Burr McCloskey, July 15, 1920 (Akron, Ohio) - January 2, 2001 (Evanston, Ill.)
VP candidate for Pioneer Party (aka American Pioneer Party) (1956)
Running mate with nominee: William Langer (1886-1959)
Popular vote: 0 (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/531
The campaign:
A case can be made that the short-lived Pioneer Party was a splinter of the Prohibition Party.
Lowell H. Coate (1889-1973) who was raised a Quaker and aspired at one time to be a Methodist minister, had at some point embraced atheism and was an ardent pacifist. Somehow in 1953 he became the first and only non-Protestant and humanist to attain the chairmanship of the Prohibition Party. Unsurprisingly, his tenure was brief.
One of the speakers at the 1955 Prohibition Party nominating convention was Republican maverick North Dakota US Senator William "Wild Bill" Langer. He was an isolationist and friendly to the prohibition cause. He used his opportunity to speak at the convention to criticize what he saw as President Eisenhower's willingness to bow to Wall Street. There was talk of Langer being the Party's Presidential nominee.
Apparently Coate and his faction supported Langer, but something dramatic happened as reported in the Sept. 8, 1955 issue of the Kokomo Tribune: "Dr. Lowell H. Coate of Los Angeles, who resigned this week as national chairman of the Prohibition Party and announced that he and 20 secessionists had organized a Pioneer Party, once was a resident of Howard County ... Dr. Coate resigned as chairman when the party rejected his proposal that it take a broader name adopted to embrace a wider range of questions than liquor ..."
The departure of Coate and his entourage was also the departure of the last significant faction of progressives within the Prohibition Party.
By Nov. 1955 the Pioneer Party had organized to the point where they held a convention with around 30 delegates from 16 states. They were affiliated with the American Rally Party and hoped to create an umbrella for all third parties by 1960. A news account at the time reported: "The delegates adopted a platform calling for economic reform, a return to constitutional government, a 'golden rule' foreign policy and free health service. The platform urged demilitarization and 'repudiation of war and conscription.'"
Sen. Langer was nominated for President by Burr McCloskey and in turn the convention selected the latter gentleman as the running mate.
McCloskey had been the campaign manager in 1952 for Herbert C. Holdridge when he ran for President under the banner of the American Rally for Peace, Abundance and the Constitution (aka the American Rally Party) in tandem with for President as the nominee of the American Vegetarian Party. Holdridge's effort was, to be direct, a fiasco.
Langer and McCloskey had known each other since 1938. Both men were brilliant, erratic, and unpredictable. They worked together in a theatrical but Quixotic attempt to deny Earl Warren his confirmation to the Supreme Court. Langer even denied he knew concerned-private-citizen McCloskey, which was a straight out lie. So when the Senator later called his nomination by the Pioneer Party "nonsense" one has to wonder how much Vaudeville was taking place in this game. On McCloskey's part, some on the progressive side felt that although he used rhetoric from the Left he might have been a stalking horse for the Right given his outspoken anti-Communist views.
In the end it was much ado about nothing. The Pioneer Party was not on any ballot and ceased to exist after the election.
Election history: none.
Other occupations: worker at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., labor organizer, soldier (WWII), steel mill worker, campaign manager, poet, playwright, novelist, advertising agency owner.
Buried: Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum (Chicago, Ill.)
Notes:
Buried in the same cemetery as Charles Gates Dawes, Bobby Franks, Virginia Graham, Oscar
Mayer, Reinhart Schwimmer, Ignaz Schwinn, Richard Warren Sears, Aaron Montgomery Ward.
If elected would have become President upon the death of Langer Nov. 8, 1959.
"I learned how to fight as a wee boy because my name is Burr and my father's name was Burr. The popular cant is that Aaron Burr was a traitor, and my lovely chums in grammar schools across the country used the cant to malicious advantage, I had to fight because I knew better. In my family the saying around the Sunday dinner table was that the only mistake Burr made in killing Hamilton was that he should have done it twenty years sooner. I still believe this. There was a national debt, an Eastern establishment: it all goes back to Hamilton. He was a pimp for Washington at Valley Forge. He should have been killed twenty years sooner. American history is so distorted that it still isn't nice to say this in polite society"--Burr McCloskey, 1973.
