A century ago—at precisely 12:45 in the afternoon on June 24, 1924—party chairman Cordell Hull opened the Democratic convention with a bang of his gavel. Little did Hull or any of the 1,098 delegates—virtually all white and overwhelmingly male—grasp that they were about to endure 16 days and 103 ballots of the most raucous, rambunctious, and riotous convention in history.
Riven by a bitter debate over whether to denounce the reborn Ku Klux Klan by name, the convention proved to be a transition point that helped create the modern inclusive, urban-based Democratic Party. It featured the first major speech by Franklin Roosevelt after he was felled by polio and the last convention that William Jennings Bryan (the party’s nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908) ever attended. The setting was apt: The soon-to-be-torn-down, Stanford White–designed incarnation of Madison Square Garden, where even rigorous cleaning and acres of bunting could not completely erase the scent from a prior event: the Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Modern conventions in both parties have descended into heavily scripted informationals with all the spontaneity of an A.I.-written romcom. Reliving the 1924 convention serves as a window into a bygone era of party politics, conveying both the exuberance of an open convention and the dangers of deadlock. In conjuring up the high points of this epic political event, I have relied on historian Robert K. Murray’s sparkling 1976 book, The 103rd Ballot, and contemporary newspaper clips, including the viciously anti-Klan dispatches of H.L. Mencken in the Baltimore Evening Sun.
Protracted conventions were not a novelty for the Democrats. New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot in 1912. The reason was a quirk in Democratic Party rules dating back to the era of Andrew Jackson: It required a two-thirds vote (732 delegates in 1924) rather than a simple majority to anoint a nominee. The two-thirds rule was popular with most factions of the party for it lessened fears of being steamrolled by a sudden rush to judgment by the delegates. It was also not the core problem in 1924: Until the dam broke at the end of the convention, no contender even mustered the support of a majority of the delegates. The reason for the fragmentation: 16 candidates (mostly favorite sons with backing from a single state) were nominated for president before the balloting began.
The Daily News, New York’s leading tabloid, captured the opening-gun mood: “On the eve of the convention, which bids fair to be the most dramatic and spectacular in the history of such political gatherings, everything was in the laps of the gods. Not even the bosses knew what was going to happen.”