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DIVIDED AND UNDECIDED, 2024’S AMERICA RHYMES WITH 1924’S  
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Dan Berry
July 5, 2024
New York Times
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_ Hearing echoes of Independence Day a century ago, when Americans
were clashing over race, religion, immigration and presidential
candidates. _

The 1924 Democratic National Convention was the longest in history:
16 days and 103 ballots., Bettmann Collection, via Getty Images

 

Things should have been settled. The weary delegates should have
already chosen a presidential nominee, packed up their Welcome to New
York souvenirs and returned home in time for the nation’s
celebration of what it stood for.

Instead, the study in indecision that was the Democratic National
Convention of 1924 staggered through the Fourth of July weekend, its
3,000 delegates all but ensnared in the red-white-and-blue bunting
adorning a tired Manhattan arena slated for demolition.

The convention, which lasted 16 days and an astounding 103 ballots, is
notorious both for being the longest in history and for being infected
by the Ku Klux Klan, which cast a long shadow over the America of that
time. Just a few dozen miles to the south, it was celebrating a
white-nationalist Independence Day with a hood-and-robe parade right
down the Broadway of a beachside New Jersey city.

The simultaneous events reflected the divide over what it meant to be
an American. Instead of proudly asserting who we are, that distant
summer day raised a question being debated over the July Fourth
weekend a century later: Who are we?

At play were the tensions between the rural and the urban; the
isolationist and the world-engaged; the America of white Protestant
Christianity and the multiracial America of all faiths; the America
that distrusted immigrants and the America that saw itself in those
immigrants, and wished to extend a hand.

Exploiting these conflicts was the Klan, the post-Civil War
white-supremacist organization that had been resurrected a decade
earlier. Its “America First” mantra resonated with an aggrieved
Protestant middle class — some Republicans, some Democrats — who
sensed their power slipping away.

Today, in the quickening of a presidential campaign that both parties
call a battle for America’s very soul, the historian Jon Meacham
hears rhyming between 2024 and 1924, when the country was reeling from
war and a pandemic, adapting to a transformative medium — radio —
and setting exceedingly restrictive immigration quotas.

The streets outside Madison Square Garden were littered with confetti
thrown by enthusiastic supporters. Credit...International Newsreel

Madison Square Garden was adorned with flags in preparation for the
convention. Credit...Bettman Collection, via Getty Images

“Given the demographic and technological changes, the anti-immigrant
and racist sentiments, and the anxiety about the loss of a largely
white-dominated culture, 1924 has long struck me as an analogous
period to our own,” said Mr. Meacham, who has been an informal
adviser to President Biden.

The thousands of out-of-towners who assembled for the Democratic
convention in late June found a Manhattan determined to shed its image
in the hustings as Gomorrah on the Hudson. The streets were swept of
pickpockets and debris, delegates were greeted with flowers and
boutonnieres, and 25,000 city employees staged a welcoming parade led
by the silk-hatted mayor, John F. Hylan, who combed his hair at every
pause along the Fifth Avenue march.

The convention took place just off Madison Square, in the second
iteration of Madison Square Garden, a massive Gilded Age confection
with a tower topped by a 13-foot copper statue of the goddess Diana.
But the dazzling allure of the arena — scene of countless balls and
prizefights, flower shows and the scandalous murder of its architect,
Stanford White — had dimmed. The convention would be this Garden’s
last as a venue of consequence.

Still, Diana, as envisioned by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
continued her vigilance over the metropolis from her heavenly perch, a
weather vane turning with the fickle wind. Her thick portfolio
included goddess of the crossroads, a fitting responsibility given the
stark political choices unfolding beneath her.

The two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination to challenge
Calvin Coolidge, the Republican incumbent with the mien of an
undertaker, almost seemed to represent different parties.

Delegates supporting Al Smith, then the governor of New York, who
decried the Ku Klux Klan as a threat to democracy. Credit...Associated
Press

Nancy Warren at the piano, serenading conventioneers. Credit...Library
of Congress

One was William Gibbs McAdoo Jr., a tall, well-educated Protestant
lawyer from the South. Stage-ready handsome and as stiff as his
starched-neck collar, McAdoo was a reform-minded progressive who
disdained political machines like New York’s Tammany Hall and
supported the prohibition against the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
But he was no progressive on matters of race, and as Treasury
secretary, he had enforced the policy of his father-in-law, President
Woodrow Wilson, to segregate federal agencies.

The other, Al Smith, governor of New York, wore his Irish Catholic
mutt heritage like a sash, and spoke with a gravelly voice that
conjured the multilingual street song of his native Lower East Side.
Smith had little formal education and often boasted of being an F.F.M.
man, for “Fulton Fish Market.” Still, the work ethic developed at
the market served him well as he rose from Tammany Hall functionary to
a master negotiator who studied proposed legislation as though
cramming for college exams. He favored immigration, opposed
Prohibition and was determined to thwart the favorite, McAdoo.

The two candidates differed sharply on the nettlesome question of the
Klan, whose supporters at the Republican National Convention in
Cleveland weeks earlier had snuffed out a resolution to denounce the
organization. (Time magazine nicknamed the gathering the “Kleveland
Konvention.”)

Smith, who decried the Klan as a threat to democracy, championed a
proposed plank in the Democratic Party platform to condemn the Klan by
name. McAdoo, though, opposed such specificity and declined to
repudiate the Klan, for fear, perhaps, of alienating its admiring
delegates and voters.

William Gibbs McAdoo Jr. supported Prohibition and declined to
denounce the Klan. Credit...Associated Press

Governor Smith supported immigration and opposed Prohibition.
Credit...The New York Times

“The Klan influence on that convention was enormous,” said Linda
Gordon, a historian and the author of “The Second Coming of the KKK:
The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.”
“And, like many social movements, progressive as well as
reactionary, they built themselves up through claims of
victimization.”

The June 20, 1924, issue of the Klan’s newspaper, The Fiery Cross,
reflected the ideology coursing through the Democratic convention and
the national conversation. Tirades against “Romanistic
influences.” Antisemitic riffs. Warnings about miscegenation. A call
for “militant, old-fashioned Christianity and operative
patriotism.”

The intolerance was buffed with a patriotic polish. Amid the odes to
the American flag and founding fathers were advertisements catering to
nativists. “EAT with Americans at the American Restaurant.” Or
purchase a Kluxer’s Knifty Knife, intended “for two-fisted
Americans.” Or buy property in the “100 percent American
addition” of the Hiawatha Gardens development in Indianapolis.

“Lots sold to white Protestant Americans only,” the ad said.

“It’s an old story,” said the historian David Levering Lewis,
“of a country that is made up of immigrants, but some don’t count
because they’re darker, or pro-alcohol, or they’re Catholic or
Jewish or otherwise suspect. The great fear was that these people
would get on ships and swamp us.”

On the first day of the convention, June 24, the delegates streamed
into the Garden in Palm Beach suits and summery linen dresses. Women
had won the right to vote a few years earlier and were well
represented, but there was reportedly only one Black participant —
an alternate who would replace a white delegate — in the excited sea
lapping against the flag-festooned main platform.

Jackets were soon removed, and souvenir fans began to flutter. It was
as if the delegates were at the circus, with the rising temperature
from bloviation and body heat seeming to summon the animal aromas from
the Garden’s big-top spectacle a couple of months earlier.

That was how it would be — hot and circuslike — for 16 days.

Democrats bickered for nearly a week over the proposed anti-Klan
plank, which would have said the party opposed “any effort on the
part of the Ku Klux Klan or any organization to interfere with the
religious liberty or political freedom of any citizen, or to limit the
civic rights of any citizen or body of citizens because of religion,
birthplace or racial origin.”

Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. McAdoo could wrangle the two-thirds majority
needed to secure the nomination.Credit...Library of Congress

Women, newly allowed to vote, were well represented at the convention.
Credit...Library of Congress

But after bruising marathons of backroom bargaining and open-floor
confrontations, the plank was defeated by a single vote. Instead, the
party tiptoed past any mention of the Klan with language that said, in
part: “We insist at all times upon obedience to the orderly
processes of the law and deplore and condemn any effort to arouse
religious or racial dissension.”

 

In the midst of this debate about the party’s direction, there
suddenly appeared on the scene a Civil War veteran named James John
Brady, an octogenarian runaway with poor hearing, no teeth and many
opinions. Without a word to anyone, Brady had left Mrs. Gray’s
boardinghouse in Vincennes, Ind. — in the midst of its own Klan
Karnival — and traveled by train to New York City, using savings
from his $72 monthly pension. The Travelers Aid Society had generated
headlines by taking up his cause to attend the Democratic convention.

For a brief day or two, the penniless veteran was the toast of Gotham.
Democratic leaders provided him with a convention ticket. An actress
from Indiana invited him to her play on Broadway. (“He’s stone
deaf and I don’t think he heard a word of the play,” she later
said.) Then he was put on a train back home, his ticket covered by his
landlady, his brief appearance like a spectral reminder of principles
considered long since settled by brother-against-brother bloodshed.

Amid bobbing banners, tribal roars and shouted snippets of state
anthems, the balloting for a presidential nominee began. In the first
round, McAdoo won nearly 40 percent of the vote, well more than
Smith’s 22 percent but far from the two-thirds needed to secure the
nomination.

And so it went, ballot after ballot, through what remained of June and
into July, past the scheduled closing indicated in the convention’s
official program. The names of dark horses and favorite sons kept
popping up, while the contest between the main contenders, McAdoo and
Smith — between the rural Klan-adjacent “drys” and the urban
Klan-averse “wets” — remained deadlocked.

Some delegates up and left the city, depleted of money or patience or
both. As for the rest, the humorist Will Rogers jokingly grumbled that
New York had invited these delegates to visit, not to live there.

The 10th ballot. The 20th. The 40th. The 60th. …

Now it was the Fourth of July. The day’s proceedings began with a
reading of the Declaration of Independence. Then came the 62nd ballot.
The 63rd. The 64th. The 65th.

Americans gathered in homes and the street to hear the first
convention to be broadcast by radio. The drama gradually veered into
farce, as time after time they heard the roll call of state
delegations begin with a disembodied Southern voice declaring:
“Alabama casts 24 votes for Oscar W. Underwood!”

A July 4, 1924, Klan parade across the river in Long Branch, N.J.
Credit...International News Photos

Voters across the country, including campers in the Berkshires, tuned
in to listen to the convention chaos via a new medium: radio.
Credit...The New York Times

Beyond the convention’s confines, Americans embraced the annual
rituals of Independence Day. Baseball fans watched the New York Giants
and the Philadelphia Phillies split a doubleheader at the Polo
Grounds. Nearly half a million people jammed the beaches of Coney
Island. And tens of thousands of Klan members and supporters claimed
the Fourth as their own in towns around the country, including the
Jersey Shore community of Long Branch.

More than 20,000 people wandered the grounds of a Klan-controlled
estate just outside the small city. The festivities featured a wedding
with bride and groom in hoods; the christening of 16 children; a
softball game between New Jersey and Pennsylvania Klan members (who
won is lost to time); and speeches, including one by a judge from
Indianapolis who reported he had “just come from Jew York.”

“No matter what they do, there will not be anybody but a Protestant
as a president or vice president,” the judge asserted.

According to a report in The New York Times, spectators were also
invited to throw baseballs at an effigy of Al Smith, a whiskey bottle
in its left hand. Three for a nickel.

A Klan member mimicked voting while riding on a parade float.
Credit...NEWS

Then, following the lead of a Klansman on horseback waving an American
flag, a few thousand robed Klan members — merchants and businessmen
and next-door neighbors, enjoying hooded anonymity — marched through
a city by the sea. On one float, a Boy Scout held a sign that said,
“We Want The Holy Bible In Our Schools.” On another, labeled
“Clean Politics,” a Klansman mimicked casting a ballot under the
watchful eye of Lady Justice.

Amid cheers and boos and silence, they paraded past the pharmacies and
candy stores and luncheonettes, past the signs for movie double
features and Hildebrecht’s ice cream, straight down a typical
American Broadway.

Meanwhile, in a stifling arena close to another Broadway — the one
in Manhattan — the deadlock continued. The 66th ballot. The 67th.
The 68th. The 69th. The 70th.

It took a few more days, but the paralysis — and, perhaps, the fever
— eventually broke.

On July 9, on the 103rd ballot, a compromise candidate, John W. Davis,
a prominent lawyer and diplomat from West Virginia, secured the
exhausted party’s nomination after McAdoo and Smith withdrew. Four
months later, Davis lost in a landslide to the incumbent, Coolidge.

John W. Davis, at center with white hair, was nominated by the party
after 103 ballots. Credit...Library of Congress

Davis supporters pulling a hansom cab down Fifth Avenue in New York.
That fall, Mr. Davis lost in a landslide to President Calvin Coolidge.
Credit...Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

William McAdoo went on to serve as a senator from California. Al Smith
won the Democratic nomination in 1928, but lost to the Republican,
Herbert Hoover, in another landslide tarnished by pervasive
anti-Catholicism.

Back in Indiana, James John Brady, the Civil War veteran, recounted
his New York adventure to anyone who would listen. “As far as the Ku
Klux Klan issue goes,” he would say, “well, the Lord forgive them
for they know not what they do.”

His words proved prophetic. This second iteration of the Klan — a
third would emerge a generation later in violent backlash to the civil
rights movement — would continue strong for another couple of years,
but its popularity would plummet amid sex scandals, criminal behavior
and internecine quarreling. By decade’s end, it would be a shell of
a fraternal organization foundering for relevance.

Within two years of the disastrous convention of 1924, the grand old
Madison Square Garden was a memory, knocked down to make room for an
insurance building. But its golden goddess, Diana, found a home at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she continues to keep watch. Bow
drawn, arrow at the ready, forever at the crossroads.

_Dan Barry [[link removed]] is a longtime
reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land
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columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics,
including New York City, sports, culture and the nation._

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