Conventional Wisdom

After the seventy-third ballot had been called, to no effect, at the Democratic National Convention on July 5, 1924, in the old Madison Square Garden, a delegate from Oklahoma named A. H. Ferguson rose with an idea for breaking the deadlock. According to the Times, Ferguson thought that “the whole trouble was that the convention was being held in New York, a wicked city.” He proposed packing up and moving the gathering elsewhere. There was some sympathy for that plan among delegates who found New York expensive, if not wicked, and were struggling to pay their hotel bills as the Convention stretched into a second week. But Ferguson’s suggested alternative, Kansas City, was greeted with derision and shouted proposals of Washington or Indianapolis—or Cleveland, where the Republicans had met earlier that summer. This was indicative of the Democrats’ larger problem, the Times reported: “Everybody was against somebody or some place, but not enough people were for anybody or any place.”