A convention when conventions really meant something

The Democratic National Convention begins Monday. It's a big deal, supposedly, even though its central purpose is long gone. Starting in 1831, and for 125 years, votes were taken, alliances made, deadlocks broken.

The last contested convention was the Republican Convention in 1964. In 1972, voters assumed the task, in primaries. Now conventions are publicity extravaganzas — four-day infomercials — promoting what has already been decided.

What were they like previously? I just re-read "Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic Convention, the Emergence of FDR — and How America Was Changed Forever" by Steve Neal, a political columnist at the Sun-Times who died in 2004. He delighted in this stuff, had deep knowledge and wide connections. This was his last book, and it's a gripping read even if you know how it ends.

In the summer of 1932, the nation was mired in the Great Depression. Chicago was paying its teachers in scrip. Still, politics then resembled politics now.

"It's pretty hard to exaggerate the bitterness here," a columnist wrote. "Names are called, accusations made, treachery charged, and discreditable stories spread."

Herbert Hoover was the aloof Republican president, refusing to aid his suffering nation. He seemed a sitting duck, and the chance to defeat him was up for grabs.

Neal focuses on FDR, but there are a half dozen others who could have also become the nominee: cigar-chewing, derby-hatted Alfred E. Smith, the "Happy Warrior" who had lost in 1924 and 1928; Huey Long, the "Kingfish" who brazenly took 10% of the salaries of all public employees in Louisiana, because he could; John Nance Garner, aka "Cactus Jack;" Albert Ritchie, Maryland's four-term governor and former Secretary of War Newton Baker, seen as the man who would swoop in if FDR stumbled.

And stumble Roosevelt did, especially in trying to eliminate the "two-third rule" that prevented him, with a simple majority of delegates, from cakewalking into the nomination on the first ballot.

"If FDR is nominated, it will certainly prove there is no limit to the amount of fumbling one can do and still win a game," future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter wrote.

Giants roamed the city. Comedian Will Rogers covered the convention, as did novelist John Dos Passos. H.L. Mencken and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. went into a Loop speakeasy where the Bard of Baltimore took objection to the crooner.

"Finally, Mencken said to the young lady behind the bar, 'I'd like to shoot that son of a bitch,'" Lodge, a future diplomat and senator, recalled. "'The young lady did not bat an eye ... She reached under the counter, pulled out a Thompson submachine gun, laid it on the counter, and with a condescending fluttering of her eyelids said, indifferently, 'Go ahead.'"

Earl B. Dickerson, a Black University of Chicago-trained lawyer, appeared before the all-white Resolutions Committee to press for a civil rights plank. "He asked his party to take a firm stand 'against discrimination by reason of race, creed or color as being outdated, barbarous and un-American,'" Neal wrote. It didn't work but reminds us how far we had to come to see a woman of color run for president.

Just as anti-abortion laws of today are an attempt of a fanatical religious minority to impose their practices on a majority that doesn't want them, prohibition of alcohol was a similar disaster designed to impose religious scruples through rule of law. FDR was a reluctant "wet."

The Chicago mayor was Anton Cermak — he had 10,000 tickets of his own printed up, and used the police to determine who got in. He also controlled the 88 votes of the Illinois and Indiana delegations, gobbling a jar of homemade pickled lamb tongues while plotting against FDR. "I am controlling things all the way down the line," Cermak said.

As now, the stakes in 1932 were very high.

"Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major American parties stood out in such striking contrast as they do today," Roosevelt said in his acceptance speech.

Given all Roosevelt would do, first to overcome the Great Depression and then to defeat Hitler, you have to wonder if any of the other candidates could have done the same. Steve Neal certainly didn't think so.

"If the Democratic Party had nominated another candidate at Chicago in 1932, it is highly unlikely that Newton Baker or Albert Ritchie would have had similar success."

Now the candidates are already chosen; the question is whether the convention will help or hurt them.