Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

When the leading candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination delivers a primary night victory speech before a pile of raw sirloin steaks, when that same party’s contenders exchange public barbs for weeks on end about the size of each other’s genitalia, who perspires more and who might have suffered a bout of incontinence backstage during a debate—you know you’re living through unusual political times.

One thing is clear, and the events on Friday in Chicago only confirmed it: Whether Donald Trump wins the nomination before July or not, this summer’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland will rank among the most tumultuous in American history.


From 1860, when the Democratic Party rent itself in two over slavery in Kansas, to 1964, whose GOP convention one attendee described as reminiscent of a Nazi rally, here are five examples of nominating conventions that also went horribly awry. For this year’s Republicans, the takeaway is somewhat reassuring. Throughout history, American democracy has often been a noisy, quarrelsome and indecorous affair. Yet our institutions have consistently proved both strong enough to endure and malleable enough to adapt. Sometimes, a political establishment needs to hit rock bottom before it can rebuild.

Chicago, 1968

Though anti-war liberals Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy dominated the 1968 primary season, roughly 60 percent of delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party officers and elected officials who committed to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an erstwhile liberal who was unfortunately bound to endorse President Lyndon Johnson’s policy in Southeast Asia. That spring, against a backdrop of continued urban unrest, campus protests and working-class backlash against inflation, both Martin Luther King and RFK were assassinated. “The world has never been more disorderly within memory of living man,” the octogenarian journalist Walter Lippmann observed that year. In such an environment, the party’s undemocratic process was bound to invite mayhem.

With Humphrey’s nomination all but certain, protesters associated with the Yippies and National Mobilization Committee to End the War (the MOBE) took to the streets outside Chicago’s convention hall; inside, city policemen allied with the local political machine roughed up liberal delegates and journalists in plain view of news cameras. “I wasn’t sentenced and sent here!” a prominent New York Democrat bellowed as a uniformed officer dragged him off the floor. “I was elected!”

The convention turned especially bitter when party bosses killed a compromise plank on the Vietnam War that would have endorsed a return to negotiations and a temporary bombing halt. In response, several thousand protesters marched on the convention hall, only to absorb a brutal assault by city policemen.

When Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut rose to denounce the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” slack-jawed TV viewers observed Mayor Richard Daley stand up, jab his right index finger in Ribicoff’s direction, and let loose a string of inaudible obscenities. Those who could read lips made out some of his harangue: “Fuck you. You Jew son-of-a-bitch!”

“How hard it is to accept the truth,” Ribicoff taunted in reply. “How hard it is.”

San Francisco, 1964

In some ways, 2016 feels like 1964 all over again. That year, moderate Republicans walked into their party’s convention determined to block the ascendance of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the recognized leader of the GOP’s arch-conservative wing, opponent of the Civil Rights Act and hawkish supporter of military intervention against the Soviet Bloc. “The hour is late,” lamented moderate New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, “but if all leaders in the moderate mainstream of the Republican Party will unite upon a platform and upon Governor [William] Scranton”—an eleventh-hour entrant in the race—“the moderate cause can be won.”

It was too late. By virtue of early primary wins and a fortuitous meltdown on the part of Rockefeller, whose own presidential bid fizzled out that spring over widespread disapproval of his divorce and remarriage, Goldwater had sewn up the nomination—but not before the convention broke into pandemonium. During a platform debate over immigration, a fistfight almost ensued when a Goldwater supporter mocked Italian Americans, many of whom—including moderate Rep. Silvio Conte of Massachusetts—took considerable umbrage at the insult. By a vote of 897 to 409, delegates flatly rejected a moderate amendment that would have strengthened the party’s plank on civil rights, infuriating moderates from the Northeast whose states and districts included sizable black populations.

Goldwater devotees grew increasingly vicious as the days wore on. It “wasn’t just the galleries,” recalled one moderate attendee. “It was the floor, it was the hall. The venom of the booing and the hatred in people’s eyes was really quite stunning.” A leader of the New York Young Republicans recalled the event as “horrible. I felt like I was in Nazi Germany.” No less a party stalwart than former President Dwight Eisenhower called the gathering “unpardonable. … I was deeply ashamed.”

What one historian later dubbed the “conservatives’ Woodstock” reached its nadir not when Goldwater delivered his now-famous acceptance speech, in which he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” but when his delegates shouted down Rockefeller during his speech. “These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror,” the New York governor intoned over the deafening jeers of the crowd. They offered “no program for America and the Republican Party ... [they] operate from dark shadows of secrecy. It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrinaire, militant minority whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Birchers.”

In the wake of the convention, which left the GOP badly divided heading into the fall campaign, Alabama Governor George Wallace, a well-known segregationist, dropped his own bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. “My mission has been accomplished,” he explained.

Charleston and Baltimore, 1860

By the time Democrats arrived in Charleston for their nominating convention, in 1860, their party was already deeply divided. Just a year before, it had been widely assumed that Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois would be the Democratic nominee, but the sectional controversy over slavery—intensified in part by John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in October 1859—brought tempers to a boil.

Douglas tried to walk a political tightrope with regard to slavery. In 1854, he had been the prime sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed residents of the two territories (Kansas and Nebraska) to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery within their borders. “Popular sovereignty,” as the policy was known, proved deeply controversial, as it abrogated the decades-old Missouri Compromise.

Though the majority of Kansas settlers were antislavery, pro-slavery forces deployed rampant violence and fraud to steal a series of elections and to pass the “Lecompton Constitution,” which legalized the peculiar institution. With his credibility on the line, Douglas—the father of popular sovereignty—broke with Democratic President James Buchanan, whose administration recognized the Lecompton Constitution as legitimate. “We must stand on the popular sovereignty issue and go wherever the logical consequences may carry us,” he declared, “and defend it against all assaults from whatever quarter.” Privately, he told friends, “I will show you that I will do what I promised. By God, sir, I made Mr. James Buchanan, and by God, I will unmake him!”

In the end, though, the issue unmade Douglas. In response to Southern demands that Douglas embrace new federal constitutional protections for slavery, in 1860 Northern Democrats insisted that “never, never, never, so help us God,” would they abandon their popular sovereignty platform.

When no candidate could secure the requisite number of votes to secure the nomination, party leaders left Charleston, took a month and a half off, and reconvened in Baltimore. It was no use. For the first and only time in American history, a major political party rent itself in two, with Northern Democrats nominating Douglas and Southern Democrats running John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the young, dashing vice president and a stalwart defender of slavery. (Adding to the year’s confusion, a coalition of conservative ex-Whigs and Know-Nothings ran their own slate of electors in favor of John Bell, a former Tennessee senator and advocate of sectional compromise.)

Running against a divided opposition, Lincoln swept up in November. Not that it mattered. Even when combined, the popular votes of his three opponents would not have been sufficient to defeat him in the Electoral College.

New York, 1924

What’s worse than a convention that produces two nominees? A convention that almost produces none. That’s what happened in 1924, when the forces of traditionalism (old-stock, Protestant, Southern and Midwestern) lined up against representatives of new America (urban, immigrant, Catholic and Jewish). They chose as their proxies William Gibbs McAdoo, a Southern transplant to California who previously served as Treasury Secretary under his father-in-law, Woodrow Wilson, and New York Governor Al Smith, an Irish Catholic and outspoken opponent of prohibition.

McAdoo was neither a Klansman nor a bigot. But he became the preferred candidate of rural delegates from the South and West and supporters of both prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, a shadowy organization that claimed millions of members in both rural areas and urban centers. Wary of joining forces with the “Invisible Empire” but unwilling to challenge its overwhelming political power, McAdoo tried to avoid the Klan issue altogether. It didn’t work.

Smith’s supporters fought for a platform plank disowning the Klan as a violent and un-American institution. For five days, delegates yelled at each other and exchanged competing taunts of “Ku Klux McAdoo!” (Smith supporters) and “Booze! Booze! Booze!” (McAdoo’s loyalists.)

In the end, the convention approved a compromise measure that denounced intolerance generally but avoided specific mention of the Klan, and on the 103rd ballot, exasperated delegates embraced a compromise candidate, John W. Davis—an uninspiring federal judge whom incumbent President Calvin Coolidge defeated handily in November.

Miami 1972

In the aftermath of the 1968 convention debacle, the Democratic Party re-wrote the rules governing its selection process. Now, voters would select roughly 60 percent of delegates by caucus or primary, and by requirement, delegate slates would draw from a more diverse population. In a wide-ranging field that included Humphrey, Maine Senator Ed Muskie and Alabama Governor George Wallace, many Democrats hoped that a spirited and open process would help avert a replay of the debacle in Chicago.

By late spring, McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot and popular senator from South Dakota, was the prohibitive favorite, but his eager embrace of groups once on the outside of party politics—including black civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, and feminists—unnerved many establishment figures. The trouble began when the party regulars, loosely organized under the aegis of the ABM caucus—“Anybody But McGovern”—attempted to change the rules in mid-game and award California’s delegates proportionally. State law was very clear on this point: Whoever won the primary won all 271 of the state’s delegates. McGovern’s supporters defeated this attempted reversion to boss rule and countered with their own measure. Finding that Illinois had ignored the new diversity rules, they challenged the credentials of the 59 delegates from Cook County, Illinois, successfully replacing Mayor Richard Daley and his handpicked delegates with a diverse but unelected slate.

Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, the columnist Mike Royko lamented, “I just don’t see where our delegation is representative of Chicago’s Democrats. … About half of your delegates are women. About a third of your delegates are black. You even have a few Latin Americans. But as I looked over the names of your delegates, I saw something peculiar. … There’s only one Italian there. Are you saying that only one out of every 59 Democratic votes cast in a Chicago election is cast by an Italian? And only three of your 59 have Polish names. ... Your reforms have disenfranchised Chicago’s white ethnic Democrats, which is a strange reform.” The rejection of Chicago’s elected delegates only compounded a situation whereby most prominent Democratic leaders were excluded from the convention, since they had run unsuccessfully as delegates for Muskie or Humphrey. Out of 255 Democrats in the House of Representatives, only 30 were present in Miami. Also missing from the convention were former New York Governor Averell Harriman and the sitting mayors of Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

The enfranchisement of grassroots activists and exclusion of party bosses may have made the convention a more inclusive exercise, but this same hyper-democratic spirit gave way to hours of televised floor debates and “desultory roll-calls,” in the words of political journalist Max Frankel, over platform planks, parliamentary procedure and the selection of a vice presidential candidate. Without the establishment’s heavy hand, there was little way to impose order or to limit debate.

As expected, McGovern easily won nomination on the first ballot. Then it was time for the vice presidential pick. Though the convention ultimately nominated McGovern’s choice of a running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, other candidates whose names had been placed into nomination refused to withdrawal from the running, forcing hours of speeches—many of them rich with identity politics and laden with politically charged culture war issues—and a long roll call, thus delaying McGovern’s acceptance speech until 3:00 am. By the time he took to the podium to plead, “Come Home America,” most viewers had already turned off their televisions and gone to sleep.

“This most unusual of conventions,” as the New York Times described it, was a wash.

Ten years later, largely in response to electoral rules that facilitated McGovern’s nomination in 1972 and Jimmy Carter’s in 1976, the party reserved a portion of delegate slots for Democratic elected officials. Dubbed “super-delegates,” these establishment figures were meant to serve as an insurance policy against unruly outsiders who in the past had crashed the party.

Which brings something else to mind: If Hillary Clinton doesn’t win an outright majority of delegates at the polls but, rather, is forced to rely on super delegates to cinch the nomination, the GOP won’t be the only party to host an unusual—and potentially electric —convention this summer.