Morry Gash/AP Photo
Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks during the Democratic National Convention Tuesday night in Chicago.
In the midst of his affable, affectionate, and amusing convention talk (and it was a measure of its success that it came across as a talk, not a speech) about his wife, first gentleman Doug Emhoff referred to Kamala Harris as a “joyful warrior.” That rang a bell, a hundred-year-old bell at that.
One hundred years ago this summer, at the Democrats’ 1924 convention in a sweltering Madison Square Garden, the party’s 1920 vice-presidential candidate walked across the stage to place in nomination for the party’s presidential candidate the governor of New York: Al Smith. The moment was historic, for two distinct reasons.
To begin, it marked the first public appearance of that 1920 vice-presidential nominee, who’d been stricken with polio in 1921 and hadn’t been seen in public since. It was generally assumed that Franklin Roosevelt’s political career was finished, though he was only 42 years old. Roosevelt couldn’t walk—he never could after 1921—but with his legs in braces so they wouldn’t bend, with the help of his son and the canes he leaned on, he remained erect while he propelled himself across the stage to the podium, simulating walking as the upper half of his body pulled his lower half along. It marked Roosevelt’s reappearance on the political stage, which he was never to leave for the rest of his life.
Second, the man Roosevelt proceeded to nominate broke a fundamental rule of American politics: Al Smith was a Catholic, whereas every president of the United States had been a Protestant. Worse yet, Smith’s nomination came at the very peak of the nation’s anti-Catholic, antisemitic, xenophobic backlash, just a few months after the Congress had enacted a law that banned virtually all immigration from Poland, Russia, and Italy, which since the 1880s had been sending Catholics and Jews to America in the millions.
Most delegates at the convention came either from the political machines of heavily Catholic and Jewish cities, or from the evangelical Protestant South. With the nomination requiring the votes of two-thirds of the delegates, and with the convention split down the middle between Smith’s supporters and his Protestant opponents, it took two weeks and 103 ballots before exhausted delegates settled on an obscure compromise candidate, John W. Davis. Smith was to win the nomination four years later, but after a campaign in which his train often traversed landscapes lit up by burning crosses placed there by the Klan, Smith lost decisively to Herbert Hoover.
But back in Madison Square Garden in 1924, Roosevelt ended his speech by placing in nomination “the happy warrior of the political battlefield, Alfred Emanuel Smith!”
I doubt that Emhoff was consciously echoing Roosevelt in calling his wife a “joyful warrior,” but the echoes are there whether Emhoff meant to or not. As Smith was a groundbreaking candidate for president due to his faith, so Harris is a groundbreaking candidate due to her gender and race. Both were children of immigrants from the kind of countries that xenophobes of their times intensely disliked; both could boast distinguish political careers characterized by policies that helped working-class families (though Smith was to turn into a conservative a decade later).
And the party that convened in Chicago this week still cites Smith’s nominator as its greatest leader, even if the most Rooseveltian speaker to address this week’s convention thus far was Bernie Sanders, who thundered from the podium last night against the hold that the billionaires and the oligarchs exert over our politics. Sanders reminded Democrats rightly fearful of Donald Trump’s threats to democracy that great wealth poses a serious and chronic threat to democracy, too, if less blatant than Trump’s.
As to the threats Trump poses, no one has ever taken him down so effectively as Michelle Obama did last night, turning the Donald’s bigoted pronouncements right back against him. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” she asked. Countering his (and J.D. Vance’s) habit of labeling their Black political opponents as beneficiaries of ostensibly unfair racial preferences, she skewered Trump by noting that most Americans do not benefit from “the affirmative action of generational wealth.”
Tuesday also continued the Democrats’ wresting the mantle of the freedom party from the Republicans, who have been hailing themselves as the champions of freedom for many decades. For Republicans, “freedom” has meant the freedom of wealthy businessmen to maximize their profits free from such impediments as regulation and taxes—free, that is, from the public policies of democratically elected governments. The Republican bans on abortion, however, have highlighted how they deny fundamental freedoms to women and girls, even as they accord more rarified freedoms to the very rich. Democrats have seized upon this obvious discrepancy to champion not just reproductive freedoms, but the freedom of children to attend school without fear of attack from some AR-15-toting maniac, the freedom of seniors and the sick to be able to afford medications, the freedom of workers to join unions and make a living wage. In this, they are following the lead of that Democrat who willed himself across the convention stage a century ago. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt declared that “Necessitous men are not free men,” and expanded the party’s concept of freedom to include freedom from want and freedom from fear. These 2024 Democrats, these newly reinvigorated apostles of real freedoms, have a distinguished pedigree.
