The Trump of the Twenties
As Donald Trump hurtles toward a confrontation with the party whose presidential nomination he is seeking, it calls to mind an earlier contest between an ambitious, hard-headed billionaire and the party that loathed him.
There are many differences between Trump and William Randolph Hearst, but also many parallels between Trump’s quest and Hearst’s crusade for the White House almost a century ago. Hearst’s ended in an epic convention that shattered his hopes and cracked his party in two; Trump could face the same possibility if he arrives at the Republican convention without enough delegates to claim the nomination.
That could happen: after Tuesday’s primaries, Trump has 446 delegates to Ted Cruz’s 347. He needs 1,237 to win. It’s not impossible the Republicans could go to their Cleveland convention with no clear winner.
What may have been the fiercest- ever struggle at a contested convention took place in 1924, as Hearst fought the Democratic Party he aimed to control. Hearst, like Trump, had immense wealth. He inherited a fortune, and made it bigger. No single person today has the sort of everyday access to American opinion Hearst had through his vast media empire. He owned newspapers, magazines, newsreels and a movie studio at a time when those were the main conduits of U. S. information and discussion.
Though he had rivals, t he Hearst corporation was the biggest and most dominant, and Hearst thought nothing of pouring vast sums into feeding his influence. Just as Trump builds monuments to himself in hotels, towers and golf courses emblazoned with his name, Hearst built ( or bought) castles, ranches, yachts and mansions as symbols of the magnificence that was himself.
He also wanted to be president. In his case, the Democratic Party was his vehicle of choice. But Democrats wanted nothing more to do with him than the Republican establishment does with Trump. Hearst (like Trump) was a populist who viewed the Democratic Party as a corrupt cabal of self- serving political hacks in league with big business, whose only ambition was to maintain their influence and continuing access to the public trough. Sound familiar?
He was right, but his political ambitions made him a threat to that very machine. And he had little to offer as an alternative other than overthrowing the leadership in favour of himself. Like Trump, his political views centred mainly on him giving the orders. Trump’s main belief is in Trump; Hearst’s was in Hearst.
Unlike Trump, he was a shy figure who didn’t seek personal glorification. He worked largely through proxies, using his web of newspapers and magazines to promote his ambitions. He was also willing to work with the machine: he served two terms in Congress and ran for mayor of New York, governor and lieutenant-governor in hopes of gaining a springboard to the presidency. When Democrat elders foiled his efforts, he formed his own party. When he couldn’t succeed himself, he ran compliant candidates in his place.
His chief rival was Alfred E. Smith — Al Smith — who served four terms as New York governor and made it his goal to block Hearst from achieving his dream. Hearst accused Smith of starving children through his failure to bring down milk prices; Smith countered with an enduring condemnation. terming Hearst “A man as low and mean as I can picture.”
Their mutual hatred came to a head in an epic confrontation in the summer of 1924. For two weeks, during a searing heat wave in New York, they wrestled over the party nomination. Smith wanted it for himself; Hearst was determined to block him with his own candidate, William Gibbs McAdoo, a former treasury secretary and leader of the Progressive movement in the early 1900s.
McAdoo supported Prohibition. Smith despised the ban on selling alcohol and, as governor, did as little as possible to enforce it. As a Roman Catholic and proponent of civil rights, Smith was opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, which held immense sway at the time in many parts of the South and West. Hearst papers had attacked the Klan but weren’t opposed to having it help destroy Smith. When McAdoo refused to denounce it, his image was stained.
The convention at Madison Square Garden went a record 103 ballots, the longest in U. S. history. When exhausted delegates pleaded that they had to return home, Hearst paid their hotel bills to stay. Desperate efforts to break the deadlock finally ended with a compromise: both Smith and McAdoo would withdraw in favour of a little-known lawyer and diplomat, John W. Davis. Davis went on to be crushed in the November presidential contest by Calvin Coolidge, the incumbent Republican president. Coolidge, known as “Silent Cal,” didn’t even bother to campaign. Davis attracted just 28 per cent of the vote, the lowest ever by a Democratic candidate.
It was a victory for Hearst in that he managed to foil Smith, but it effectively ended his own presidential dreams. Their confrontation splintered the party: in the November election many liberals stayed home in disgust, or voted for the third-party candidate, Robert LaFollette. Smith managed to capture the party nomination four years later, but lost badly, winning more votes but even fewer states than Davis. Democrats were only rescued when the Depression hit and the country turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt to save it.
Mitt Romney, the wealthy 2012 GOP nominee, has instructed advisers to look into ways to stop Trump at the nominating convention in Cleveland. Anti-Trump forces in the party are pouring millions into attack ads. The goal would be to stop Trump from securing the nomination before the convention, opening the way for a floor battle and brokered convention in which backroom deal-making could pick someone else: like, maybe, Romney.
It will be hot, it will be July. Unlike 1924, this time there will be air conditioning. But it could be just as entertaining, and just as self-destructive.
FOR A HINT OF WHAT THE GOP MAY BE IN FOR, CONSIDER 1924’S EPIC, 103-BALLOT LEADERSHIP CONVENTION THAT ALMOST DESTROYED THE DEMOCRATIC
PARTY.
HEARST (LIKE TRUMP) WAS A POPULIST WHO VIEWED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AS A CORRUPT CABAL OF SELF- SERVING POLITICAL HACKS —KELLY McPARLAND