Convention Comic • In this cartoon, from the 1892 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, the banner says “We’ve Got It – National Republican Convention.” Among the sunshine-faced characters’ feet it says “They Are Coming Home.”

On the eve of the June 1892 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, rumors stirred about the potential insurgent candidacy of then-Secretary of State James G. Blaine – especially if he secured the support of an number of black GOP delegates.
In the end, the convention, by all accounts, turned out to be less a drama and more of a snooze, a short-term entertainment with no long-term implications, at least for Minneapolis and the country.
Blaine didn’t come close to grabbing the nomination, and black delegates (who numbered almost double the black delegates at the 2004 GOP national convention) did nothing out of the ordinary to support him.
What some out-of-town reporters remembered most about the 1892 convention were endless meals of beans and the stifling heat. Local reporters and the city’s leaders were proud of a job well done, after the big party unfolded without a major miscue.
Republican delegates chose as their candidate President Benjamin Harrison, who was looking for a second term in the White House. Things didn’t work out too well for Harrison, who lost the election to Democrat Grover Cleveland, the same candidate he’d beaten four years earlier.
Of course, things didn’t work out too well for Cleveland, who’d go on to have the bad luck to encounter the Panic of 1893, an economic depression caused in part by speculation in the railroad business – a scenario similar to the economic troubles the foreclosure crisis has caused today.
Local historian Iric Nathanson has probably spent more time than anyone else studying the 1892 convention, having penned in-depth articles on the event for Minnesota History and Hennepin History magazines. Harrison’s first term, Nathanson suggests, was “lackluster” and not “terribly dramatic,” although he did sign the first bill ever to reign in monopolistic business interests in the Sherman Antitrust Act.
On the other hand, his party suffered mid-term electoral losses in 1890 and cartoonists ceaselessly mocked the bearded president as a mere stooge compared with his heroic grandfather, William Henry Harrison, who battled American Indians at Tippecanoe, led American armies against the British in the War of 1812 and served as Indiana’s governor before becoming president in 1840. William Henry Harrison died after only a few months in office from pneumonia and assorted ailments, holding the presidency for the shortest duration ever.
How Minneapolis came to win the convention was almost as intriguing as the event itself. Looking to expand from its East Coast and Wall Street base, the Republican leadership focused on having the 1892 convention in a Western city. In the competition were, at one time or another, Chicago, San Francisco, Omaha and Cincinnati.
The local business community supported the cause, among them Minnesota Republican delegation chairman John S. Pillsbury, the legendary flour magnate, and General Mills founder Cadwallader Colden Washburn. Then-Gov. William Merriam added to the case for Minneapolis by proclaiming Minnesota a “battleground” state.
Minneapolis, then just 36 years old, had plenty of advantages to attract a convention, according to Nathanson, whose day job is as financial resources coordinator for the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers in Minneapolis.
During the previous decade the city’s population had tripled to 165,000. Built in 1886, the city’s Exposition Building – “the Xcel Center of its time” – could hold more than 10,000 spectators and 902 delegates in one enormous two-tiered hall, Nathanson says. Fact sheets distributed in 1891 to the RNC highlighted the city’s status as a national railway hub, extensive telegraph networks and many housing accommodations.
Eventually Chicago backed out of the competition to focus on the World’s Fair coming up in 1893. After seven ballots the RNC gave Minneapolis the nod on Nov. 24, 1891.
“One newspaper article said ‘now the Republican Party can move out of the shadow of Wall Street into the bright sun of the prairies’” Nathanson says. “Minneapolis leaders played up the fact it would be a real political plus to have it here. They did the same kind of lobby folks did here a couple of years ago.”
The convention began June 6, 1892. The city hall at the time, located at Hennepin and Nicollet, hung a three-foot-long key above a banner announcing “This City Is Yours.” Outside of the Exposition Hall, the center of action for conventioneers was The West, a 407-room hotel so dedicated to opulence that it was said to be the finest west of Chicago.
“The lobby of the West Hotel is now a seething cauldron in which the varied political elements are at boiling point from morning to night,” wrote the Minneapolis Journal. “Every few minutes a bubble comes to the surface, there is a sharp exchange of hot words between leaders of opposing factions and perhaps a blow is struck.”
The arguments at the beginning of the convention came as a result of Blaine’s resignation as secretary of state. The former U.S. senator and speaker of the House of Representatives had captured the hearts of many who saw him – nicknamed “The Plumed Knight” – as a more formidable candidate than Harrison, Nathanson says.
“It’s really as if in 2004 George Bush was going to be re-nominated and there’s a boom for Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state, and Powell supporters go to the convention and try to wrest the nomination away from George Bush,” he explains.
Blaine, who lost the presidential election in 1888, saw no reason to dampen his supporters’ enthusiasm. He was “careful not to put his hat in the ring, he’s coy about his choices, he’s sort of vague, making statements he’s not a candidate,” Nathanson says.
Within the 116 black Republican delegates – or roughly 13 percent of all GOP delegates that year – a simmering support for Blaine brewed. Virginia delegate John M. Langston, slated to chair the convention, openly supported Blaine by calling him “a friend of the black man in the South.” The comment lost him the convention chairmanship, according to Nathanson.
At the local level, Republicans proposed having prominent black attorney Fredrick L. McGhee of St. Paul serve as an at-large presidential elector representing Minnesota. However, complaints from the Swedish Republican community led the party to “unceremoniously” yank him from the process, the historian says.
Though the black community could have had a game-changing influence, it never coalesced around Blaine or wild-card Michigan Gov. Russell A. Alger. As Nathanson points out in his Minnesota History article, blacks did come together to craft a strong anti-lynching resolution, but when the measure passed it was in a narrower and watered down version that failed to stop the heinous practice.
“I suspect that 1892 was the high point of black delegates to the Republican Convention,” he adds. In fact, blacks represented only 6.7 percent of delegates at the 2004 RNC convention.
Nathanson attributes the relatively high number of black GOP delegates to the “legacy of Reconstruction.” As
a result of Reconstruction, blacks in the South held some elected positions, which meant they were in control of some patronage jobs and that helped boost their delegate numbers.
By the next presidential election, the lasting effects of Reconstruction had almost disappeared.
As for the pro-Blaine contingent at the convention, it lost early and easily – Harrison won the nomination on the first ballot with 535 votes. Briefly, it looked as if convention chair and Ohio Gov. William McKinley might even get the nomination, but that opportunity failed to materialize.
When the convention ended, several party leaders told McKinley that he would likely be the nominee four years later, a correct prognostication.
Nathanson’s research uncovered some other intriguing tidbits. Neither Blaine nor Harrison even attended the convention, which was common among presidential candidates in the 1800s. Susan B. Anthony held a suffrage rally June 7 with black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a decidedly odd couple. The duo was odd because after the Civil War the suffragette movement dropped its allegiance with abolitionists because it wanted to attract the support of Southern women, according to Nathanson.
The convention featured only two female delegates, both from Wyoming. One of them, G.C. Carleton, stayed with Martha Ripley, a pioneering female physician in Minneapolis who went on to establish a maternity hospital on Glenwood Avenue in North Minneapolis. Today, the hospital has been converted to housing.
So what did the convention do for Minneapolis≠ The press gave a mixed report card. A Boston reporter’s miserable experience led to the comment “Minneapolis will not soon be selected as the place of holding a national convention. It was never intended as a convention city.”
The Minneapolis Times, in contrast, wrote: “The hospitality of the city of Minneapolis has been weighed and not found wanting.”
The resplendent exposition hall became a financial boondoggle too large to attract many conventions. It finally met the wrecking ball in 1940. A northern suburb still celebrates James G. Blaine in its name.
“There’s no indication there was a long-term impact from the convention,” Nathanson says. “I think they – delegates and media – all leave pretty quickly. This year we’ll have a lot of excitement, a lot of hoopla, a lot of buildings being painted, flowers being planted, hotel rooms being filled up. But then the delegates will go home and it will be business as usual.”

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