Republican National Convention

ST. PAUL (AP) ― Republicans hoped to tighten their grip west of the Mighty Mississippi by picking Minneapolis for their 1892 convention.

They fell a few hundred feet short.

The Industrial Exposition Building where delegates backed President Benjamin Harrison sat on the river's east bank. Harrison went on to lose the election to Democrat Grover Cleveland, and the first big political convention west of Chicago got mixed reviews, including complaints about the food from East Coast scribes.

Minnesota was still reliably Republican back then, with a GOP governor and an unbroken string of voting for GOP presidential candidates since statehood in 1858.

There's a GOP governor again today, but his party is on the opposite side of the state's long Democratic presidential streak. The 2008 convention will happen east of the Mississippi again, just a few hundred feet from the river at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center.

A month before Republicans gathered in 1892, the New York Times worried over a plan to feed visitors pork and beans from a log cabin outside the convention hall. The paper dubbed Minneapolis "a bad restaurant city" and called the bean menu "practically, utterly and simply designed to make the town a laughing-stock."

Local papers had a different take on the city's ability to host so many out-of-towners.

"Everything in Apple Pie Order for the Entertainment of All," said one headline in the boosterish Minneapolis Journal, which also called the convention building "the perfectest hall in the history of national conventions."

Some 10,000 people flooded into the Exposition Building for opening speeches, but the real place to be seen was the prestigious West Hotel across the river, which put up delegates from New York, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and several other states. The Minneapolis Tribune described the scene in the lobby: "There is a constant ebb and flow of men, a continued hum of voices like the ceaseless murmur of a summer ocean."

The buzz heading into the four-day gathering centered on Secretary of State James Blaine, a former presidential contender and Harrison appointee who became the sitting president's leading opponent for the nomination. Blaine fed into the speculation by resigning from the cabinet days before the convention.

Blaine had already swept Minnesota in the 1884 presidential election, when Cleveland won his first term, and newspapers including the Minneapolis Journal made much of the possibility that Blaine might deny his boss the nomination.

In the end, it wasn't even close: Harrison got 535-1/6 votes on the first ballot, compared with 182-1/2 for Blaine and 182 for William McKinley, who would win the nomination and the presidency four years later.

The convention nominated New York Tribune editor Whitelaw Reid for vice president.

"A lot of people -- and especially in Minnesota -- were very unhappy with Benjamin Harrison, and they would have preferred another candidate," said Leonard Nadasdy, a political history buff from Independence, Minn., whose memorabilia collection will be on display during this year's convention.

Neither Harrison nor Blaine came to Minneapolis. For a candidate to appear at such a nakedly political gathering was considered unseemly.

"You weren't supposed to go out and advocate for yourself, but let the party come to you," said Twin Cities historian Iric Nathanson.

Of the 902 delegates to the convention, 116 were black and two were women.

Lynchings peaked that year, with 161 black people killed by lynch mobs, and the African-American delegates pushed the convention to include a strong condemnation of the attacks in the party platform. Frederick Douglass, who grew up a slave and became an abolitionist, came to town to attend a suffrage rally led by Susan B. Anthony, a leader in the movement for women's rights.

Nathanson said the African-American delegates went home disappointed when a weakened resolution denouncing "inhuman outrages" went into the platform, with no follow-up. That year marked a high point in their political participation as Jim Crow segregation laws started to take hold across the south.

West of the Mississippi, populist parties were tapping into farmers' anxieties in a region that had helped the GOP control the White House for most of the previous three decades. Minnesota's elite pitched a Minneapolis convention as part of a multistate strategy to help Republicans hold onto those states.

Minneapolis, the country's flour capital, was picked after top Minnesota leaders cut a deal to take Chicago out of the running in exchange for supporting Chicago's bid for the 1893 World's Fair. Convention boosters raised $50,000 and pointed out that major rail and telegraph lines connected Minneapolis to the rest of the country.

The convention ended a day early, prompting a crush at the train stations -- and some more snickering from eastern reporters -- as visitors tried to get out of town.

A few days earlier, the New York World said Minneapolis has "no past to speak of, no more than a baby photographed in the act of saying `Goo."'

The paper went on to predict: "When the next convention is held here, the town will be twice as big as it is now and twice as well satisfied with itself, if possible."

Off by just 58,000 Minneapolitans and one town -- this year's convention happens in St. Paul.

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