When America Liked Ike by Gary A. Donaldson

Author:Gary A. Donaldson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter 7

Conventions

Both parties headed off to their respective Chicago conventions without concrete decisions as to who their candidates would be. Since the 1970s, the two parties have chosen their candidates through national primary campaigns that have lasted most of the election year cycle. But in the immediate postwar years, primaries only played a small part in the nominating process. Often parties would assemble at their conventions without a certain candidate in place, and the delegates would fight it out, voting, and voting again, until one candidate emerged, collected the number of delegate votes needed, and accepted the nomination of the party. Such was the case with both party conventions in 1952.

If there ever was a city that fit the bill as a national convention city, it was Chicago. It was centrally located. It had the facilities for a convention, all located near downtown. And Chicago could claim the experience to do the job. Four years earlier, in 1948, both parties had made (what was considered by many) the terrible choice of moving their conventions to Philadelphia, where it was hot, rainy, and both parties had a fairly awful experience: Tom Dewey had been nominated by the GOP in an air of perceived victory, and then lost the election; and the Democrats had nominated Truman in an atmosphere of defeat, leading the South to bolt the party to run their own third-party candidate. The Chicago Convention Building and International Amphitheater (although a couple of miles from the downtown Loop) boasted a new air-conditioning system, and it had several advantages to accommodate the new medium of television. The Republican convention was set to open on July 7. By that time, by most accounts, Taft was within striking distance of a first ballot victory over Eisenhower. But when the Republican delegates arrived at their hotels in Chicago, they were hit immediately with the Fair Play Resolution, a challenge being pushed by Eisenhower’s people. Some state delegations had come to Chicago contested. Delegates from eight states (as many as seventy-five delegates) had filed complaints with the Republican National Committee that their validity was somehow in question. The most important of that group was Texas, with thirty-eight contested delegates. Eisenhower’s supporters had drafted a telegram that accused the Truman administration of corruption in office, and insisting that in order for the Republican Party to combat that corruption, “the Republican nominee [must] enter the campaign with clean hands, and no question can be raised regarding the methods employed in his securing the nomination.”1 It was Taft’s people who controlled the RNC and the other committees that would decide the issue, and it looked as though Taft (and not Eisenhower) would win the contested delegate decisions. But Taft’s people insisted that the decisions regarding the contested delegates be made behind closed doors, not televised, and without the presence of the press. That decision, apparently, made the press people covering the convention mad, and Taft began to be treated badly in the press.2 Within just twenty-four hours, Taft

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