Whiskey Men at National Party Conventions

Forward:  The nature of running a liquor-associated business often involved pre-Prohibition whiskey men intimately in the political processes of their times.  Here are brief stories of three who had  achieved sufficient stature in the Democratic or Republican party to be named as a national convention delegates charged with  nominating a Presidential candidate.

Whatever the enterprise,  Christian Hanlen of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, throughout his life exhibited an uncanny ability to be on the side of success.   As a soldier in the Yankee Army during the Civil War, as a whisky dealer, and as a delegate to the 1892 Democratic National Convention,  Christian was could pick a winner.

Beginning about 1882, Hanlen emerged as owner/manager of a wholesale liquor business called Hanlen Bros., located a 330 Market St. in Harrisburg.  As Hanlen’s business flourished, so did his stature in the community.  Like many of the whiskey dealers and saloonkeepers of the time who saw Prohibitionist forces heading to the Republican banner,  Christian was a strong Democrat. 

His involvement in party activities came during a particularly crucial period.  Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected President since before the Civil War, had been defeated for reelection in 1888 by the Republican Benjamin Harrison despite Cleveland having garnered a majority in the popular vote.   When Cleveland ran again in 1892, serious opposition to him erupted within the Democratic Party.  Hanlen, however, was cited by the New York Times as a particularly ardent Cleveland supporter.

Elected as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in Chicago,  Hanlen headed across the country by train and emerged upon a convention center nicknamed “The Wigwam.”  Shown here it was a temporary building that had been thrown up in 30 days, located on Michigan Avenue between Washington and Madison.  Whatever excitement Christian experienced as a delegate, the Wigwam provided much of it.   The first day of the convention was marred by a rainstorm when the building sprung a massive leak.  Delegates were opening  umbrellas inside.  The following day as nominations were made, the roof broke again during a rain, showering the delegates.

Presidential balloting did not begun until 3 a.m. that morning.  Cleveland received enough votes to be nominated on the first ballot.  When the convention broke up at almost 5 a.m. Hanlen presumably was tired but  jubilant.   He would celebrate again on the night of the general election when Cleveland went on to victory and a return to the Presidency.

Jere M. Blowe, an African-American, ran a saloon and liquor business in Vicksburg, Mississippi, during a period of history when the local newspaper opined:  “Don’t mess with with white supremacy;  it is loaded with determination, gunpowder and dynamite.” Yet Blowe managed to provide leadership in his community, including being a delegate to the Republican National Convention.

Briefly during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), blacks in Mississippi were given a measure of freedom roughly equal to whites.  But as the Federal Government relented in its effort to seek equality,  a series of white-passed laws increasingly discriminated against the Negro population.  Growing up during Reconstruction, it is possible that Blowe was able to get a good public education, but he experienced the gradual erosion of rights for himself and his people.

For a time Blowe served as a Vicksburg alderman, a position that seems to have had little power.   He also was selected an alternate delegate to the GOP Convention of 1908, along with a fellow black Vicksburg saloonkeeper named Wesley Crayton.  It is likely that they shared a “Jim Crow” train car to travel to Chicago where the Coliseum awaited, patriotically decorated for the convention.  Historian Neil McMillan has written: “Although impotent in the state and local context, Mississippi’s blacks, like Republican functionaries in other parts of the South, took an important part in the nomination of Presidential candidates.

The 1908 convention nominated Secretary of War William Howard Taft of Ohio, who would go on the win the general election.   McMillan goes on to say that black delegates had a disproportionate influence on convention outcomes and “performed their function in a corruption atmosphere.”  Whatever his experience, Blowe could return to Mississippi, where he was largely powerless to affect local affairs,  knowing that the GOP platform that year vowed to “uphold the rights of African-Americans.”  It turned out to be an empty promise.

In 1893, swayed by a powerful preacher, Tom Doores of Bowling Green, Kentucky,  took a solemn pledge never again to touch alcohol.  By 1900 he seemingly had forgotten, abandoned carpentry, and was in business as “J. T. Doores & Co., Distillers and Wholesale Liquor Dealers,” on Main Street.  After ten years of making money from alcohol, Doores sold out and turned his attention to real estate and politics.

Doores already had taken steps toward political prominence.  In 1904 he was elected as a Kentucky delegate to the 1904 Republican convention held in Chicago, one that nominated Teddy Roosevelt.  In 1908 he was an alternate to the convention that selected William Howard Taft.  He was seen by the Taft people as an effective loyalist.

By 1812, however, the Grand Old Party had been riven by a split between Roosevelt and Taft. By now Doores not only was the Warren County Republican chairman, he also had been appointed by the Taft Administration as the postmaster of Bowling Green, a highly sought, well paid political appointment. After the 1912 GOP nominating convention in Chicago, the “muckrakers” of Colliers Magazine charged that a group of 23 Kentucky postmasters and assistant postmasters who also were county chairmen, Doores among them, had stolen the state’s nominating votes from Roosevelt.  The periodical named them and quoted their salaries.  At $2,700 a year, Doores was the highest paid.

Ultimately the split cost the GOP the White House as Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected.  Doores lost his postal job.  He made a bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916 but inexplicably pulled out just before the election.  A year later he tried bootlegging, was caught and tried.  The Cincinnati Enquirer opined:  “Doores probably is the most prominent man who yet has been arrested in Kentucky on a charge of peddling liquor into a dry burg.”  What happened then is undisclosed.  He probably received a fine and no jail time.  Five years later, Doores — still a relatively young 52 years — died and was buried in Fairview Cemetery in Bowling Green. 

Note:   More complete vignettes on each of these whiskey men can be found elsewhere on this website:   Christian Hanlen, August 9, 2012;  Jere Blowe, April 6, 2013; and Tom Doores, January 26, 2015.