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Those TV
yappers are in a tizzy about the upcoming Democratic
convention. They keep jibber-jabbering about how neither
Clinton nor Obama will have enough delegates to win the
presidential nomination and they’ll need to woo the
high-powered superdelegates. They keep yakking about a
deadlocked convention! Or, better yet, a brokered
convention!
These
young whippersnappers don’t know doodley about a
deadlocked convention. Most of them weren’t even born the
last time a convention fight went beyond the first ballot,
which was in 1952.
Back in my
day, Democrats had real conventions with real nomination
fights that went on for dozens of ballots. It took 46
ballots to nominate Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and 44 ballots
to nominate James Cox in 1920. Jeez, it took four ballots
to nominate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932—and he was FDR,
for crying out loud!
In those
days, people weren’t in such a damn hurry. They liked to
vote for their state’s “favorite son” candidate for a few
ballots just to show some local pride. In 1932, FDR’s
campaign manager asked Sam Rayburn, who was the campaign
manager for John Nance Garner of Texas, if he could get
the Texas delegation to vote for FDR after the first
ballot.
“Hell,
no,” Rayburn said, “we’ve got a lot of people up here
who’ve never been to a convention before, and they’ve got
to vote for Garner a few times.”
But you
didn’t come all the way out here to the old folks’ home to
hear me beat my gums about the good old days. You want to
hear about the greatest deadlocked convention of them all,
don’t you? That would be 1924, when the battle went on for
103 ballots and even governors were getting into
fistfights on the convention floor.
Give me a
minute to put my teeth in and I’ll tell you all about it.
It was the
Roaring Twenties, the days of hot jazz and bathtub gin,
and the Democrats met in
Madison Square Garden,
which was packed to the rafters with
New York characters, described in The Washington Post as “Tammany
shouters, Yiddish chanters, vaudeville performers, Sagwa
Indians, hula dancers, street cleaners, firemen,
policemen, movie actors and actresses, bootleggers....”
Plus 1,098 delegates and 15 presidential candidates.
To win, a
candidate needed the votes of two-thirds of the delegates
and, as the convention opened on June 24, nobody was even
close. But the obvious front-runners were Al Smith, the
governor of New York, and William McAdoo, a California
lawyer who had been Woodrow Wilson’s Treasury secretary
and was
Wilson’s
son-in-law.
Smith and
McAdoo represented the two sides of America’s cultural
divide—what today’s TV yappers would call the red states
and blue states. Smith’s backers tended to be Northern,
urban, Catholic and “wet,” meaning anti-Prohibition.
McAdoo’s supporters tended to be Southern or Western,
rural, Protestant and dry.
Just to
make things more interesting, a lot of McAdoo’s rooters
were members of the Ku Klux Klan, which was then at the
height of its power. The Klan hated Catholics and Smith
was a Catholic. (Needless to say, there were exactly zero
black delegates.)
It wasn’t
going to be easy uniting these factions, but the party
bosses tried. They managed to finesse the Prohibition
issue with a compromise that called for the enforcement of
all laws but avoided mentioning the hated law against
hooch. They tried to finesse the Klan issue in the same
way, writing a platform that denounced violent secret
societies but neglected to actually mention the Klan.
That
didn’t work. The anti-Klan folks balked, demanding a
resolution that named the Klan. This sparked an anti-Klan
demonstration on the floor that led to fistfights as pro-
and anti-Klan delegates fought for possession of various
state banners. Believe it or not, the governors of
Kentucky and Colorado got into fistfights trying to keep
their state banners out of the hands of anti-Klan
delegates.
Governors
throwing punches—now, that’s the kind of convention high
jinks you just don’t see anymore!
Ultimately, the anti-Klan resolution that didn’t mention
the Klan beat the anti-Klan resolution that did mention
the Klan by exactly one vote.
And then
this seething, angry crowd settled down to try to pick a
presidential candidate. First came 15 windy nominating
speeches, followed by 15 windy seconding speeches. This
torrent of oratory produced only two words that anybody
still remembers: FDR calling Smith the “happy warrior.”
When FDR
ended his speech, the crowd went nuts. Smith’s Tammany
machine had packed the galleries with thousands of hacks
armed with drums, tubas, trumpets and a bunch of
ear-piercing electric fire sirens that were so loud that
people scooted out of the hall with their fingers in their
ears.
“It
sounded,” The Post reported, “like 10,000 voodoo doctors
in a tropical jungle beating 10,000 tom-toms made of
resonant washtubs.”
The hacks
in the galleries weren’t so friendly to McAdoo. Anytime a
speaker uttered his name, the hacks chanted, “Oil! Oil!”—a
snide reference to the fact that McAdoo had received two
mysterious payments from an oil baron implicated in the
Teapot Dome scandal. It was as if Obama delegates greeted
any mention of Hillary by hollering, “Whitewater!
Whitewater!”
Anyway,
after all this folderol, they finally called the roll for
the first ballot and, needless to say, nobody got the 732
votes needed to win. McAdoo led with 431, followed by
Smith with 241, and 13 other guys, mostly favorite sons
with delusions of grandeur, each with fewer than 60 votes.
What
happens when you get no winner? Those TV yappers probably
don’t know but the answer’s simple: you vote again. That
first day, which was June 30, they took 15 roll-call votes
and still nobody was anywhere near victory. The next day,
they came back and took 15 more roll-call votes and still
nobody won.
This was
the first convention broadcast on radio, and all over
America people listened to the endless roll calls, each of
them beginning with an Alabama delegate drawling,
“Al-a-ba-ma casts twen-ty fo-ah votes fo-ah Os-cah Dub-ya
Unnn-der-wood!” Soon, everybody in America was mimicking
that drawl, saying, “Os-cah Dub-ya Unnn-der-wood!”
The voting
was weird, even for Democrats: on the 20th ballot, the
Missouri delegation switched all 36 votes from McAdoo to
John W. Davis, the favorite son from West Virginia, which
got everybody all excited, but on the 39th ballot, they
all switched back to McAdoo.
On
Wednesday, the third day of voting, William Jennings Bryan
asked the chairman for permission to explain his vote for
McAdoo. Bryan was the grand old man of the Democratic
Party, which had nominated him for president three times.
He was the “Great Commoner” who’d delivered the legendary
“Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 convention. But when he
started orating for McAdoo, he was drowned out by angry
boos from the gallery and chants of “Oil! Oil!”
“His
voice, which had competed in the past with foghorns and
tornadoes, sounded like the hum of a gnat,” The Post
reported. “For the first time, Bill Bryan’s larynx had met
its master.”
Listening
on the radio, Americans were shocked to hear the rabble of
evil New York shouting down a good Christian gentleman
like
Bryan.
On and on
the voting went—50 ballots, 60 ballots, 70 ballots. The
convention was supposed to be over but it still hadn’t
nominated a candidate, so it went into extra innings, like
a tied baseball game. Some delegates gave up and left,
others wired home for more money. The McAdoo people
complained that rural delegates couldn’t afford
New York
prices and urged the party to pay their hotel bills, which
caused the Smith people to accuse the McAdoo people of
trying to bribe the delegates by paying their hotel bills.
“This
convention,” wrote H.L. Mencken, the most famous reporter
of the age, is “almost as vain and idiotic as a golf
tournament or a disarmament conference.”
But still
it continued, day after day—80 ballots, 90 ballots, 100
ballots. Finally, both Smith and McAdoo gave up and
released their delegates and on July 9, after 16 days and
103 ballots, the Democrats nominated John W. Davis of West
Virginia for president.
The band
played “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” and the delegates limped
home, weary and bleary, their self-loathing exceeded only
by their loathing of the other Democrats.
In the
November election,
Davis was creamed by Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, a
laid-back dude who didn’t let the duties of his office
interfere with his afternoon nap.
What?
Speak up, young fella, I don’t hear too good. Those
Tammany fire sirens ruined my ears. Fun? You wanna know if
the 1924 convention was fun? Well, it was fun for the
first 20 or 30 ballots, but after 50 or 60 it got a tad
tedious, and by the 80th or 90th even the driest of the
dry delegates longed to take a swan dive into a bottle of
bootleg bourbon.
People
said the 1924 convention was so ugly it would kill the
Democratic Party. It didn’t, but it did kill the romance
of the deadlocked convention. After 1924, Democrats hated
deadlocks even more than they hated rival Democrats.
At the
1932 convention, the party leaders started to panic after
three ballots and McAdoo got up and urged the convention
to avoid “another disastrous contest like that of 1924.”
FDR’s people offered the vice presidency to anybody who
controlled enough votes to break the deadlock. John Nance
Garner took the deal, delivered the Texas delegation and
ended up vice president, a job he later reportedly
described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.”
The last
time a convention went more than one ballot was 1952, when
the Democrats took three ballots to nominate Adlai
Stevenson, who was trounced by Dwight Eisenhower. These
days both parties confine their brawling to the primaries,
and by the time the convention rolls around, they’re
cooing and kissing like newlyweds. Now, conventions are
just long infomercials for the candidates. They’re so dull
they make you pine for a deadlock.
Maybe
that’s why the TV yappers are jabbering about a deadlocked
Democratic convention. If Clinton wins Texas and Ohio,
they say, then neither she nor Obama may have enough
delegates to win, so the nomination will be decided by the
796 superdelegates, the people we used to call the party
bosses.
Well, I
think they’re full of baloney, but I hope they’re right. A
little deadlock livens things up, and the prospect of
floor fights, fistfights and backroom wheeling and dealing
quickens the blood.
Two
ballots, five ballots, 10 ballots—that would give an old
geezer a reason to go on living. But, please, not 103
ballots. Take it from me, young fella, that’s a little too
much of a good thing. |
