“The conduct of the Republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over … statesman and able men, and they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar.” -The New York Herald on the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for president at the 1860 Republican National Convention.
A far cry from today’s glamorous 72 hour long infomercial, the Republicans’ first official nominating convention at Chicago’s historic, “Wigwam” in 1860 celebrated its party’s inaugural nomination of Abraham Lincoln, without its nominee. 200 miles away, back home in Springfield Illinois, the future President of the United States idled away his time waiting for news from the convention playing, “fives–a variety of handball,” in an empty lot next to the Illinois State Journal, according to David Herbert Donald’s, “Lincoln.”
Meanwhile, stretched across billiard tables covered with mattresses, their bellies filled with ham sandwiches and ale, America’s new political breed, a composite of former Whig and Know-Nothing party affiliates calling themselves Republicans, choked down-town Chicago, 40,000 strong. The country’s fastest growing city at the time, Chicago served as host for the party of Lincoln in 13 subsequent national conventions.
Reduced to a pit of charred cinders by the Great Fire of 1871, the Windy City re-emerged into the national political spotlight a decade later, with Ohio’s James Garfield reluctantly accepting his party’s nomination from the floor of Chicago’s, “Glass Palace.” Foreshadowing today’s modern party split between establishment Republicans and Tea Partiers, warring factions of Gilded era politicians were similarly divided, pitting the “Stalwarts” against the “Half-Breeds.”
Originally slated to endorse Hayes Administration Treasury Secretary John Sherman, Garfield’s rousing floor speech transcended party divisions, and in adding Stalwart party favorite Chester Arthur as Garfield’s second, party bosses and delegates alike, rocketed the Ohio congressman straight to the top of ticket. Winning the presidency, Garfield was inexplicably assassinated by lone gunman Charles Guiteau, after serving only six moths in office.
At the turn of the century, it was back to Chicago as political giant Theodore Roosevelt challenged his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination. With its participants locked in an epic gladiatorial grudge match, the famed Chicago Coliseum was a fitting venue for the event. The bane of machine bosses, Roosevelt bolted the GOP after losing his bid, mounting an unsuccessful third party run in the general election. The standard bearer for the newly formed, “Bull Moose Party,” Roosevelt, who ended up garnering more votes than any other third party candidate in history, caused a schism among Republicans, giving Democrat Woodrow Wilson a clear path to the White House.
In an age of Republican domination, of the 40 years from 1952 through 1992, Democrats called 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. home for only 12 of them. Included in that era, and with talks of a co-presidency bandied about, the 1976 battle with Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan at Mississippi’s Kemper Arena is considered the last politically relevant nominating convention for Republicans. His victory locked up, Ford pivoted to Reagan’s sky box in an effort to quell low grumblings of, “We want Ron,” beginning to emanate from the floor, and invited the California governor to address the convention one final time. “Behind him Ford stood in gathering gloom, aware that his own speech had been but a warm up for this one,” writes Edmund Morris in “Dutch a Memoir of Ronald Reagan.” Launching into “what was patently the acceptance speech he would have given,” had he won, writes Morris, Reagan hushed the audience, “doing what he did better than any candidate in memory: tell a story.”
The primaries in the rearview, the presumptive nominee anything but presumptive, today’s modern political conventions are largely pro-forma booster rallies officially signaling the beginning of the general election. Favoring optics over oratory, this year’s Republican convention in Tampa features Frank Lloyd Wright inspired set designs; an homage to its Chicago roots, proving that tableau vivant, and not votes will decide whether the convention, and not the candidate, will be a winner.
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