Cleveland’s twelve-thousand-seat public auditorium was packed with delegates and spectators on the afternoon of June 12, 1924, and the Republican National Convention was in full swing. They had just nominated Calvin Coolidge for a full term as president and, in hopes of fostering the spirit of party unity before the candidates hit the campaign trail, the convention’s chairman, Wyoming GOP stalwart Frank Mondell, invited a delegate from Wisconsin to make the traditional call for a unanimous endorsement of the party’s choice. Coolidge, who a year earlier had succeeded the late Warren Harding as the nation’s president, had been nominated as the party’s standard bearer with what newspapers across the country referred to as a “practically unanimous vote.”1 It would be the job of the Coolidge partisan from Kenosha, Thomas Scott, to wrap things up by rallying delegates to make the president the convention’s undisputed choice.
Scott, however, had been given an impossible task. In Wisconsin’s twenty-nine-member delegation, he was the sole Coolidge backer. The rest were supporters of Robert M. La Follette, Wisconsin’s sixty-eight-year-old senior senator and former governor, whose name had not even been placed in nomination, and who had received only thirty-four delegate votes (those of the Wisconsin crew and six progressives from North Dakota). Coolidge had received a whopping 1,065.2 Mondell and other party leaders imagined that Scott might be able bring his fellow Wisconsinites back into the fold.
Instead, the rest of the Wisconsin delegation rejected Scott’s call. Loudly. “[Scott] began a speech but was shouted down by his colleagues,” reported Time magazine.3 Things quickly grew heated. Wisconsinites shouted down Scott, and the rest of the convention began chanting, “Put ’em out,” calling for the expulsion of the La Follette backers. At that point, the Coolidge backer made a wise decision. Instead of rejoining his delegation, Scott took a seat with delegates from Vermont, the state of the president’s birth.4 Amid the chaos, Mondell finally put the motion to the full convention, and it was greeted with “a great chorus of ‘Ayes’” and “a handful of lusty ‘Noes’ from Wisconsin.” A frustrated Mondell announced, “With the exception of a very few voices, the nomination of Calvin Coolidge is made unanimous.” The “very few voices” were from Wisconsin, according to Time’s account, “28 to be exact.”5
That was just one of the many instances in which the Wisconsin Republicans threw the party’s 1924 convention into disarray. They proposed a platform that, according to magazine, “denounced all the major works of the Republican Party.”6 They brought up the Teapot Dome Scandal, which a year earlier had rocked Washington with the
