BRIAN: Today on our show, we're tackling the question inspired by Lloyd's 15 minutes of fame. Were conventions always this boring? You know, there had to be something exciting back in your period, Peter or Ed. I mean people weren't falling asleep at those conventions, were they?
ED: I'd have to say the 19th century is when political conventions were in their heyday and that's for a number of reasons. First, there was a lot at stake. This is when they really did determine in real time with real horse swapping and deal brokering who the candidates were going to be. And so not only were they naming the candidates that they were going to rally around, but the delegates were representing districts especially in the north, where voter turnout was nearly universal. Every man in the county would vote. And so they know they are representing the entire constituency of their party in their county and they're going to be held accountable for that. The other reasons the conventions were not boring back then is that it was really lubricated by a lot of male bonding, so you had a lot of alcohol. All the sessions would have been just drenched in liquor. You would also find that people were bringing in prostitutes to help persuade swing votes to go their way.
BRIAN: And so it would have been a strange combination of civics and debauchery. And they had a lot of jobs, literal jobs to hand out to folks if their party was able to carry the day. So I'd just add to what Ed already said, a hiring hall. This is a big jobs pool. And everybody is watching how you're voting, you know?
ED: So if you go back and read the letters to any basically political figure of the 19th century, as I'm sure everybody wants to do, their files are filled with letters saying, "At the last convention, just ask anybody, I was calling for you when nobody else was." I was a true blue supporter of you when it looked as if your fortunes might fade. So give me that post mastership in East Overshoe, Ohio. I demand it right now. This is high drama. So I don't think there would have been as many people going to sleep back then because there was more at stake. You know, I think about the convention of 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, when so much was at stake that breaks up and in many ways, the Civil War is the result when the Democratic Party decides that it cannot decide on who can represent the entire party in the nation. And the two-party system breaks. Then the way is open for Abraham Lincoln. So I guess what I would say is it's not such a bad thing that the conventions today are such snooze fests.
PETER: What's interesting, Ed, is that back in my period in the emergence of political parties, they didn't choose their candidates through conventions at all. In fact, the first national party convention didn't happen until 1830. We're going to turn now to the story of how that convention came to be.
ED: This story has a lot to do with of all things, Freemasonry, the Masons. So we're going to pause here just a moment and remind everybody who the Masons are. They're a fraternal organization that, I think Peter, have been around for a long time.
PETER: Well, they've been in what became the U.S., that is in the British colonies since the 1730s and a list of Masons from early American history reads almost like a who's who of the political elite. You've got Paul Revere. You've got Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, James Monroe, George Washington, even Lewis and Clark
ED: Wow. And so that was really deeply identified with sort of the founding, but by the 19th century, they're even more popular. They seem to be everywhere and you seem to have to belong to the Masons to get ahead. Now they've kept their rituals and their practices secret. And so people come to be suspicious. What's doing on behind those closed doors with all that paraphernalia that allows these guys to be getting ahead when I'm not? Is this secrecy even compatible with democracy? And in 1826, a lot of this comes to a head when a mysterious murder in Western New York sparked a powerful anti-Masonic backlash. BackStory producer, Jess Engebretson tells the story.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: The problem started when a brick mason in upstate New York named William Morgan threatened to publish a book revealing Masonic secrets. The local Masonic Lodge decided that he had to be stopped. First, the story goes, they tried to steal the manuscript. When that didn't work, they set fire to the publisher's office. Eventually, they had Morgan arrested for failing to pay a debt of $2.68.
MICHAEL HOLT: He was arrested by a Masonic sheriff
JESS ENGEBRETSON: This is Micheal Holt, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia.
MICHAEL HOLT: Released by that sheriff essentially to a mob or a group of people who were seen with him in a carriage going from Batavia, New York, west.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: And that's the last that anyone saw of William Morgan. Some said that he was paid off by the Mason's to move to Canada or that he ended up in the Cayman Islands, where he was hanged as a pirate. But the most common story is that the Masons rode him out to the middle of the Niagara River and drowned him. Outraged citizens demanded an investigation and they got one, sort of.
MICHAEL HOLT: The sheriff was a Mason. He called in grand jury members who were Masons. The judges were Masons. People petitioned the state legislature. The state legislature wouldn't do anything because it turned out most of the members of the legislature were Masons. So nothing was done.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: Concerned locals took matters into their own hands. They were convinced that Masons cared more about protecting each other than protecting American democracy. They gave themselves a name, sensibly enough the anti-Masons. Here's what the Monroe County anti-Masons had to say.
MICHAEL HOLT: In the dark days of the investigation, we supplicated the legislature to quicken her pace and strengthen her arm, but it was a Masonic legislature and we were coldly repulsed. We now appeal to the sovereign people.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: The sovereign people responded by electing 15 anti-Masons to the state legislature. A new political party was taking shape, dedicated to taking back the government from secretive, corrupt elites.
MICHAEL HOLT: And this spread like wildfire in New York State and then it spread to other states. There were some traces of it in Ohio and in Michigan territory, but it was really Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: The anti-Masons were mostly poor rural farmers, suspicious of big cities and the old boys network that ran them. Anti-Masonic newspapers tarred both major parties with the same brush.
MICHAEL HOLT: The violated laws of the country and the unavenged blood of a murdered citizen were not questions of sufficient importance to withdraw the politicians from the pursuit of political honors. The people were left to oppose Free Masonry without the aid of the laws and unsupported by the countenance of leading men.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: Throughout the late 1820s, the anti-Masons grew stronger, getting candidates elected to local office and even sending a few representatives to Washington, D.C. Then came the presidential election of 1832. Andrew Jackson, the incumbent, was a Mason. The opposition candidate, Henry Clay, also a Mason. The anti-Masons decided that they had to field their own candidate. Normally, a candidate would have been chosen by the party's congressional caucus. That's how the mainstream parties had done it in the past. But the anti-Masons didn't have enough people in congress to make that a possibility and anyway, that backroom wheeling and dealing didn't sit well with their populist image.
MICHAEL HOLT: Certainly the anti-Masons were running as we're the party of the people. We're the party of republicans. We're the small R against grand kings. I mean the rhetoric of the anti-Masons was really anti-elitist. The first really power to the people political movement.
JESS ENGEBRETSON: And so on September 11, 1830, the fourth anniversary of William Morgan's disappearance, the anti-Masons held the first national party convention in American history. It would be a clean break with the past, a chance for the common man to regain control of his government. But something strange happened. By the time the convention rolled around, party leaders had shifted their focus from Masons in general to Andrew Jackson specifically. And when the anti-Masons finally nominated their candidate, the guy they picked was a Mason. His name was William Wirt and in his acceptance letter, he said that if elected, he would not ban Masons from public office. Party leaders then went on to make common cause with Henry Clay's national republicans in many states. [inaudible 00:12:51] felt that the party had been hijacked by the very insiders it was meant to challenge. And this whole idea of a convention, this radical, anti-elitist way to choose a candidate, it became mainstream within a few years. The national republicans had their first convention in 1831, the democrats in 1832. By 1838 or so, the anti-Masons had been folded into a new party, the Wigs, successor to the national republicans. The radical activists who'd railed against the corrupt two-party system had been engulfed by it
ED: That was one of our producers, Jess Engebretson, telling the story with the help of the University of Virginia's Michael Holt.