It was a nation at war with itself when party delegates gathered in Chicago to choose a nominee for president. Outside in the downtown streets, well-planned but raucous demonstrations erupted as citizens demanded a voice in the process.
Inside the crowded convention hall, tensions were equally high as the ideologically split delegates wrestled over their choices before picking the party’s candidate to lead the country through that vicious and unpopular war.
The last national political convention in Chicago in 1968?
Nope.
Actually, it was the first. In 1860, Republican delegates huddled in a new 10,000-seat meeting place known as the Wigwam at Lake Street and Wacker Drive and selected a failed U.S. Senate candidate named Abraham Lincoln to bear the GOP banner into the Civil War.
Although New York Sen. William Seward had been thought to be the front-runner, Illinoisans used their home-court advantage to stampede delegates into choosing Lincoln on the second ballot. The rest, of course, is history.
In the next 108 years, Chicago established its place as the most frequent political convention site of any city.
As the Democratic National Committee prepares officially to select Chicago as the site of its 1996 national convention, much has been made of its riotous gathering here in 1968, which reduced the city to a microcosm of the national mood of unrest spawned by the Vietnam War.
Both major political parties have shunned Chicago for the last 26 years, primarily because of bad memories from that episode. The convention tore apart the Democratic Party and helped elect Republican Richard Nixon president.
“The highly charged atmosphere inside the convention and the violence outside on the streets made for great television drama,” said Chicago Ald. Edward Burke (14th). “The images from that convention are etched in many people’s minds.”
But Chicago has hosted 25 major national political conventions, starting with the Wigwam gathering in 1860. Several of them were at least as controversial as 1968-and probably more history-making, although they never achieved such lasting notoriety through TV and film.
Playing host to two national parties in 1884, 1912, 1932, 1944 and 1952, Chicago, with its central location, remains the convention champ. Baltimore, with 10 conventions, and Philadelphia, with seven, aren’t even close.
Chicago history buffs know the city’s appellation as “The Windy City” comes not from the breezes off Lake Michigan but rather was a mocking monicker slapped on the city by a New York journalist describing the blustery bursts coming from Chicago’s politicians.
The Wigwam, the Coliseum, the International Amphitheatre, Chicago Stadium-all have been sites of political conventions in Chicago. But politics is a citywide sport here, and some major choices have been made outside the convention confines.
When the Republican convention delegates met in June 1920, Warren G. Harding was not picked in the convention hall but rather was plucked from political obscurity by a group of powerful insiders meeting in a now-legendary “smoke-filled room” in the Blackstone Hotel.
The longest run in U.S. presidential history began in Chicago in 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated by the Democrats to lead the country out of the Great Depression. FDR’s nomination marked the first time a political convention was held at the Stadium.
Eight years later, and back in Chicago, Roosevelt had decided to stick with a tradition established by George Washington and eschew an unprecedented third presidential term.
But Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly would have none of that. Behind the scenes, Kelly plotted to reject Roosevelt’s withdrawal.
“I am happy to have been partly responsible for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s precedent-smashing third term,” Kelly wrote in his memoirs in 1947. “I was the first to issue a `draft Roosevelt’ statement. I believe I was the first to tell him to his face this it was his `duty’ to run again.”
But not without a little help from his friends, Kelly confessed.
Dipping into Chicago’s hefty bag of political dirty tricks, Kelly planted Thomas Garry, the city’s sewer commissioner, in the basement of the Stadium on the night that delegates were read FDR’s statement declining a third term.
“We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!” Garry thundered over the public address system. Enthusiastic delegates took up the chant, extending it for more than an hour until it became the “spontaneous” draft movement that Roosevelt said he needed to change his mind.
Roosevelt went on to win his historic third and, subsequently, fourth presidential elections.
“And Thomas D. Garry became known to posterity as the `Voice from the Sewer,’ ” said Burke, who likes to regale audiences with that bit of Chicago lore.
Another more genuine draft occurred in Chicago in 1952 when Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic nomination to wage an uphill presidential battle against World War II hero and brand-new Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. The nomination was the high point of that campaign for Stevenson, who was trounced by Ike in 1952 and again in 1956.
It was at the 1956 convention in Chicago that another, eventually brighter, political star got his first major exposure.
When Stevenson accepted the nomination, he asked the delegates to choose his running mate, and a floor fight broke out under the watchful eyes of the infant television medium.
Although the nod eventually went to Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who often wore a coonskin hat, his closest rival, the youthful Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, benefited from the national television exposure that helped propel him to the Democratic presidential nomination four years later.
While he had been a major benefactor of a national convention battle, Kennedy took steps toward transforming the function of those political gatherings from genuine selection processes into more ceremonial affairs.
Using the primary election system in 1960, Kennedy piled up enough delegate votes to steamroll the convention for the nomination.
Last week, Mayor Richard Daley acknowledged the changes when he said, “They’re not really conventions to pick a candidate anymore. That’s done through the primaries now. They’re just rallies now.”
But they are spectacular rallies, with hundreds of delegates and even more media. They all spend money and, officials of the host city hope, make the town look good to future potential tourists.
That plan can backfire, of course, as the late Mayor Richard J. Daley learned in 1968 when the Democratic convention degenerated into chaos on and off the floor of the Amphitheatre. TV cameras turned away from platform debates and onto Michigan Avenue, where Chicago police battled demonstrators while crowds chanted, “The whole world’s watching.”
In his reflection last week, the mayoral son noted that while Chicago’s mayor is still named Daley, a lot of other things have changed in 26 years.
In 1968, the country was embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy’s brother Robert, a New York senator and presidential hopeful, had recently been assassinated. The drug culture and Yippie movement were in full swing, and the whole country was at the boiling point.
“Things were a lot different then,” Daley shrugged.
Armed with that conviction, Chicago prepares once again to reclaim its title as the country’s leading political convention site.
With a history of the “voice from the sewer” and “the whole world’s watching,” it seems the title is well-deserved and ready to come back home.