Camel Crusade

The setting smacked more of a revivalist rally than a political convention. Seated primly on folding chairs in the recreation room of the Young Women's Christian Association head quarters in Detroit, under banners reading DRY CRUSADERS and CONSERVATIVE-AMERICAN-CHRISTIAN, were some 50 delegates of the Prohibition Party. When a speaker really got warmed up, the delegates, with a rustling of shawls, erupted in lusty choruses of "Amen!" For pep songs, they turned to the New Day Temperance Songs pamphlet. For hardhitting oratory, they had Michigan Fundamentalist Charles Ewing, who deplored life under the Great Society as "a syncopated Watusi," in which "grey-haired mothers and grandmothers have shortened their skirts, exposed their bones, lit up their cigarettes, put on their war paint and started on a gin blitz for freedom with their bouffant bobs aflappin' in the wind."

The purpose of the somewhat gerontological gathering was to nominate a slate of "Prohi" candidates for 1968, a full year ahead of the laggard major parties. That is the only lead the party is likely to enjoy. Having amassed a grand total of 27,000 votes in 1964, the Prohibitionists--whose symbol is a camel, because, as one member explained, "it can go a long way without liquid"--decided to stick with a loser. Renominated for President was E. Har old Munn Sr., 63, an associate dean at Michigan's Hillsdale College. Named as his running mate was Topeka Evangelist Rolland E. Fisher, 67.

Organized 98 years ago, the Prohis hit their high watermark in 1892, when their presidential candidate got 271,058 votes. Since then, they have endured a long, dry spell at the polls. Their most notable victories in decades were the 1942 election of a constable in a Kan sas township and the 1959 triumph of two town board candidates in Indiana. "I would to God we could elect one good honest dry politician," cried Arizona Evangelist Charles W. Burpo last week, but no Andrew Volstead is in sight and the party's prospects are at best as low-proof as the beverages they would serve at any victory celebration.

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