by Robert Sobel
He was a very sick man. He collapsed… he had been unconscious for hours. But even in that condition his mind was subconsciously turning over the problem at Chicago. He came to at last… turned to Leighton C. Taylor, his secretary, and asked what they were doing at Chicago. It was the first question he asked after regaining his consciousness. Taylor answered that they had been doing nothing, that a deadlock had been reached. The senator lay a moment, thinking. “Call up King,” he said at last to Taylor, “and tell him to throw it to Harding.”
Again and again the conferees went over the different possibilities, and every time the Harding gambit seemed the best. News of this may have leaked to the Ohio senator. Described as harried and worried earlier in the day, he now was spied by a reporter who saw him leaving the Ohio delegation headquarters with former Governor Myron Herrick at 11:00 PM. When asked for a comment, Herrick said, “You can say that Senator Harding will be nominated on the first ballot tomorrow,” but of course this was to have been expected from a Harding supporter.
At around 11:00 PM the conferees in the “smoke-filled room” had just about settled on Harding. They were tired and uncomfortable due to the heat. Brandegee said what many of them must have thought:There aren’t any first-raters this year. This ain’t 1880 or any 1904; we haven’t any John Sherman or Theodore Roosevelt; we got a lot of second-raters and Warren Harding is the best of the second-raters.
An hour later Harvey sent for Harding, who was expecting the call. Harvey wanted to know whether there was anything in the candidate’s background that might embarrass the Republican Party were he nominated for the presidency. Nan Britton, the mother of his illegitimate child, was with Harding in Chicago. There was also a liaison with another woman, Carrie Phillips, the wife of a close friend who had tried unsuccessfully to blackmail him into taking a pro-German position before the United States entered the war. In addition, there were rumors one of Harding’s ancestors was black. Harding asked for a few minutes to think it over, then said he was clean. After this, the group broke up. While waiting for an elevator, Senator Smoot was greeted by a reporter, George Morris of the New York Telegram. “Anything decided on at your conference upstairs?” Morris wanted to know. Surprisingly, Smoot did not prevaricate: “Yes. We decided on Harding, and he will be nominated this afternoon, after we have balloted long enough to give Lowden a run for his money.” Morris wired in his story, and the newspaper had the scoop of the convention. It was almost precisely at the time Daugherty had predicted it would be.
But had the smoke-filled room really selected Harding and then foisted him on the convention? Years later, when he wrote his memoirs, Daugherty denied the senatorial clique had given Harding the nomination. True, he wrote, there was a meeting, but the participants did not have the impact everyone seemed to think. Robert Murray, the premier Harding biographer, agreed with Daugherty’s version of how Harding achieved the nomination, writing that “no orders ever went to convention delegates as a result of it, nor did it signify the implementation of a senatorial plan to nominate Harding.” Murray notes that thirteen of the senators voted for other candidates after the meeting, and they continued to do so for several more ballots. But this would be in line with what Smoot had told the reporter, and those senators who did not vote for Harding might have had other political debts to pay. Besides, the few personal votes wouldn’t have made a difference.
Finally, Claude Fuess quoted a letter from Mark Sullivan to Edward Duffield sent shortly after the convention:There never was any time when the Senate group was not in control of the Chicago Convention. I was a delegate there as you were and I was also a reporter and had the reporter’s end of it, and I knew all the time what was going on behind the scenes. I am dead sure that I was not mistaken.
In other words, although the party bosses would in time lose power, in 1920 they still held an iron grip on the convention.
Messengers were dispatched to the Lowden, Wood, and Johnson headquarters, telling the hopefuls that Harding was the choice. They would not bow out gracefully, however. The following morning Lowden and Wood met and tried to hammer out a deal. As Lowden wrote in a memo he placed in a confidential file:It was arranged that General Wood, in a closed car, should drive to the Michigan Avenue entrance of the Blackstone and that I should get into the car at that point. This was done, and we had a conference of perhaps three quarters of an hour, I should say. It was evident to both of us that the Senate combination was making great headway with Senator Harding. General Wood suggested that we ought to get together, and that our managers should meet at once. I concurred in this.
The deal might have resulted in a Wood–Lowden ticket—and they had the combined delegates to make it work—but Lowden’s managers concluded that it would be next to impossible to convince his delegates to vote for Wood, while Lowden was unwilling to accept second place on the ticket. They could not reach an agreement, and besides, it was already too late.
The convention reconvened at 10:00 AM, and the balloting continued, with Harding gaining strength all the while. Lowden went into the lead on the fifth ballot by a margin of 303 to 299, with Harding’s vote at 78, an increase over his 63½ on the fourth ballot. The two leaders tied at 311 on the sixth ballot, while Harding went to 89. On the seventh they remained almost unchanged, and Harding went up to 105. It continued that way through the ninth ballot, on which Harding received 374½ votes. He won on the tenth, with 692⅕ votes to Wood’s 156 and Johnson’s . Lowden, who had released his delegates, received 11 votes. On the final ballot Coolidge received five votes, four from New York and one from Massachusetts.
Following convention tradition, shortly after 6:00 PM, the delegates made the nomination unanimous. The next day some delegates were comparing Harding to McKinley. Not Roosevelt, not Lincoln, but McKinley, as the candidate himself often did. They clearly felt the country needed a period of calm after two decades of reform and war.
Because of the turmoil surrounding the presidential nomination, most people ignored the vice presidency—except those candidates who were trying to strike deals. In order to correct this oversight, some of the men who had put forth Harding gathered under the platform to select his running mate. What they wanted, of course, was a man who would complement Harding. After a short conference, they had their man: Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin.
A close friend and associate of Harding’s, Lenroot was a perfectly decent and intelligent senator. He had once been one of Robert La Follette’s closest confidants, and had served as a member of the House. Then he broke with La Follette over the issue of the war, and became increasingly conservative. His selection for the number two spot made little sense, except that he was acceptable to Johnson, which might mollify some of the old Progressives. In this period of ticket balancing, having two midwesterners on the same ticket was pointless. Moreover, Lenroot had angered conservatives with his earlier iconoclasm, and hard-core Progressives with his subsequent change of heart.
Lenroot, however, was unwilling to accept the offer. He did agree to talk it over with his wife, but when he located her she agreed he shouldn’t run on the national ticket. Why should he? After all, the vice presidency was a thankless post. The inhabitant of the office was, as Nelson Rockefeller would later say prior to being selected for the office, standby equipment. And what might happen if through the death of the president he did succeed to office? Five vice presidents—John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, and Theodore Roosevelt—had filled out the terms of presidents who died in office. Of that group only Roosevelt managed to win nomination on his own for the following election, and of course Roosevelt was an extraordinary person and president. The last vice president other than Roosevelt to receive his party’s nomination on his own, without succeeding on the death of the president, had been Martin Van Buren, back in 1832. The vice presidency was a dead end job; everyone knew this in 1920. In any case, while Lenroot pondered, the delegates took the decision out of his hands.
After the
Harding nomination delegates started to leave the hall. Supporters of Lowden, Wood, and Johnson were disgusted, hot, and tired, and anxious to leave their expensive hotel rooms. Many of the others had had their fill of politics. Even so, there were more than enough to make a quorum. The work of the convention continued.
On the convention floor Crane was busily trying to whip up support and votes for a Coolidge vice presidential nomination, but before he could do this another man accomplished the task for him.
When Chairman Lodge called for nominations for the vice presidency, Senator Medill McCormick of Illinois delivered a short speech of support for Lenroot. There were seconding speeches, but these efforts were greeted unenthusiastically. By then most of the delegates had heard the stories of how the bosses had named Harding, and now were trying to do the same with Lenroot. What could they do? They had seen the front-runners disposed of, the wishes of the primary voters ignored, and the back room crowd take over once again. That evening reporters filed stories discussing the feeling of letdown among delegates.
Lodge apparently did not recognize what was happening, or if he did, he paid it no mind. In addition, he, too, must have been weary, experiencing a letdown of his own now that the major work of the convention had been completed. He turned the gavel over to Ohio’s former Governor Frank Willis, and left the auditorium.
Then fifty-three-year-old Wallace McCamant rose to seek recognition. Willis, who hadn’t much of an idea what McCamant intended to do, presumably thought he would second Lenroot. McCamant took the opportunity, if not to become kingmaker, at least to create the convention’s prince.
Although just an obscure Oregon judge, McCamant had already gained a degree of notoriety at the convention. On June 8, when the convention opened for business, the New York Times ran a front-page story about him under the headline, “One Oregon Delegate Refused to Support Johnson; Convention Row Likely Over State Instructions.” Hiram Johnson had won the Oregon primary, which was binding on the delegates. Delegate McCamant supported Wood, and said he would vote for the general. He claimed that he had declared for Wood prior to the primary, and was still elected by the voters. The Times’s reporter called this “an unprecedented problem for the convention”—a problem further compounded when four delegates from Nebraska declared that they, too, would vote for Wood, despite Johnson’s victory in their state. So McCamant’s “Declaration of Independence” had struck fire. McCamant had his way, voting for Wood on all ten ballots, and the convention records show that as few as three and as many as five Nebraskans also voted for Wood in the balloting.
Now McCamant wanted more. He had received a copy of Have Faith in Massachusetts, which he read before leaving for Chicago. “I was impressed with Governor Coolidge’s sterling Americanism, his fine spirit during the World War, the soundness of his thinking, and the conservative trend of his thoughts,” he later told Claude Fuess. He and the others of his delegation resented having Harding rammed down their throats, and now the bosses handed out notices saying Lenroot was the choice for vice president. The delegates were tired of taking orders. McCamant described the Oregonians’ reaction:No one of the delegates was pleased by the Lenroot suggestion. The suggestion that Coolidge’s name be put before the convention was made by Honorable Charles H. Carey of Portland. He also suggested that I speak for the delegation in so doing. I asked the others whether the suggestion met with their approval. They nodded yes.
According to one version, McCamant told the convention:When the Oregon delegation came here instructed by the people of our state to present to this convention as its candidate for the office of vice president a distinguished son of Massachusetts [meaning Lodge] he requested that we refrain from mentioning his name. But there is another son of Massachusetts who had been very much in the public eye during the past year, a man who is sterling in his Americanism and stands for all that the Republican Party holds dear; and on behalf of the Oregon delegation I name for the exalted office of vice president Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts.
The nomination energized the convention, and in the confusion few noted that McCamant had said that his first choice had been Lodge. Had Lodge agreed to accept, and had the convention turned to him, he would have been president in 1923. On the other hand, the convention may not have accepted him over Lenroot. What they seemed to want was an outsider—like Coolidge. The applause for him was real, not manufactured and orchestrated. Several reporters wrote that the applause was louder than the cheers that had come with the Harding nomination. The delegates were aware of the deals, the campaign spending, the acrimony that threatened victory in the fall. To them Coolidge was an honest, decent, intelligent, sound-thinking, and even energetic governor who had no connections with the smoke-filled rooms and fat cat bankrolls.
McCamant’s words set off a wave of seconding speeches, each from a state that was supposed to be controlled by a boss. H.L. Remmel of Arkansas, who shortly before had seconded Lenroot, rose to switch to Coolidge. A Kansas delegate nominated Governor Henry Allen, and more speeches for Coolidge followed. Then Henry Anderson of Virginia was nominated, but the clamor for Coolidge continued. The roll call came soon after, with Coolidge, 674½ to Lenroot’s 146½. A motion to make the nomination unanimous was made and passed. And with this, the convention closed, at 7:30 PM.
Had there ever been anything quite like this? The Boston Globe had it right when it concluded, “Calvin Coolidge was the first vice president in a hundred years who was not wished on the country; the country wished him on the Republican Party.” Former New York Senator Chauncey Depew, the dean of the convention at the age of eighty-six, had another view; telegraphing his congratulations to Coolidge, he said, “I have been present at every Republican convention beginning with 1856, and I have never seen such a spontaneous and enthusiastic tribute to a man as the vote for you for vice president.” Other wires followed, including one from Wilson’s Vice President Thomas Marshall, who wrote, “Please accept my sincere sympathy.” Coolidge was now a national figure.
Writing of the experience after his retirement, Coolidge mused that he might have won the presidential nomination had the Massachusetts delegation been solidly on his side; that is, he placed the blame for his poor showing on Lodge. Perhaps this was the case, but probably not. Mark Sullivan concluded, “[I]f the Coolidge candidacy for the presidential nomination had been pressed with half the astuteness that had been behind Harding’s, Coolidge would have been the nominee.”
But as we have seen, there was never much chance Coolidge would run a campaign like that. Coolidge did not pursue any political office the way most men did at the time. He preferred to wait until it came to him, or when it seemed improbable that his bid would be rejected. So it worked out well for all concerned, especially for Coolidge. He later wrote:While I do not think it was so intended [that I be nominated for the presidency] I have always been of the opinion that this turned out to be much the best for me. I had no national experience. What I have ever been able to do has been the result of first learning how to do it. I am not gifted with intuition. I need not only hard work but experience to be ready to solve problems. The presidents who have gone to Washington without first having held some national office have been at great disadvantage. It takes them a long time to become acquainted with the federal officeholders and the federal government. Meanwhile they have difficulty in dealing with the situation.
Of course, we do not know how he felt at the time about not receiving the presidential nomination. He had followed the convention through the newspapers and telegrams and telephone calls, but not the radio, because at the time “wireless telephony” was in its infancy, and broadcasting still a dream. Calvin and Grace Coolidge were in their two-room suite at the Adams House when the news of McCamant’s speech reached them. Telephone calls came in from Boston newspapers, which received information about the convention by telegraph. Grace knew something important had happened. Before the nomination, Coolidge spoke with Stearns via long distance lines, a conne
ction that took a while to arrange. After one of the local calls, which lasted a bit longer than the others, Coolidge hung up and then turned to his wife.
“Nominated,” he said.
“You aren’t going to take it, are you?”
“Well—I suppose I’ll have to.”
There were more calls and some visits from well-wishers. Then the candidate wrote a statement which he gave to the reporters:The nomination for the vice presidency, coming to me unsought and unexpectedly, I accept as an honor and duty. It will be especially pleasing to be associated with my old friend, Senator Warren G. Harding, our candidate for president. The Republican Party has adopted a sound platform, chosen a wise leader, and is united. It deserves the confidence of the American people. That confidence I shall endeavor to secure.
H.L. Mencken later told a story that has become part of Coolidge lore:In one of the passages I encountered a colleague from one of the Boston papers, surrounded by a group of politicians, policemen, and reporters. He was making a kind of speech, and I paused idly to listen. To my astonishment I found that he was offering to bet all comers that Harding, if elected, would be assassinated before he had served half his term. Some one in the crowd remonstrated gently, saying that any talk of assassination was unwise and might be misunderstood, for the Armistice was less than two years old and the Mitchell Palmer Red Hunt was still in full blast. But the Bostonian refused to shut down.
“I don’t give a damn,” he bawled, “what you say. I am simply telling you what I know. I know Cal Coolidge inside and out. He is the luckiest ________ ________ in the whole world!”
Many versions of the story exist. One holds that Stearns told this to Daugherty, after which he supposedly added, “Everything comes along to him [Coolidge] in a most uncanny and mysterious way.”