The Convention
At the 1940 Republican National Convention itself, keynote speaker Harold Stassen, the Governor of Minnesota, announced his support for Willkie and became his official floor manager. Hundreds of vocal Willkie supporters packed the upper galleries of the convention hall. Willkie's amateur status, his fresh face, appealed to delegates as well as voters. The delegations were selected not by primaries but by party leaders in each state, and they had a keen sense of the fast-changing pulse of public opinion. Gallup found the same thing in polling data not reported until after the convention: Willkie had moved ahead among Republican voters by 44% to only 29% for the collapsing Dewey. As the pro-Willkie galleries repeatedly yelled "We Want Willkie", the delegates on the convention floor began their vote. Dewey led on the first ballot but steadily lost strength thereafter. Both Taft and Willkie gained in strength on each ballot, and by the fourth ballot it was obvious that either Willkie or Taft would be the nominee. The key moments came when the delegations of large states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York left Dewey and Vandenberg and switched to Willkie, giving him the victory on the sixth ballot. The voting went like this:
ballot; | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Thomas E. Dewey | 360 | 338 | 315 | 250 | 57 | 11 |
Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft | 189 | 203 | 212 | 254 | 377 | 310 |
Wendell L. Willkie | 105 | 171 | 259 | 306 | 429 | 633 |
Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg | 76 | 73 | 72 | 61 | 42 | - |
Pennsylvania Governor Arthur H. James | 74 | 66 | 59 | 56 | 59 | 1 |
Massachusetts Rep. Joseph W. Martin | 44 | 26 | - | - | - | - |
Hanford MacNider | 32 | 34 | 28 | 26 | 4 | 2 |
Frank E. Gannett | 33 | 30 | 11 | 9 | 1 | 1 |
New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges | 19 | 9 | 1 | 1 | - | - |
Former President Herbert Hoover | 17 | - | - | - | 20 | 9 |
Oregon Senator Charles L. McNary | 3 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 9 | - |
Willkie's nomination is still considered by most historians to have been one of the most dramatic moments in any political convention. Having given little thought to who he would select as his vice-presidential nominee, Willkie left the decision to convention chairman and Massachusetts Congressman Joe Martin, the House Minority Leader, who suggested Senate Minority Leader Charles L. McNary of Oregon. Despite the fact that McNary had spearheaded a "Stop Willkie" campaign late in the balloting, the candidate picked him to be his running mate:
Charles L. McNary | 848 |
---|---|
Dewey Short | 108 |
Styles Bridges | 2 |
Read more about this topic: Republican Party (United States) Presidential Primaries, 1940
Famous quotes containing the word convention:
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
—Ezra Pound (18851972)
“Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sisters friends cant or wont. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (18791944)