I recently asked a friend if he would be watching this week’s Democratic National Convention. “Nope,” he replied. “Who wants to watch a convention on Zoom?” Which, for all practical purposes, is what the 2020 version of that quadrennial gathering is.
It’s a sad reflection on how far political conventions have fallen. The mystery and the excitement of wondering how it will all turn out are gone. We knew in March that Joe Biden would be the nominee. We knew last week that Sen. Kamala Harris would be his running mate. Nobody has paid attention to either party’s platform since Bill Clinton ignored his in 1992. All that was left was the fun of the balloon drop, the event’s traditional grand finale. Now, even that’s been denied us.
So, don’t be surprised when the convention on Zoom’s TV ratings come back low.
It’s a far cry from another Democratic gathering nearly a century ago that took things to the opposite extreme — because the 1924 Democratic National Convention can be called the “Convention from Hell.”
It lasted an agonizing 17 days and took a staggering 103 ballots to pick a presidential nominee. Nearly 100 years later, it still holds the record for the longest political convention. Given that it dragged on and on during the depths of the summer heat — in an age before air conditioning, mind you — it physically felt like the “Convention from Hell,” too.
Democrats were divided as they filled New York’s Madison Square Garden on June 24. A sizable number supported William Gibbs McAdoo for president. A lawyer from the South, he was a leader in the party’s progressive wing. Woodrow Wilson made him secretary of the treasury, and McAdoo thereupon assured his job security by marrying his boss’s daughter in a White House ceremony.
A movement to stop McAdoo was spearheaded by New York Gov. Al Smith, who was very Northern, very Roman Catholic (no Catholic had ever been nominated for president by a major party at that time), and very much anti-McAdoo. Supporters of the two went at each other with all their might.
There was drama on an industrial scale. The convention was held during Prohibition (though plenty of bootleg booze was smuggled inside the arena in hip flasks), so Wets and Drys battled it out over which position would be recognized in the platform (the prohibitionists won). The Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its popularity just then, and an anti-Klan plank was heatedly debated and narrowly rejected.
There was major star appeal, too. A dramatic moment came when Franklin D. Roosevelt made his first major public appearance since contracting polio three years earlier. Roosevelt had been the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 1920, and his speech nominating fellow New Yorker Smith not only marked his political comeback, it was delivered so masterfully that speechwriters still study it today.
There was even room for a little history to be made, like when Lena Springs became the first woman whose name was placed in nomination for vice president by either major party, though the move was more a symbolic gesture than practical politics.
In the end, the slugfest over the top spot on the ballot drew the most attention. When it became apparent neither McAdoo nor Smith could secure the nomination, other names were floated and one by one rejected. In all, Democrats voted for an astonishing 58 candidates. After broiling in the stifling heat of Madison Square Garden for more than two straight weeks, exhausted delegates finally nominated John Davis of West Virginia, chiefly because he hadn’t said or done anything that made anyone mad.
But it was all for naught. Davis was soundly defeated that November by incumbent Republican “Silent Cal” Calvin Coolidge, whose personal popularity coupled with the economic prosperity of the Roaring Twenties proved unbeatable.
A personal favorite story from this landmark convention involves legendary Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken, who typed a report in the press box that began this way: “Everything is uncertain in this convention but one thing: John W. Davis will never be nominated.” Just minutes after filing that dispatch, Davis was indeed picked as nominee. Mencken rolled his cigar in his mouth for a while and then mused, “I wonder if those idiots [in the newsroom] in Baltimore will know enough to strike the negative from that sentence.”
Mencken wouldn’t have that problem in 2020 with the convention on Zoom.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He’s VP of communications at Ivory Tusk Consulting, a South Carolina-based agency. A former broadcast journalist and government communicator, his “Holy Cow! History” column is available at jmarkpowell.com.
