January 06, 2008

Keeping track of 1948 political conventions was tricky

By Gene Krider

On Dec. 28, I was diagnosed with strep throat and on New Year’s Day with pneumonia. So my 2007 is continuing into 2008, sort of like the never-ending presidential election.

My first memory of one was the conventions of 1948, and I have augmented my recollections with a printout from Wikipedia.

The 1948 presidential conventions were actually very historic: the first after the end of World War II; the first to be televised (although only about 1 percent of Americans could view them, many in bars); the last in which national radio played a major media role; the only ones that resulted in fielding four party nominees; and a strange GOP platform that was much more liberal than that of the Democrats.

I think I took an interest in the conventions because all four radio networks carried the gavel-to-gavel proceedings and preempted their usual summer programming. This meant I could not listen to NBC’s “Monday Night of Music,” comedy shows or “The Lucky Strike Hit Parade.” I had read some political news, so I was familiar with the main races.

In those days, most delegates were picked by state party conventions, so it was usually known in advance that neither party had a majority of delegates, so a lot of deals were made, or not made, in “smoke-filled rooms” with various candidate’s backers politicking for delegates.

As I remember, the voting rules stated that on the first ballot delegates had to vote for the candidate they were pledged to, but after that the smoked-filled rooms were puffing away. Then state party chairmen could release their delegates to vote for another candidate or could be released to vote as they wanted.

As each state’s name was called out from the rostrum, the chairman would stand up and shout into the microphone something like this: “The Great State of Michigan, whose tremendous manufacturing base contributed mightily to producing armaments to win the war, is proud to cast its ballots as follows.” Then tallies would be read. Almost inevitably, a delegate would grab the mike and call out, “I demand that the delegates be polled!” accompanied by a great groan from the delegates.

This procedure produced the only levity in the convention when a delegate from the Virgin Islands would demand that his delegation be polled. The Virgin Islands only had two delegates. A robust laugh accompanied by shrill whistles would immediately erupt from the tired delegates.

The Republican Convention was held in June with 11 candidates and obviously did not have a clear winner. For the second roll call, I can remember stretching out on my bed with a Blue Horse spiral-bound notebook with all the candidates listed so I could write down all their votes. Then I would add and subtract to see what was happening.

Remember, I only had a toy addition machine to help me. After all the states had been canvassed, any state could ask to change their ballots, and it really got messy and there were many calls for the state delegation to be polled always including the Virgin Islands.

I believe the second ballot went on into the middle of the night and I stayed with it, erasing and striking through my ballot list entries until it was almost illegible.

Next week, the GOP and Democratic results.