After a morning of looking through the digitized archives on ProQuest and the Library of Congress, here's what I can tell you about the Theocratic Party:

It was a small, local (*very* local) byproduct of the establishment of Zion, Illinois by the Scottish-American itinerant minister John Alexander Dowie in the early 20th century. Dowie had spent the 1890s gaining a reputation as a clerical leader in the Chicago area and in 1900 announced the founding of the still-existing northern suburb of Zion as a planned community in which he personally owned all the land and property therein. Dowie and his followers set up a theocratic non-denominational Protestant political structure and municipal economy in the city that conformed to their ideas and theories of Christian worship and virtuous living. Zion had several restrictive covenants to this end; alcohol, tobacco, pork, oysters, medical doctors, pharmacies, dancing were all forbidden within city limits. The lands incorporated into Zion were leased by Dowie for an unprecedented 1,100 year contract. This in and of itself was not that strange, as planned communities of all sorts of ideological stripes were popular in the mid 19th-early 20th centuries, such as utopian socialist townships of the Robert Owen tradition, free-love polygamous communities, and feminist collectives. Most of these planned communities existing in the New England and Great Lakes areas, and it only makes sense that a Protestant theocratic community in the vein of Zion would be part of that national trend. The newspapers seem to concur that Dowie had somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 followers at the establishment of Zion in the 1900s. The community center and heart of Zion was Dowie's impressive Shiloh Tabernacle Church, an 8,000 seat building that gave Dowie a dedicated pulpit to preach from to the citizens of Zion. The church burned down in 1937 in an arson attack by a disgruntled employee.

Dowie and his fellow citizens founded the Theocratic Party soon after in 1904 to become the articulated political expression of the aims and goals of his movement. However, this doesn't mean that Dowie was totally divorced from the spectacles of national political intrigue. In October 1904, speaking to a packed crowd at Shiloh Tabernacle Church, Dowie implored Zion's populace to cast their votes for Theodore Roosevelt and their incumbent Republican congressman George Foss (Foss was actually on stage with Dowie and spoke for his party after Dowie finished speaking). Dowie candidly declared the ultimate aim for his Theocrats in that speech as well. "Zion City will be unanimously republican, for until we can carry the country for our own theocratic party we will vote the republican ticket". Dowie and his followers were dedicated temperance activists, and politically reasoned that the Democratic Party, the political representative of throngs of undesirable and hard-drinking European Catholic emigres, was the anti-temperance party. "A vote for the Democratic party is one for the brewer and distiller", Dowie said from the Shiloh pulpit. Zion and the Theocratic Party got some attention from the local Chicago press as well as from some newspapers out of the state, but was generally treated as an eccentric and even cultish outgrowth of the self-aggrandizing personage of Dowie himself. A Democratic newspaper may have covered Dowie's endorsement of the Republican ticket as a backhanded way of associating the Republicans with obscure Protestant fundamentalists shutting themselves off from society.

Dowie apparently suffered a debilitating stroke in Zion in 1905, and traveled to Mexico and the Caribbean to recuperate. Dowie took a group of trusted advisers with him as aids, which was written off as public expenditure for the municipal government of Zion. Dowie and the top brass of Zion's micro-theocratic government had been gone for several months, racking up a monthly travel bill of over $2,000 (well above 50,000 per month in 2021 dollars). They had also apparently purchased a large tract of land to establish a new community in the tropics as well. This was an immense recurring expense for the community, which had meteorically grown to as many as 10,000 people before dropping precipitously to only a bit over 5,000, and discontent was brewing. Fearing backlash and uneasy about the length of his recuperation and time away from Zion, an increasingly ill Dowie sent his trusted and much younger aid Wilbur Glenn Voliva back to the United States to oversee Zion. Voliva had previously been dispatched to Australia to start another church community there in Dowie's name. Dowie was right to be anxious. Upon Voliva's return, public accusations and denunciations of Dowie's leadership were made across the community. He stood accused of financial embezzlement that had left Zion a couple million dollars in debt, practicing polygamy in secrecy, and establishing greater and more destructive degrees of administrative incompetence as his senility grew more pronounced. Voliva effectively launched a coup d'etat against Dowie, and won unanimous election as the new leader of Zion. Dowie eventually returned and attempted to litigate control of the community back to him, challenging the Voliva putsch as an illegal seizure of his assets. He failed, and accepted retirement with a municipal allowance as his settlement until his death in 1907, his reputation destroyed. This likely was a deeply embarrassing episode for the local Theocratic Party that controlled the affairs and governance of Zion.

Information gets a lot spottier after the early establishment and political turbulence of Zion. It appears that the Voliva putsch liberalized Zion's political atmosphere somewhat, with organized political independents vying for office against Voliva's Theocratic Party. Zion elected a mayor who was not a Theocrat, though keep in mind that Voliva, inheriting control of virtually all of Dowie's assets of physical and liquid capital (basically the whole town) was the real power broker. Apparently the Theocrats actually lost local elections to the City Council and police magistracy in 1909 before they won them back the next cycle. In 1922, the Topeka, Kansas State Journal advertised that the Theocrats of Zion had once again read their brief "Magna Charta" platform (written in 1902), to newly elected aldermen of the Zion City Council. The platform, apparently read for affirmation to every cycle of local elected aldermen upon their taking of office, declared loyalty to the US Constitution and laws and their "improvement in a Theocratic direction", their motto as "Where God Rules, Man Prospers", and to establish "the Rule of God in every department of government, by the free will of the people".

As Theocratic leader, Voliva was reasonably popular for a while. Through prudential policy, he apparently managed to get Zion out of the black hole of debt expenditures piled up by Dowie's circle, and moved towards establishing a more coherent Theocratic Party policy platform and away from simply being a vehicle for endorsement of the Republican Party. Zion's population grew by a few thousand under his tenure, and the original spiritual zeal of the planned community's social and religious life seemed to be recovering from initial embarrassment. However, Voliva ended up falling into the same lavish trappings as Dowie, and as the director and controller of virtually the entire community without oversight, also passed the bill to the followers. Voliva was a millionaire after a while, and in charge of a city's economy that was not really very productive at all. Zion was hit very hard by the Great Depression, which Voliva tried to remedy by pursuing a sort of New Deal on the micro level for Zion by tightening his belt and attempting income-making public works for the city. However, it was not working, and discontent against him was growing. That employee who burned down the Shiloh Tabernacle Church in 1937 was animated by this growing discontent against the Voliva leadership. Voliva declared personal bankruptcy during the Depression, though personal bankruptcy was basically akin to municipal bankruptcy given the totality of his control of the city's assets. Independents took convincing control over the city government and Voliva was basically sidelined and viewed as a black sheep until his death from cancer in 1942. Under the weight of local mismanagement and a national tendency towards federal power during the Depression/WW2 era, Zion as established by Dowie and changed by Voliva effectively just became a normal town in the 1940s, with the once all-encompassing power of the Theocrats largely dissolving.