IT was the 36th time that the Democrats met in convention since Andrew Jackson first called the faithful to Baltimore in 1832. But so unusual was the Democratic Convention that nominated George McGovern that it could have been the first one ever held.
Gone were the building blocks of tightly controlled state delegates answerable to political bosses, to old-line party discipline, to organized labor. Gone were the tightlipped, gravel-voiced party barons from the tiers of the New Jersey, New York and Illinois delegations. Gone were the trappings that moved Will Rogers to describe conventions as "the Fourth of July of American politics." One waited for the pipe organ to sound, for the delegates to pour into the aisles, for state banners held aloft to parade the hall.
There was none of that. There were no ranks of golf bags standing in the hotel lobbies; instead, the tennis courts were crowded from sunup till dusk. The parties were few and saw little determined boozing but a lot of quiet talk in corners and a bit of freeloading by young delegates short of cash. Party leaders sweeping down Collins Avenue in their rented air-conditioned limousines could pass up a sandaled, T-shirted hitchhiker only at their peril; they never knew whether he might be a key delegate. The violent tradition of Chicago was dead; the encampment of protesters in Flamingo Park was quiet, even a bit forlorn.
In the convention arena, there was an air of gentleness despite the heat and pressures of political conflict, an air of almost studied politeness. The uncharacteristic courtesy and discipline, the responsiveness to the chair and the agenda, were succinctly explained by one young McGovern delegate: "We're not here to hassle, but to nominate."
As the convention began, a curious air of inevitability hung over Miami Beach like the hot, wet clouds that usually greeted delegates when they ventured outside the air conditioning. McGovern's astute young organization, working through the spring, had sent him to Miami with an apparently overwhelming delegate total, tantalizingly close to the 1,509 needed for nomination. Everyone knew that the nomination would be decided not in the formal balloting on Wednesday night but on Monday, when the convention assembled to vote on the crucial issue of delegate credentials.
The entire campaign narrowed down to the question of who owned California's 271 delegates. McGovern had captured all of them in the June 6 primary, according to California's winner-take-all law. But as the party's Credentials Committee met in Washington late last month, a stop-McGovern coalition formed, centered around Hubert Humphrey and organized labor; Edmund Muskie's supporters joined along with George Wallace, Washington's Senator Henry Jackson, Arkansas' Wilbur Mills and even New York's Shirley Chisholm. The "A.B.M. movement," some of them called it—"Anybody But McGovern."
In the Credentials Committee, the A.B.M. movement succeeded in nullifying California's winner-take-all rule, for the moment stripping McGovern of 151 delegates and sending the fight ultimately to the convention floor. There, the matter turned on legal niceties: Should McGovern's 120 delegates—the proportional share he was entitled to by winning 44% of the primary vote