THE REPUBLICAN PARTY will meet in Philadelphia July 31-Aug. 3 to nominate Texas Gov. George W. Bush as its presidential nominee. It will be the GOP's 37th presidential nominating convention and its sixth such gathering in the City of Brotherly Love.
It will, however, mark the end of a 52-year hiatus for Philadelphia as host of a major party national convention. Here's one way of looking at just how long it has been since Pennsylvania's biggest city played host to both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1948:
The Republicans are billing their 2000 meeting as the first full-fledged convention of the Internet age. But the last time the party went to Philadelphia - to nominate New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey for his illfated challenge to President Harry S. Truman - it was the dawn of the television age. In fact, the infant medium of television had a lot to do with the parties' choice of Philadelphia that year, according to historian Zachary Karabell, author of the recently published book, The Last Campaign: Horn Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election.
"Only on the East Coast could you be sure that there would be programs and reception, and then only in the major cities did AT&T's coaxial cable provide a fuzzy picture on those massive livingroom consoles with their tiny seven-inch screens. The broadcast range of television was 50 miles, and in order to reach the widest constituency of viewers, the political parties chose Philadelphia as their convention site. From there, the AT&T cables took images up and down the coast and into the living rooms of the select owners of the new boxes," Karabell wrote.
There will be more new than "new media" about this year's Republican convention. One of the reasons that the convention is in Philadelphia is because of its nearly new, spacious, high-tech-wired arena, the First Union Center, in the sports complex on the city's south side.
However, there will be plenty of harking to the old when the GOP meets in the historic city. Republican attendees certainly will hear convention speeches laden with the symbolism and imagery of holding a nominating convention in a place that includes Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.
This was a recurring theme during those days, long ago, when Philadelphia was a frequent stop on the Republican convention circuit. As Mark Hanna, the famous Republican Party boss, told national convention delegates who gathered in Philadelphia to re-nominate President William McKinley exactly 100 years ago: "The National Republican Committee made no mistake when they brought the national convention to the city of Philadelphia. This city, the cradle of liberty, the birthplace of the Republican Party, this magnificent industrial center, a veritable beehive of industry."
With his allusion to the OOP's "birthplace," Hanna was referring to the fledgling Republican Party holding its first presidential convention in Philadelphia in June 1856. The new party (it was officially founded elsewhere in 1854) organized around one unifying princi- pie: opposing the extension of slavery to the Western territories just then being populated by American settlers.
At the 1856 gathering, delegates selected as their presidential nominee John C Fremont, the famous explorer known as the "Pathfinder" for his expeditions in the West in the 1840s - an embodiment of Americans' belief in their "manifest destiny" to dominate the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Their vice presidential nominee was former New Jersey Sen. William L. Dayton, who beat out a former Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln for the No. 2 slot. But Fremont lost the election that November to Democrat James Buchanan.
Republicans returned to Philadelphia 16 years later, holding a convention on June 5-6, 1872. The intervening years had been tempestuous: Lincoln's election as the first Republican president in 1860; the Gvil War from 1861-65; Lincoln's assassination in April 1865; and the election of Republican Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. Republicans were again poised to nominate Grant, even though a reformist faction of "Liberals" had bolted the party over the administra tion's purported corruption of civil service.
Rejecting the Li berals' call that Grant retire after one term was Gerritt Smith, head of the New York delegation to the Republican convention, who said that "my doctrine is that his having proved himself a good president once, proves him fitted for it a second term." Smith said Grant should be p elected "because the a slavery battle is not yet fought out," a reference to the Southern Reconstruction era then underway. The only suspense was over the vice presidency: Incumbent Vice President Schuyler Colfax was defeated for renomination by Massachusetts Sen. Henry Wilson. That November, Grant trounced New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, who ran under the Liberal Republican and Democratic banners. (The Democrats, who met in Baltimore in July, rubberstamped the Liberal Republicans' candidates and platform.) Greeley died before the electoral votes were certified.
The Republicans next held a national convention in Philadelphia in 1900, and again they prepared to renominate a popular president. McKinley, still bathed in the glow of popularity from the United States' victory in the Spanish-American War, had no intra-party opposition and was unanimously selected on the first ballot.
As in the 1872 convention, most of the suspense revolved around who would be the vice presidential nominee. As fate would have it, the delegates' decision would have a profound impact on American history. The death of Vice President Garrett Hobart in 1899 created an opening on McKinley's ticket. McKinley took no part in naming his running mate and instructed Hanna to do the same.
That worked to the advantage of Theodore Roosevelt, the popular 41-year-old New York governor and a hero of the SpanishAmerican War. Roosevelt had seemed opposed to his selection as the vice presidential nominee. But Roosevelt, whose behavior at the convention was termed by author Edmund Morris as "so puzzling as to defy logical analysis," confidently strode down the aisle of the convention hall on June 19, donning a wide-brimmed black hat one observer quipped was "an acceptance hat." Though Hanna was chagrined by the independent-minded Roosevelt's nomination, the Republican ticket that November swept to victory for the ninth time in 11 presidential elections.
Barely more than a year later, McKinley was assassinated by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, and Roosevelt succeeded him. Serving in the office until 1909, Roosevelt would be one of the nation's most popular presidents.
The Republicans next returned to Philadelphia in 1940, when they were going up against eight years of a popular Democratic administration. Those were the days before the 22nd Amendment imposed a two term limitation on presidential service, and Republicans had to someone to take on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was expected to stand for an unprecedented third term.
The Republican convention's choice was unconventional: Wendell Willkie, a charismatic, likable lawyer and corporation executive from Indiana. Dewey, then known as the "crime-busting" young Manhattan district attorney, and Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, son of former President William Howard Taft, both were serious candidates for the presidency before Willkie emerged. By the convention, both sensed Willkie's strength. But neither Dewey nor Taft withdrew in favor of the other; it took Willkie six ballots, but he clinched the nomination. He lost to FDR decisively in November.
Few could have guessed that when the Republicans came back in 1948, it would be their last convention in Philadelphia for more than a half-century. Dewey, in the intervening eight years, had been elected governor of New York in 1942, lost to the waning Roosevelt as the 1944 Republican nominee and was re-elected as governor inl946. He entered the 1948 campaign as the solid frontrunner for the GOP nom- ination. But unlike 1944, when he was the near-unanimous party choice for the unenviable task of challenging the revered Roosevelt in wartime, Dewey in 1948 had to fend off challenges from Tait and Harold Stassen, Minnesota's "boy governor." Dewey prevailed on the third ballot.
Nominated for vice president was California Gov. Earl Warren, who would kter become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (and a liberal jurist who would become a major irritant to conservative Republicans).
The Democrats, who convened in Philadelphia a month after the Republicans, nominated Truman, who was elected vice president in 1944 and succeeded to the presidency upon Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Cast as the scrappy underdog, "Give 'Em Hell Harry" narrowly defeated Dewey to win election in his own right.
[Author Affiliation]
-Gregory L Giroux, CQ Politics Staff
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