Conventional Wisdom
By David Swanson
Welcome back to Culture Club, the weekly feature where Talia and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing.
If you’ve been following the conventional wisdom over the first half of the year, you’ve no doubt read that 2024 is just 1968 all over again: campus protests, assassination attempts, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Unless, of course, 2024 is 1924 all over again: book bans, surging white-nationalism, anti-immigration crusades, rising Christian fundamentalism.
As I’ve noted here before, history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it does echo, and the reverberations from both 1924 and 1968 have been ringing loudly in 2024. That seemed especially true a month ago, as the Republicans treated their own national convention like a coronation ceremony. With their nearly-martyred standard-bearer leading the charge, a victory in November seemed like a formality.
“When two Republicans meet at a national convention they retire behind the nearest potted palm and embrace,” wrote H.L. Mencken. “When two Democrats meet they clear a space in some crowded hotel lobby, leap in air with fearful whoops and proceed to tear each other limb from limb." Although he was writing in 1928, the observation seemed apt as recently as several weeks ago.
And then things veered off course. Like in 1968, the Democrats’ beleaguered incumbent shockingly announced an end to his re-election campaign. But unlike in 1968, when LBJ’s decision left the Democrats adrift, divided, and in disarray—tearing each other limb from limb—this time around the party seamlessly coalesced around an alternative candidate. And now, thanks to this summer’s astonishing Kamalaissance, the Democrats seem as unified as ever going into this week’s convention. So, it won’t take weeks of back-room horse-trading to finally settle on a nominee, like in 1924 when John W. Davis was selected on the 103rd ballot.
In order to get a better handle on the lessons electoral history has to offer, I’ve been reading up on the last century of national conventions, with a focus on the Democratic Party, and on 1924 and 1968 in particular. A lot of that research is collected below, an array of archival material that includes contemporaneous accounts, first-person narratives, and historical re-assessments. In addition to Mencken, I’ve included pieces by Walter Lippmann, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Arthur Schlesinger, Murray Kempton, and Jill Lepore, and many more.
Taken as whole, this selection shows just how far off the rails a national convention can go, and what kind of lasting damage can ensue. In other words, it demonstrates what might have happened if things had gone a little differently over the last few weeks. Now, as the Democrats kick off their national convention, it appears that rather than repeating the mistakes of 1924 or 1968, the party has actually learned from them.
Post-Mortem
By H.L. Menken
The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1924
There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming.
One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell-and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour…
The New York convention was riotous from end to end. Even during the long days of balloting there was always melodrama under the surface. The volcano slept, but ever and anon it sent up a warning wisp of smoke. When it belched actual fire the show was superb. The battle that went on between the Ku Kluxers and their enemies was certainly no sham battle. There were deep and implacable hatreds in it. Each side was resolutely determined to butcher the other. In the end, both. were butchered-and a discreet bystander made off with the prize.
It seems to me that the essence of comedy was here. And a moral lesson no less, to wit, the lesson that it is dangerous, in politics, to be too honest. The Hon. Mr. Davis won the nomination by dodging every issue that really stirred the convention. The two factions lost everything that they had fought for. It was as if Germany and France, after warring over Alsace-Lorraine for centuries, should hand it over to England.
The Setting for John W. Davis
By Walter Lippmann
The Atlantic, October 1924
No one, I think, can understand the deeper issues of this campaign who has not first understood how that passionately popular convention in New York turned against all its own preconceptions to nominate John W. Davis. For when it assembled very few delegates thought that he could be chosen. The jinxes of politics had apparently done their best to destroy him. He came from a small border state; he had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James; he was a Wall Street lawyer. Thus he violated all the tabus in the political ritual, and he was impossible. Yet two weeks later he was the inevitable choice of a convention which had displayed more unvarnished popular feeling than any important assembly of our time…
There in Madison Square Garden was that same sectional division which arose over the adoption of the Constitution and the fiscal policy of Alexander Hamilton, took on the character of a social revolution in the victory of Andrew Jackson, played a determining part in the Civil War, and has since then inspired every important expression of political discontent from the Greenbackers through the Populists to Bryan, the Bull Moose, and La Follette’s candidacy in 1924. It is the division first between town and country, generalized into a conflict between those sections where the towns are dominant and those where the rural counties are dominant. The distress of the agrarian West during the last few years would in any case have revived this old sectional conflict. But it had been embittered by the historic coincidence that the old economic, social, and cultural division corresponds roughly to a new racial and religious division. The ancient suspicions of the countryside against the bankers, the wholesalers, and the magnates of the towns fused with the dislike of the older Protestant villages for the Catholic, Jewish, and foreign-born populations of the great cities. It happened that Mr. McAdoo became the rallying point of the antipathies of the West and South, Governor Smith for those of the North and East. They brought an historic conflict to a dramatic issue.
Smith Wins Nomination on First Ballot
By W.A. Warn
The New York Times, June 29, 1928
Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York was nominated for President of the United States by the Democratic National Convention on the first ballot tonight. Formal announcement of his nomination was made at 11:55 P.M., when Senator Joseph T. Robinson, Permanent Chairman of the convention, announced that he had received a total of 849 2-3 votes.
The announcement was followed by a wild demonstration. The banners of every State in the Union and every Territory were carried through the aisles of the huge auditorium while men and women, marching, cheered at the top of their voices and the bands played the east side melodies associated with Governor Smith.
As the convention is approaching its close all concerned are felicitating themselves at the prospect of harmony. Only a couple of months before this convention assembled it was the view of many leading Democrats that there was the menace of a party split. The only ripple of discord that has appeared on the horizon related to the platform plank on prohibition, but before the platform was presented to the convention for adoption the prohibition plank had the backing of all but a mere handful of the members.
Democrats: Happy Warhorse
Time, June 27, 1932
Al Smith has been going to Democratic conventions since 1908. As a New York delegate-at-large this year, he has behind him a veteran’s skill to combat a neophyte’s candidacy. Writing last fortnight in the Saturday Evening Post he delivered these matured views on conventions:
“It is… high time to declare in favor of some modern method of conducting our National Conventions… Nominating a candidate in June brings him before the electorate… for four solid months. It requires a man of great vigor and great bodily strength to stand the physical strain of it… The conventions should occur about the first week in September…
“There is one thing about our conventions of today that certainly does not create a very good impression… and that is the ever-attendant disorder… Conventions are not conducted with the dignity and the decorum commensurate with their great importance… In Denver, in 1908, on the first two days of the convention, a majority of the delegates were on Pike’s Peak, 80 miles away.”
Donkey Doings
Time, July 6, 1936
It took a whole day and most of one night to renominate Franklin Roosevelt. As in 1932 in Chicago, New York’s lean, dry Judge John E. Mack, Roosevelt neighbor and onetime State Supreme Court Justice, plowed dutifully through a long, flowery speech ending up with: “I give you as your candidate for President, no longer a citizen merely of one state, but a son of all the 48 states, Franklin D. Roosevelt!” At that traditional signal all hell broke loose on the convention floor. Delegates danced and pranced, whooped and hollered, marched and capered in a mighty effort to display their enthusiasm for their leader. For a full hour the parade milled round & round the hall, giving off all the noise that lungs and instruments could make, carrying placards with which each state tried to outdo the rest in promises of victory. Sixty-one minutes after the demonstration began Senator Robinson informed the demonstrators that they had broken all endurance records, had exceeded “the estimate.” Drunk with their own zeal, the delegates could not stop. Alabama’s Governor Bibb Graves was turned loose before the microphones to make what was presumably a seconding speech into a sea of sound.
Planning to outdo the elephant show at Cleveland where vanquished rivals joined in seconding Nominee Landon, Showman Farley had arranged for every state to second Roosevelt’s renomination. That meant 48 speeches plus nine more from non-voting areas. It meant more than eight hours of fervid oratory in praise of Franklin Roosevelt. Toward midnight Chairman Robinson requested speakers to be brief but West Virginia’s Senator Neely insisted on delivering a full-length speech, to which no one listened. Governor General Frank Murphy of the Philippines did his duty in ten words: “The Philippine Islands gratefully second the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” At 12:42 a.m., two minutes after the roll call of states ended, Franklin Roosevelt was nominated by acclamation, without a ballot. The delegates staggered to their feet, went wild for the last time.
Triumph of Democracy
By H.L. Menken
The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 21, 1940
It needed only an ordinary pair of ears at Chicago to discover that loyalty to the Throne was far from a universal pestilence among the delegates and alternates in convention assembled. There was bitter resentment of the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt's hypocritical maneuvering for a third term, and there was resentment even more bitter of his imperious insistence that the Hon. Henry A. Wallace be made his running mate. At the moment Wallace was shoved through on Thursday night, with the steam roller laboring and sputtering like Behemoth in travail, it is probable that a secret poll would have shown fewer actual votes for him than for any other statesman in all this great Republic, not excluding the Hon. Wendell L. Willkie.
It was, indeed, a common joke of the convention that large numbers of the delegates were for Willkie even as against Roosevelt himself, and would so vote in November. How much truth was in this I do not profess to say, but certainly it was plain that the anti-third-term tradition was dying hard, and to the tune of grave du-bieties. The show in progress was not merely a political combat; it was a downright revolution, and even the stupidest delegate must have given some uneasy consideration to its possible consequences.
If a third term, why not a fourth? And if a fourth, then why have any parties at all?
Letter from Chicago
By Richard H. Rovere
The New Yorker, August 17, 1956
It is probably a good thing that people tend to cast aside the wisdom of history in the midst of conventions, since to put much stock in it would, for one thing, make the conventions far duller, and, for another, inhibit the attempts to face down the odds that provide all the suspense. This convention has been moderately suspenseful, and hardly ever as thunderously dull as certain conventions of the past. To be sure, the oratory at the International Amphitheatre now and then broke new ground in oppressiveness and witlessness, and the few feeble efforts that were made to hold the attention of the television audience most notably, the documentary movie on the past glories of the Party-were not marked by brilliance. But while a convention, for most of its participants, is an exercise in histrionics, its drama, when there is any, is not of the sort that can be taken in by the eyes and ears alone. This convention had one scene-the balloting for the Vice-Presidential nomination—that was primarily a theatrical scene, and a very good one, but it seldom happens that things are as compact and vivid as that. The extraordinary interest of this convention has derived from the effect it has had, or seems likely to have, on the biographies of half a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party. Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and Averell Harriman are today very different men from what they were a week ago.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket
By Norman Mailer
Esquire, November 1960
Delegates are not the noblest sons and daughters of the Republic; a man of taste, arrived from Mars, would take one look at a convention floor and leave forever, convinced he had seen one of the drearier squats of Hell. If one still smells the faint living echo of a carnival wine, the pepper of a bullfight, the rag, drag, and panoply of a jousting tourney, it is all swallowed and regurgitated by the senses into the fouler cud of a death gas one must rid oneself of—a cigar-smoking, stale-aired, slack-jawed, butt-littered, foul, bleak, hard-working, bureaucratic death gas of language and faces (“Yes, those faces,” says the man from Mars: lawyers, judges, ward heelers, mafiosos, Southern goons and grandees, grand old ladies, trade unionists and finks), of pompous words and long pauses which lay like a leaden pain over fever, the fever that one is in, over, or is it that one is just behind history? A legitimate panic for a delegate. America is a nation of experts without roots; we are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot take a step, and when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity. A delegate is a man who picks a candidate for the largest office in the land, a President who must live with problems whose borders are in ethics, metaphysics, and now ontology; the delegate is prepared for this office of selection by emptying wastebaskets, toting garbage and saying yes at the right time for twenty years in the small political machine of some small or large town; his reward, one of them anyway, is that he arrives at an invitation to the convention.
Fear and Loathing in America
By Hunter S. Thompson
August 29, 1968
Here I was in Chicago, in a scene that had all the makings of a total Armageddon, with my adrenaline up so high for so long that I knew I’d collapse when I came down… ten feet in front of a row of gleaming bayonets and with plain-clothes cops all around me and cameras popping every few seconds at almost everybody… and suddenly this grinning, hairy-faced little bugger from Berkeley offers me a joint. I wonder now, looking back on it, if McGovern would have accepted a joint from McCarthy on the podium at the Ampitheatre… because I felt, at that moment, a weird mixture of panic and anticipation. For two days and nights I’d been running around the streets of Chicago, writing longhand notebook wisdom about all the people who were being forced, by the drama of this convention, to take sides in a very basic way… (“once again,” I had written on Monday night, “we’re back to that root-question: Which Side are You on?”) And now, with this joint in front of my face, it was my turn… and I knew, when I saw the thing, that I was going to smoke it; I was going to smoke a goddamned lumpy little marijuana cigarette in front of the National Guard, the Chicago police and all three television networks—with an Associated Press photographer standing a few feet away. By the time I lit the joint I was already so high on adrenaline that I thought I would probably levitate with the first puff. I was sure, as I looked across that sidewalk at all those soldiers staring back at me, that I was about to get busted, bayoneted and crippled forever. As always, I could see the headlines: “Writer Arrested on Marijuana Charges at Grant Park Protest.”
The Lessons of 1968
By George McGovern
Harpers, January 1969
The Democratic National Convention of 1968 already has settled into the folklore of American politics. Its mere mention evokes the vision of tumultuous floor debate, bloodshed and tear gas in the streets, demonstrators and delegates standing together, arm-in-arm, in confrontation with the police. To some it also evokes the image of rigged procedures, of a political party assembled to reach predetermined decisions. The Convention became the shame of the Democratic party, and in all likelihood assured its defeat in the November following.
Wherever politicians meet—wherever Americans meet—they agree that the Convention imposed such a strain on the democratic system of government that a repetition would be intolerable.
Yet this Convention was governed by essentially the same rules as those which nominated Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy…
Delegates to those earlier conventions may have disagreed over the Presidential nominee, but they usually concurred on the basic questions of domestic and foreign policy. The assumption in those days seemed to be that the delegates had assembled to pick a winner, and it mattered very little how they went about their work. For several decades, of course, the deep South had not concurred in the party's objectives-and at every Democratic convention since 1948, blocs of Southerners have either defected or threatened to defect. These defections spotlighted the ugly racial exclusion practiced by many delegations. At successive conventions the majority took steps to correct that failing. In 1968, however, it was not the Southern minority but something like half the delegates who were profoundly disaffected. Feelings about the war ran so deep that it became impossible to hide the presence of a fundamental defect within the structure of the convention system itself. The defect was a failure of democracy, and went to the heart of the American political system.
The Siege of Chicago
By Norman Mailer
Harpers, November 1969
Monday night, the city was washed with the air of battle. Out at the stockyards, some hours after the convention had begun, the streets were empty but for patrol cars and police barricades at every ap-proach. The stench of the yards was heavy tonight, and in a district nearby where the Mayor lived like the rest of his neighbors in a small wooden frame house, the sense of Chicago as a city on the plains (like small railroad cities in North Dakota and Nebraska was clear in image, and in the wan street-lights, the hushed sidewalks, for almost no one was out in this area, the houses looked ubiquitously brown, the fear within almost palpable outside. The average burgher of Chicago, cursed with the middling unspiked culture of that flat American mideult which lay like a wet rag on the American mind, was without those boulevards and mansions and monuments of the mind which a thoroughgoing culture can give to paranoia for enrichment; no, the Chicagoan hiding this Monday night (as he was to hide Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night) inside his home was waiting perhaps for an eruption of the Blacks or an avalanche of Yippies to storm the chastity of his family redoubts. So fear was in these empty streets, and the anger of the city at its own fear, an anger which gave promise not soon to be satisfied by measures less than tyranny.
Democratic Convention Notes
By Michael Janeway
The Atlantic, October 1976
At Madison Square Garden in July, the sheer symmetry of the Carter nominating festival made people happy for the same reason it bored television audiences: the wounds of the 1968 Democratic convention, which led in turn to the wounds of the 1972 Democratic convention, were finally healing, and there was nothing to fight about this year. And yet, that symmetry made people wonder too. One heard it all week long, undefined expressions of unease, questions that no one but Jimmy Carter could answer, and which he would not. (What, specifically, do you mean by…? What, specifically, are you going to do about…?) And there were questions that Carter could not have answered if he had wanted to…
Jimmy Carter asked the basic question himself, early on: he asked his party and his country to take him on faith. The answer so far was yes, but it was tentative. Carter’s refusal to give more answers about himself and his positions is of a piece with his acceptance of that tentative yes. It comes down to time. What was at once attractive, and in various ways disconcerting, about the Carter love-in in New York was that we were witnessing, for the first time since 1960, the politics of making a leap from what is past and known toward a future that defies categories and labels. What concerns people, even alarms them, about Jimmy Carter is precisely what he employed to defeat his rivals, and what he has going for him in the election this fall: he blends being elusive with being a man of consensus. Still “Jimmy Who?” in many ways.
Son of 1924
By Milton S. Gwirtanan
The New York Times, March 14, 1976
Going into the 1924 campaign, the nation had just experienced a severe recession, during which the party had picked up 78 seats in the midterm Congressional election. The Teapot Dome affair, the most notorious political scandal until Watergate, dominated the headlines with daily evidence that under a Republican Administration the sale of governmental favors had reached all the way to the White House. And the incumbent Republican, Calvin Coolidge, who had assumed the Presidency upon the death of Warren G. Harding. though undeniably honest, lacked the political legitimacy that comes with having been elected. In fact, things were looking pretty good for the Democrats. It was assumed if the party could come up with a ticket that combined the South's support (in those days the South was solidly Democratic) with the swelling immigrant vote of the Eastern cities, it would then have only to appeal to the insurgent, progressive spirit of the voters beyond the Mississippi to put together a comfortable majority.
But Protestant, Prohibitionist, small‐town America and the growing Catholic, anti‐Prohibitionist cities eyed each other with distrust and hostility. Still a majority of the population, Americans of Northern European origins who traced their families in this country back for generations feared that the massive wave of immigration that had started coming to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe around 1890 was beginning to effect a fundamental change in the country as they knew it. They were increasingly concerned that the more these immigrants, coming to awareness under the leadership of urban Catholic political machines, voted and sought public office, the more the Democratic Party, the Federal Government and eventually the nation would be transformed.
1980:The Democratic Convention
By Elizabeth Drew
The New Yorker, August 31, 1980
The drive for an “open Convention” gained new impetus as a result of a number of coinciding elements. First, there was the Billy Carter affair, which broke in the course of the Republican Convention last month, and which was characterized by a series of revelations, sudden recollections, and new ques-tions. It wasn't Watergate by any means, but it felt like it at times- even in the reaction of the politicians. There was the panic on the part of Democratic members of Congress who returned from a July recess having found that Carter was in terrible shape in their states or districts and fearing that they would go down with him. (At this point, Carter's popularity rating is at twenty-one per cent in the Gallup Poll, the lowest for any President in the poll's forty-five-year history, and he is twenty-eight points behind Reagan in the ABC News-Harris Survey.) For many of these people, the Billy Carter problem presented an op-portunity. In the Senate cloakrooms, there was talk-reminiscent of Watergate times of a delegation's going to the President to ask him to with-draw, or, at least, release his delegates. But the senators recognized that they were confronted with one of the most tenacious politicians in memory. Eventually, Robert Byrd, the Senate Majority Leader, who was trying to protect his flock, and who has never been very fond of Carter—the Carter people failed to cultivate Byrd appropriately, and Byrd is a very proud man—called for an “open Convention.” (Of the thirty-four senators up for reëlection this year, twen-ty-four are Democrats, and several of them are in very tough races.) Two Fridays ago, about fifty House members, most of them relatively junior, gathered to try to figure out how to extricate the Party from Carter. They also considered how to make the effort seem more noble than a "dump" movement, and out of that came the call for an “open Convention.”
Faded Glory: What Fun They Used to Be
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The New York Times Magazine, July 12, 1992
“It is not the best portion of the convention which does the real work of selection,” E. L. Godkin's Nation magazine observed as early as 1867, "but a small minority whose chief qualification for the task is skill in that species of jugglery called ‘management’… governed by considerations of all kinds, most of them very low, of which the public outside can see or learn absolutely nothing.”
Bosses, not voters, generally controlled the outcome. In 1920 Harry M. Daugherty of Ohio, musing about the impending Republican convention, blew the fatal secret. “The convention will be deadlocked,” Daugherty told a newspaperman, “and after the other candidates have gone their limit, some 12 or 15 men, worn out and bleary-eyed for lack of sleep, will sit down, about 2 o'clock in the morning, around a table in a smoke-filled room in some hotel and decide the nomination.”
The nominee of the smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago was of course Warren G. Harding—a salutary reminder for those with romantic illusions about the superior wisdom of professional politicians. Bosses generally back candidates they think will cause them no trouble. Such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan won nominations over the opposition of much of their party organizations.
Mencken saw it more darkly: “When two Republicans meet at a national convention they retire behind the nearest potted palm and embrace. When two Democrats meet they clear a space in some crowded hotel lobby, leap in air with fearful whoops and proceed to tear each other limb from limb.”
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The Brawls of Yesteryear
By Murray Kempton
New York Review of Books, August 10, 2000
There is no crueler way to assess what conventions have become than to remember what they used to be and notice how carefully their managers have labored to eliminate every one of the unexpected, the untidy, and the disorderly elements whose mixture made for a brew unique for its tang, flavor, and purgatively bitter aftertaste.
We shall never feel again the wicked exhilarations of the sight of the hatred of brother for brother and sister for sister showing the naked face that cares not what visiting strangers might think. There will always be conventions where one set of delegates detests the other; but, since the result is almost invariably known in advance these days, enmity can only manifest itself with the sodden air of depression.
Oh, for the brawls of yesteryear. The Democrats maintained a steadier key of low-level fratricide than the Republicans who, being a church, generally preferred close harmony. But just because they were a church, the Republicans would now and then lurch into some doctrinal quarrel, and rise to savageries of spleen that would turn the hair of a hockey fan.
Party Crasher: A Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, Over One Week in 1964
By Jack Hitt
The New York Times, December 31, 2006
When the delegates started arriving at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August 1964, they were all aware of the storm heading their way from Mississippi. The state party was controlled by white racists who had openly declared themselves in favor of segregation. Since there was only a feeble Republican Party in Mississippi, there was no practical way for blacks to have much of a voice in politics. And so early in 1964, Victoria Jackson Gray, along with other activists, decided on a radical and cunning idea. They formed a new party—or a new incarnation of the Democratic Party—called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and declared it open to everyone. They held their own precinct meetings and delegate caucuses and nominated their own candidates: Gray would run against the racist titan, Senator John Stennis, and Gray’s two friends and fellow activists, Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine, would run for House seats.
They also made plans to challenge the right of the segregationist Mississippi party to represent the state at the Democratic convention. Gray, Hamer, Devine and 65 other delegates traveled to Atlantic City, and by the time they arrived, other delegations were clamoring for the Freedom Party delegation to be seated officially at the convention—to make a statement against the segregationists. Meanwhile, the “Mississippi regulars,” who had given up on President Johnson when he signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that year, declared they could seat “a dozen dead dodos” and no one could do anything about it.
How to Steal an Election
By Jill Lepore
The New Yorker, June 27, 2016
One lesson of American Presidential history: You can’t beat somebody with nobody. Desperate, late-in-the-day attempts to draft into the race, say, Mitt Romney are unusual at this point in American history. But running a dark horse was a minor American art form well into the twentieth century. George Bancroft finagled Polk’s nomination by making sure that Polk’s name wasn’t mentioned until the third day of the Convention. “My name must in no event be used until all efforts to harmonize upon one of the candidates already before the public shall have failed,” Franklin Pierce warned when he was the dark horse of the Democratic Convention in 1852. James Garfield, a Republican delegate, made such a good speech, nominating his fellow-Ohioan the uninspiring John Sherman, that Conkling, a New York delegate, handed Garfield a note that read, “New York requests that Ohio’s real candidate and dark horse come forward.” Garfield’s nomination was masterminded by a Philadelphia banker, who seated Garfield supporters at strategic sites around the hall so that, from his seat on the stage, he could cue them to greet Garfield with perfectly timed ovations.
The protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 resulted in a change in the balance of power between the primaries and the Conventions: before 1968, primaries hardly mattered; since 1968, the Conventions have hardly mattered. A report issued in 1968 predicted that “instantaneous polls of the entire electorate” conducted by “central computers from every home” would make nominating Conventions obsolete, which has, in fact, happened. That’s the de-facto change, but the de-jure change is that the primaries became binding.
The Worst Convention in U.S. History?
By Josh Zeitz
Politico, July 22, 2016
In 1868, Frank Blair, an erstwhile conservative antislavery man, issued a public letter on the eve of the convention, denouncing Republicans for enfranchising a “semi-barbarous race of blacks” that “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.” Blair’s letter established the tone for the convention, whose slogan read, “This is a white man’s country. Let a white man rule.” As one Democratic strategist unabashedly acknowledged, the party’s only path to victory was to excite “the aversion with which the masses contemplate the equality of the Negro.”
In 1868, only three years after the end of the Civil War, the Democrats met in New York York City to write a platform and pick a presidential candidate. The Democrats hated the Republicans who had just defeated the Confederacy and freed the slaves, and they loathed the strong federal government that was enforcing racial equality. But their virulent opposition to the federal government did not mean unity. Party leaders had to balance the racism of white Democratic voters against the demands of eastern financiers who wanted to roll back taxes but who also wanted the new $5 billion national debt to be paid in full.
They couldn’t. The convention caved to southern whites. Delegates declared America “a white man’s country” and the platform attacked the Union government that had just won the Civil War. It called for an end to black rights, taxation and government bureaucracy.
Lessons from the Election of 1968
By Louis Menand
The New Yorker, January 1, 2018
We watched every minute of the 1968 Convention in our basement, and there were some very late nights. What everyone remembers are the attacks by police and National Guardsmen on demonstrators in the streets outside. In fact, the networks did not devote much time to covering those. Out of thirty-eight hours of Convention coverage, CBS devoted thirty-two minutes to the demonstrators. NBC devoted fourteen minutes out of nineteen hours of coverage.
But the scene inside the hall—the Chicago Amphitheatre, on the South Side, near the stockyards—was tumultuous enough. The CBS reporters Dan Rather and Mike Wallace were roughed up by security personnel. After a vote on an antiwar platform plank failed, members of the New York delegation joined arms and sang “We Shall Overcome.” When Senator Abraham Ribicoff, of Connecticut, was giving a speech, the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, shouted at him, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home.”
The antiwar delegates lost every battle. A last-minute attempt to draft Edward Kennedy was aborted, and Humphrey won the nomination on the first ballot, with some seventeen hundred delegates, eight hundred and forty-seven more than the rest of the field.
The Convention left the Party fractured. McCarthy refused to endorse Humphrey, who began the fall campaign far behind in the polls. “Right now, you’re dead,” his campaign manager, Lawrence O’Brien, told him. He did come back, and nearly made up the difference. At the end of September, he at last broke with Johnson and announced that he would halt the bombing. At the end of October, McCarthy finally endorsed Humphrey. It was not quite enough. On November 5th, something happened that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: Richard Nixon was elected President.
How Political Conventions Went from Provocative to Predictable
National Geographic, August 17, 2020
When the U.S. Constitution was written, it didn’t lay out a process for determining a presidential nominee. For years, political parties relied on a secretive process known by the derisive nickname “King Caucus” to select their candidates. These caucuses were informal affairs in which U.S. Congressmen met to set their parties’ platforms and determine who would run.
Candidates and citizens alike despised this undemocratic system. By the 1820s, criticism had reached a fever pitch and it became clear King Caucus’ days were numbered. But how should parties figure out who to nominate?
An answer came out of left field in 1831, when the nation’s first third party, the Anti-Masons, held the first ever nominating convention in an attempt to do away with caucus secrecy. Though the nominee, William Wirt, only won seven electoral votes in the national election and the party lasted little more than a decade, the idea almost immediately was taken up by the two major political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, forerunners of the Republicans.
But 19th-century nominating conventions were dramatically different from today’s. In theory, they gave the American people more say in the political process by shifting the nominating responsibility from Congress to state delegates who would vote on the candidates at a national convention. But in reality party insiders controlled these proceedings, too, as they were valuable opportunities to meet and exchange both information and political favors. As presidential historian Gleaves Whitney writes, it was “the era of the proverbial smoke-filled room.”
Divided and Undecided, 2024’s America Rhymes With 1924’s
By Dan Barry
New York Times, July 5, 2024
Things should have been settled. The weary delegates should have already chosen a presidential nominee, packed up their Welcome to New York souvenirs and returned home in time for the nation’s celebration of what it stood for.
Instead, the study in indecision that was the Democratic National Convention of 1924 staggered through the Fourth of July weekend, its 3,000 delegates all but ensnared in the red-white-and-blue bunting adorning a tired Manhattan arena slated for demolition.
The convention, which lasted 16 days and an astounding 103 ballots, is notorious both for being the longest in history and for being infected by the Ku Klux Klan, which cast a long shadow over the America of that time. Just a few dozen miles to the south, it was celebrating a white-nationalist Independence Day with a hood-and-robe parade right down the Broadway of a beachside New Jersey city.
The simultaneous events reflected the divide over what it meant to be an American. Instead of proudly asserting who we are, that distant summer day raised a question being debated over the July Fourth weekend a century later: Who are we?
As Democrats Gather in Chicago, the Spirit of ’68 is a Painful Memory
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post, August 18, 2024
The return to Chicago this week comes amid echoes of 1968. The party has once again had to find its footing when the sitting president made a stunning decision to not seek reelection. Thousands of protesters are expected to march outside the convention and law enforcement is prepared for the possibility of violent disruptions. Cultural and generational divides in the party are pronounced. And there has been gunfire on the campaign trail, a jangling reminder that an election year can be turned upside down at the speed of an assassin’s bullet.
And yet despite those echoes, the Democrats are gliding into Chicago with little or no resemblance to the polarized and grieving party of 1968.
Unlike in 1968, the Democratic ticket is settled. The poll numbers are rising. The party activists are euphoric, with enthusiastic crowds greeting Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on the campaign trail.
And, unlike in 1968, there’s just not much left to decide in Chicago. When President Joe Biden stepped aside, some party leaders and pundits advocated for a protracted nomination contest culminating at the convention. With stunning speed that idea evaporated. In just days, Harris became the consensus choice and is already officially the nominee.
