The Convention-Crasher in Chief
Late in the evening of July 1, 1932, Chairman Thomas H. Walsh, senator from Montana, took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to share an electrifying message. He’d just received a call: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was coming to Chicago to accept the nomination. And he would be flying.
No Democratic candidate had ever accepted the nomination in person, most waiting instead until an official “notification ceremony” weeks or months after the convention. And no candidate of either party had ever flown in an airplane — a mode of transport still more closely associated with daredevils like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart than with cautious politicians.
Roosevelt’s decision to attend the 1932 DNC was a masterful bit of political theater. But it set the stage for an even more masterful bit of political communication.
As a candidate, Roosevelt faced a credibility problem. If elected, he, a two-term governor of New York and former assistant secretary of the Navy, would assume responsibility for guiding the country through its greatest crisis since the Civil War. Some, like columnist Walter Lippman, doubted he was up to the job. “He is a pleasant man,” Lippman wrote that year, “who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”
The opening of Roosevelt’s acceptance speech struck at the heart of that critique.
“The appearance before a National Convention of its nominee for President, to be formally notified of his selection, is unprecedented and unusual,” Roosevelt began.
But these are unprecedented and unusual times. I have started out on the tasks that lie ahead by breaking the absurd traditions that the candidate should remain in professed ignorance of what has happened for weeks until he is formally notified of that event many weeks later….
Let it also be symbolic that in so doing I broke traditions. Let it be from now on the task of our Party to break foolish traditions. We will break foolish traditions and leave it to the Republican leadership, far more skilled in that art, to break promises.
Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small.
Unable to establish ethos with his political résumé alone, Roosevelt used his arrival in Chicago as a case in point. To beat the crisis, Roosevelt argued, America needed to reject old orthodoxies and constraining customs. As proof he could deliver that change, Roosevelt offered his presence.
Spectacle is one of the more common elements in the political periodic table. Though it has its uses, it can only take a speaker so far. Getting an audience’s attention with theatrics is easy; earning trust with theatrics is hard. But, in 1932, Roosevelt did just that — with a bit of rhetorical alchemy, he transformed spectacle into substance. It was one of the most impressive displays of public speaking at any convention, before or since.
It may also be one of the most important. His credibility established, Roosevelt concluded his speech by offering the assembled crowd a new phrase — a slogan to describe the promise that would replace all he would sweep away:
I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms.
The New Deal would transform the country by giving it a new political tradition: one rooted in the belief that the federal government could and should look out for the welfare of its citizens; one intended to balance self-reliance with solidarity; one aimed, as all great American political movements are, at a more perfect union.
And though few remember it, the seeds of that transformation were first planted in July of 1932 — by a convention-crasher in an airplane.
In “Orations Worth Ovations,” professional speechwriters analyze great speeches (real or fictional, historic or personal) and explain what makes them so good.
Read Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 Democratic National Convention speech here.
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