With their country reeling from economic crisis and their world buckling to a soon-to-be global war, approximately 1,500 Northwestern students convened at Roycemore Field to decide who was fit to be the next United States President.
It was April, 1940, and the 900 delegates at the Mock Political Convention — New Hampshire and Rhode Island sat up front and the Phillipines, Utah and Nevada in back — were actually representatives from campus houses, student groups, fraternities and sororities.
The front page of a booklet for the 1956 Mock Political Convention. Courtesy of University ArchivesSocialist Party leader Norman Thomas had an early lead, but an “overwhelmingly conservative campus” (in the words of Daily Northwestern writer Don Turner) was not to deny Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg — after enough delegates defected from their first ballot choice of Thomas Dewey to elect the Michigan Republican.
The organizers of last week’s “Rock the Vote” debate and its 25 participants might envy such a hefty turnout for an act of student democracy. But then again, last week’s debaters didn’t claim to broadcast the student body’s “answer to the difficulties that challenge America,” which was the goal for Northwestern’s MPC, in the words of its chairman in 1936.
Of course, the Mock Convention choice had no bearing on the actual results — the voting age was 21 then anyway — because Vandenburg finished fourth in the Republican primaries, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt won that year handily.
But these delegates did produce what appears to be a manifesto for the “youth of 1940,” outlining a platform on behalf of the university’s students, which pleaded for the U.S. to stay out of the war and preserve “the maintenance of a competitive capitalistic order.”
The 1940 convention was no spur-of-the-moment anti-war uprising, just the latest installment of what was by then a quadrennial institution on campus. Every election year from 1908 to 1968, delegates at the Mock Political Convention chose a presidential candidate; after it became a bi-partisan event in 1936, the Convention hosted thousands of student political activists, national speakers and parades along Sheridan Road, attracting widespread attention.
Though these days student political groups appear to fit into separate niches — such as student groups for a certain party or candidate, or the voter registration and awareness group NU Decides — the Mock Convention seemed much broader in scope and ambition.
“The Convention is the voice of the students of Northwestern University, and through them the voice of college students throughout the country,” wrote J. Robert Coughlan, the chairman of the national committee in the 1936 “Book of the Northwestern University Non-Partisan Political Convention.”
A stretch perhaps, but in 1944 the Convention seated more than a thousand delegates. Eight years later, Patten Gym teemed with approximately 2,000 students as the now infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy spoke. Though the anti-communist demagogue inspired some revulsion around campus — “we of Tau Delta Phi desire to show our disapproval of Sen. McCarthy and his tactics,” an Apr. 24, 1952 letter to the Daily reads — McCarthy actually won delegates’ approval, by a count of 543 to 378.
McCarthy wasn’t the only national figure to grace the Mock Convention stage. MPC speakers in 1960 included Chicago’s (first) Mayor Daley, the Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. senators from Florida and New York, and the governors of Illinois and Michigan.
And a document from 1968’s Convention (the name had by then been changed to the Northwestern Political Convention) reported that Richard Nixon’s campaign arranged for a congressman to speak there on his behalf. “His purpose is to explain the policies of the GOP’s front-running candidate, and to urge support for the Nixon campaign prior to the Convention,” the document states.
But by then, the pomp and circumstance of years past — including a “tired, confused elephant borrowed from a local circus” that the Daily reported to be at the 1952 Convention’s parade — had faded.
“This is Northwestern Political Convention week,” the Daily reported in April, 1968, “but unless interest in the nation’s oldest continuous political convention increases before Friday, the ‘68 version is in danger of being a flop.” It warned that a pre-convention “tug-of-war” at the Rock “fell on its face when only campaigners for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace appeared in force.”
Soon after, the Convention picked its first ever Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, but although 800 delegates had shown up, the event didn’t even make the front pages. There appears to be no archival record of the Convention thereafter.
University archivist Kevin Leonard isn’t sure why, although he points out that the voting age was lowered to 18 around then; 1971 to be exact. Either way, the “voice of the students of Northwestern University” appears to have disappeared.