AP Photo Fourth Estate 1924: The Wildest Convention in U.S. History Nearly 100 years ago, it took the Democrats 103 ballots and 16 sweaty days to select a nominee. Could the GOP be headed for a similar showdown this year?

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Like a mighty bulldozer that has thrown a track, the Donald Trump campaign for president has lost its forward momentum, causing analysts and Trump foes to speculate on what will happen if the Manhattan mogul fails to drag himself over the 1,237-delegate hump required to win the Republican Party’s nomination on a first ballot.

If Trump stalls, the Republican convention could enter brokered mode. (See this Boston Globe piece for the specifics, especially this piece on the intricacies of Rule 40.) Ohio Gov. John Kasich is almost banking on a convention that would free delegates pledged to candidates—by virtue of primary or caucus victories—to cast their subsequent ballots for a candidate of their choosing, namely Kasich. At this point, the struggling Marco Rubio is lullabying himself to sleep with the vision of a brokered convention, and Ted Cruz is probably humming the tune, too.


The free-for-all of a brokered convention would unleash the greatest display of political back-stabbing and double-dealing since the 1924 Democratic National Convention, which took a record 103 ballots and 16 sweaty days to select a nominee. For the journalists amassed in Cleveland for the Republican convention, it would be like covering a small war, a tsunami and a mass shooting simultaneously, and nearly as dangerous.

The parallels between the Democrats’ 1924 convention and the Republicans’ upcoming one are there for a columnist’s taking. The 1924 Democratic Party was as divided as the Republican Party is today, maybe more so. The convention is often called the “Klanbake” because one of the front-runners, white shoe lawyer and former Wilson Cabinet member William G. McAdoo, was supported by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was a major source of power within the party, and McAdoo did not repudiate its endorsement. The other front-runner, New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic who represented the party’s anti-Klan, anti-Prohibition wing (McAdoo also backed Prohibition, which was then the law of the land), and his faction failed by a slim margin to pass a platform plank condemning the Klan. The convention, which was held in Madison Square Garden, had no black delegates.

As a two-thirds vote was needed to win the nomination, McAdoo and Smith essentially canceled each other out and the scores of “favorite sons” placed into nomination prevented either man from collecting even a simple majority of votes. A total of 19 candidates got votes on the first ballot. By the time the thing concluded, 60 different candidates had received a delegate’s vote. Floor demonstrations abounded between ballots, with the chants for “Mac! Mac! McAdoo!” countered by Smith’s forces who cried out, “Ku, Ku, McAdoo,” as Robert K. Murray writes in his splendid 1976 book The 103rd Ballot. Fistfights and screaming matches, featuring choice obscenities were common. On Independence Day, the 10th day of the convention, 20,000 Klansmen amassed across the Hudson River in New Jersey to burn crosses and punish effigies of Smith.

H.L. Mencken, who covered the rowdy, sweltering, never-ending convention for the Baltimore Evening Sun, wrote, “There may not be enough kluxers in the convention to nominate McAdoo, but there are probably enough to beat any anti-klan candidate so far heard of, and they are all on their tiptoes today, their hands clutching their artillery nervously and their eyes apop for dynamite bombs and Jesuit spies.” The ensuing deadlock inspired Mencken to pen this oft-quoted passage about political conventions in a July 14, 1924, post-mortem of the Madison Square Garden spectacle:

For there is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell—and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.

I really should discuss the results of 103 ballots, one by one, as an Andy Kaufmanesque experiment in journalistic terror, but I won’t. Like Trump, McAdoo came to the convention fully expecting to be the nominee, and led through the 77th ballot. Smith’s purpose, as Murray writes, was primarily to block McAdoo—and he did. As the convention wore on, Mencken filed a story with this lede: “Everything is uncertain in this convention but one thing: John W. Davis will never be nominated.” But ultimately neither McAdoo nor Smith got enough votes, and a “compromise” candidate was selected: Corporate lawyer Davis, the guy Mencken bet against.

“When the debris began to fall, somebody looked underneath the pile and dragged out John W. Davis,” wrote New York Times reporter Arthur C. Krock. The 1924 convention wasn’t the Democratic Party’s first experiment in conventional chaos. The 1912 convention took 46 ballots to select Woodrow Wilson, and the 1920 convention spent 44 ballots on picking James Cox. But the 1924 convention appears to have wounded the Democratic Party, which failed spectacularly in the fall election. Davis collected only 28.8 percent of the vote against the winner, Republican President Calvin Coolidge (54 percent), and third-place finisher Progressive Party candidate Robert M. La Follette Sr. (16.6 percent).

“A brokered convention is the Loch Ness Monster of American politics. We’ve all heard the legends, but most of us have never covered one,” wrote the Washington Post’s Callum Borchers a month ago. (The last brokered conventions came in 1952, which took the Democrats three ballots, and 1948, which the Republicans finished in two.) Journalists welcome the idea of a brokered convention because the current scripted pageants that pass for political conventions provide reporters with no real political news to report. The whole show is for the TV cameras, and even then it’s not much of a show. It’s like a striptease in which none of the dancers shows any skin or a professional wrestling match that lasts four days. The only spontaneous moment I can recall in decades of watching conventions was Clint Eastwood’s interview with an empty chair in 2012.

A brokered convention would bring out the absolute best in the nation, and by best I mean the worst—name-calling, vicious threats of payback, deep acts of betrayal, lawsuits, hair-pulling, and in the finest tradition of the 1924 convention, bloody fist-fights. It’s probably too much to hope for a gathering of 20,000 Klansmen in Cleveland to report on, but a fleet of Trumpites canoeing their way up the Cuyahoga River would gratify the press corps.

No matter who wins the Republican nomination, either clinching it before the convention or wrestling it down during the proceedings, the party needs a bloodletting of Tarantino proportions, and there would be no better place for the red to flow and the “healing” to begin than a nationally televised gathering. The 1924 debacle caused the Democrats to lose the White House again in 1928, but it helped move them to the 1932 starting line where they commenced their longest-running political dynasty. There’s nothing like losing big to put you on the road to victory.

So for the sake of the Republican Party but mostly for my profession, I offer just these three words and this one exclamation point: Make It Happen!

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Imagine my disappointment as a child when I learned that no real fighting took place during a convention floor fight. Send your childhood disappointment to [email protected]. My email alerts were committed to Scott Walker, my Twitter feed pushed Huck, but I’m holding RSS feed for leverage in picking the nominee should the convention broker itself.