The Democratic Party's circular firing squad...of 1924

Because I'm definitely not doing a current events blog

A Ku Klux Klan march down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1928. Public domain.

One of the many cool things about studying history is that you realize that what you thought was linear is actually cyclical. From that revelation, you can often infer that, when things are bad, they aren’t necessarily going to become worse indefinitely. Sure, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty about just how bad they’ll get before they get better, but sometimes I take a strange comfort from glimpses into our country’s past that are just way, way worse than things are now. And that’s what brings me to the Democratic National Convention of 1924, which was hosted in New York City and occurred just a month after the Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law.

I didn’t know anything about the Democratic National Convention of 1924 until two days ago. My grasp of U.S. history during the 1920s is sketchy at best. As I’ve mentioned earlier, 10 years ago I tried to write a history book and completely stalled out in the 1920s. I just couldn’t figure out what this decade really meant or represented, other than speakeasies, flappers, and the U.S. largely withdrawing from European affairs and, seemingly, the world (the League of Nations in particular). I thought of it as some random decade where the United States writ large just checked out.

Well, turns out it’s one of those periods in U.S. history that is a bit like Reconstruction: understudied, and those few who do study it have a fundamentally different view of U.S. history than almost everyone else. I’m currently 2/3 of the way through Lisa McGirr’s excellent book The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, and two days ago, reached her chapter about the Democratic National Convention.

What she had to say interested me immediately, because I’m still parsing my way through the Congressional debates on the Immigration Act, and I was noticing that quite a few of the restrictionists, who were strongly in favor of the law’s national origin quotas and butting up against Fiorello La Guardia and his ilk, whom I discussed here:

Fiorello La Guardia, or how you get an airport named after you

were Southern Democrats. But they weren’t exclusively Southern Democrats. There was a lot of party-line-crossing during the debates, and ultimately it was Republican President Calvin Coolidge who signed the Immigration Act into law.

So then I got interested in how support for or opposition to the national origin quotas tracked with “wet” and “dry” voting patterns (meaning, anti- or pro-Prohibition). I had a feeling there would be a lot of overlap between the Southern Democrats and the “dry” caucus in Congress—I knew enough about Prohibition to know that the Ku Klux Klan was somehow involved—and indeed there was a lot of overlap. If you want to get a taste of what Lisa McGirr’s book is about, here she is in a video interview discussing it:

But there was still not complete overlap between “dry” votes and Immigration Act votes; in particular, the anti-Japanese California contingent, whom I discussed here:

California and the Immigration Act of 1924

were mostly “wet” votes. So, it struck me that this might have been an era in which party politics were getting a little scrambled, and boy, was I not wrong about that.

Here are three things to know about the Democratic National Convention of 1924:

(1) It was the longest continuously-running convention in U.S. political history (June 24 - July 9), and it took 103 ballots to arrive at an acceptable Presidential nominee (don’t even try to guess who it was, I promise you haven’t heard of him).

(2) The Ku Klux Klan was out in force (thankfully, not in full regalia, but still) and managed to defeat an anti-Klan plank being added to the party platform. Before you Republican readers start crowing about that, know that the Klan had already defeated a similar proposal at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, a few weeks beforehand, with a presence at the RNC sufficient for Time magazine to brand it “the Kleveland Konvention.”

(3) It was held at Madison Square Garden. In July. With no air conditioning.

McGirr describes the Convention as “perhaps the most contentious in the party’s history until the riotous Chicago convention of 1968.” The journalist Arthur Krock, at the time, called it a “snarling, cursing, tedious, tenuous, suicidal, homicidal roughhouse.” Sounds like fun!

The virulent anti-Catholicism of the Klan delegates all but guaranteed that Al Smith, a “wet” delegate with strong support from the “ethnic urban” wing of the party and Franklin Delano Roosevelt serving as his campaign manager (referred to openly as “the cripple”), would not receive the nomination. 103 ballots later, the Democrats finally nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia (have you ever heard of him? If so, good on you. If not, I rest my case).

So…an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats—in 1924. But those unruly, ethnic, working-class urbanites may have achieved something over the longer term.

Instead of reading more of my writing this week, why not watch this Youtube video and see what you think came of all this chaos?