Issues ought to have been settled. The weary delegates ought to have already chosen a presidential nominee, packed up their Welcome to New York souvenirs and returned dwelling in time for the nation’s celebration of what it stood for.
As an alternative, the research in indecision that was the Democratic Nationwide Conference of 1924 staggered by means of the Fourth of July weekend, its 3,000 delegates all however ensnared within the red-white-and-blue bunting adorning a drained Manhattan area slated for demolition.
The conference, which lasted 16 days and an astounding 103 ballots, is infamous each for being the longest in historical past and for being contaminated by the Ku Klux Klan, which solid a protracted shadow over the America of that point. Only a few dozen miles to the south, it was celebrating a white-nationalist Independence Day with a hood-and-robe parade proper down the Broadway of a beachside New Jersey metropolis.
The simultaneous occasions mirrored the divide over what it meant to be an American. As an alternative of proudly asserting who we’re, that distant summer time day raised a query being debated over the July Fourth weekend a century later: Who’re we?
At play have been the tensions between the agricultural and the city; the isolationist and the world-engaged; the America of white Protestant Christianity and the multiracial America of all faiths; the America that distrusted immigrants and the America that noticed itself in these immigrants, and wished to increase a hand.
Exploiting these conflicts was the Klan, the post-Civil Conflict white-supremacist group that had been resurrected a decade earlier. Its “America First” mantra resonated with an aggrieved Protestant center class — some Republicans, some Democrats — who sensed their energy slipping away.
In the present day, within the quickening of a presidential marketing campaign that each events name a battle for America’s very soul, the historian Jon Meacham hears rhyming between 2024 and 1924, when the nation was reeling from warfare and a pandemic, adapting to a transformative medium — radio — and setting exceedingly restrictive immigration quotas.
“Given the demographic and technological modifications, the anti-immigrant and racist sentiments, and the nervousness concerning the lack of a largely white-dominated tradition, 1924 has lengthy struck me as a similar interval to our personal,” mentioned Mr. Meacham, who has been an off-the-cuff adviser to President Biden.
The hundreds of out-of-towners who assembled for the Democratic conference in late June discovered a Manhattan decided to shed its picture within the hustings as Gomorrah on the Hudson. The streets have been swept of pickpockets and particles, delegates have been greeted with flowers and boutonnieres, and 25,000 metropolis workers staged a welcoming parade led by the silk-hatted mayor, John F. Hylan, who combed his hair at each pause alongside the Fifth Avenue march.
The conference occurred simply off Madison Sq., within the second iteration of Madison Sq. Backyard, an enormous Gilded Age confection with a tower topped by a 13-foot copper statue of the goddess Diana. However the dazzling attract of the sector — scene of numerous balls and prizefights, flower reveals and the scandalous homicide of its architect, Stanford White — had dimmed. The conference can be this Backyard’s final as a venue of consequence.
Nonetheless, Diana, as envisioned by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, continued her vigilance over the metropolis from her heavenly perch, a climate vane turning with the fickle wind. Her thick portfolio included goddess of the crossroads, a becoming duty given the stark political selections unfolding beneath her.
The 2 main candidates for the Democratic nomination to problem Calvin Coolidge, the Republican incumbent with the mien of an undertaker, nearly appeared to signify totally different events.
One was William Gibbs McAdoo Jr., a tall, well-educated Protestant lawyer from the South. Stage-ready good-looking and as stiff as his starched-neck collar, McAdoo was a reform-minded progressive who disdained political machines like New York’s Tammany Corridor and supported the prohibition towards the manufacture and sale of alcohol. However he was no progressive on issues of race, and as Treasury secretary, he had enforced the coverage of his father-in-law, President Woodrow Wilson, to segregate federal businesses.
The opposite, Al Smith, governor of New York, wore his Irish Catholic mutt heritage like a sash, and spoke with a gravelly voice that conjured the multilingual avenue track of his native Decrease East Facet. Smith had little formal training and sometimes boasted of being an F.F.M. man, for “Fulton Fish Market.” Nonetheless, the work ethic developed on the market served him nicely as he rose from Tammany Corridor functionary to a grasp negotiator who studied proposed laws as if cramming for school exams. He favored immigration, opposed Prohibition and was decided to thwart the favourite, McAdoo.
The 2 candidates differed sharply on the nettlesome query of the Klan, whose supporters on the Republican Nationwide Conference in Cleveland weeks earlier had snuffed out a decision to denounce the group. (Time journal nicknamed the gathering the “Kleveland Konvention.”)
Smith, who decried the Klan as a menace to democracy, championed a proposed plank within the Democratic Occasion platform to sentence the Klan by title. McAdoo, although, opposed such specificity and declined to repudiate the Klan, for worry, maybe, of alienating its admiring delegates and voters.
“The Klan affect on that conference was huge,” mentioned Linda Gordon, a historian and the creator of “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the Nineteen Twenties and the American Political Custom.” “And, like many social actions, progressive in addition to reactionary, they constructed themselves up by means of claims of victimization.”
The June 20, 1924, subject of the Klan’s newspaper, The Fiery Cross, mirrored the ideology coursing by means of the Democratic conference and the nationwide dialog. Tirades towards “Romanistic influences.” Antisemitic riffs. Warnings about miscegenation. A name for “militant, old style Christianity and operative patriotism.”
The intolerance was buffed with a patriotic polish. Amid the odes to the American flag and founding fathers have been ads catering to nativists. “EAT with People on the American Restaurant.” Or buy a Kluxer’s Knifty Knife, supposed “for two-fisted People.” Or purchase property within the “100% American addition” of the Hiawatha Gardens growth in Indianapolis.
“Heaps bought to white Protestant People solely,” the advert mentioned.
“It’s an previous story,” mentioned the historian David Levering Lewis, “of a rustic that’s made up of immigrants, however some don’t depend as a result of they’re darker, or pro-alcohol, or they’re Catholic or Jewish or in any other case suspect. The good worry was that these folks would get on ships and swamp us.”
On the primary day of the conference, June 24, the delegates streamed into the Backyard in Palm Seaside fits and summery linen attire. Girls had received the suitable to vote a couple of years earlier and have been nicely represented, however there was reportedly just one Black participant — an alternate who would exchange a white delegate — within the excited sea lapping towards the flag-festooned most important platform.
Jackets have been quickly eliminated, and memento followers started to flutter. It was as if the delegates have been on the circus, with the rising temperature from bloviation and physique warmth seeming to summon the animal aromas from the Backyard’s big-top spectacle a few months earlier.
That was how it could be — sizzling and circuslike — for 16 days.
Democrats bickered for almost every week over the proposed anti-Klan plank, which might have mentioned the get together opposed “any effort on the a part of the Ku Klux Klan or any group to intervene with the spiritual liberty or political freedom of any citizen, or to restrict the civic rights of any citizen or physique of residents due to faith, birthplace or racial origin.”
However after bruising marathons of backroom bargaining and open-floor confrontations, the plank was defeated by a single vote. As an alternative, the get together tiptoed previous any point out of the Klan with language that mentioned, partially: “We insist always upon obedience to the orderly processes of the legislation and deplore and condemn any effort to arouse spiritual or racial dissension.”
Within the midst of this debate concerning the get together’s course, there out of the blue appeared on the scene a Civil Conflict veteran named James John Brady, an octogenarian runaway with poor listening to, no tooth and lots of opinions. With no phrase to anybody, Brady had left Mrs. Grey’s boardinghouse in Vincennes, Ind. — within the midst of its personal Klan Karnival — and traveled by practice to New York Metropolis, utilizing financial savings from his $72 month-to-month pension. The Vacationers Assist Society had generated headlines by taking over his trigger to attend the Democratic conference.
For a quick day or two, the penniless veteran was the toast of Gotham. Democratic leaders supplied him with a conference ticket. An actress from Indiana invited him to her play on Broadway. (“He’s stone deaf and I don’t assume he heard a phrase of the play,” she later mentioned.) Then he was placed on a practice again dwelling, his ticket coated by his landlady, his temporary look like a spectral reminder of rules thought of lengthy since settled by brother-against-brother bloodshed.
Amid bobbing banners, tribal roars and shouted snippets of state anthems, the balloting for a presidential nominee started. Within the first spherical, McAdoo received almost 40 p.c of the vote, nicely greater than Smith’s 22 p.c however removed from the two-thirds wanted to safe the nomination.
And so it went, poll after poll, by means of what remained of June and into July, previous the scheduled closing indicated within the conference’s official program. The names of darkish horses and favourite sons saved popping up, whereas the competition between the primary contenders, McAdoo and Smith — between the agricultural Klan-adjacent “drys” and the city Klan-averse “wets” — remained deadlocked.
Some delegates up and left the town, depleted of cash or persistence or each. As for the remaining, the humorist Will Rogers jokingly grumbled that New York had invited these delegates to go to, to not dwell there.
The tenth poll. The twentieth. The fortieth. The sixtieth. …
Now it was the Fourth of July. The day’s proceedings started with a studying of the Declaration of Independence. Then got here the 62nd poll. The 63rd. The sixty fourth. The sixty fifth.
People gathered in houses and the road to listen to the primary conference to be broadcast by radio. The drama step by step veered into farce, as time after time they heard the roll name of state delegations start with a disembodied Southern voice declaring: “Alabama casts 24 votes for Oscar W. Underwood!”
Past the conference’s confines, People embraced the annual rituals of Independence Day. Baseball followers watched the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies cut up a doubleheader on the Polo Grounds. Almost half one million folks jammed the seashores of Coney Island. And tens of hundreds of Klan members and supporters claimed the Fourth as their very own in cities across the nation, together with the Jersey Shore neighborhood of Lengthy Department.
Greater than 20,000 folks wandered the grounds of a Klan-controlled property simply outdoors the small metropolis. The festivities featured a marriage with bride and groom in hoods; the christening of 16 youngsters; a softball recreation between New Jersey and Pennsylvania Klan members (who received is misplaced to time); and speeches, together with one by a choose from Indianapolis who reported he had “simply come from Jew York.”
“It doesn’t matter what they do, there is not going to be anyone however a Protestant as a president or vp,” the choose asserted.
In line with a report in The New York Instances, spectators have been additionally invited to throw baseballs at an effigy of Al Smith, a whiskey bottle in its left hand. Three for a nickel.
Then, following the lead of a Klansman on horseback waving an American flag, a couple of thousand robed Klan members — retailers and businessmen and next-door neighbors, having fun with hooded anonymity — marched by means of a metropolis by the ocean. On one float, a Boy Scout held an indication that mentioned, “We Need The Holy Bible In Our Faculties.” On one other, labeled “Clear Politics,” a Klansman mimicked casting a poll beneath the watchful eye of Girl Justice.
Amid cheers and boos and silence, they paraded previous the pharmacies and sweet shops and luncheonettes, previous the indicators for film double options and Hildebrecht’s ice cream, straight down a typical American Broadway.
In the meantime, in a stifling area shut to a different Broadway — the one in Manhattan — the impasse continued. The 66th poll. The 67th. The 68th. The 69th. The seventieth.
It took a couple of extra days, however the paralysis — and, maybe, the fever — ultimately broke.
On July 9, on the 103rd poll, a compromise candidate, John W. Davis, a distinguished lawyer and diplomat from West Virginia, secured the exhausted get together’s nomination after McAdoo and Smith withdrew. 4 months later, Davis misplaced in a landslide to the incumbent, Coolidge.
William McAdoo went on to function a senator from California. Al Smith received the Democratic nomination in 1928, however misplaced to the Republican, Herbert Hoover, in one other landslide tarnished by pervasive anti-Catholicism.
Again in Indiana, James John Brady, the Civil Conflict veteran, recounted his New York journey to anybody who would hear. “So far as the Ku Klux Klan subject goes,” he would say, “nicely, the Lord forgive them for they know not what they do.”
His phrases proved prophetic. This second iteration of the Klan — a 3rd would emerge a technology later in violent backlash to the civil rights motion — would proceed sturdy for an additional couple of years, however its recognition would plummet amid intercourse scandals, felony conduct and internecine quarreling. By decade’s finish, it could be a shell of a fraternal group foundering for relevance.
Inside two years of the disastrous conference of 1924, the grand previous Madison Sq. Backyard was a reminiscence, knocked right down to make room for an insurance coverage constructing. However its golden goddess, Diana, discovered a house on the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork, the place she continues to maintain watch. Bow drawn, arrow on the prepared, without end on the crossroads.
