In one of the most fascinating congressional races in the country that autumn, wealthy playwright Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous wife of TIME, Life and Fortune founder and publisher Henry R. Luce, announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House from Connecticut’s […]

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician and antiwar activist, was formally nominated for the presidency by the People’s Party forty years ago this weekend. Organized around opposition to the Vietnam War and originally co-chaired by novelist Gore Vidal and Spock himself, the People’s Party was […]

Barry Commoner, a pioneer in the ecology movement and Citizens Party candidate for president, earned a spot on the Oregon ballot on this day in 1980 with a speech before an enthusiastic crowd of 1,100 cheering supporters in Portland’s Memorial Coliseum. The crowd, which included […]

Minnesota’s Norma Lundeen, widow of the Farmer-Labor Party’s Ernest Lundeen, an isolationist who was later accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, unexpectedly entered the race for her late husband’s U.S. Senate seat on this day in 1942. Lundeen’s husband, who had been tragically killed in […]

Gathering in Cleveland for its third annual convention, the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA) adopted a comprehensive platform and endorsed the Socialist Party’s Norman M. Thomas for the presidency on this week in 1932. Led by the brilliant but rumpled left-wing philosopher John Dewey […]

Meeting in Cleveland’s Municipal Auditorium on this day in 1924, the Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA) formally nominated the ailing Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin for president by acclamation. Gathering on the 148th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the CPPA convention was […]

Longtime Prohibitionist Andrew Jackson Houston, son of the legendary Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto and first president of the Lone Star Republic, died in a Baltimore hospital on this day in 1941. Two months before his death, the 87-year-old Houston had been appointed […]

Alfred K. Stern, a former chairman of the Illinois State Housing Commission who once polled 16,529 votes as the American Labor Party’s nominee for the U.S. House in Manhattan’s twenty-first congressional district, died in Prague at the age of 88 on this day in 1986.  A multimillionaire investment broker who […]

Insurgent antiwar candidate Eugene J. McCarthy easily won the New York Democratic primary on this date in 1968. Coming only two weeks following Robert F. Kennedy’s tragic assassination after narrowly winning the California primary on June 4, McCarthy at first refused to actively campaign in the […]

Sen. J. William Fulbright, who helped to rally opposition to the war in Vietnam from his powerful perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was overwhelmingly defeated in a bid for a sixth consecutive term in the U.S. Senate on this day in 1974. Fulbright, […]