A political convention in Chicago?
Why not?
If the city gets the 2024 Democratic National Convention — obviously, not yet even close to a certainty — it would be the 25th to be held here.
Although Chicago hasn’t hosted a major party gathering in more than a quarter of a century, the city was historically the nation’s most popular site for national political conventions.
Chicago’s first was the 1860 gathering that saw Republicans nominate Abraham Lincoln at a hastily built frame building at Lake and Wacker nicknamed the Wigwam. It was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. And its most recent was the 1996 convention at which Democrats renominated President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore at the United Center on the Near West Side.
The 1920 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Warren G. Harding was nominated after the notorious meeting in the “smoke-filled room” at the Blackstone Hotel.
At the time of the 1996 convention, the city had hosted more than twice as many major party political conventions as any other U.S. city.
In addition to Lincoln, other presidents nominated here include Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, returning to the Chicago Stadium in 1936, the site of his nomination four years earlier.
Chicago Sun-Times archives
Others include Republican Richard M. Nixon, nominated here for his failed 1960 losing bid to John F. Kennedy, and Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920. Harding secured his party’s nomination, after his campaign manager reportedly predicted the decision would be made by party bosses who “will sit down about 2 o’clock in the morning around a table in a smoke-filled room. ”Actually it was a suite of rooms, Rooms 804-805 ofthe Blackstone Hotel.
Past convention sites included the Auditorium Theatre, the Coliseum, the old Chicago Stadium and the International Amphitheatre.
It was at the Amphitheatre that FDR promised “a New Deal for the American people” in 1932 — and returned four years later to defend it. The old Coliseum was the site of William Jennings Bryan’s historic 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech.
Of course, the most notorious convention in recent history was the 1968 Democratic event, which saw the nomination of Hubert Humphrey and clashes between police and protesters later described as “a police riot.”
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