of his […]