Name John Woolley Died August 13, 1922 | ||
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Education Ohio Wesleyan University | ||
John Granville Woolley (February 15, 1850 – August 13, 1922), a lawyer and public speaker, was the Prohibition Party's candidate for President of the United States in the election of 1900.
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Biography
Woolley was born in Collinsville, Ohio, on February 15, 1850, and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1871, later gaining admission to the Illinois bar. He was elected City Attorney in Paris, Illinois, in 1875 and became Prosecuting Attorney of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1881. Two years after entering private practice in New York in 1886, Woolley, a reformed alcoholic, began a career of public speaking around the country.
Woolley was nominated for President of the United States, together with Henry B. Metcalf of Rhode Island for Vice President, at the Prohibition Party's national convention in Chicago on June 27–28, 1900. (Woolley had declined a previous nomination for President in 1896.) Woolley received the third-highest number of popular votes on November 6, 1900, after William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan (over 209,000 or 1.5% of the national total), but not a single vote of the Electoral College in December. [The 1900 ticket's highest popular vote in a single state was 27,908 (2.4%) in Pennsylvania; its highest percentage of a state's popular vote was 5.7% (2,244) in Florida.]
As the 19th century ended and the 20th began, Woolley was successively editor (and part-owner) of The Lever in Chicago and of the journal into which it merged, The New Voice, national organ of the Prohibition Party, founded in 1899. Woolley made two tours of Europe in 1901 and 1905 to speak for Prohibition, and died in Granada, Spain, on August 13, 1922.