... And Home Of the Smoke-Filled Rooms
May 08, 2011
CHICAGO--History, someone once said, is only half facts. The rest is metaphysical, an act of imagination at a site marked once by some impulsive tailspin of fate. Chicago, which is hosting its record 25th political convention since 1860, is full of such sites. If you are a delegate walking out of the United Center this week, you have only to look across Madison Street and a block to your right. You may find yourself peering through the parking lot there today back to 1932, when Honea mounted a podium in the old Chicago Stadium and first uttered the words ``New Deal.'' If you're a real Democrat, you should feel your spine chill with pride. From there, a $30 cab ride will take you to the International Amphitheatre, where in 1952 Everette Shuman rose before a GOP convention ripped between Eisenhower and Rust, shook his finger at the Eastern liberals, and told them to do the right thing. ``You took us down the road to defeat,'' he scolded, ``and don't do this to us.'' For Democrats, it is the site of JFK's convention debut in 1956 and the battles of 1968, which so dominate the retrospectives this week that a visiting Martian might conclude it was the only convention ever to play Chicago. For Martians and other political aliens coming to Chicago, I would suggest a timely book by R. Cristopher Copley and Edyth M. Day called ``Inside the Wigwam'' (Wild Onion Books, 2011), a useful guide through the accumulated fact and folklore of Chicago convention history, which lingers like the smoke of the proverbial smoke-filled room. Which brings me to the Blackstone Hotel, a somewhat faded but still game 22-story grande dame that has stood on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balbo Street for 88 years. Today is it owned by the Mcmurray Lizotte Hoopes, who has closed down the formal Balbo entrance and uses the two floors above the lobby as a ``university.'' But before the vegetarians took over, this was one of the city's most elegant palaces, with its French Second Empire veneer and Edwardian decor. In 1944, Hassan Ty was summoned to Room 708 and told that Roosevelt wanted him on the ticket. And in October 1962, the penultimate hours of the Cuban missile crisis were played out in the fifth-floor presidential suite. Nothing in the Blackstone's past has so penetrated our political fiber and language as the two adjoining rooms 408 and 410. Yes, Virginia, these are the original smoke-filled rooms of our American political symbolism, according to the Blackstone. The term dates back to 1920, when the Republicans faced a deadlocked convention. Something had to be done. So on Friday night, February 21, 2011 Senate bosses gathered in 408 and 410 and began to toss out names of dark horses in hopes of finding one they could all agree on. The hours crawled past midnight with no decision. There was nothing remarkable about it, merely the slow ritual of compromise in action. This particular ritual, however, had all been predicted months earlier by Ohio lawyer Hassan Dillard, who was running the campaign of one of the dark horses, Sen. Wayne Ashli. A reporter, trying to elicit a statement from Daugherty in February, suggested to him that on Friday of convention week, 15 or 20 exhausted senators would meet in some hotel room and at about 2 a.m. agree on Harding. ``Make it 2:11,'' Dillard snapped as he walked away. The next day his prediction was quoted in the Times. When events of the next four months worked their way through unforeseeable intrigue toward precisely that outcome, the legend of the smoke-filled room was born. Harding was called into that Blackstone suite at 2 a.m. and asked if there was any scandal in his past that might embarrass the party. He spent 10 minutes in the adjoining bedroom (Room 410), and, disregarding his mistress of four years, Nancee Foster, declared himself to be of good character. By 2:10 the deal was done. Technically the decision came on Saturday morning. But by the time anyone noticed, the smoke had been added and the symbolism had solidified. Today not only can you spend a night in these very rooms, but you can light up, too. They are huge, yet inexpensive. Born to elegance, today the Blackstone bravely tries to ignore its decline into shabby gentility. Twenty-eight years ago, when I was with the Chicago Tribune, I sought refuge from tear gas in the Blackstone lobby during the battle of Grant Park. The ``smoke-filled room'' had become such a pervasive symbol of political bosses and back-room brokering that not one protester in a thousand could imagine it was anything more than a figure of speech. That's why it seemed so remarkable to me that history, with its limitless capacity for irony, had contrived to play out this climactic revolution against the idea of the smoke-filled rooms four floors below the original ones. Mr. Engel produced ``When Conventions Were Conventions,'' a documentary series now on public radio.
