"...converted the massive, hangar-sized building where armor plating had been put on railcars during the war into Schenectady's new convention hall, in part an effort to attract the 1920 Democratic National Convention to the small but densely industrial city northwest of Albany. The idea that such an event would every go to "sleepy little Sch'nady," as it was put, was ludicrous, but the new building - called Hudson Hall by its promoters - nonetheless served as a new, large venue for the 1918 Democratic convention for New York the first weekend of August, as the party gathered to choose and nominate a full slate of candidates for statewide offices. It wound up being one of the most momentous conventions in New York history, its impact echoing deep into the present day, even if few suspected that would be the case, then - or if they did, it was for other reasons entirely.
The 1918 New York state Democratic convention in Schnectady was, in many ways, about the Shakespearean play [1] that was William Randolph Hearst's personal and political life; Robert Wagner would remark at Hearst's 1951 funeral that Hearst's life was in some ways "an opera, in five acts:" his first decades of life culminating with his graduation from Harvard and his layabout years in San Francisco and managing his father's mining empire; his rise to power in New York as one of the most talked-about eligible young bachelors of the time in the mid-1890s and then his populist campaign for Governor in 1898 and meteoric rise to national pre-eminence; his Presidency as the climactic action of the third act; and then the 1910s as something of a falling action, in which the Democratic Party both nationally but especially in New York lived in his long shadow, followed by the time after 1918, in which he absconded into a semi-exile of denouement in Beverly Hills and his lavish coastal estate in California with his mistress and true love, Marion Davies. It is critical to think of 1918 as the time between those fourth and fifth acts of a man who defined the first two decades of American politics in the 20th century, and very much the endpoint of his influence.
Hearst had in many ways been impossible for Democrats to escape, especially in his adoptive home state, and for good reason. He was the first President since Andrew Jackson, who ranked among his many idols, to have served two full, consecutive terms. After two decades of haplessness in the face of an organized, well-funded Liberal machine, the Democrats had roared back after the turn of the century and governed under Hearst with supermajorities in both Houses of Congress, passing the ambitious Fair Deal agenda that dramatically expanded the role of the state and ushered in a progressive revolution in national, state and local governance whose echoes were growing louder in the postwar economic calamity of 1917-20. For an entire generation of Americans, he was in many was the definitive President, one who defined a decade as Jackson had the 1830s and ushered in a time of prosperity and national confidence. He was, honestly, truly and for good reason, still popular with the American people, particularly in the postwar, when his administration came to be seen as a time of peace and stability, even as it had ended in recession and deteriorating relations with the Confederacy in its final year. This wave of soft-glow Hearst nostalgia was strongly apparent by the summer of 1918, and had of course not gone unnoticed by the man himself, who had never quite gotten over his defeat in 1912 and had worked diligently to maintain his relevancy in New York Democratic circles and carefully plotted a way back to prominence, with this year being identified as the likeliest time to make his move. 1914 had been too soon to come back after the Presidency, and Hearst had deduced correctly that 1916 was likely the poisoned chalice even as the war was wrapping up and the popular Hughes chose to stand down [2]. 1918 was the time of promise, the first step in his grand comeback, first to Albany, then on to Philadelphia.
On paper, Hearst's plan was sound, and indeed as the New York Democratic county and precinct chairmen, ward bosses, and other delegates arrived at Hudson Hall, the general sentiment was that while Hearst's vision of a glorious coronation was probably over-optimistic, it was still his race to lose purely thanks to the prestige of his name and his cachet in the party as the winningest Democrat of the last eight decades, who had only lost one election and that was by virtue of a "curse" in 1912 via breaking the Washington precedent. But elections are not won by paper, they are won by people, and here Hearst had significant limitations.
The first was that the New York Democrats were hungry for a win. Since 1915 the state party had been starved of the federal patronage it had grown fat on with Hearst and Bill Sulzer in charge in Washington, with both Senators being Liberals, and the loss of the New York mayoralty in 1917 had stung, badly. Through that lens, there was a great deal of recency bias; Hearst had lost the Presidency in 1912, factional party infighting had contributed to losing a Senate seat in 1914 to what was then considered a weak Liberal opponent in James Wadsworth, his close ally George B. McClellan, Jr. had lost the election in 1916 (though made it closer than another perhaps may have, considering the context of the race), and then in indulging his vindictiveness had denied Al Smith the mayoral nomination the next year and led to a Socialist sitting in Gracie Mansion dissembling the patronage machine Tammany Hall had spent two decades building, oiling, and fine-tuning. Seen from such a perspective, Hearst seemed less like a sure thing, and more like a liability, and the man had done little to nothing to combat this perception amongst his co-partisans. This further compounded Hearst's second problem, which was his pitch of a triumphant return emphasized that he was very much a figure of the past, that the 1918 election in New York - which Democrats were supremely confident they would win due to the unprecedented unpopularity of Elihu Root in his home state - would be an exercise in nostalgia rather than one about the future.
The problems for the former President that he had not thought through continued from there. Some thought that the whole run was a vanity project spearheaded from a man declining in relevance and credibility, with several Assemblymembers themselves (privately, of course) stating that the Hearst campaign was about Hearst and not about New York Democrats or New York state. Others were chagrined at the thought that Hearst would be nominated, very likely win over whatever sacrificial lamb the Liberals tapped the next weekend in Rochester, and then proceed to invest all his time and energy elevating his dwindling list of personal allies and a handful of cronies into positions of influence across New York in an effort to secure the nomination for President in 1920. Still more were put off by the salacious tabloid columns about him living almost openly with Davies, suspected of being his mistress, with the well-liked former First Lady nowhere in sight for months at a time. The ambition and hubris on display, after having been unable to escape Hearst's shadow for nearly ten years, rankled, and it would come back to bite Hearst in Schenectady that weekend, hard.
The biggest issue, however, was Hearst's relative lack of institutional investment. He had assumed, perhaps not without reason, that he would waltz into Hudson Hall, the assembled delegates who were opposed to him would slowly fall in line after a ballot or two, and that his personality and oratory was a sufficient whip operation in a pre-primary era when grassroots organizing mattered very little, especially in machine-run New York politics. Especially after the debacle of 1917, this was most certainly not the case; Charlie Murphy's cachet had entirely collapsed even within Tammany Hall after that, and "Silent Charlie" swore off any unilateral decisions, instead electing to "go with the wind." Hearst had, again reasonably, understood this to mean that when the wind blew in his direction, Murphy would follow.
The wind however was about to blow in a new direction, in large part due to the efforts of two younger, fresher figures in New York politics - Robert Wagner, of course, but also James Farley, who made his presence and impact felt immediately upon New York Democratic circles as he would for the next half-century. [3] Wagner had emerged as the star of New York City working class politics ever since his commitment to the workers affected by the Triangle fire, and he had a crucial advantage in being German-born but Lutheran in being able to straddle a number of ethnic and religious divides in the city. By 1918, he was the Majority Leader of the New York Senate and a key (if unofficial) figure in Tammany Hall's rising generation, helping continue the effort of Murphy to detach it from corruption and instead be a vehicle for the organizing of progressive endeavors. Wagner would never be Tammany's "boss" by being a state politician, but he was amongst the most powerful men in Albany, and in some ways as the lone gubernatorial term of James Gerard drew to a close, he was the "governor in the shadows." He was also Smith's closest friend, personally and politically.
Farley for his part was just coming up, having only a few months earlier been elected the chairman of the Rockland County Democrats - thus making him an "up-stater," as it were, even if proximity via railroad would soon make Rockland a region of commuter-based bedroom communities. Even before the growth of the suburbs, Rockland was already a Liberal stronghold, especially in gubernatorial races where no Democrat since Horatio Seymour had carried it, not even Hearst in 1898; but it was outside of the city, and thus Farley was seen as speaking for the thousands of Democrats who resided north of the city, either in the Hudson Valley or stretching west to Buffalo. While he was often caricatured as a New York Irishman, Farley had an astute understanding of rural voters, what made them tick, and most importantly, how to get them to the polls.
Wagner and Farley often disagreed, sometimes pointedly, but they shared one thing in common: a genuine belief that Al Smith was the better candidate than Hearst, and a sense that in 1920, after New Yorkers had headed the Democratic ticket four straight times, that the delegates who gathered somewhere other than Schenectady would not nominate a New Yorker again, at least not so soon. With this in mind, they wanted instead to look ahead to 1924 or 1928, when the war generation and those after would be even older and less attached to memories of Hearst, and for that they needed a new figure, a figure of the future, not a man of the past.
The final showdown between Hearst and Smith had been predicted for years, going back to 1914; assumptions that Hearst would slap away the new generation and reimpose the old guard was based on fault assumptions, grounded in inertia. Farley's whip operation as Schenectady opened up revealed dozens of county chairmen who were uncommitted and, critically, a Buffalo delegation that had already internally voted to support Smith. Wagner spent all morning of Saturday, August 3rd at the Mohawk Hotel, confusing many delegates; it turned out that he had been called into a meeting by Bill Sulzer, who was already known to support Smith against Hearst, and when Wagner arrived at the meeting it was Theodore Roosevelt, the famed newspaperman whose son's wedding had just been the event of the season, ready to jockey. Wagner told him plainly that his ask was taking out Hearst by the third ballot, and if Roosevelt committed his faction of the party to that, then Roosevelt could have whatever he wanted. Roosevelt already had a considerable list waiting, quickly and without hesitating elaborating that he wanted former Hearst attorney and current state judge Clarence Shearn out of the running for Attorney General, a factional candidate of his choosing for Lieutenant Governor, and then the big - and fateful - price: the Senate nomination in 1920 for his cousin, the Naval war hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a former state Senator who had quit the Legislature just as his career grew promising to go off and fight the war, and who had been considered a dark horse nominee for Governor were it not for Hearst.
Wagner was hesitant, even though he knew "Cousin Frank" decently well, and Farley had even helped organize voters for him in one of his campaigns. Ill memories of the jockeying for slots on the 1914 tickets were fresh and indeed part of Smith's handicap now; to promise the nomination against the bete noire in James Wadsworth in two years was a very, very steep ask. He took a lunch privately with Smith and Farley a few blocks away soon thereafter to explain to him what Roosevelt had proposed, and Smith asked Farley for his thoughts. Farley remarked that "Commander Roosevelt" was a talented politician who had been able to turn his reputation as a rich dilettante on its head in his first campaigns, especially in years that were not favorable for Democratic candidates nationwide, and that he would be a formidable Senate nominee, particularly after his conduct at Hilton Head which had left one his legs permanently crippled. He was not opposed to it as a political matter, and noted further that Theodore Roosevelt had already tipped his hand somewhat by not inviting any of Smith, Wagner or Sulzer to his son's gala wedding, while Hearst was a guest of honor and family friend, and pointed out that Roosevelt's vengeful personality and clashes with state leaders during his brief Mayoralty of New York had proven what he was capable of if insulted or snubbed. Wagner concurred, remarking that just the fact that Roosevelt - friends with Hearst for decades and whose newspapers were the backbone of Democratic messaging in the state - took the meeting at all was fairly incredible, having assumed that Roosevelt was in the Hearst camp until the end, and Smith then added that of course Roosevelt's price was so high: he was not going to betray his good friend for nothing. With that realization reached, Smith told Wagner to accept the deal while it was still in the offing. As they did, Farley took Smith aside and noted to him that Commander Roosevelt had something of a reputation in the Hudson Valley political scene of being a philanderer, and while that was not uncommon at all amongst politicians in an age where the media considered such matters strictly private, the fact that that Franklin was already known as such early in his career was worth raising eyebrows. Smith expressed confidence that the Roosevelt empire of Journal papers could effectively paper that over in the rare case it became an issue, but Farley in later years would admit that he felt the conversation darkly and ironically tempting fate, even then.
The trap was thus largely set - on the second ballot, Hearst and Smith were suddenly tied, and James Gerard came on stage for the third ballot to put Smith's name into nomination personally; on the fourth ballot, Smith prevailed, narrowly clearing the fifty-percent mark needed to clinch by just two votes. It was, by any objective measure, a shocking result. Hearst described it is a "bloody betrayal, a plot by the Brutuses and Judases of our time!" [4] President Root, stunned by the news while at the Presidential coastal retreat in Long Branch, referred to it more succinctly as a "putsch." Hearst was not beaten in a floor fight between delegates, or on dozens of ballots as his enemies gradually built up strength; he was decapitated, clean and simple, his defeat arranged well in advance and executed. The spectacular showdown, the battle of Hearst vs. Smith in Hudson Hall, never materialized, nor did the coronation that Hearst had dreamt of.
Al Smith was, thus, the Democratic nominee for Governor of New York, concluding his meteoric rise from the ashes of the Triangle factory fire; come November, he would dispatch Liberal nominee Charles Whitman, the former Attorney General of New York who had narrowly lost to Gerard four years earlier, in a landslide, winning well over sixty percent of the vote in what was usually a closely-divided state. The election made Smith a national figure, the first Democrat who had ever faced off with Hearst and defeated him, even though the list of men who had chosen to turn on Hearst in an act of collective, surprising defiance stretched from Schenectady to Tammany Hall. The events of August 1918 also marked the definitive closing chapter of Hearst's political career; the furtherance of his affair with Davies and the embarrassment of his spoiled coronation foreclosed on any potential return to the Presidency, even as he offered his name as a compromise unity candidate at the multi-ballot 1920 Democratic National Convention. The fourth act had transition for him to the fifth, a well-earned retirement for one of America's most mercurial and Jupiterian statesmen; for Al Smith, the path ahead was only just now truly beginning..." [5]
- The Happy Warrior
[1] Which play I know not, for he is no Hamlet, but he is also no Macbeth
[2] Don't read this footnote until you've read the whole entry, but keep in mind that a big reason Hughes stood aside was machinations by party bosses against him that he just didn't want to deal with, and here Hearst's return is deep-sixed by similar figures. A parallel outcome, for two New Yorkers, in different circumstances.
[3] Apropos of nothing, but when I saw I have an aesthetic appreciation for ethnic urban machine Democrats, its people like Jim Farley I'm thinking of. Honestly one of the most interesting figures in American political history, and an extremely important one.
[4] I guess we have our Shakespeare play!
[5] This was a monster update, but closing the door on Hearst and setting up Smith's machinations required such - these New York political updates always get a bit out of hand!