Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 4
At some point in this election-year summer, as thousands of politicians, delegates, and journalists gather for the quadrennial rites of democracy known as national political conventions, commentators will complain that the proceedings have devolved to nothing more than a long television commercial. And, after invoking images from the innocent past, when sweaty men in baggy suits waving smelly cigars decided grave matters of national import, they will announce that they’ll no longer pay no attention to these political anachronisms. Some will take their cue from Ted Koppel, the host of ABC’s “Nightline,” who left the Republican convention in 1996 in a huff, saying he would not allow his show to be party to a political advertisement.
Like sports fans who watch replays of old championship games, many politics watchers long for an era when everything seemed more authentic and pure. They yearn for those conventions that featured spontaneous demonstrations, soaring speeches, dramatic debates, and heroic candidates. Their folk memories of the golden age of political conventions are preserved in black-and-white newsreel footage starring the great names of the past—Al Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Robert Taft, Tom Dewey, Wendell Willkie—as they thrashed out great issues in full view of the press, when a single great speech could result in a stampede and change the course of a campaign. Again, like nostalgic sports fans, they insist that today’s conventions, with their Hollywood-style packaging, have been corrupted by modern values and well-tailored political consultants who worship the false gods of image and advertising.
There is some merit in these complaints. Indeed there was merit in them when they were first made—more than a hundred years ago. In the early 1890s Theodore Roosevelt complained that the legendary political operative Mark Hanna was selling his choice for the 1896 Republican nomination, William McKinley, “as if he were a patent medicine.” (And a fine salesman Hanna was; Roosevelt availed himself of McKinley’s medicinal qualities in 1900 by becoming his Vice President and then succeeded to the White House when McKinley died of an assassin’s bullet in 1901.)
Those who believe that television, polls, consultants, and the primary system have robbed the conventions of any spontaneity might be surprised to learn that seventy-five years ago their counterparts were lamenting the intrusion of radio coverage, which had begun at the infamous 103-ballot Democratic National Convention in 1924. Talk about a loss of spontaneity. When an exhausted Alben Barkley, acting as chairman, tried to restore order during the vice-presidential nominating process, he turned to the raucous New York delegation and shouted, “Dammit, can’t you wait?” A mild enough epithet by today’s standards, it caused a scandal when the phrase made its way over the innocent airwaves of Prohibition-era America. Suffice it to say that from then on, convention chairmen have taken great pains to avoid such a display of authentic, spontaneous emotion.