Inside the Wigwam

17 Jun 2016 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln, Chicago, GOP, nominating conventions, Politics, Wigwam

Nominating conventions came into being in the 1830s, after Andrew Jackson and his ilk turned party politics into a more egalitarian affair. The elite caucuses that had once chosen presidential candidates gave way to more inclusive mass gatherings where delegates styled themselves as representatives of the people. By the time the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, nominating conventions had become significant political events in the life of the country. Journalists, artists, and photographers documented the appearance and actions of the delegates and the spirit and style of the gatherings.

This particular artist’s drawing shows the meeting of the Republican Party in Chicago in 1860, when the young anti-slavery party nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. The Republicans went to the trouble to build a special hall for the convention, a vast domed wooden structure that they called the Wigwam. (It stood at the corner of Lake and Wacker and was reportedly destroyed by fire in the late 1860s.) Notably, the illustration shows a mainly female audience crowding the galleries to follow the proceedings. (Women would not gain the right to vote until 1920.)

Faced with the likelihood that the federal government would sanction the spread of slavery into the West and strengthen its legal underpinnings everywhere in the US, those participating in the Republican convention believed it to be an event ‘on which the most momentous results are depending.’ ‘No body of men of equal number,’ the convention chair proclaimed, ‘was ever clothed with greater responsibility than those now within the hearing of my voice.’

The Republicans, though only a northern regional party, were intent on dislodging the dominant Democratic Party, which they did that November, against all odds.

Image from this source.

The Un-Democratic Party

25 Feb 2016 By Susan Barsy in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: 2016 election, anti-party feeling, Bernie Sanders, delegates, Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, nominating conventions, political parties, Politics 2 Comments

It’s fascinating that, though Bernie Sanders has won one primary election and only narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in two others, Democratic party rules give him next-to-no chance of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. These circumstances justified the headline of Monday’s lead article in the New York Times: ‘Delegate Count Leaving Sanders With Steep Climb.’ Continue reading →

When Nominating a President United a Party

31 Jul 2015 By Susan Barsy in The Party System Tags: 1900s, 1904 election, American History, nominating conventions, presidential candidates, Theodore Roosevelt, US politics, US presidents 2 Comments

This photograph provides a measure of how much our style of choosing presidents has changed. In 1904, when this picture was taken, there was no doubt whatsoever of the power of political parties to select their presidential nominees. In the century since, both parties have lost that control.

Admittedly, the star of this picture, Theodore Roosevelt (in the white vest), was immensely popular, and the incumbent. His rise had been dependent, however, on his skill in gaining support of the major powers in his party–the political bosses who controlled large blocks of delegates, and the senior officeholders whom the bosses supported. A presidential hopeful had to take into account established figures and personally win them over. The months leading up to a convention were a period of intense jockeying, as hopefuls and their friends made the rounds, trying to gain traction within the organization. No way could a candidate hope to become president without the party establishment, because the power to select a nominee really lay, not with voters, but with their delegates.

Ultimately, delegates to the conventions chose the nominee. They could change their votes during the balloting if they pleased, and such changes were often necessary. This process forced the people who were most invested in a political party to come to an agreement about competing nominees and decide which of them best served the party’s interests. In the process of rejecting candidates, the party also closed off undesirable ideological directions it might have taken. (Both the Democratic and Republican parties curtailed the independence of delegates after the tumult of the 1960s, gutting the conventions of their essential purpose and drama.)

Young Roosevelt understood that his individual destiny was interdependent with that of the GOP. Early on, he labored to prove his loyalty to the Republican Party, despite his Progressive leanings and reputation for being an impetuous renegade. He recognized that, whatever his personal talents (which proved to be considerable), he needed the vast organizing structure of the party to propel him upward. After angling for years to get the party where he wanted it, the party finally acquiesced.

The ritualistic mating game they had played was epitomized in the nominating committee’s formal call on Roosevelt after the convention. They visited Roosevelt at his home on Long Island, Sagamore Hill, where he personally received them and demurely accepted their invitation to be the party nominee. The character of the event was not unlike an at-home wedding.

The accommodation that he and his fellow Republicans achieved gave Roosevelt the personal glory he craved, while benefiting the party, which, by organizing itself around Roosevelt, soared to new levels of popularity. In the general election that pitted him against Democrat Alton B. Parker, Roosevelt won every state in the North and the West, including Missouri, which hadn’t gone Republican since the 1860s. His margin of victory was 2.5 million popular votes, the largest in American history.

Roosevelt forgot what he knew about interdependence later in life. Having declared that he would never again run for the presidency, he yielded his place to William B. Taft, who retained the White House for the Republicans in 1908. In 1912, Roosevelt made a disastrous decision to run against his party, splitting it and effectively giving the presidency to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats. It was that party’s first presidential victory since before the Civil War. Roosevelt’s go-it-alone mentality and determination to defy the stolid power of the parties betokened the ill-conceived and divisive presidential bids so prevalent now.

Image: from this source.

Woodrow Wilson Casts His Ballot

26 Oct 2012 By Susan Barsy in Reading old photographs Tags: 1910s, 1912 election, Democrats, James Beauchamp Clark, nominating conventions, photography, political customs, President Obama, Progressive Era, US presidents, Woodrow Wilson 1 Comment

I’d been looking for an excuse to write about Woodrow Wilson when Monday’s presidential debate, with its exchange over “horses and bayonets” and the WWI navy, came along especially to encourage me.

An interesting cache of photographs put online by the Woodrow Wilson Library includes this one of Wilson casting his ballot in the presidential election of 1912. Wilson, then governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate for president, won the election in a landslide.

The photograph, with its mesh ballot receptacle, handwritten records, and air of social intimacy, casts doubt on some time-honored political verities. How free and fair were the elections conducted with this “technology”? Did our elective process, so often derided as “broken,” really work better in an earlier day?

In 1912, most black Americans were barred or discouraged from voting. Community norms and party interests inflected how election rules were applied. Until the ‘Australian’ ballot was universally adopted, casting a vote was a social act, not granted any privacy. And party loyalty was the grease that kept the machinery running: for much of the nineteenth century, “voting” typically meant nothing more than delivering to the poll a ballot that your party had already completed for you.

Wilson’s ascent coincided with a move toward a more participatory democracy. In 1912, US senators were still elected, not by the populace, but by the state legislatures. A Constitutional amendment changing that would be ratified the next year. The nominating conventions of 1912 were historic, because they were the first to include delegates chosen, not by party operatives, but by popular votes cast in the nation’s first presidential primaries.

* * *

A scholar-statesman not unlike Barack Obama, Wilson, a noted professor of political science and former president of Princeton University, spent just two years as New Jersey’s chief executive before catapulting to the presidency.

His path to the White House was more than a little unlikely. The 1912 election pitted him against three other candidates: the Socialist Eugene Debs, incumbent President William Taft, and former president Theodore Roosevelt, the latter two representing the Conservative and Progressive wings of the Republican Party, respectively. Only deep divisions within the Republican Party enabled Wilson, the first Southerner to be elected to the White House since Zachary Taylor, to succeed. Wilson had been a dark horse in the fight for his party’s nomination, triumphing over the favorite, James Beauchamp Clark, a popular House Speaker, in the eleventh hour.

Wilson’s agenda was progressive and sophisticated, but the fractious political environment prevented him from realizing many of his cherished visions, dealing him some notable humiliations instead. In 1913, John McCutcheon drew this cartoon drubbing Wilson’s first-year performance, yet in the succeeding years Wilson presided over many liberal reforms (e.g. women’s suffrage) and fiscal innovations (e.g. the income tax) that shape our political landscape today. While Wilson’s approach to the Great War was adroit, he suffered a rebuke heard round the world when a Republican-controlled Senate jettisoned US participation in the new League of Nations and refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. (Unbelievably, Wilson was the first US president to make an official trip abroad when he traveled to Europe to negotiate the Treaty in 1919.)

Image: Wilson voting in New Jersey, from this source.

Stephen Colbert on the recent attacks against the 17th Amendment here.

That Was Some Speechifying

10 Sep 2012 By Susan Barsy in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: 2012 election, Democrats, nominating conventions, oratory, political customs, political engagement, political parties, TV stills 2 Comments

The conventions are over, leaving me satisfied that our democratic traditions are alive and kicking. The parties have some liabilities—the Republicans’ more evident than the Democrats’—but I found it hard not to get excited about the strenuous, face-to-face character of the political action and oratory.

Blatant lies marred Paul Ryan’s otherwise impressive speech, leaving Ann Romney to claim the palm as the Republicans’ best speaker. She was not just interesting and animated; she did a masterful job of recasting her husband’s character, inadvertently proving that she’s a much better stump-speaker than he.

The Democrats not only had better hats and sexier women (let’s admit it: we all notice); their speakers were more thrilling, and their delegates more engaged and visually interesting. Democratic delegates were a real force in the proceedings, unlike their Republican counterparts, who, when they bothered to fill their seats, spent their time texting or listening warily with folded arms. I loved the Democratic delegates’ orchestrated use of placards.

As for the Democratic speakers, they offered resounding proof of the health of their party. San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, First Lady Michelle Obama, and former presidential nominee John Kerry were all standouts, topped only by Bill Clinton, whose ability at once to enlighten and entertain is far superior to anybody’s.

Besides the political import of the convention, it was a treat to hear so many fine modern speeches that were by turns colloquial, fiery, affecting, and funny. Though Democrats still have much work to do ideologically, it was good to see them working successfully as a body to reassert the basic values of fairness and equal opportunity.