Riotous convention was caucus catalyst
THE YEAR THAT TRANSFORMED THE NATION
Bob Krause and a buddy were working on the railroad in Mason City, Iowa, during the tumultuous summer of 1968. On a whim, the recent high school graduates decided to “go see democracy in action.”
They drove a little red Volkswagen to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, and when they arrived, Krause saw a scene he would never forget. The streets outside the Conrad Hilton were filled with protesters yelling, “Sieg Heil!” because they saw the police wielding clubs and troops marching in formation.
“There was barbed wire strung at an angle across the street, and klieg lights from the media and the police lit up the area. It was the most eerie thing I had seen in my life,” Krause said.
He was a short-haired farm boy, a naive small-town patriot whose father
served in World War II. What was going on? “It didn’t fit any paradigm and forced me to do a lot of thinking,” said Krause, who became a Democratic Party activist and Iowa General Assembly representative.
Those protests rocked the country and helped set in motion a change in the way presidents were selected, from a good-old-boys party nominating process to one where the people’s voice was heard. It also led to changes in the way it all starts – at the Iowa caucuses.
Three years later, Krause watched a man named Richard Bender pick up the telephone after looking at a wall calendar and announce that the Iowa caucuses would be Jan. 24, 1972 – making them the nation’s first nominating contest, a status that, over time, would bring presidential contenders and the national media to the state for months at a time.
“It was kind of like being in the room when they signed the Declaration of Independence,” he said.
Blocked by process
In 1968, America was experiencing the turmoil of protests over the Vietnam War and for civil rights, while dissatisfaction with authority boiled over, often directed at President Lyndon Johnson. Any channel to change seemed to be blocked by the process to challenge party leaders in the coming presidential election.
“You had the idea of the smoke-filled room where it was decided who the nominees were for various party positions,” said Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political science professor and co-author of the book “The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event.”
Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota initiated a challenge to Johnson as an anti-war candidate for the Democratic nomination, and young voters across the country were mobilized.
Johnson announced in March that he would not run. Bobby Kennedy, who had launched a campaign in March, was assassinated, and the turmoil continued.
At the Iowa state convention in June, “the war was the last item of business, and the anti-war folks thought they had won the vote and demanded a roll call,” recalled Bender, a longtime staffer for former Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. “But the chair of the convention said the minority plank had lost and bang, bang, bang, it was over.”
Chairs were thrown. Folks didn’t think they had been heard, and everyone headed to Chicago in August, feeling that the party would not give a chance to McCarthy to be nominated and instead choose Hubert Humphrey, who had sat out the nominating process but was backed by party regulars behind Johnson’s stance on the war.
While the streets outside the convention teemed with protesters, inside the convention hall, “there were people trying to stand up and get attention and overrule the chair,” said Neal Smith, a former Iowa congressman. People wanted a voice in the process. Humphrey was nominated. The city erupted.
“It was just astounding the sense of chaos, the sense of what we used to think we could count on, all the sudden we weren’t so sure,” Goldford said. Out of that chaos came change. “Harold Hughes was a force for good at that convention. He came out determined to change our nominating process, to democratize the system,” said Jerry Crawford, then a young page who later became a force in Democratic Party politics in Iowa.
How Iowa became first
Iowa’s governor, Harold Hughes, pushed for proportional representation in delegate selection, supported by the McGovern-Fraser Commission that was formed after the general election. Many Democrats thought the party leaders lost the election to Richard Nixon by going with Humphrey.
Primaries and emphasis on better representation of women, minorities and young people would replace “a bunch of old guys making the decisions,” said David Redlawsk, chairman of political science at University of Delaware and co-author of “Why Iowa?”
Iowa, he said, was a microcosm of the nation, its parties run from the top down and inaccessible.
Along came Iowa’s own commission, picked to develop a set of changes for proportional representation of delegates. That needed to start with the caucuses.
Bender said that without today’s technology, each convention at local and state levels had to be a month before the others and that he just counted backward to arrive at Jan. 24, 1972.
He knew that the caucuses would be first and that it mattered, but he just didn’t know how much.
National reporters saw that George McGovern of South Dakota did better than expected against favored Edmund Muskie of Maine in the caucuses. It drew national attention in The New York Times after Bender hastily used an oldfashioned calculator to tabulate the state totals for the waiting media.
Then came Jimmy Carter in 1975, a little-known Georgia governor,
Carter’s strong Iowa caucuses showing led to his election and to the ascent of the caucuses.
The Republicans followed and eventually started holding their caucuses on the same day.
Last month, the first potential candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination appeared at the Iowa State Fair, giving average citizens more than two years before the general election to gather information. It was national news.
“None of this would have happened without 1968,” Bender said. “The elevation of forces that wanted change.”