Maine’s election is receiving the nation’s attention this fall because it could go either way for Bush or Kerry. Nationally prominent officials have made their presence known in the state, stumping for their candidate. It’s almost as if the old power brokers of yore – the ones who used to say, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” – had returned in ghostly form to pace the political stage and puff on their cigars.

Between 1820, when Maine became a state, and 1957, after voters changed the state’s constitution, Down Easters held their state elections for governor, legislators and some other offices on the second Monday in September, giving national party bosses a preview of what would happen in November when the country, including Maine, voted for president.

The state’s role as a bellwether lasted between 1840 and 1936, when it was obvious Mainers had fallen out of the political mainstream. In voting for Alf Landon, the Republican candidate for president, instead of Franklin Roosevelt, the overwhelming victor, the old maxim became a joke: “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”

But a century ago, the saying remained true to the test. An editorial writer at the Bangor Daily News put it this way on Aug. 30, 1904, as the September election drew nearer: Maine “was an advance guard, a scout to lead the marshalled hosts. … While the great army of States come along behind, Maine advances as a picket to feel out the enemy and to test his strength.”

And, of course, those enemies were Democrats.

Teddy Roosevelt was running for re-election against lackluster candidate Judge Alton B. Parker. No one except a few Democrats gave Parker a chance, but Republicans wanted the biggest victory they could get to help ensure the future. It was important that T.R. not only defeat the judge, but that he crush him.

Nor was there any doubt about who would win the governor’s office in Maine. The Republicans had had a hammerlock on Maine politics since the Civil War. Immediately after Rockland lime magnate William T. Cobb was nominated in June, Republican papers such as the Bangor Daily News declared him the winner. A few days later, the Bangor newspaper even ran a piece speculating which Bangorites would be on Cobb’s staff.

A parade of Republican luminaries began entering the state a few weeks before the election to get out the vote. They included Sen. Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Secretary of War William H. Taft, Attorney General William H. Moody and Sen. Charles W. Fairbanks, the Republican vice presidential candidate, appeared as well.

Democrats were reported to be more aggressive than usual. William F. Sheehan, chairman of the Democratic National Executive Committee, was vacationing at Bar Harbor. But Republicans alleged he was really in Maine orchestrating the Democrats’ campaign.

These were heady days for the Republicans, who appeared permanently unbeatable. They would continue to control Maine’s political scene with few exceptions until Edmund Muskie was elected governor in 1954. Nevertheless, even at the turn of the century some cracks in the Republican monolith were visible, however faint, and the political career of William T. Cobb illustrated them well. Among those divisive forces was the old bugaboo, prohibition.

A major plank in the Republican platform called for the enforcement of the liquor law, which had been a thorn in the state’s political thicket for more than half a century. Most people, especially Republicans, spoke in favor of prohibition, but few people seemed to care if it was enforced, and efforts at enforcement could rile the body politic to no end.

William T. Cobb was a different sort of Republican. Like every other Republican leader, he said prohibition should be enforced. The difference was he meant it. Looking stiff-necked and self-righteous in the photographs of him that appeared in the newspaper, this was the man of whom the Bangor Daily News declared, “Not a drop of intoxicating liquor ever has passed his lips.”

Cobb won the election by a wide margin of 26,000 votes, half again as many as his chief opponent, Cyrus W. Davis of Waterville. The other two candidates – a Prohibitionist and a Socialist – hardly made a ripple in the electoral pool. The message Maine sent to the nation was clear: Roosevelt would easily defeat Parker.

Once in office, Cobb proceeded to do just what he said he would. He signed a law setting up a liquor enforcement commission that sent deputies into the hinterlands. It so horrified the people who liked prohibition as long as it wasn’t enforced that when Cobb ran again two years later (the length of a gubernatorial term back then), he won by only 8,000 votes.

In his second term he increased his unpopularity by vetoing an effort to repeal the liquor commission law. In 1908 his Republican successor won by only 7,000 votes even though it was a presidential election year and the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, swept the nation.

The best epitaph for Cobb’s struggle with the liquor laws and the hypocrites who propped them up was delivered by William R. Pattangall in 1909. Pattangall, one of the state’s greatest political satirists, also happened to be running for Congress as a Democrat in that election of 1904, and he was handily defeated. But he admired honest men such as Cobb even if they were Republicans.

“Governor Cobb found out that Maine did not want prohibition for daily use. That all we wanted it for was as an advertisement to the world of the holy condition, which we had reached, that it was to us what robes were to the Sadduccees and prayers to the Pharisees,” wrote Pattangall in one of his Maine Hall of Fame profiles.

He continued, “To learn the fact he [Cobb] risked the existence of his party. In learning it he opened the eyes of others. When local option comes in Maine, as it will come, the honor of its coming must in a great degree, be given to William T. Cobb, the man who made prohibition unpopular by attempting to enforce it.”

Local option, of course, is the system we have today.

In a few weeks I’ll write about how Teddy Roosevelt did in the November elections in Maine, one of his favorite places for living the strenuous life.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.