It's strange now to learn that Los Angeles elected a Prohibition Party candidate to Congress a century ago. The party also elected a governor in Florida, a long-time Democrat who held some rather repellent views on race even for their day. But for a movement to actually succeed in changing the Constitution, it has to have very broad support and attract people with very different views on other issues, and even different political philosophies. Ideas and movements that we've come to regard as mutually exclusive weren't always so sharply opposed as we've come to assume.
This is very, very true. I've actually been doing a little online research since my last post on this topic and was fascinated to learn that much of the agitation for women's suffrage was not from a radical, "freethinking" perspective at all, but for a very different reason: women are more religious and moral than men. Thus if ever given political power (which they had never had before), what was to prevent them from forever banishing alcohol, premarital sex, prostitution, war, and all the other traditional evils that rowdy men (with their brains all jacked up with testosterone) were unwilling to address? This is a far cry from the opinion sometimes given on Free Republic: that women are unthinking, overemotional Commies whose enfranchisement would inevitably reduce America to a political sewer. Many early "feminists" (though I don't think that's really an appropriate label for them) were actually very conservative and moralistic and sought a more moral and religious country (though of course, there had always been those women's rights crusaders who were indeed free-thinking radicals).
Another issue that simply doesn't seem to fit into our current ideological divide in America is the position on free public schools. Nowadays the assumption is that anyone who ever at any time advocated such a thing was a (in the words of an old Johnny Carson "Tonight Show" routine) a "bribe-taking, gay, Communist, peeping tom wife beater." The original public school system was in Puritan "theocratic" Massachusetts and taught religious orthodoxy along with everything else (the act creating it was called "The Old Deluder Act," since it aimed to fight the old deluder Satan with education). American public schools originally taught a certain form of Protestantism as "the American religion" and one of anti-Catholicism's main issues was defense of the public school and opposition to any state money going to Catholic (or as they called it, "religious") institutions. One may challenge the idea of such a school system (and the removal of the primary responsibility for educating children to the parents), but it was in its beginnings hardly a red horror birthed in Hell by the devil and Adam Weishaupt. All that came later because of other reasons. Theoretically, any public school system can be a religious system (though this works better in mono-faith societies, of course).
Conservatives today have come to be total Jeffersonians (if not neo-Confederates), seeing any such Federalist/Whig crusade or position as the start of The Revolution--ironic, considering the Federalists and Whigs were considered the conservatives of their day. I have seen posts on FR hailing the Catholic opposition to public schools as a glorious prophetic insight of what those schools were "inevatibly" to become, even though the parochial school system could be considered the "public education system" of the organized and official Catholic community, and even though the parochial schools are now as full of leftist nonsense as the government schools.
How many contemporary conservatives recall that up until a hundred years ago American Catholics were opposed to prayer and Bible reading in public schools (just like the G-dless ACLU) and in the early nineteenth century the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia created a fire storm by suggesting the Bible be removed from public schools there (not because he was anti-religious, but simply to ensure peace between Protestant and Catholic students).
Let no FReeper interpret this post to mean that your own Zionist Conspirator is some sort of Horace Mann; I am not. In particular, I regard the mandatory nature of education in America as something totalitarian and as something that makes our schools very much like prisons. I merely wish, once again, to show that not every issue throughout American history can be read through the contemporary ideological lens.
Pinging wideawake for his interest.