Politics and Punditry: Could this be 1924 all over again?

While seeking his party’s 1960 presidential nomination, John Kennedy used to warm up Democratic Party gatherings with an anecdote about the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York, where the delegates — bitterly divided over race and religion — took 103 ballots and 17 days before finally compromising on a nominee, respected West Virginia lawyer John W. Davis, who would win just 29 percent of the national vote that November.

According to JFK, sometime before the 95th ballot and after the mounting costs of room and board in the Big Apple had emptied many Democrats’ wallets, the chairman of the Massachusetts delegates called a caucus where he announced, “We are faced with a choice — either we move to a more modest hotel or to a more liberal candidate.”

In 1924, for the first time, a Catholic, New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith, was a serious candidate to become the presidential nominee of a major American political party. Smith, the son of Irish immigrants, had compiled a progressive public record and was the favorite of Northern Catholic and Jewish voters and the huddled masses of the cities.

He was a “wet” who favored the repeal of the constitutional amendment that prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and whose candidacy provoked the unbridled opposition of the anti-drink “drys,” Protestants from the South and West, as well as others resisting the loss of power to so many recently arrived “new” Americans.

Their standard-bearer, Southern-born Protestant William Gibbs McAdoo had family connections. He was the son-in-law of the last two-term Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, and had been secretary of the treasury.

McAdoo is rightly remembered for defining the empty rhetoric of Republican president Warren Harding as “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”

Anti-immigrant fever gripped the nation. A new federal law limited immigration to 2 percent of the ethnic composition of the country in the 1890 census and no Japanese — which was before all those foreigners speaking different languages and practicing different faiths invaded from Eastern and Southern Europe.

The Ku Klux Klan, with a national membership in the millions and a nativist creed, was so prominent at the 1924 convention that newspapers called the party event a “Klanbake.” On July 4, in the middle of the convention, the Klan, most wearing sheets and hoods, held a cross-burning celebration for 20,000 across the river in New Jersey, where they threw baseballs at an image of Al Smith.

On a resolution to specifically condemn them by name, the Democrats — by the closest vote in convention history, 543 and three-twentieths votes to 542 and seven-twentieths votes, unheroically refused to condemn the anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black organization.

This tawdry chapter in party history did mark the last hurrah for the Klan-backed McAdoo and the national debut of the man who would lead the Democrats to majority status in the nation.

On crutches and crippled from the polio, which had struck him three years earlier at the age of 39, Franklin Roosevelt electrified the Madison Square Garden crowd with his speech nominating Al Smith. It ended with these lines from William Wordsworth:

“This is the Happy Warrior, this is he

Whom every man in arms should wish to be.”

Four years later, Al Smith would be the Democratic nominee and would lose the presidency and most of the up-to-then solidly Democratic (and anti-Catholic) Southern and border states to Republican Herbert Hoover.

With today’s Democrats bickering about race — including the egotistical Bill Clinton’s indefensible charge that the Obama campaign had played “the race card” against him -- and religion — with the terminally narcissistic Rev. Jeremiah Wright demonstrating that patronizing abrasiveness and intolerance are not the exclusive property of the majority race — the party could be poised in a year when the Republican “brand” has been almost mortally damaged and devalued to do the impossible and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It just might be 1924 all over again.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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Copyright 2008 Mark Shields