Why do they usually avoid holding conventions in New York?
This summer marks a sea change in the traditions of American party politics. For the first time, the Democratic National Convention will be held in Boston, and the Republican National Convention will be held in that great Babylon, that hole of sin and abomination, New York City.
Actually, the Republicans have never held a convention in Boston, either, which is rather surprising when one considers that right up to the Great Depression, Massachusetts was a rock-ribbed Republican stronghold. The reasons for this were probably as much logistical as well as political. The city that has hosted far-and-away the most major-party conventions is Chicago, with Philadelphia a distant second. This is not so surprising, since both cities were major rail hubs—and pretty much the only two major metropolises to burden its citizens with competitive political machines in both parties.
Boston’s popularity no doubt has also suffered from the fact that for most of American history, it has been the city most readily associated with censorship, priggishness, and puritanism—whether of the Yankee or the Irish variety. Not quite the best reputation for attracting a horde of virile, red-blooded, cigar-chomping, bourbon-swilling delegates, hellbent on spontaneous demonstrations, credentials fights, hurling their straw hats in the air, and other, less delicate amusements.
The Republicans’ reluctance to brave the Great White Way is also understandable. New York, even on its second consecutive Republican mayor, is seen as a Democratic town, and always has been. Only five of the city’s seventeen newspapers endorsed Abraham Lincoln, and Gotham gave his Democratic opponents large majorities. This is the town where Walter Mondale beat Ronald Reagan by almost half-a-million votes; where Dukakis crushed Bush, Adlai Stevenson stomped Ike (twice), and where McGovern beat Nixon. The last time New York City voted for a Republican presidential candidate was for Calvin Coolidge—and even then, the city only gave Silent Cal a plurality.
Yet the fact is that Democrats, too, have historically been reluctant to come to New York. Up until 1976, there had only been two Democratic conventions in the city and there were none between that year and 1924, a period when New York was generally considered to be the most exciting, racy, downright sinful town in America. The reason for this trepidation was that New York was not merely a Democratic town; it was Tammany’s town.
Few American alive today can have any good idea of the level of bile, of the gnashing of teeth and the shaking of fists, that the very name of Tammany Hall could raise once upon a time in America. The old Tammany Tiger was first belled by Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s, and finished off by a coalition of Democratic reformers that included Eleanor Roosevelt and Ed Koch in the early 1960s, but for many decades before that it was considered the very avatar of corrupt, boss-dominated machine politics. Loathing for Tammany went beyond the merely political; the machine seemed to epitomize all that Americans have traditionally feared and reviled in cities. Tammany was ethnic, dirty, cunning, the very embodiment of the big-city shakedown artist taking in the country bumpkin, and denunciations of it frequently bordered on the racist and bigoted.
The machine was supposedly a vital part of the Democratic party, valued for its organizing and money-raising abilities. Yet whenever the national party set foot on its turf, Democrats seemed to find themselves in a political house of mirrors, where they had trouble even recognizing themselves.
The first effort to beard the Tiger in its den came in 1868, when the Democratic convention was actually held in the old Tammany Wigwam on Fourteenth Street, in downtown Manhattan (Tammany was named for a quasi-mythical Indian chief, Tammamend, so everything about it was Indian related—its clubhouse the “wigwam,” its wardheelers “braves,” its leaders “sachems,” ad nauseam.) William Marcy Tweed himself, the legendary Ur-“Boss” of machine politics was on hand, along with Horatio Seymour, the convention chairman, and the Tammany pick to be the nominee.
Seymour was having none of it. A two-time governor of New York, he was a savvy enough politician to know he would have virtually no chance, and had already refused to be nominated on four separate public occasions. The Democracy had been shattered by the Civil War, and many of its Southern constituents were still unable to vote. The “unreconstructed” states of Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas were not allowed to cast any electoral votes at all. And meanwhile, heading the Republican ticket, was the popular hero of the war, Ulysses S. Grant.
But events soon spun out of Seymour’s hands. The 1868 convention went 22 ballots, while delegates—described by one city paper as “a rough lot—hirsute, porky creatures”—paraded through the streets with brass bands and banners, including one that read, “The people demand payment of the bonds in greenbacks and equal taxation. One currency for all. Pendleton the people’s nominee.” As historian Herbert Eaton noted, “Brevity was considered neither the soul of wit nor the source of political advantage.”
In the end, Governor Seymour’s friends physically wrestled him off the platform and hustled him away in a carriage, lest he turn the convention down again. He was led away in tears, moaning to a friend, “Pity me, Harvey, pity me!”—a reaction which is unlikely to be emulated by either George W. Bush or John Kerry this summer. It was a sentiment that would reflect his effort. Seymour’s one stump speech was characterized as “more insipid with each repetition,” and in the end he carried only eight states.
The 1924 convention was an even greater debacle, a record 15-day, 103-ballot exercise in racism, division, and utter futility which effectively destroyed the old, pre-New Deal Democratic party. The balloting for president did not even get under way until the seventh day of the convention, delayed by a bitter floor fight over a platform plank that explicitly condemned the Ku Klux Klan, then a major political force in the South and Midwest, and as virulently anti-Catholic as it was anti-black. The plank to condemn the Klan finally failed, in the closest vote ever recorded at a convention, 543 3/20 to 542 7/20—something that was not surprising considering that an estimated 343 delegates were active Klansmen. (Just which delegate was able to divide himself into twentieths remains unclear.)
The convention thereupon drifted into an endless battle between Tammany darling Governor Al Smith, the quintessential New Yorker, and Georgia-born William McAdoo, who had served as secretary of the treasury under Wilson, and would later be a senator from California. Ironically, there was little difference between the politics of the two men. Both were steadfast progressives. Although Smith was a loyal Tammany man he ran a clean, reformist administration in Albany, and had begun to build the social welfare state that would ultimately undermine his own organization. McAdoo was an urbane polymath, a lawyer and railroad executive who had lived in New York for decades, oversaw the building of the “tube” trains under the Hudson River, and supported equal pay for equal work for women.
But this fight was more emotional than intellectual, as politics so often is. Smith represented everything that was urban and ethnic. He was a Catholic who spoke with a heavy New York accent, denounced Prohibition, and despised the Klan. McAdoo represented the other half of the Northern-urban—Southern-rural alliance that had made up the uneasy Democratic coalition for so long. He was no great admirer of Prohibition or the Klan, but felt he could not afford to shun either and still have a hope of winning. Their fight was over nothing less than which half would lead the party in the future—over what America itself would be, predominantly urban and multicultural, or pastoral and Anglo-Saxon.
With such stakes at risk, the usual, facile convention compromise of the time could not be made, and the party was deadlocked. One observer wrote that “Time disappears and eternity steals in as this interminable convention keeps on balloting.” It went on for so long that delegations began to run out of money. The Massachusetts chairman supposedly told his troops, “Gentlemen, we are faced with a choice—either we have to move to a more modest hotel or to a more liberal candidate.”
Perhaps it was the curse of Stanford White’s old Madison Square Garden, then on 23rd Street and far and away the loveliest of the five different Madison Square Gardens that would move up and down, rising and falling all over Manhattan through the decades. White had been shot to death on the roof garden of his own creation, in one of the most famous murders in New York history, and the odor of the foul deed still seemed to linger over the hall. Actually, the odor was leftover from the annual visit of the circus, and it didn’t help matters that, despite the summer heat, some gay soul had covered over the Garden’s air vents with bunting and other decorations.
Nevertheless, the 1924 convention provided probably the best political theatre in the whole, bloated history of our convention pageants. History seemed to hang visibly in the balance. The whole donnybrook was the first convention to be broadcast nationwide, over radio, and listeners could hear the 15,000 loyal Tammany braves who packed the galleries scream invective down at McAdoo’s delegates. They screamed back—and flooded the Garden and convention hotels with anti-Catholic literature. William Jennings Bryan made his last convention appearance to plead, ineffectually, for unity and McAdoo. Most dramatically of all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, three years removed from his polio attack, made his way painstakingly across the platform on crutches, to dub Smith “the Happy Warrior.” The past and the future of the party, and of America, all moving duly across the stage, as if in some fantastic, non-secular passion play.
By the time it was over almost nobody cared that the Democrats had compromised on a sure loser, the brilliant Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis, who would gain his greatest fame arguing the losing side in Brown v. Board of Education—and whose politics were probably more conservative than those of nearly anyone on either McAdoo’s or Smith’s side. To compensate for this—and the fact that Davis might be seen as too urban—the Democrats nominated Bryan’s brother Charles, then the obscure governor of Nebraska.
“A ticket that not even a brother could support. No, not even William Jennings Bryan can make it progressive, and how will he explain the impossible biology?” mused New York congressman Fiorello La Guardia, and the Little Flower was as astute as ever. In November, Davis took less than 29 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race, the worst Democratic result since the Civil War—and lost the city to Coolidge.
As if to symbolize the fall of the Democratic House of Usher, White’s Garden was torn down immediately after the convention finally ended. It all proved to be a necessary levelling, though, as Al Smith was finally nominated in 1928, and Roosevelt went on to lead the party to its decades-long ascendancy. Nonetheless, the Democrats never came back to New York, at least not until Tammany was long dead and buried, and a calmer, more controllable era of convention politics prevailed.
Maybe this is the real reason why it has taken the GOP so long to hold a convention of its own in New York. If that’s what the city did to Democrats, imagine what it would do to Republicans.