Thanks to an earnest Boston journalist, the short span when we essentially had one political party is called “The Era of Good Feelings.’’ It ran from 1816-1825. And it overlapped with James Monroe’s presidency; Benjamin Russell coined the phrase when Monroe did a goodwill tour of the city. No wonder the Virginian felt good — he was our last president to run virtually unopposed. The Federalist party had crashed, leaving only Monroe’s Democratic-Republicans. Great, since he thought parties were “the curse of the country.’’ Thomas Jefferson concurred: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.’’
I got those flammable quotes from “National Party Conventions: 1831-2008’’ (CQ, 2008), which has prepped me well for this month’s Republican and Democratic events. The book is loaded with essays, timelines, and highlights. I learned that Chicago has hosted the most conventions (25) because of its central location. And that the first convention was held by the Anti-Masonic party in 1831. That party soon crashed too, but the convention structure survived because as the popular vote totals grew — up threefold between 1824 and 1828 — each party needed a bigger gathering to state its case. The Democrats held their first in 1832, the Republicans in 1856.
Conventions were motley, feisty, and unprecedented; they aren’t in the Constitution, since the founding fathers didn’t foresee political parties. It’s amazing how then echoes now: Bernie supporters would feel déjà vu in 1839 when the Democrats blasted the Whigs for backing a national bank, an institution “of deadly hostility to the best interests of the country.’’ A Black Lives Matter sign would make sense in 1876, as Frederick Douglass decried Republican conventioneers for freeing the slaves without “providing means for their economic or physical security.’’ And I marvel at the Republican platform of 1928; it wanted to outlaw war.
Platforms are seldom that bold. Indeed, historian Michael F. Holt calls the Republican economic plank of 1876 “weasel-worded.’’ I so enjoyed his “By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876’’ (University Press of Kansas, 2008), partly because of punchy phrasing like that, partly because it sure offers parallels to 2016: a New York plutocrat (Samuel Tilden) rose to the top of his party, and one of the hot issues was immigration.
The Republican convention, held in Cincinnati, finally offered up native son/dark horse Rutherford B. Hayes — in an age of rampant federal fraud, voters liked that he was a Washington outsider — who won by one electoral vote, thanks in part to the brand new state of Colorado.
Charles Peters, the legendary Washington Monthly editor, next gives us his buoyant “Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing ‘We Want Willkie’ Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World’’ (PublicAffairs, 2005). Peters’s thesis is that because interventionist Willkie beat out isolationists like Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey (helped by the fact that France fell just weeks before the convention) Roosevelt could move forward with his lend-lease plan to help supply British war efforts against Hitler and still win the election — then, five years later, the war.
What a great story: Willkie, an earthy Hoosier who became a Manhattan utilities exec, was at zero percent in the polls three months before the convention. But he masterfully charmed the press; he had an affair with Irita Van Doren, book review editor of the Herald Tribune, who co-wrote his speeches and introduced him to American literati; and NBC tripled its originally scheduled convention coverage. Willkie won on the sixth ballot, one of the biggest upsets in US political history.
A feminist like me has trouble with Norman Mailer, that brilliant bad boy. But you can’t cover convention books without citing his wildly alive 1968 classic, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968’’ (Random House, 2016). With “the country roaring like a bull in its wounds’’ after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, he goes to the “sultan’s strip’’ of Miami Beach for the Republican convention. There, he’s alternately moody and prophetic, quickly grasping that Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan can’t compete with Richard Nixon, who’d gone from resembling “an undertaker’s assistant to looking like an old con seriously determined to look respectable.’’
Then to Chicago, where the stockyards offer a fine metaphor for political blood sport; before the week’s over, some 600 protesters would be arrested, including a drunken Mailer. This was our last convention where the nominee (Hubert Humphrey) didn’t run in the primaries; Pennsylvania clinched it for him, even though Eugene McCarthy got 90 percent of the primary vote. It reminds you that conventions can be unconventional. To quote a recent Chicago Tribune headline: “The July Surprise: Could Republicans Really Dump Trump in Cleveland?’’ Whatever happens, I predict few good feelings.
Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton. She can be reached at katharine.whittemore@comcast.net.
