In June 1948 the Republican party held its national convention to select its nominee for president of the United States. A Guardian editorial on 22 June described the Republican process (compared to that of the Democrats) as ‘a field for power politics rather than for ideologies; they have preferred to settle their differences by discreet compromises.’
Thomas E Dewey was eventually selected as the Republican nominee, losing unexpectedly to the incumbent Harry S Truman in November 1948. Strom Thurmond, long-serving senator and record filibuster, stood on the Dixiecrat ticket that opposed desegregation.
Alistair Cooke, who had become the Manchester Guardian’s chief US correspondent the previous year, wrote an ‘ABC of American ritual’ on the Republican Convention:
An Englishman dropped into the middle of a nominating Convention begins by saying that he feels like the man from Mars. The more he is plied with enlightenment, the more he loses hope of ever understanding the political mores of America, ancient or modern. He usually ends up by branding them with his favourite adjective for whatever is alien or unpleasant to have to face: they are “fantastic.” He tends to let it go at that.
What commonly confuses the stranger is the tendency of his instructors to mix the mechanics of the Conventions with the motives of the delegations involved in them. He is unable to pick out the tune from the floods of harmony and dissonance that swirl around it. But there is a tune, an eighteenth-century one, that derives from the Constitutional Convention of the Founding States and that is no more intricate and no less formal than a Haydn symphony.
