It took two hours for all of the delegations to cast their votes. When it was finally complete the results were as follows:
Results of the first ballot:
770 needed for nomination
William Gibbs McAdoo: 441.5
Albert Ritchie: 334
Harry Byrd: 77
J. Hamilton Lewis: 58
George White: 52
John Nance Garner: 46
Harry Moore: 32
William H. "Alfalfa Bill" Murray: 31.5
James Reed: 30
Huey Long: 20
Joseph Robinson: 18
Newton D. Baker: 14
The first ballot brought the long-expected stalemate. McAdoo controlled around 38% of the delegates, compared to 29% for Ritchie and the remainder split among the various favorite sons. All observations suggested that McAdoo's support was built on shaky ground, and unless he quickly built momentum his delegates would begin jumping ship. This was not lost to the Ritchie campaign, who pushed for a second ballot as soon as possible to deny the McAdoo camp time to work out a deal with the favorite sons. The Marylander believed that to win he simply had to wait for McAdoo to peak, at which point the convention would quickly unite behind him. With McAdoo opponent Jouette Shouse chairing the convention, the second ballot began soon after the end of the first.
Results of the second ballot:
770 needed for nomination
William Gibbs McAdoo: 456
Albert Ritchie: 333.5
Harry Byrd: 77
J. Hamilton Lewis: 58
George White: 52
John Nance Garner: 46
Harry Moore: 32
William H. "Alfalfa Bill" Murray: 31.5
James Reed: 26
Huey Long: 24
Newton D. Baker: 18
James M. Cox: 0.5
McAdoo made a small gain on the second ballot, mostly due to Arkansas favorite son Joseph Robinson abandoning his campaign and throwing his support behind him. However, with the Arkansas delegation uninstructed, four of the delegates instead voted for populist firebrand Huey Long of neighboring Louisiana. The
de facto dictator of his state, Long wasn't particularly enamored by any of the candidates and coveted the presidency himself. Thus, Long had himself nominated as Louisiana's favorite son by a delegation of loyalists to influence the convention. Other than Arkansas, the second ballot was virtually identical to the first, and Shouse called a brief recess for lunch, planning to resume balloting later in the afternoon.
Daniel C. Roper, McAdoo's floor manager, spent most of the recess meeting with members of the Garner campaign, hoping to swing Texas' 46 votes behind his candidate. As House Speaker, Garner was the highest-ranking Democrat in the country and was often mentioned as a candidate himself. To many southern Democrats he seemed a modern Andrew Jackson, a tall, rough-hewn, frontiersman who could herd cattle and ride the range. His nomination at the Texas state convention had been met with whoops and cheers from all corners of the Lone Star State, and had he actively sought the nomination he likely would have been the front-runner. But Garner stood firm in his refusal to seek the White House. He was perfectly happy as House Speaker, and feared that throwing his hat into an already crowded field would only threaten Democratic unity at a time when the American people desperately needed strong leadership. After visiting the White House to negotiate an economic relief package with President Hoover, Garner remarked "I always thought of the White House as a prison, but I never noticed until today how much the shiny latch on the Executive office door looks like the handle on a casket."
Garner had loyally supported McAdoo in his earlier campaigns, and given his apparent disinterest in the presidency, Roper assumed that it would be easy to win over the Texas delegation, giving the Californian the convention floor momentum he sorely needed. Over lunch, he met with Garner floor manager, congressman Sam Rayburn in a sweltering Sherman House hotel room to request that the delegation switch to McAdoo on the third ballot. “Hell no,” Rayburn replied. “We’ve got a lot of people up here who’ve never been to a convention before, and they’ve got to vote for Garner a few times.” Roper's warning that McAdoo's support would collapse if he wasn't nominated by the fourth ballot and offering the vice presidency to Garner failed to sway the Texans. While Rayburn didn't rule out switching the delegation to McAdoo down the road, Roper feared that it would come too little, too late. The Texan delegation was enthusiastically behind Garner and were determined to drag their man, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the White House.
Robert B. Ennis, floor manager for the Ritchie campaign, was involved with negotiations of his own. While McAdoo's chances were fast approaching nil, he still controlled nearly 40% of the delegates, giving him veto power over any would-be nominee. Ennis laid out a roadmap to victory. He would persuade one or more of the favorite sons to switch to Ritchie on the third ballot, giving him momentum as McAdoo stalled. As McAdoo's coalition fractured, Ennis would make a play for his Southern support by playing up Ritchie's Virginian upbringing and conservative leanings. In the event that his "Southern strategy" failed, he would work to get the Southern delegations behind Virginia's Harry Byrd. Byrd had much in common with Ritchie: both were Southern governors of aristocratic Virginian stock who held firm to the Jeffersonian maxim that the government that governs best is the government that governs least. Ennis believed that their ideological similarities would allow Ritchie to win over Byrd, perhaps by offering him the vice presidency.
The Virginian, meanwhile, was watching the unfolding deadlock with excitement. Harry Byrd had been a rising star in politics since his election as governor in 1925, and anticipating a prolonged floor fight in 1932, believed he had a good chance of nomination as a compromise candidate. In addition to his native Virginia, where his "organization" held a stranglehold on politics, Byrd controlled the delegations of neighboring Kentucky and North Carolina, where he had cultivated strong support among the states' business communities. With McAdoo faltering and Ritchie facing an uncertain path to victory, the Byrd forces sensed an opportunity. Word on the convention floor was that Byrd was the second choice of many of the Southern delegates backing McAdoo, and Byrd believed that after McAdoo fell, he would have a good shot at uniting the South. For the first time, the Byrd camp began making tentative efforts to win over delegates north of the Mason-Dixon line, laying the groundwork for victory once the South had been won over.
Meanwhile, Ritchie's pandering to Southern conservatives had largely failed to reap the expected benefits. His uncompromising wetness remained a bitter pill to swallow for many, and the McAdoo camp seized upon his strong support from Al Smith and the urban machines as proof that Ritchie was a "Tammany Trojan Horse" every bit as beholden to boss politics as Smith. It didn't help that Ritchie had a strong relationship with boss Frank Kelly of Baltimore, infamous for his corruption and election fixing[1].
Worse for Ritchie's campaign was the spectacular corruption scandals shaking the state of New York. Since 1930, attorney Charles Tuttle[2] had been investigating corruption in New York City government with astounding findings. Government jobs were doled out to Tammany stooges with no regard for competency, politicians grew fat off of graft, and the city courts were rife with fixing and bribery. Perhaps one of Tuttle's most infamous findings was a ring of Vice Squad officers who arrested women on baseless prostitution charges and imprisoned them unless they paid the right people, who were of course Tammany loyalists. Medical reports of one woman arrested by the ring showed clear evidence of assault[3]. By the spring of 1932, Tuttle's investigation had led him straight to the top, and he charged New York's mayor, the flamboyant womanizer Jimmy Walker[4] with accepting nearly $300,000 in bribes as mayor. Tuttle's investigation of Walker led him to an even higher politican, state Governor John A. Hastings.
A former State Senator, Hastings had narrowly defeated incumbent Republican Albert Ottinger in 1930, becoming the youngest governor in state history at just 30 years old. A charismatic Tammany ally, Hastings had often been mentioned as the next Al Smith and even a potential presidential candidate someday. But over the course of a few weeks in 1932, it all came crashing down. Tuttle uncovered evidence that while a State Senator, Hastings had recieved cash payments from a private bus company that employed him in return for lobbying on their behalf. By the time the convention had meet, impeachment proceedings were underway in the state legislature. The staggering levels of corruption uncovered by the Tuttle investigation gained national attention and shone a renewed light on corrupt urban machine politics. More importantly for the Democratic National Convention, it forced Albert Ritchie into a difficult corner. Coming out too strongly against Tammany's corruption risked alienating critical machine support, while appearing soft on the issue would hurt his chances of wooing crucial Southern delegations.
As the convention reconvened that afternoon, it was clear that it was nowhere close to picking a nominee. The McAdoo camp had all but conceded defeat after the Texas delegation refused to switch sides and meetings with the other favorite son campaigns were equally fruitless. Nevertheless, the campaign was still determined to win over any delegate to increase their bargaining power. Even if McAdoo had no chance of winning the nomination himself, he was still determined to pick the next nominee. The Ritchie camp was looking for a burst of momentum to establish the Marylander as the clear frontrunner, while Byrd worked to position himself as the natural compromise candidate.
[1]In 1919 the Republican nominee for governor of Maryland, Harry Nice, was a strong Kelly ally even though Kelly was a Democrat. When Nice promised to clean up corruption in Baltimore, Kelly threw his support behind the Democratic nominee, Albert Ritchie. Ritchie won by just 165 votes thanks to a huge margin out of Baltimore, where there was considerable evidence of voter intimidation/ballot stuffing
[2]IOTL FDR asked Judge Samuel Seabury to conduct the investigation into Tammany. With the Republican Ottinger in office in 1930, the job instead goes to Tuttle, a Republican prosecutor known for his crusades against corruption.
[3]All OTL
[4]From what I've read Walker was basically Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons
