“I belong to no organized party,” the humorist Will Rogers said in 1924. “I’m a Democrat.”
Rogers had just witnessed the longest and by some accounts “wildest” political convention in American history: the 1924 Democratic National Convention, which took 16 days and 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate.
Beginning on June 24, the summer convention was a bleak, sweltering affair for the Democrats. Initially buoyed by optimism over divisions and corruption within incumbent President Calvin Coolidge’s Republican Party, the Democrats quickly became aware that their coalition was even more divided. Dueling factions representing starkly different constituencies, policies and worldviews had come together in New York City’s Madison Square Garden to tear each other apart with no plans for reconciliation or compromise.
The divisions within the party were so profound that fights broke out on the convention floor and across the New York metropolitan area. At one point, 20,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, which backed leading candidate William Gibbs McAdoo, “battered to a shapeless pulp” an effigy of New York Governor Al Smith, the other front-runner, at a demonstration across the Hudson River in New Jersey, wrote historian Robert K. Murray in The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden.
By the final ballot on July 9, delegates had abandoned their first-, second- and 102nd-choice candidates and settled on John W. Davis of West Virginia, a conservative lawyer, congressman and compromise candidate who satisfied almost no one.
After all the chaos of the convention, the Democrats lost badly to Coolidge in the 1924 presidential election. The Republicans’ slogan, “Coolidge or chaos,” resounded across the country, reminding voters of the troubled state of the Democratic Party. Davis won just 12 states—all of the former Confederate states plus Oklahoma—and 29 percent of the popular vote.
Because of its disorganization and ultimate failure, the 1924 DNC has been largely forgotten. But its flaws—as well as the glimmers of hope that squeaked out of Madison Square Garden—offer valuable lessons 100 years later, as a new generation of Democrats prepares to nominate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for re-election in Chicago this August.
A party divided against itself
Ahead of the 1924 convention, the Democratic Party was in the throes of an identity crisis.