Given the changes in American society over the last twenty-five years, it is odd that so many political junkies and journalists look back at the old days with such affection and regard the conventions of today as somehow unworthy. The days of the smoke-filled room—the phrase was coined in 1920, when the Republican party elders met out of public view to decide to nominate Warren Harding—may seem colorful, but in fact they were decidedly monochromatic. During the golden age of conventions, candidates were often chosen behind closed doors, but for all the wrong reasons and by a small group of white, middleaged males.

The Harding nomination is a classic case in point. The Republican convention of 1920 was an old-fashioned, dealcutting suspenseful event. The few primaries then in existence had decided nothing. Delegates arrived in June to find Chicago in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures breaking triple digits. Famous names like Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Hiram Johnson, and Robert La Follette were in contention, and several states put up favorite son candidates to hold votes while deals were made. During the first ballot, when the head of the Missouri delegation announced that his state wasn’t ready for the roll call, a voice from the rafters shouted, “Still counting the cash?”

After four ballots a few party bosses, including Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge and Sen. William Borah, adjourned the convention, assembled in a smoke-filled room, and eventually settled on Harding because he offended nobody and looked like somebody’s idea of a president.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone today—when women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and gays and lesbians are a vital presence in politics and at conventions—would lament the passing of a time when such a male-only, white-only club could dictate to a convention. The old-time bosses like Tom Platt, Roscoe Conkling, and Richard Croker could never get away with their wheeling and dealing in the twenty-first century.

We are, after all, more democratic and more diverse, and today’s conventions reflect those changes.

In fact, for all their modern flaws, conventions still manage to provide sublime and unforgettable moments. Gerald Ford’s narrow firstballot victory over Ronald Reagan in Kansas City in 1976 led to an extraordinary unscripted climax when the nominee called Reagan to the podium, an unprecedented gesture that could be described as brave, foolish, magnanimous, or all three. Reagan gave an off-the-cuff speech about Soviet threats around the world that implicitly criticized the policies of the man who had invited him onstage. As Reagan spoke, the television cameras cut to Henry Kissinger,

Mario Cuomo’s keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco will stand the test of time as one of the great convention orations. Had it been given in 1884 rather than 1984, Cuomo could have left San Francisco with the nomination; indeed, many delegates that night concluded that the party was selecting the wrong man. Cuomo stated the case against the popular policies of Ronald Reagan with a conviction and an eloquence that even Republicans admired. That convention also produced the first woman nominee on a major-party national ticket; Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro waving from the podium together was a milestone in American history. Only the terminally jaded could have left San Francisco (or their television sets) complaining about a lack of drama.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Pat Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston gave a passionate voice to one side of a cultural split in the party that has been widening to canyon size since President Reagan left office. Whether watching from the hall or the living room, one could easily imagine George Bush’s supporters cringing as Buchanan declared that the nation was engaged in a “cultural war.” Bush, the embattled incumbent, was doing his best to pacify his right wing, but Buchanan’s prime-time address brought the conflict into the open and added to Bush’s wounds. There was also drama outside the hall in Houston, drama as intense as any floor fight during the golden age of conventions, as pro-choice Republicans, including a number of delegates, clashed bitterly with a right-to-life contingent near a Planned Parenthood clinic. Police had to keep the two sides apart. One pro-choice delegate, Tanya Melich, of New York, packed up and left town after being called a baby killer and a murderer. Her experience led the long-time GOP activist to write a book titled The Republican War Against Women.

To be sure, the 1996 national conventions offered very little of this sort of drama, although historians will one day note that in nominating Bob Dole, the Republican party bade farewell—without, it must be said, any ceremony—to the World War II generation. Both 1996 conventions were suspenseless even by modern standards. In that, they were throwbacks of another sort. When the Democrats, or Democratic-Republicans, as they were called, met for their very first nominating convention in 1832, they simply ratified the choice of President Andrew Jackson already made by the various state legislatures’ party caucuses. The first conventions, like today’s, often served only to put a formal stamp of approval on the party’s preference. In the

It didn’t take long for conventions to become known as places where colorful battles were fought. In 1868 the out-of-office Democrats met in New York with no clear favorite until a former governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, was named the convention’s president. With no other candidates able to build support, the convention started to fall in love with Seymour on the fourth ballot. Seymour was horrified. Having turned down a chance to run for President in 1860 and already having taken himself out of the running this time, he announced, “I must not be nominated by this Convention, as I could not accept the nomination if tendered….” The party’s top New York bosses then met at Delmonico’s—where else?—and decided that Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who had been added to the ballot earlier, would be the party’s nominee. By the twenty-second ballot, however, it was clear that Chase was running out of steam, and momentum began to shift back to Seymour, whereupon he attempted to rush the podium to nominate Chase. Seymour’s supporters physically blocked him, dragged him out of the hall, and held him hostage while the dealmakers arranged for his nomination. His last words as a non-nominee were directed to a friend. “Pity me,” he said.

This is just the sort of excitement many seem to yearn for: a competitive convention, multiple contenders, multiple ballots, dinners in Delmonico’s to plot strategy, and, finally, an unexpected climax. But as Horatio Seymour himself might have said, is this any way to pick a candidate?

The old conventions may look like fun from the twenty-first century, but the delegates and bosses often couldn’t wait for them to end. Imagine sitting through nominating and seconding speeches for fourteen candidates, as the Republican delegates were forced to do in 1888. Or the fifty-eight seconding speeches for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. In 1912 Democratic delegates slept in their chairs as the nominating speakers extolled the virtues of their champions literally until dawn. Like farm work, whaling, or combat, the act of choosing a presidential nominee from a dozen or so candidates looks charming, colorful, or glorious only from the safety of the present. In 1904 it took William Jennings Bryan sixteen excruciating hours to present his planks, clause by clause by clause, to the resolutions committee of the Democratic National Convention. He won his points partly because he had more stamina than the committeemen. And few who suffered through Alben Barkley’s two-hour nominating address in 1932 would sympathize with those who lament the short-attention-span speeches of today.

Still, every now and again, some throwback attempts to recapture the days when delegates had

While there can be no denying that the multiple-ballot pre-primary convention of yore often had drama no modern one can match, the fact is that for every such convention there was at least one of the sort we would recognize today. Al Smith and Herbert Hoover both had their parties’ respective nominations sewed up before the 1928 meetings; the Republican convention of 1924, which put up Calvin Coolidge for a term in his own right, and the Democratic convention of 1936, which picked Franklin Roosevelt for a second term, hardly justified the bar bills turned in by the political press corps. Of the forty-two Democratic conventions since 1832, twenty-nine have finished their work on the first ballot; the Republican convention has gone beyond one ballot only nine times since 1856. So the drama and mystery that we associate with the old-time conventions may be, like so many of our folk memories, more imagined than real anyway.

The delegates in Philadelphia and Los Angeles this year certainly will witness nothing like the scenes leading to Horatio Seymour’s nomination in 1868. There will be no moments like the confrontation between Connecticut’s senator Abraham Ribicoff and Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley in 1968, when Ribicoff denounced the Chicago Police Department’s “Gestapo” tactics.

Our current conventions are bound to seem tamer than they were when the nation faced such issues as slavery, segregation, and the Vietnam War. On the floor this year there will be only the arguments of politicians appealing for votes in a time of peace and prosperity.

Not very dramatic at first glance. But look closely. What you’ll be watching is democracy in action. Surely there’s a story there somewhere.

My Favorite Convention