A legion of political journalists is
heading to Cleveland (and then to Philly) this month with a sense of anticipation that’s been
absent for decades: at long last, a national convention with the
prospect that something unexpected might actually happen.
After decades of suspenseless, pro forma conventions where the
identity of the party’s nominee has been known for months in advance and
every moment has been as scripted as a corporate product launch, the
Republican National Convention at least holds out the possibility for
something approaching unpredictability.
Will Trump face a delegate walkout? Will Ted Cruz’s army whip
together the votes to change convention rules and unbind delegates? Will
the party, in a wild election season, find
some way to break out of the droning, made-for-TV coronation that the conventions have become?
Boring conventions weren’t always the norm. Throughout most of
American history, in fact, raucous and mercurial gatherings were the
rule rather than the exception. The unexpected was routine—grand
speeches, lost battles, dragged-out fights with meaningful implications
for the course of the country.
Now, as Donald Trump seeks to finally and officially win the
nomination of a party that his candidacy has badly fractured, there’s at
least a chance that some of that old high drama could return.
And if not, there’s still a chance that something meaningful will
happen. History is dotted with less-famous convention moments that have
provided the drama—even farce—that added spice to what has become a diet
of gruel. And sometimes they, too, changed the course of politics.
FDR and the Voice From the Sewer
In 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was halfway through his
eighth year in office and at pains not to be seen breaking the “no third
term” tradition that had been recognized by every president since
George Washington. Roosevelt himself had often expressed his wish to
retire, but with Europe engulfed in war and a strong isolationist
movement resisting any attempt to help beleaguered Britain, the absence
of Roosevelt could prove decisive for both party and country.
There were big-name Democrats eager to succeed him for the
nomination, including Vice President John Nance Garner, and longtime FDR
aide James Farley. But one question loomed over Democratic
convention-goers in Chicago: What were Roosevelt’s real intentions?
The answer to that key question became even more uncertain after
Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley read a message from Roosevelt to the
assembled convention: “[The president] wishes in earnestness and
sincerity to make it clear that all of the delegates in this convention
are free to vote for any candidate.”
Any candidate? Did that include Roosevelt himself? In the
confusion, before a debate could break out in the convention hall, a
voice suddenly roared over the loudspeakers: “Illinois Wants Roosevelt!
Ohio Wants Roosevelt! We All Want Roosevelt!”
Delegates quickly joined in on the chant, and “We Want Roosevelt!” echoed through the Chicago Stadium rafters.
And whom did that voice on the loudspeakers belong to? None other
than Thomas Garry, superintendent of Chicago’s Department of Sanitation
and—more importantly—boss of the 27th Ward and a loyal footsoldier of
Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly, a New Dealer and an FDR loyalist.
History does not reveal whether this “voice from the sewers” was
Kelly’s brainchild or was inspired by people inside Roosevelt’s inner
circle. What is clear is that the rallying cry helped stampede the
convention into nominating FDR for a third term in office. Garner and
Farley, who had entered the convention as the most popular declared
candidates, each ended up with less than 7 percent of the vote. The
unexpected intervention over the P.A. system made a decisive difference
in who led the nation through the Second World War.
Reagan’s “Co-Presidency” Tease
Ronald Reagan had locked up the 1980 Republican nomination long
before the party gathered in Detroit. But two days into the convention,
an incredible story was spreading: Reagan was seriously considering
naming former President Gerald Ford, the man he had nearly unseated four
years earlier, as his running mate. Ford more or less confirmed the
rumors in a series of TV interviews. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite
pinned down Ford, asking whether he and Reagan were considering a
“co-presidency.” Ford didn’t shoot down the rumors and, as the interview
progressed, displayed a deep knowledge of the constitutional
complications that such an arrangement would produce.
Allies of the two men were meeting to discuss the terms of such a
deal. Would ex-President Ford be given “portfolios” to manage—say,
foreign policy? Would Henry Kissinger return to power under a President
Reagan, who had for years denounced Kissinger’s foreign policy approach?
Late into Wednesday night, the convention came to a standstill, and
delegates on the floor were buttonholing TV reporters to ask about the
latest rumors (it was a pre-cellphone age).
The expectations turned to near certainty—
Reagan and Ford were heading to the convention!
And then Reagan himself, in a sharp break with tradition, came to the
hall, unaccompanied, to say that the much-discussed “co-presidency”
would not happen. He had chosen a running mate: his rival during the
primary campaign, George H.W. Bush.
It was in political terms, a near-escape for Reagan. That year, the
Democrats’ chief critique of Reagan was that he was in over his head.
The specter of a nominee turning to a defeated ex-president for gravitas
would not only have fed that narrative, but validated the accusation.
Two Speeches That Launched Presidencies (And Two That Didn’t)
The best-known convention speech in American history is almost surely
the fiery attack that 36-year-old former Nebraska Congressman William
Jennings Bryan made on the gold standard at the 1896 Democratic
Convention. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown
of thorns!” he thundered. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a Cross of
Gold!” The speech propelled Bryan into the first of three losing
campaigns as the party’s presidential nominee.
Bryan, however, never won the White House. By contrast, look at what
happened after a far less memorable speech at the 1924 Democratic
National Convention in New York. A promising political figure, Franklin
D. Roosevelt, had served as assistant secretary of the Navy during the
Great War, and in 1920, was the Democratic candidate for vice president.
A year after that campaign, he was disabled by polio. It was certain
that this disability would sideline his designs on running for a higher
office.
But in 1924, the 42-year-old Roosevelt maneuvered himself up to
the rostrum at Madison Square Garden and entered New York Governor Al
Smith’s name into nomination. It marked Roosevelt’s return to politics.
Four years later, he succeeded Smith as governor of New York; eight
years after that, he won the presidency in a landslide election.
Decades later, another promising 42-year-old Democrat gave a more
memorable though equally historic speech. In 2004 in Boston, Democratic
convention-goers listened to an obscure Illinois state senator with an
odd name enrapture delegates with his assertion that “there is not a
liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of
America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino
America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.” Barack
Obama’s introduction to a national audience was a powerful tutorial on
how you can tell if a convention speech is truly memorable: the
delegates stop cheering every 10 seconds, and actually begin to listen.
At the other end of the spectrum, Texas Senator Phil Gramm was picked
to keynote the 1992 GOP convention in Houston. Gramm was a man of high
intelligence, undisguised presidential ambitions, and minimal people
skills (“even his best friends can’t stand him,” according to one
popular gibe). A few minutes into his address, Gramm was talking about
President Bush unveiling a new commemorative postage stamp. It was clear
that Gramm was not connecting with his audience: The delegates weren’t
cheering, and they weren’t really interested in listening to him,
either. He continued to speak for a half hour more. It was an early clue
that Gramm’s 1996 presidential bid would not end well.
The Balloon Fail
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter limped into the New York convention
after a bruising primary battle with Senator Ted Kennedy. After an
effort to “unbind” the delegates failed, Kennedy conceded to Carter in a
lofty, moving speech with a rousing conclusion: “The work goes on, the
cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
The bar was high for Carter’s acceptance speech: It needed not only
to inspire a divided convention but also deliver an image of unity to
viewers in the hall and watching at home: The president needed a
friendly Carter-Kennedy embrace, and a festive post-speech celebration.
It didn’t quite happen like that. In his acceptance speech, Carter
tried to pay tribute to liberal champions of the past, including “a
great man who should have been president, who would have been one of the
greatest presidents in history: Hubert Horatio Hornblower—Humphrey!”,
thus conflating the name of Minnesota’s progressive champion with that
of a fictional British naval officer.
But the “Hornblower” flub was a mere prelude to twin disasters at the end of his address.
First, when his defeated primary foe, Kennedy, came to the platform,
Carter desperately wanted the “arms raised in victory” photo shot;
Kennedy offered only a tepid handshake. Second and simultaneously, the
obligatory balloon drop became snarled in the rigging of Madison Square
Garden; instead of the anticipated blizzard of red, white and blue,
there came a pathetic dribble of occasional balloons, as though the
convention hall had become afflicted with an enlarged prostate. (In
2004, the same thing happened to the balloons in Boston after John
Kerry’s acceptance speech;
CNN somehow managed to broadcast it with audio of the increasingly frenetic
and obscenity-laced demands of a convention logistics manager, who
likely knew full well how the news media would seize on the incident as a
symbol of a faltering campaign.)
The “Undermine the Catholic” Plan
There was a time when newspapers would print “scorecards” so that
radio listeners and TV viewers at home could watch how candidates’
fortunes ebbed and flowed through several convention ballots. They
haven’t done it in a while, probably because the last time any
major-party national convention went past a first ballot was in 1956—and
it
wasn’t to choose a presidential nominee.
After winning the presidential nomination for the second time, former
Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson jolted the delegates by throwing open
the vice-presidential contest—in effect, letting the delegates decide
who his running mate should be. It was designed to provide a dramatic
contrast to Vice President Nixon, who was far less popular than
incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Through two ballots, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver and
Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy staged a back-and-forth race, with
Tennessee’s other Senator, Al Gore Sr., providing the difference.
Following the second ballot, JFK was only a handful of delegates away
from victory (he had 618 votes out of the required 687), and state
delegations clamored for the recognition of the chair so that they could
switch their votes. It was up to the convention chair, House Speaker
Sam Rayburn of Texas, to decide which state would be called upon first.
Rayburn, fearing the presence of a Roman Catholic on the ticket,
recognized Tennessee—whereupon Gore withdrew from the race, threw his
support to Kefauver,
and the stampede was on.
In one sense, it made little difference: There was no way Stevenson
was going to deprive Eisenhower of a second term. In another sense, what
did
not happen proved to be a godsend: As Kennedy himself later
observed, if the Democrats had lost in a landslide with JFK on the
ticket, it would have been “proof” that a Catholic was still politically
unacceptable to the American electorate—prematurely derailing his
victorious presidential campaign just four years later.
***
Will we see anything in Cleveland (or Philly) that approaches such
genuinely unpredictable and historic levels? If the 2016 GOP
convention—with all of the passions surrounding the impending nomination
of Donald Trump—winds up being a by-the-numbers infomercial, maybe it’s
time to give up on conventions and take a lesson from the Democratic
Party in 1872.
When Democrats met in Baltimore that year, they were so bereft of
viable presidential candidates that they simply decided to nominate
Horace Greeley, the candidate of a breakaway
Republican faction opposed to GOP President Ulysses Grant, and a journalist, no less.
Their entire convention took six and a half hours.
I am honored to be one of 1832 delegates chosen to represent Bernie in Philly.
