Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’re going to take a moment to share an update about the future of Now & Then, which unfortunately is going to be coming to an end on September 13th.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, the decision to end the show wasn’t ours, but it’s important for us to state we have loved making the show for you over the course of the last two years, and we are really proud of the work that Heather and I and the entire Now & Then team have done.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Got to say, fabulous team and fabulous co-host.

Joanne Freeman:

Likewise.

Heather Cox Richardson:

If you have enjoyed your time here with us at Now & Then there’s still plenty of places you can find us. You can subscribe to my newsletter, which is Letters From an American on Substack, and that’s a way to bring readers into the history behind today’s politics. And my next book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, which is obviously a reference to Thomas Jefferson, which I sort of feel Joanne got the last word there, is coming out on September 26th and you can pre-order it now if you’re interested.

Joanne Freeman:

You can also tune into my free weekly webcast, History Matters (…and so does coffee!) because it’s in the morning. It’s sponsored by the National Council for History Education. It’s at their website. You can find it at ncheteach.org/conversations. Every Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern time, I find a way in which history can offer us some guidance into how to chart our way through these rather complicated and tense current moments that we’re living through. And of course, you can also actually take my online course at Yale, the American Revolution, which is free and open to the public.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You can also follow us on social media platforms. Everything from the one that used to be known as Twitter and now is known as X and Facebook. And I’ve actually noticed and would love to hear more about this, that Joanne is using Threads in a bunch of new ways.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m all over the place, I swear.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, we’re both all over the place.

Joanne Freeman:

I’m on every platform pretty much. And Newbie is on a couple two.

But we’re not done yet. Over the next three weeks, we’re going to cover a few important topics that are going to have something to do with the upcoming election cycle, and it’ll give us a chance to think about what’s coming up ahead, and also generally speaking, we’re going to be thinking about some of the themes and ideas that really have defined the show over the last two years.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So for our listeners, please give us a phone call and let us know if you have a favorite moment from the show. If you make them relatively brief, we’ll be able to feature a few of them during our final episode. So you can leave us a voicemail at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-247-7338. You’ll hear Preet’s voice on the answering machine, but we’re the ones who will listen to them.

Joanne Freeman:

You can also write to us with any thoughts or questions at letters@cafe.com. That’s letters, L-E-T-T-E-R-S @CAFE.com.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And we’ll have many more reflections during our final episode on the past couple of years. But for now, we actually have a really interesting episode at hand.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, we are still almost a year away from the 2024 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, but we actually haven’t talked about the history of conventions thus far on Now & Then, and that’s one natural topic for us to discuss now in the lead up to what’s going to be coming next year. We are already beginning to get some sense of what these conventions will look like. So the Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago in August of 2024. Actually on August 8th, the DNC announced that Minyon Moore will be the chair of the DNC.

Moore, a Black woman, and Chicago native, is a longtime democratic party fixture. She served as President Clinton’s White House director of political affairs from 1999 until the end of his administration, and she played central roles in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 presidential runs. Moore has also played a behind the scenes role of significance in the Biden administration, and a lot of people credit her with encouraging President Biden to select now vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate in 2020 and Moore also counseled Biden in advance of his nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court last year.

Heather Cox Richardson:

If that’s the Democrats, the Republican National Convention will take place in July 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And the city got a dry run of the convention last Wednesday when the first Republican national primary debate took place there. Much of the current attention surrounding that convention, centers around security. There are widespread protests expected in the city, particularly if former President Trump is the nominee. So we have a long way to go until the conventions and how their dramas play out, but the story of why we have conventions and whether they have either helped or hindered the attempts of parties to embrace the concept of democracy, small-d democracy, might actually help us think about them going into 2024.

So Joanne, let’s start with where the heck we get conventions. They’re not in the constitution and they don’t start immediately. I have a lot of questions about this you’ll be happy to know.

Joanne Freeman:

Okay. Well, the first thing to know as you suggested, we don’t have them at the outset of American politics. We don’t have conventions at all. We have caucuses. In essence, there were, in one way or another, and this was true in nominating presidential candidates, it was true when considering one party or another thinking about congressional candidates, they would have a caucus, meaning a private meeting of a select number of people who would make some kind of a decision.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Do you know how you got invited to be a member of a caucus?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, in Congress there was a party caucus for each side. As far as other caucuses, I really think you were invited if you were seen as significant or important enough to be invited to the caucus. The important thing to note here, and people at the time realized it, was that there was nothing democratic about caucuses. They were small groups.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was who you knew.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, it was who you knew, there were people in this time period, the early American time period, who knew and understood how exclusive and undemocratic caucuses were and declared them that. For example, the Philadelphia Aurora declared in the late 1790s that the Federalist Congressional Caucus, which was going to pick a Federalist presidential ticket, was “a self-appointed, self-elected, self-delegated club or caucus or conspiracy of about 24 persons unknown to the constitution or the law.” Federalist John Trumbull of Connecticut disliked the whole idea of caucuses just on principle for all of these same reasons. He said, “I never attended a caucus underlined and never intend to do it.” So they were under understood to be exclusive methods of making political decisions, that had little if anything to do with the public.

Now, what I find fascinating is the transition between these caucuses and what will end up being conventions. Because in essence there comes to be an understanding, and you can hear it in the quotes that I just read, all of this does not look very small-d democratic. It doesn’t look like the people have anything to do with nominating, whether that’s congress, whether that’s president, it’s all back rooms. And that seems improper increasingly as American politics and the American political system becomes more at least symbolically democratic and eventually realistically democratic.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. Can I ask you a question about this though?

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if literally a caucus could be made up of, I’m going to say congress critters, but it could be just a bunch of rich guys in Kentucky or wherever. So if you are nominated for president by a caucus in the House of Representatives or the Senate, or maybe they caucus together, don’t you basically have to do what they say?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that’s a really interesting question because what’s missing in this period is party structure and discipline. So the answer to that question might be yes, if the people coming together in the caucus were a unified band of something. But more often than not, when you look at politics in this period, there’s some party ideology, there are personal ties, there’s sectional thoughts. It’s very hard to track people who stay in one lane and remain in that one lane. So on the one hand, yeah, you would think that the people who come together and say, we want you for president have some power over you, but I don’t think anyone really expected discipline in the sort of way that we do now because of parties.

In one of the earliest presidential caucuses leading up to the election of 1800, both sides, Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists, they were so unsure that members of these caucuses would stay true to the caucus that they made members of the caucuses swear their honor that they would stay true to what the party had decided, and throughout the election, in letter after letter, you see one person writing to another and saying, “You took the pledge. You pledged to support the candidate we picked.” So on the one hand, that’s fascinating they’re trying to instill discipline, but on the other hand, they don’t have it. And elections very early on didn’t end up with clean slates of two people on one side and two people on the other side.

For example, in 1796, only eight out of 16 states had a straight ticket as they had been picked. 52 out of a total of 136 presidential electors didn’t abide by the caucus decisions, and there were a total of 13 candidates who got electoral votes. So the pre-convention system is an attempt to get organization in these caucuses in a period when just generally that was hard to do. People didn’t trust it. And although it helped start off with a selected choice that wasn’t cemented in stone in any way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they give up the caucus system because if you’re on the outside, you look at that and you say, “You’re a bunch of weenies, we don’t want to abide by your choices.” Right?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, also because they want to look more democratic. So they do all of these funky things, again, not necessarily for president, but just generally to nominate people. For example, they will take over a town meeting and suddenly declare it a caucus or a meeting of some kind to pick a candidate. Or they’ll stage some kind of private caucus and then hold a convention and have people in the convention vote for candidates, but the private meeting before this semi seeming convention had already decided on the candidate. So the seeming convention isn’t a convention at all, it’s just a meeting that’s meant to look as though it’s small-d democratic.

So what you see in the early 19th century are people acknowledging that a handful of men in a room making a decision, it’s not in sync with what American democracy should be as limited as it’s understood to be at that moment. So they try in a variety of ways to create more public meetings. They create pronouncements that are saying, look at us, we’re engaged with the public, but they’re not really in any kind of a deep way. And so really you can see why, on a bunch of levels, the next natural movement is some kind of meeting that at least can suggest that it’s more than a room full of 24 men making a decision.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So how do we get that? I mean, how do we get the changes? And when do they come?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, in part, you get the rise of parties and then you have parties coming up with some way of finding a solution of picking candidates. For example, in 1831, the Anti-Masonic Party, which didn’t last very long, held a national convention just to get together as a pseudo party and to agree on candidates. A few months later, the Henry Clay led National Republican Party, which is on its way to becoming the Whigs, also held a national convention. This is in a period when obviously parties are coming and going and forming, and so in part what you’re seeing here is people trying to come together to be some kind of cohered organization or sentiment to bring people together from around the country, which isn’t necessarily easy to do at all, and get them together to make some kind of a decision. It’s the coming together of it, I think, the practical component of that, that in part helps to lead to what we might recognize more as a modern convention.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It sounds like the rise of parties in the convention system are in part a way to try and knit together this conglomerate of different interests around the country, in the 1830s?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, in the 1830s. In the 1820s when politics, really party politics, if you want to call it that, begins to get scrambled, they begin arguing about caucuses. And many people, as a matter of fact, refer to an object to what they call King caucus because it has control, but what’s happening as a result of it isn’t necessarily working the way people want to. So the 1830s is when you really more begin to see things that are like conventions. And not surprisingly, that’s also the era when you see the rise of Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy. And part of what he brings in is an understanding of the appeal and power of just having real political organization.

Now, of course, he talks about being in favor of the common man. He’s in favor of a certain kind of white common man, but still he mouths a lot of rhetoric that suggests we’re doing something different, we’re organizing and we’re working for the people. And that’s also part of what ushers in conventions, political conventions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The objections to King caucus really take off in 1824 when the Federalist Party has disappeared and the Jeffersonian Republicans have split into a whole bunch of factions. Are people complaining about King Caucus because their faction is not the one that’s in power? And they’re like, wait a minute here, we’re all supposed to be part of the same party. And instead you got a few guys who are choosing their leaders to take over everything, so let’s throw this all open to a much bigger system where we might have a better say? That is, is this partly just an internal political fight on the Jeffersonian Republican side?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, in part, and then whoever ends up being picked doesn’t feel like it’s a widely supported, decided upon candidate. It feels, and was indeed, fractured. You had lots of different candidates representing lots of different interests, and again, it was not structured in a way that would make presidential contests very easy. And this has to do with the election actually of 1824. There’s a caucus, the caucus comes up deciding that it’s going to support Treasury Secretary William Crawford, and the Baltimore Morning Chronicle says this of that decision, “The poor little political bird of ominous note and plumage denominated a caucus was hatched at Washington on Saturday last. It is now running around like a pullet in a forlorn and sickly state. Reader, have you ever seen a chicken directly after it was hatched, creeping about with a bit of eggshells sticking to its back? This is a just representation of this poor, forlorn congressional caucus. The sickly thing is to be fed, cherished, pampered for a week, when it is fondly hoped that it will be enabled to cry the name of Crawford, Crawford, Crawford.” That is some prose there. I just love the image.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s just funny because when you talk about the change from the caucus system to the nominating system, I just hear Martin Van Buren pulling all the strings, and I kind of roll my eyes. This is New York getting what New York wants again. But actually it seems to have played out in such a way that it actually does serve small-d democracy much better than the caucus system did.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, it did. And also people were aware of that at the time. But here’s the important thing to note, people were very aware of the fact that when you had some kind of nominating convention or something like that as opposed to a caucus, it looked more small-d democratic. And the appearance of this process of deciding things and the way in which it visibly in some way or another included or was appealing to the public mattered. Regardless of how much that was actually happening, the democratic appearance mattered.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that jumps out at me about this is that where these nominating conventions are held really matters until at least the second half of the 20th century, because of course, if it’s held near your favorite candidate, the chances are you’ll have more people there who support that candidate. And the machinations about where the conventions are going to be held really matter because literally until we get airplanes and cars, whether you’re closer to water or to land or to railroads or to nothing, actually really matters a lot in the 19th century. And one of the statistics I dug out, Chicago has been the city of the nominating convention for more than a quarter of our nominations, which kind of makes sense if you think about it being the central railroad hub of the country.

Joanne Freeman:

I was going to say location, absolutely. It’s a big city, but it has that useful location. That makes perfect sense.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So that really comes to the fore in 1860. The 1860 convention is really interesting and illustrative of all of these developments, both the idea of being small-d democratic and the idea of there being backdoor maneuvering, in that, for example, the fact that Chicago gets the Republican National Convention in 1860 when its real front runner is from New York, that would be William Henry Seward, is completely a function of what an incredible politician and maneuverer Abraham Lincoln was. Because of course the idea of there being a convention in his backyard was going to give him a huge leg up in the convention.

And one of the things that jumps out is when the convention meets in 1860 in Chicago, there’s complete disarray around the country in general, especially in the Democratic Party, but the fact that it’s held in Chicago means that Lincoln’s people are really able to set up the way it operates. In Chicago in 1860, there were only about 110,000 people and they did not have a big enough place to meet. So the Republican leaders constructed what was called the wigwam. It was a two story, 12,000 person capacity temporary structure. And what they did when they laid out the seats was they made it in such a way that it was very difficult to move down the benches. And then when they actually assign seating to the different delegates, they put the New York delegation, which would be supporting Lincoln’s chief rival, as I say, William Henry Seward, in such a way that they couldn’t easily get out of where they were sitting to go talk to other people.

Joanne Freeman:

And I just want to point out how typical of the ways in which political decisions get made with these very practical, often invisible moves. We’re going to make it so that these delegates who are going to support someone we don’t like are inconvenienced. We’ll put them in a location in which it’ll make it harder for them to make themselves heard.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s just so typical of so much in politics and even in the law where people will say, oh, this is even handed. Now this is an absolutely even handed. Look, everybody gets a seat, but your seat is in a place where you actually can’t move around.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s an improvement over where we started. It’s an improvement over 20 guys in a room, so that it’s more public, there are more people. It’s actually seemingly, in part, an open process, but still there’s this other component behind the scenes where people are making strategic decisions so that whatever happens in that room will fall a certain way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All right, so let’s set up the scene for the Republican National Convention in 1860. The Democrats had previously met in April of 1860 and they had shattered. They were unable to come up with a nominee in their April convention. When the Republicans meet in the following month, in May of 1860, in Chicago, they were supposed to be able to respond to whoever the Democrats nominated, but they didn’t nominate anybody. So the Republicans are really taking the bit in their teeth here.

They’re virtually a new party. In 1856, they nominated John C Fremont of California who actually ran very well, as did all the candidates in that election who stood against what they called the slave power, the people who were trying to spread enslavement into the American West. But the real issue for the Republicans was that there were a number of favorite son candidates, and I’ve mentioned William Henry Seward a lot. He was from New York, and really the protege of a major political kingmaker in New York named Thurlow Weed. The Lincoln people want to push Seward off stage by the seating arrangement, but also because of something significant in the way that the two men think. And this is where I’m really pushing the idea that the nominating convention enables the nomination of a president who can win in constituencies that are not necessarily the party’s most significant base.

Seward, he’s got Thurlow Weed behind him, he’s got New England reformers behind him, not all of them, some want somebody who’s more extreme than he is, but he has had the issue of the fact that he gave a big speech saying that there was an irrepressible conflict between the North and the South over the issue of enslavement. By 1858, Lincoln has given the House Divided speech that says we’re either going to be all enslavement or all freedom and this is the way it’s going to be. But then Seward has also given another speech in which he says that a higher law enables the government to get rid of enslavement. And for a lot of Americans, that was a really dangerous position to take because what that said is that his moral values outweighed the US Constitution.

This is something Lincoln noticed. He hit it very hard saying, listen, I don’t like human enslavement, but I also care deeply about our system of laws based in the Constitution. And if we are going to get rid of human enslavement, it has to be by constitutional means, which of course he’s going to do during the Civil War with first the Emancipation Proclamation and then his insistence on putting the end of human enslavement in the Constitution. He runs on that in 1864, and that’s where we get the 13th amendment to the Constitution. Because he was afraid that the emancipation proclamation, which he’d done under the war power, might not hold up once peace came back.

But by hammering on the idea that you couldn’t change the laws just because you had a moral sense that that law was wrong, Lincoln stood firm on the principle of the Constitution. Which really mattered because there’s a real question there. If my morality says there shouldn’t be slavery, what if your morality, as many Southerners were arguing, says that everybody should have enslavement? And that idea of pushing away morality as the centerpiece of America really mattered.

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. It’s an important point which we certainly have made before on the show, and which the framers thought about too, which is that process and structure and system matters. That’s how you get out of difficult political binds. That’s how you find your way through a crisis. It’s through structure and system and the constitution ultimately. So it makes perfect sense that, at least for some people, moving towards there’s a higher law, mode, of reasoning your way through politics would feel dangerously unconstitutional or at least would open the door to moving in that direction.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, we just made that sound very highfalutin and principled, in fact, there was a lot of wheeling and dealing that went on at the convention.

Joanne Freeman:

At the convention, Seward narrowly wins the first ballot, but at that point, Abraham Lincoln’s supporters end up convincing Pennsylvania senator and contender Simon Cameron to convince the Pennsylvania delegation to throw their support to Lincoln. Lincoln expressly said that he didn’t want to be held to any kind of binding deal. He telegraphed the people representing him at the convention saying, “I authorized no bargains and will be bound by none.” Even so, Cameron, Simon Cameron, ends up in a cabinet position in exchange for his support. He serves as Lincoln’s Secretary of War at the start of his administration. And with Cameron and those delegates secured, other long shot candidates begin to throw their support to Lincoln. So Lincoln wins the nomination decisively on the third ballot, which happens a lot in these conventions, is that people go in thinking one person is the obvious person and it ends up being sometimes someone who people really have almost not heard of, but is acceptable to the people in the room.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and this is a great example of wheeling and dealing. Simon Cameron was as corrupt as the day was long, and he doesn’t last long in the position because he is so corrupt. But it’s really Cameron’s willingness to back Lincoln that starts this real stampede toward the Lincoln ticket so he’s nominated decisively on the third ballot. And then his people really push the idea that this is a small-d democratic triumph. So one of his key managers, a guy named Leonard Swett, says, “5,000 people leaped to their seats, women not wanting. And the wild yell made vesper breathings of all that proceeded. A thousand steam whistles, 10 acres of hotel gongs, a tribe of Comanches might have mingled in the scene unnoticed.” Journalist Murat Halstead though, saw it in a very different way. He said, “Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, a score of big steam whistles going, steam at 160 pounds per inch, and you conceive something of the same nature. I thought the Seward yell could not be surpassed, but the Lincoln boys were clearly ahead and feeling their victory.”

Joanne Freeman:

I have to say two things here. One is, I found it really fascinating and amusing the degree to which how loud people could yell was seen as a sign of the power of candidates, even just on the streets of Washington. When I was doing research for my last book, you have people judging who’s louder, and if one candidate’s people are louder, the other deliberately will go and try and be louder still, I think in part for the fun of it, but also again, sort of mirroring or suggesting there’s popular support. The people are crying out.

And the point related to that that I want to make is, I think Americans generally have a sense of Lincoln as honest Abe. He’s this guy who comes out of nowhere and he’s this honest president. What they don’t necessarily have is an image of him as someone who can politically coordinate and maneuver behind the scenes. And the fact that what we’re seeing here is Lincoln in that mode, not necessarily in a corrupt way, but in an effective way, that makes an important point about American politics and the fact that democracy and appealing to the Democratic ideal and being strategic politically and maneuvering and managing things so that you get the ends you want, that they can both be there at the same time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and I think actually the idea at the time of shouting louder is a proxy for how many people are shouting. And the thing that always jumps out to me, and I always tell people in the modern era, if they care about politics to take up oxygen for this very reason, because you look at, for example, at the book bannings of late, and it turns out that the people who are banning all these books, there’s like two people. And the idea that our social media is dealing with algorithms now that make it possible to amplify very few voices so it looks like they’re lot of voices.

Joanne Freeman:

They seem to be screaming louder.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, yes, exactly. And a lot of people insist that those who are opposing the extremists in America are a minority, and it’s the exact opposite. But the minority has been able to scream louder thanks to the algorithms that amplify their voices. Kind of interesting that that idea of shouting louder is really still a central way of maintaining that you have a majority and a popular majority going into an election.

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely. And it’s grounded on a kind of struggle that goes all the way back to the founding, which is that they realized, even when they were not necessarily small-d democratic, that in a democratic republic the people govern and public opinion matters. But from the very beginning, they were asking each other constantly, how do we know what the public thinks? Who is the public? What does that mean public opinion matters? And some of what we’re looking at here is the simple fact that if you’re loud and consistent, you can be taken for public opinion.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that brings us to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which many people probably remember. It is an iconic event in American history, because it is transformative, I think, for both parties. But the Democratic National Convention is especially transformative for the Democrats because of the way it changes the way that the Democrats select presidential candidates. And that’s going to lead to a decade of reform and of rethinking how the party is going to come up with its leaders.

But I think it’s also really important that 68 set of conventions, because it’s the first set of conventions in which both parties have to grapple with the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Because the 1965 Voting Rights Act says, hold on a second here, folks. Black Americans and people of color are going to be roaring into voting booths after ’65 in ’68. How are the political parties going to grapple with the small-d idea that minority voters are going to be key in this country? And the way the two parties respond is illustrative and it shapes the period ever since then.

Joanne Freeman:

And again, along the lines of the theme that we’re developing here, once again, you see reform and revision that in one way or another has to do with the working of, again, small-d democracy, how people want it to work, how it actually is working, how it needs to appear to be working, and how that’s changing over time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The Republican party holds its convention in such a way that there’s really only two ways into it by road. And so they’re really able to use their positioning of where they are to control who’s there and to make it look very calm, and that’s really going to matter. And people think about going into the election of ’68, oh look, the Republican convention was simple and calm. That’s not what’s going to happen in Chicago.

Because in Chicago, the Democratic Party has a real issue because LBJ, the president has gotten deeply involved in the Vietnam War, and he actually runs, and then he drops out. He drops out in March, which means that Hubert Humphrey, who’s his vice president, who’s going to take over sort of the LBJ mantle going into this election, has not actually participated in the primaries, but he of course is the choice of the people who are behind the LBJ presidency.

So then when LBJ drops out in March, there are two anti-Vietnam candidates who’ve been running in the primaries. Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, both are picking up speed in the presidential primaries. And then in the midst of all this, Kennedy is assassinated on the night that he wins the California primary, which is June 5, 1968. So now we have Hubert Humphrey who’s the choice of essentially the people who are running the Democratic Party, but he hasn’t participated in the small-d democratic process. And then we have Gene McCarthy, the Minnesota Senator who’s anti-Vietnam, who’s really popular among the younger voters who see him as a progressive candidate, going into the convention. And at the convention, the Democrats, just like the Republicans, still pick their presidential candidates through the delegate system. And the delegate system is run by politically important state leaders who are known as delegates who vote in behalf of their state at the National Convention.

Joanne Freeman:

The Democratic Convention in July of 1968 was marred by, as suggests by what Heather was just saying, widespread protest against Vietnam and the closed nature of the Democratic primary process. So anti-war activists ended up clashing with Chicago police officers outside of the International Amphitheater, which was the site of the convention, leading to 600 arrests and 250 serious injuries.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And can I just say something about that? That becomes known as a police riot, and I actually watched footage of that last year, as one does. What really jumped out at me was that we know it as the police riot, as this really incredibly violent event when the police turn their badges around and they just start whacking people in the crowd. If you look at that, it emphasizes just how incredibly militarized our country has become since then. The police in that police riot are wearing slacks and cotton shirts and they have helmets on and they have nights sticks. And you’ve set that up against what the image of, I think it was June 2, 2020 of the militarized police on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and you just think, what the hell happened?

Joanne Freeman:

And again, to emphasize the point you’re making here, as I mentioned just a moment ago, there were 600 arrests and 250 serious injuries. So we’re not talking about scale, we’re talking about the nature of the “combat.” I hadn’t thought of that before, but that’s actually really striking and of course somewhat terrifying in its own way.

But meanwhile, as that’s happening outside of the convention and things are deteriorating, the assembled delegates in large part decided to back Humphrey despite McCarthy’s strong primary performance, Humphrey’s lack of primary participation, and Humphrey’s unpopular defense of Vietnam. As they nominated Humphrey, whose chances aren’t necessarily huge, the convention also voted to create a commission to reform the delegate selection rules to make them more of an authentic representation of the Democratic Party electorate. And that is key. Here you begin to see change.

The commission was led by South Dakota Senator George McGovern and released its report in advance of the 1972 Democratic National Convention, by which point McGovern himself was the front runner for the Democratic nomination. And this commission included stipulations that number one, only 10% of delegates could be appointed by state party committees. Number two, delegate selection process had to be governed by public written rules. And number three, minorities, women and younger Americans had to be represented within the delegate base. You can see here really a shift in attempting to just change the nature of the people who are there in the conventions shaping what’s happening, shaping choices.

And the new rules had an immediate impact on the makeup of delegates, particularly those from the south, and in the end almost certainly helped McGovern, who was something of a progressive voice in the party, to secure the 1972 nomination. Black, Southern delegates increased from 10% of the total Southern delegate base in 1968 to 24% in 1972, while southern women increased from 12% in 1968 to 36% in 1972.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things this does is it does in fact increase participation in the Big D Democratic Party. There’s an explosion in state primaries, democratic primaries double from 17 in 1968 to 35 in 1980. 13 million Americans participate in the nominating process in 1968, while 32 million do in 1980. But one of the things that happens is that of course, George McGovern loses in a landslide to Nixon in 1972. And one of the things that the Republicans do in this period is they try and look like they’re opening things for more people, but in fact, they arrange their system in such a way that the early nominating procedures for the Republicans happen in low information states where people tend to vote according to name recognition. So the backroom guys still get to decide essentially who’s nominated for the Republicans, even though it looks much more popular. This new approach to nominating presidents of course leads to McGovern’s astonishingly high landslide loss to President Nixon in 1972.

The Democrats decide they’re going to rework their nominating process to undo some of the recommendations of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. They have another commission called the Hunt Commission. And that commission openly said that the McGovern campaign was a mistake. It’s a North Carolina governor who says they need to appeal to more moderate working class Democrats who had been bolting the party to side with the Republicans after Reagan.

There’s two important takeaways here. One is the idea that if you simply go with the enthusiasms of the people who show up for the primary process, you get the most extreme members of the base. And we’re seeing that now in the Republican party, of course, and the Democrats start a new system of what are called super delegates. And those super delegates are designed to be a ballast in the party, if you will, so that they don’t go for another McGovern. It also though, I think, reflects the degree to which the Democrats for all that in 68 they looked as if they were going to embrace this small-d democracy that is ushered in with the Voting Rights Act of ’65. They back off it and they say, wait a minute, we’re going to try and get those white voters back. So the idea they’re grasping at that, at those white working class voters, is something that the party is not really going to adequately address until 2020.

Joanne Freeman:

Think about the balancing act there. The first reforms, in one way or another, make the primaries of particular importance. And as you just mentioned a moment ago, people who vote in primaries do tend to be people who have more extreme views. So that’s part of the result of these reforms. And in response to that, they say, okay, okay, okay, super delegates, insiders of one kind or another, who are going to move us back a little bit from that extreme democracy. That balancing act of democracy versus control, I mean, that’s as old as the republic, but it’s so strikingly blatant here.

It’s like Uh-oh, we let the floodgates open a little bit too much, so let’s close them a little because that’s kind of dangerous. Being aware of that balance between opening things up so that they become less exclusive and then pulling things back in, that’s just an important dynamic overall to bear in mind whenever you’re looking at any American politics, but particularly contemporary American politics.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But I look at the super delegates actually quite positively because they say to me, and there’s a leap here, but they say to me, Abraham Lincoln’s people. As in, yeah, William Henry Seward might’ve been more popular because he said, I’m going to get rid of enslavement tomorrow, but he never could have gotten elected because a lot of people, of voters, would look at that and say, “Wait a minute, if you get rid of enslavement tomorrow, what are you going to do next if you’re only answering to God?” You need to answer to the Constitution.

The thing about super delegates is that they can come in and say, “Listen, you might love your candidate, whomever, but that person will never get a vote in North Carolina.” That’s what the super delegates do. They are made up of elected members of the Democratic National Committee. They’re sitting democratic governors and congresspeople. They’re former democratic presidents, vice presidents and congressional leaders, and they’re un-pledged, so they can throw their votes to somebody who might not otherwise be whipping up their base supporters, but who can win in both Georgia and South Dakota and New York, maybe not by getting all those base voters, but by making it a general enough case that they can get elected.

Joanne Freeman:

But what I love about this is that I agree with you, that bringing these people in, as you put it to ballast the party, can make things in a sense more democratic, but they’re doing that by giving these very selective members, elected members of the DNC and sitting governors and congresspeople and former presidents and vice presidents. It’s a very select group of people who are beaming in to help sift through and sort through what’s happening for good purpose, as you suggested, though very possibly for bad purpose. Again, it gets back to the idea of balance to me, which I just find fascinating.

Trying to figure out how democracy works, how it works best, what are the biggest threats against it, and how much control allows it to flow without stopping it up and preventing it from happening. The balance of democracy is very difficult to manage. And in this convention conversation that we’re seeing over the course of these centuries, that’s part of what we’re watching.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So it brings us to the present where both parties are really launching new ways of figuring out who’s going to lead their party.

Joanne Freeman:

And new almost wants to be in quotation marks because we’re at a moment where, in one way or another, very aggressively, bluntly, assertively, we’re not only talking about methods, we’re talking about how democratic they are or aren’t in a different kind of way. So it’s not necessarily, as we’ve been talking throughout this episode, how are the people represented? How are they not represented? In a way, what we’re looking at now, particularly on the right, is people questioning the democratic process itself and how it functions. So we’re no longer talking about balancing numbers and power. We’re just talking about power now and how the political process in one way or another can shape who has power and who keeps power.

A great example of the moment that we’re in and how we’re not just talking about shifts in balance but in something entirely new, has to do with the fact that in 2020, the Republican Party basically didn’t have a platform. Now, think about that. We didn’t talk about platforms throughout this episode, but typically that’s what happens at these conventions. There’s a platform and people talk about, this is what the party represents, even as they’re finagling to figure out who their nomination will be. There’s a platform about what the party represents, and by bringing parties together, national representatives into one space, it matters. In 2020, the Republicans just don’t. They just don’t have a platform of that sort. That’s striking. That’s pretty remarkable.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Now, in contrast to that, the Democrats in 2020 under Joe Biden really seemed finally to be grappling with the reality that the Voting Rights Act of ’65 changed who small-d democrats were in this country and recognized that rather than essentially making white Americans the default, that if in fact the United States was going to move into the 21st century along with the rest of the world, it needed to recognize the crucial importance of people of color, women and black Americans to that democratic process. And now going into the August 2024 nominating convention, it is not insignificant that the DNC has made Minyon Moore, a black woman, the chair of the DNC. It to me is a sea change in the concept of American democracy, small-d democracy, that really is playing out in a very, very powerful way leading into 2024.

Joanne Freeman:

Throughout this episode, we’ve been talking about conventions as a number of things combined. We’ve been talking about them as, in part, a display, carrying out, demonstration, almost performance of the power of the people. In part, an arena where you can have the sort of machinations that you need to end up with an outcome that everyone will support. In part, a system and a structure that offers some kind of support and guardrails for the democratic electoral process. We’ve also talked about how in one way or another these conventions are a reflection of where politics, and in a way, American society is at a given moment.

And in that sense, as we’re coming into the next year, it’s really important to think about all of those things as we’re watching these conventions that are going to be coming. what is on display? What is the performance that we’re going to be witnessing? What do we know or what do we think is happening behind the scenes? What structurally are these conventions doing? Who’s included? Who’s excluded? How do they or do they not connect with simple constitutional principles and structures? And what do these conventions reflect or reveal about that party’s vision of America and who counts at that moment in time? Democracy really is a continuing balancing act. And in a sense, conventions are a public minded moment intended to broadcast a message. And the real question for next year will be, what message is being sent by the two parties, and what does that mean?