WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN called the presidential nominating convention "a photograph of the nation."
In Ballots and Bandwagons, Ralph G. Martin saw it as "a glorified national town meeting, mixed with a sense of circus and a huge tremor of hope and history." To H. L. Mencken, it was "vulgar, ugly, stupid, tedious, hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus. And yet there suddenly comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."
For...