The Smoke-filled Room (June 1972 | Volume: 23, Issue: 4)

The Smoke-filled Room

AH article image

Authors:

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

June 1972 | Volume 23, Issue 4

A “smoke-filled room,” as every politician knows, is where the other party’s bosses secretly choose their candidate. One’s own standard-bearer, of course, is selected openly and freely by the divinely inspired delegates of the People. To the newsmen and television commentators a smoke-filled room is one where they couldn’t get in.

It all goes back to the Republican convention of 1920, when after a day of indecisive balloting Warren G. Hording, a dark horse, was supposed to have received the bosses’ nod in the first so-called smokefilled room, and Calvin Coolidge was then picked as his running mate. On this, Mark Sullivan commented in Our Times : …I doubt whether a nomination for the Presidency (or anything else) ever merely ‘happens,’ always it must be brought about and always somebody must play the part of brmger about. ”

The truth, alas, is not always what political writers and commentators tell us it is. A very different version of what took place in Chicago more than a half century ago was recorded in 1952 by the sole survivor of the original smoke-filled room, former senator James W. Wadsworth of New York, who died shortly afterward. His story, as related in an interview for the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, is as follows:

Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was certainly what might be termed a receptive candidate for the Republican nomination in Chicago, as was Senator Miles Poindexter, from the state of Washington. The two outstanding candidates, however, were General Leonard Wood and Governor Frank O. Lowden, the former governor of Illinois. Another candidate who was running third, let us say, was Governor Hiram Johnson of California, who had run on the Roosevelt ticket as candidate for Vice President in 1912.

The convention met at Chicago, and after two or three days of balloting an apparently hopeless deadlock occurred between Wood and Lowden. It was finally apparent by Friday night (Friday was the next to the last day of the week in which the convention sat) that neither of them could be nominated. The weather was extremely hot. The delegates sat in their shirt sleeves. “What will we do? What will we do?”

A goodly share of the press at that time emphasized and has emphasized for a long time since what went on in what came to be known as the “smoke-filled room” in which it was alleged that the nomination of Harding was decided upon. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was chairman of the New York delegation and as such it was my duty to move around just as much as I could to find out what was going on. Personally I had been supporting Lowden.…

Then we come to the “smoke-filled room.” That was a room on an upper floor of the Blackstone Hotel which was reserved and