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Earl Farwell Dodge, Jr. (December 24, 1932 – November 7, 2007) was an American politician who served as the Prohibition Party's chairman and presidential candidate from the 1984 to 2000 presidential elections and later ran with the nomination of his own faction during the 2004 presidential election.
Life
Earl Farwell Dodge, Jr. was born on December 24, 1932, to Earl Farwell and Dorothy May Harris in Malden, Massachusetts. He attened school until the ninth grade and on July 20, 1951, he married Barbara Regan. In 1952, the joined the Prohibition Party after attending a rally hosted by future Prohibition vice-presidential nominee Mark R. Shaw.
Politics
From 1958 to 1962, he served as the co-chairman of the Prohibition Party under E. Harold Munn. In 1979, he was selected to served as the chairman of the National Statesman Party, which the Prohibition Party had changed its name to in 1977, and served until 2003. In addition to his work with the Prohibition Party, Dodge was active in various other temperance organizations, as well as the right to life movement, and in several political memorabilia collecting organizations. In his later years, Dodge began to make a living producing political items.
In 1956, he received the Prohibition nomination for Massachusetts Secretary of State. In 1960, he ran for Indiana's second congressional district and later ran for Kansas Senate in 1966. He also ran for the governorship of Colorado with the Prohibition nomination in every election from 1974 to 1994 except for in 1990. In 1990, he ran in Colorado's Senate election while his daughter, Karen J. Thiessen, ran for state Treasurer, his son, Calvin G. Dodge, ran for Secretary of State, and Calvin's wife, Elsi, ran for the regent of Colorado University.
On June 24, 1983, forty five delegates voted to give Dodge the presidential nomination in Mandan, North Dakota for the 1984 presidential election and on January 3, 1984, he suffered a heart attack, but recovered. He appeared on the ballots in North Dakota, New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, and Colorado and as a write-in in Ohio and received 4,236 votes.
2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns
In 2003, members of the party opposed to him met at a condo in Tennessee and promoted him to chairman emeritus, as a polite way of firing him according to James Hedges. During the 2004 presidential election their faction nominated Gene Amondson under the Concerns of People ballot line while eight delegates from his faction of the party gave him its presidential nomination at his home in Lakewood, Colorado. In the general election he appeared on the ballot in Colorado and received 140 votes while Amondson received 1,944 votes from Colorado and Louisiana.
On June 12, 2007, members of his faction from three states met in a church in Arvada, Colorado where they nominated him for president and Howard Lydic, who received the vice-presidential nomination in 2004, for vice-president. On November 7, Dodge was waiting to board a flight en route from Denver International Airport to Pennsylvania, when he suddenly collapsed due to a cardiac arrhythmia and was taken to the University of Colorado Hospital where he died. Following Dodge's death Howard Lydick worked to unite the two factions of the Prohibition Party behind Gene Amondson before Lydick's own death on August 5, 2008.