A "Klanbake" at the 1924 Democratic National Convention

Part One in a series on nativism in American politics in the 1920s and 2020s

Scene from the 1924 Democratic National Convention. (via Wikimedia Commons)

Apologies for not posting last week. I always underestimate the time-consuming nature of the end of a school year and the beginning of summer with kids. But I thought this week I’d dive into the topic of nativism in American politics with a series of “History for Today” posts. Specifically, a look at how the anti-immigration movement roiling American politics at the moment is reminiscent of similar sentiments that upended two consecutive presidential elections almost exactly one century ago.

American nativism in the 1920s and the 2020s

I’ve been thinking lately about how politics in America in the 2020s actually has some intriguing, and perhaps uncomfortable, resemblances to politics in America in the 1920s. And I’m not talking about the pandemics (the flu pandemic in 1918 and COVID in 2020) which upended society and politics during both eras. Rather, what’s been on my mind is how a powerful homegrown nativist movement managed to inflame American politics during each of those two decades, a century apart from each other.

These days, as we know, there is a constant stream of headlines about the immigration policies of the Trump administration, the controversial arrest tactics used by ICE agents, the courtroom battles, and in a surprising number of cases the deportations even of immigrants who have no criminal record. Anti-immigration sentiment has been growing for some years now, sparked by the large numbers of migrants who have come to the U.S. in recent decades, both illegally and legally, from across Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa.

But this dismay over immigration is quite similar, actually, to sentiments expressed in the 1920s, when the country had also just experienced several decades of record high immigration, in that case from southern and eastern Europe. The Italian Catholics, Polish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, and others who migrated to America at the time caused considerable angst among some Americans because (aside from perhaps the Irish Catholics who’d come in the 19th century) a majority of earlier settlers were white Protestants from northwestern Europe. Thus, there was fear that these new immigrants would never entirely fit into American culture or ever be true Americans.

As Sen. David Reed of Pennsylvania wrote in the New York Times in 1924:

For the first time in our history men began to come large numbers from Italy, Greece, Poland, Turkey in Europe, the Balkan States and from Russia … This change brought new difficulties in the problem of assimilation. These new peoples spoke strange languages. It was not to be expected that they would readily fuse into the population that they found here. It was natural that they should not understand our institutions, since they came from lands in which popular government is a myth.

Reed’s piece was published in support of a new law that would soon be passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis, the Immigration Act of 1924, which established immigration quotas. The bill banned most immigrants from Asia and set severe caps on many other countries in an effort to ensure that most new immigrants would again come from northwestern Europe. These policies stood for four decades, until they were revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Newspaper headline about the 1924 Immigration Act. (via Library of Congress)

Of course, concern over whether immigrants can assimilate is one thing. But there was also a darker side to the anti-immigration movement of the 1920s, notably with a revived Ku Klux Klan that gained popularity across the country and took aim not only at Blacks but also at Catholic and Jewish immigrants. There was fear that these groups would somehow undermine or threaten the traditions of American society. The sentiments were so powerful they threw American politics, and particularly the Democratic party, into turmoil for two consecutive presidential elections.

So I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at those elections and at that era as a way to explore this nativist thread in U.S. politics. I’ll tackle the 1924 and 1928 elections in separate pieces, with an additional post later to look more closely at politics today and in comparison to the 1920s.

Let’s start with the 1924 presidential contest, with a focus on that year’s Democratic convention, which was a doozy of an event that vividly displayed the fractures running through American society.

The 1924 Democratic convention

When the 1924 presidential race kicked off, the Republican Calvin Coolidge was preparing to run against a yet-to-be nominated Democrat. Coolidge himself had been president for less than a year, having taking over from Warren Harding after the former president’s death in 1923 of a heart attack.

Despite his brief time in the Oval Office, Coolidge was a popular figure. The 1920s economy was booming and Coolidge, a famously taciturn New Englander who’d grown up on a Vermont farm, was a president who focused less on making waves than on limiting government and not doing anything to upset the country’s prosperity. At the 1924 GOP convention in Cleveland, he was overwhelmingly nominated to run for another term.

The Democrats, on other hand, had anything but an easy time in finding a nominee. The leading candidates were Governor Al Smith of New York and former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo of California. Smith was a popular governor of a large state, while McAdoo had served as Treasury Secretary and created the Federal Reserve system while serving in President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet. Neither contender, however, controlled enough delegates to claim the nomination at that year’s convention in New York City. To complicate matters, the party’s two biggest constituencies each backed a different candidate and were bitterly divided over key issues.

For decades, the Democratic Party’s core base had been the rural, Protestant vote in the South and West. This electorate in 1924 strongly favored Prohibition, the Constitutional amendment outlawing alcohol. A fair number of these delegates were also affiliated with the newly revived Ku Klux Klan, which (as noted above) was not only anti-Black but also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. With several million members across the country, the KKK opposed any policy that seemed to threaten the perpetuation of a white, Protestant American culture.

These issues of nativism and Prohibition were more interrelated than they seem on the surface, and in a way that was hugely problematic for Democrats. That’s because Prohibitionists connected the problem of alcohol abuse to urban immigrants. The issue of “the immigrant and the saloon,” as it was known, was a driving force behind the Prohibition movement.

But, as fate would have it, the Democrats’ other longtime base consisted of … yes, immigrants. These voters clustered in northern cities, were loyal to urban political machines, opposed Prohibition, and happened to include large numbers of Catholic and Jews.

So the party’s two key sources of support were in direct and visceral opposition to each other in 1924. McAdoo, a Georgia native, supported Prohibition and was backed by the rural South and West. And Smith, a native New Yorker — and himself a Catholic — denounced Prohibition and was supported by northerners, urban residents, and immigrants. Klan members were especially vehement in opposing Smith, calling him “that Catholic” from “Jew York.”¹

1924 Democratic contenders: William McAdoo (left), and Gov. Al Smith (images via Wikimedia Commons)

The 1924 convention thus turned into a cultural clash as much as a political battle. And to make matters more challenging, the Democrats then had a rule that required nominees to win a two-thirds majority of delegates, which was an obvious recipe for stalemate in a closely divided party.

That year, on the first ballot, McAdoo received 431 votes to 241 for Smith.

On the 15^th ballot, it was McAdoo 479 and Smith 305.

On the 70^th ballot, it was McAdoo 415 and Smith 323.

Neither faction was able to break the deadlock. One historian said it was as if the battle was “between the Pope and the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, so solidly did the Catholic delegates support Smith and the Klan delegates support McAdoo.”² During the convention, in fact, 20,000 Klansmen met in New Jersey, where they burned crosses and effigies of Smith.

The proceedings dragged on, day after day for more than two weeks. New York happened to be experiencing a record heat wave that summer, which turned the non-air conditioned Madison Square Garden into a virtual sauna and led one writer to dub the convention a “Klanbake.”³

Amid the heat and the standoff, tempers flared and fist fights broke out between delegates. The nation’s voters, who were listening to a political convention on radio for the first time, were horrified by the intraparty brawl.

Finally, after 96 ballots, McAdoo and Smith mutually withdrew their candidacies. Then, on the 103^rd ballot of the longest convention in history, the delegates compromised on John Davis of West Virginia, a former Congressman and Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

The fall presidential campaign

Davis, it turned out, was well-regarded by many people. The Saturday Evening Post called him “a great lawyer, efficient and experienced public servant, a cultivated and courteous gentleman.”⁴ But this compromise candidate had one rather significant problem. Namely that he was a conservative, the sort of candidate the Democrats hadn’t nominated in at least two decades.

Progressives were appalled (there were still progressives in both parties then), since they were now left with a choice between the conservative Davis and the even more conservative Coolidge. This sparked a third-party movement, with progressives staging a third convention that summer and nominating Republican Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin for president.

Ironically, since LaFollette provided a sharper contrast with Coolidge than Davis did, Republicans ran as if the Progressives were the real challenger. Davis actually complained that Republicans were disregarding him. In the end, he did what he could under the circumstances, but it was difficult to sway voters in a booming economy, especially as a conservative challenger running against a conservative incumbent.

Coolidge breezed to victory. He won the popular vote by 54-29% over Davis, with LaFollette taking 17% in third place. In the Electoral College, Coolidge won 382-136-13.

In the end, though, the lasting image of the 1924 presidential election was not so much Coolidge’s victory but rather the 103-ballot debacle at the Democratic convention. The battle exposed the fault lines in American politics, with rural white Protestants facing off against a more urban, multiethnic and multiracial coalition that encompassed Catholics and Jews. The fact that both factions existed within the Democratic Party at the time made the division all the more stark because each side effectively held a veto over the other side’s preferred presidential candidate.

Echoes of this fracture are still obvious in the nation’s politics today, a full century later. First though, as we’ll see in my next post, the very same fissure erupted rather dramatically again just four years later, during the 1928 presidential campaign.

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This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

1. Robert K. Murray, The 103^rd Ballot: The Legendary 1924 Democratic Convention That Forever Changed American Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1976/2016), 109.

2. David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition 1918 – 1932 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986), 121.

3. Jon Meachem, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (New York: Random House, 2018), 120.

4. Irving Stone, They Also Ran: The Fascinating Story of the Men Who Almost Became President (New York: Pyramid Books, 1943/1964), 377.