Silas C. Swallow was one of those born fighters that students of history love to investigate. Though a man of the cloth, he had an instinct for the jugular. Though an experienced family counselor, he was all too prone to speak before he thought. Though enormously popular in many circles, Swallow made a number of enemies in his career—and not only saloon keepers and machine politicians. Swallow was occasionally denounced by his fellow prohibitionists, and on one occasion was called upon to face the official reprimand of his church. He was "The Fighting Parson" not only because he saw brief service in a Union regiment of the Civil War, but because his entire career was characterized by a combative style.
In the 1890s, for example, Swallow was editor of a church publication called The Pennsylvania Methodist. While most readers expected to find in such a publication church news and Bible study lessons, Swallow was soon using this and every other venue to attack incumbent politicians for being complicit in the liquor traffic. In 1897 he used the pages of his church paper to make some especially sensational charges.
In 1897 the state Capitol Building in Harrisburg burned. Swallow hinted darkly that certain state officials either caused the fire, or at any rate allowed the fire to burn. He charged John C. Delaney, the State Superintendent of Public Buildings, with malfeasance and corruption in setting up the temporary legislative hall in Grace Church. His sensational charges bore two immediate fruits: Swallow was brought to trial for criminal libel, and he won the nomination of the Prohibition Party for state treasurer. The state treasurer's position was one of two state jobs up for election in 1897, and was one directly related to his charges of misuse of state funds.
Swallow's dramatic charges against state officials, as well as his fierce campaigning against the evils of John Barleycorn, made him the most prominent Prohibition Party candidate in Pennsylvania history. In the 1897 state treasurer's race he carried an unprecedented ten counties, winning a total of 119,000 votes, or 16 percent of the total. This 1897 election was one of the strongest state races in the history of the Prohibition Party. The only disappointment came with the fact that Swallow's ticket mate (the Prohibition candidate for state Auditor General) won only half as many votes as the Fighting Parson.
Swallow was especially pleased to learn, a few days after the election, that a state appeals court had overturned his earlier conviction on criminal libel charges. The court held that citizens certainly had the right to criticize state officers for their official actions, and that Swallow had been well within his rights in the stories he had published.
The following year the Pennsylvania Prohibition Party honored Swallow with its nomination for governor. Several other small parties also nominated Swallow, including the Populist, Liberty, and Honest Government parties. In this contest Swallow undoubtedly benefited from, and contributed to, the bitter factional fights within the Republican party. The New York Times reported that the Wanamaker Republicans were backing Swallow. In some of his campaign speeches Swallow produced evidence that certain key Republicans were prepared to sell out their party to secure the defeat of the Quay faction. When the voters spoke in this 1898 gubernatorial race they did not elect Swallow governor, but they did increase his vote from the 1897 race, though admittedly the overall turnout was also larger. Swallow won 133,000 votes, the great majority of which were on the Prohibition party line. His votes represented 13.7% of all votes cast.
Four years later Swallow was again the party's gubernatorial nominee in the Keystone state, but by this time the Pennsylvania Republicans were pulling together, and Swallow's vote totals fell to only 23,000, less than one-fifth of his earlier totals. At the same time as this second gubernatorial campaign, Swallow's detractors within the Methodist church brought charges against him for conduct unbecoming a clergyman. These charges related to Swallow's combative involvement in politics. Church leaders found Swallow not guilty of the most serious count, but did issue an official reprimand to the Fighting Parson based on the other counts of unclergy-like conduct.
As the Prohibition Party prepared to assemble for its 1904 national convention in Indianapolis, the national press was excited by the prospect that the party's nominee was likely to be General Nelson A. Miles, the grizzled old Civil War hero turned Indian fighter. Miles had been the top Army officer in the Spanish-American War, but was eased into retirement because of his later conflicts with President Theodore Roosevelt. While Miles was not a member of the Prohibition party, he had voted for the party's nominee John G. Woolley in the last presidential election. Further, while he had not been a lifelong teetotaler, he had abstained from alcoholic beverages for the last four years.
The chief debates early at the Prohibition Party's national convention centered around the question, Would Miles accept the nomination? While he had issued statements to the effect that he would not accept the nomination of a one-issue party, many party leaders argued that this was simply Miles' way of encouraging the prohibitionists to adopt a broad platform. Finally, however, the noisy demonstrations for Miles came to an end, as Miles sent a telegram asking that the party refrain from nominating him.
After his impressive candidacies of 1897 and 1898, and his credible showing in 1902, Silas C. Swallow was the next most likely nominee. After his name was placed in nomination one of Swallow's fellow Pennsylvanians arose and began an earnest attack on Swallow, but the convention chair hurriedly ruled the delegate out of order and even ordered the Sergeant at Arms to silence him. Swallow did win the nomination, and to balance this septuagenarian candidate the party tapped a much younger Vice-presidential nominee, George W. Carroll of Texas.
Swallow nearly refused to accept the nomination of his party. He sent party leaders a note saying that if the nomination implied a necessity of campaign travel he must refuse to accept, as his wife was quite ill. Swallow and the National Committee came to some understanding, however, and the clergyman did accept the nomination.
The Prohibition party in this 1904 election did wage a "broad gauge" campaign of the sort Miles would have liked. They supported not only suppression of the liquor trade, but also the Progressive changes of initiative, referendum, and direct election of Senators. The party favored removing the tariff from politics and putting it in the hands of an "omnipartisan commission." The party also favored international arbitration to prevent wars, and favored a reform of divorce laws and new laws against prostitution.
Swallow won 148,000 votes for president, or about 1.9 percent of the total. Thus his presidential vote was only a little larger than the vote he won in Pennsylvania state races in 1897 and 1898. His vote did reflect the party's rebuilding efforts. The party had won 2.2 percent of the vote in both 1888 and 1892, then had fallen to only 0.9 percent during the gold-silver craze of 1896—an election in which the party ignored the money issue, and saw a splinter prohibition group make its own nomination. After the 1896 debacle John G. Woolley had won 1.5 percent in 1900, and Swallow increased that to 1.9 percent. Unfortunately for the party, Swallow's percentage would stand as a twentieth century high, with the number falling after the nomination of Chafin, Hanley, and their successors.
Both the historian and the political collector are fortunate in the case of Silas C. Swallow. Swallow was a great self-promoter, and there is no shortage of Swallow memorabilia. There is also plenty of information about Swallow, in his autobiography entitled III Score and X, which he took through innumerable editions. Unfortunately almost all the biographical material on Swallow has been based on his own self-laudatory words, both in III Score and X and in several biographical sketches that apparently self-written.
The future biographer of Swallow will have to be careful to dig deep and find newspaper material less influenced by Swallow's own hand.
For Swallow there are goodly number of button designs, some of which appear with this article and many more which do not. There are several varieties of sepia single-picture button, including the two shown above. One minor flaw in some of these designs is that the edges of the rectangular photo used to make the design are clearly visible near the button's left or right edge, or both.
Hake's Encyclopedia shows nine different Swallow buttons, but this is most definitely an under-counting.
Prices on Swallow items are neither especially high nor low. The prices are somewhat high because Swallow buttons were issued in numbers far small than similar buttons for Roosevelt or Parker. They are also somewhat high because some of the designs are particularly good and Swallow has a particularly nice old-fashioned look about him. (He has the Lincolneseque style of beard, which lacks a mustache.) On the other hand, the buttons are not terribly high in price because Swallow is not as popular a candidate among collectors as is Teddy Roosevelt or Eugene Debs.
In short, a majority of the Swallow buttons can be had for $45 to $75, with some of the scarcer ones selling in the neighborhood of $250.
Source: National Cyclopedia of American Biography; Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem; III Score and X; New York Times issues for 1897, 1898, 1902, and 1904.
| © 1998 by Stephen Cresswell |