Another teetotaler in the White House?

You might think that asking what the Prohibition Party stands for is like asking who is buried in Grant's Tomb. Actually they are both trick questions. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is buried in Grant's Tomb, of course, but so is his wife, Julia Dent Grant, and unless you included her in your answer you have it only partly right.

As for the Prohibition Party, its platform stands squarely against drinking, but it is for the right to life, against commercial gambling and pornography, for the right to prayer and Bible reading in the public schools, and promotes a "meaningful discussion of judiciary reform."

"We must appoint judges who will render decisions based on the U.S. Constitution," says Earl Dodge, 71, who will be making his sixth try for the U.S. presidency in November. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Dodge says, are the only high court justices to pass the Prohibition Party's test.

"The Prohibition Party was also the first to campaign for the right of women and minorities to vote," he adds. "And we were for family values long before the major parties."

Not that many Americans know this. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Japanese network television have broadcast stories on the Prohibition Party, and two contestants on the American TV quiz show "Jeopardy" have correctly identified Dodge as the Prohibition Party's presidential candidate.

"But the networks in America steer clear of us," says Dodge.

So here's a brief history: The unbridled growth of saloons and breweries after the Civil War led to the founding of the National Prohibition Party and the Anti-Saloon League, which were eventually successful in enacting Prohibition in the United States in 1920. The country stayed dry until 1933.

Prohibition has come to be known as the "noble experiment that failed." But there were those who felt it was good for America. "Those who lived then," says Dodge, "remember it as a time when they never saw anybody drunk on the streets and the man of the house wasn't staggering home each night."

According to Fletcher Dobyns, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was a special assistant attorney general of the United States during the Prohibition era, the strategy of the campaign to discredit the Prohibition in the eyes of the nation was to blame everything -- from unemployment and the Great Depression to moral laxity and crime -- on prohibition. Dobyns, meanwhile, was convinced that Prohibition was advancing the social, economic and spiritual welfare of the nation. He gave his views in his book "The Amazing Story of Repeal" (Willett, Clark, 1940).

Dobyns' research revealed that business tycoons were afraid that without the taxes from the sale of whiskey, the government would resort to taxing the income of the rich to pay the country's war debts.

Word was leaked to the churches that if they continued to support the Prohibition, the large donations the business leaders normally made to the churches would be going instead to the government in income taxes to make up for the loss in liquor taxes. The churches would suffer financially.

Despite the adversity, the Prohibition Party has had a candidate in every presidential election since 1872, three years after the party was founded. The party's all-time-high vote total in a presidential election was in 1892, when it received 275,000 votes -- 2.5 percent of the total votes cast that year. In 1988, when the senior George Bush won the election with 49 million votes, Dodge received 8,000 votes.

In the last presidential election in 2000, Dodge garnered fewer than 500 votes nationwide. He blames the low total partly on the fact that the Prohibition Party was on the ballot in only one state -- Dodge's home state of Colorado. That was the only state where the party collected the required number of signatures.

Born in a suburb of Boston, Dodge met his wife at a church gathering on historic Boston Common. Married for 54 years, they have seven children. Dodge operates a successful mail-order business specializing in presidential memorabilia such as old campaign buttons and posters.

Earl and Barbara Dodge are active in teaching a Monday afternoon Bible study group at a Denver retirement home. More than 5,000 people have passed through the program in the 30 years since the Dodges took it over.

"I do the teaching, Barbara does the music," says Dodge. The Dodges consider themselves members of the Religious Right and attend a Baptist church.

Dodge's running mate in November will be Howard Lydick, a 73-year-old Dallas attorney who received a heart transplant a few years ago.

Dodge plans to keep running for president but he is under no illusions. "Probably the only time I'll get inside The White House," he says, "is on a guided tour. I'm not going to give up my day job just yet."