The Union Party was a short-lived political party in the United States, formed in 1936 by a coalition of radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who had taken control of Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement after Long's assassination in 1935. Each of those people hoped to channel their wide followings into support for the Union Party, which proposed a radical populist alternative to the New Deal reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, but critics charged that the Union Party was in fact controlled by Father Coughlin, a former Roosevelt supporter who had broken with Roosevelt and had begun an ugly slide into anti-Semitism and demagogy by 1936.

Many observers at the time felt that there was a place for a party more radical than Roosevelt and the Democrats but still non-Marxist in the political spectrum of the time. However, the Union Party suffered from a multiplicity of problems almost from the moment of its inception. A primary one was that each of the party's three principal leaders seemingly saw himself, not its Presidential nominee, William Lemke, as the real power figure and natural leader of the party. Another was that each man's movement was largely a result of the force of personality more than a truly cohesive ideology, in the case of Coughlin and Townsend their own personalities; in the case of Smith, he largely inherited the movement built by the charismatic personality of Long. Smith himself was considered a far less charismatic figure. This was not the basis for an even moderately-successful party over the long run. Also, Smith, like Coughlin, had turned to racism and anti-Semitism which was a far cry from the largely racially tolerant views of both Long and Townsend, reducing the appeal of the group among many progressives.

Lemke, a U.S. Congressman from North Dakota, was chosen as the party's nominee for the 1936 Presidential election. Lemke received 892,267 votes nationwide, or less than 2% of the total popular vote, and no electoral votes. However, even this meager showing was the best for a U.S. third party between the 1924 Progressives and the 1948 Dixiecrats. The Union Party was disbanded shortly after the 1936 elections. Presidential nominee Lemke continued to serve in Congress as a Republican, eventually dying in office while serving an eighth term; upon U.S. entry into World War II, the Roman Catholic Church ordered Father Coughlin to retire from the airwaves and return to his duties as a parish priest, and he died in obscurity in 1979; Townsend, already quite elderly, saw his movement largely supplanted by the enactment of Social Security the next year and also largely became quite obscure afterwards, although he lived until 1960; and Smith became even more of a radical fringe figure who eventually became an early proponent of Holocaust denial, which he was still touting at the time of his death in 1976.

Older namesake

In the 1864 Presidential election the Republican Party of incumbent President Abraham Lincoln ran as the National Union Party or Union Party. The name was in reference to the Union faction of the American Civil War.