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1892 Republican National Convention: Background

Minneapolis was a city on the make when the National Republican Party brought its presidential nominating convention here June 7-10, 1892.  That year, the booming Midwest metropolis, only decades away from its frontier origins, would host the first Republican convention held west of Chicago.

Civic leaders worked feverishly to prepare for the days in early June when their city would be in the national spotlight. Storefronts up and down Hennepin Avenue were decorated with colorful bunting and City Hall at the corner of Hennepin and Nicollet displayed a huge banner announcing “the city is yours,” just above a three foot long gilded key.

The convention’s movers and shakers stayed at the opulent West Hotel on Fifth and Hennepin considered the most luxurious hotel in the Upper Midwest.  During the convention week they marched down Hennepin Avenue and across the river to the mammoth Exposition Hall, the convention’s site, where 10,000 spectators jammed into the Hall’s balconies to observe the 902 delegates on the convention floor below them.

The week’s main event, the nomination of incumbent President Benjamin Harrison for a second four-year term was something of an anti-climax. For days preceding Harrison’s re-nomination on the first ballot, hordes of local and national journalists whipped up a frenzy of public excitement by filing reams of copy about the backroom political machinations preceding the final day’s balloting.

Now, more then 100 years later, as the Republican National Convention prepares for a return visit to Minnesota, local historian Iric Nathanson will retell the story of that earlier political event.

Other facts about the 1892 Republican National Convention:

• One of the most prominent non-delegates in Minneapolis during convention week was the noted abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who had come to town to participate in a suffrage rally with Susan B. Anthony.

• Lynching would reach its high point in America in 1892, with the reported murders of 161 African Americans at the hands of white mobs that year.

• The convention delegates included 116 African Americans, many of whom joined Minneapolis’ small black community a few nights before the convention to protest lynchings and murders terrorizing black people in the South.

• The black delegates came together to endorse a strongly worded anti-lynching resolution. A watered down version of the resolution became part of the platform.

• The convention was held at the Minneapolis Industrial Exposition Building, which opened in 1886. In 1903 it became a mail order warehouse for the International Stock Food Company, whose clerks navigated its spaces on roller skates. It was torn down in 1940.

Sources:

Green, Ken. “The 1892 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.” Hennepin History (Autumn 1996).

Holmquist, June Drenning. “Convention City: The Republicans in Minneapolis 1892. Minnesota History (June 1956): 64-76.

Nathanson, Iric. “’The Ballot Has Been Fought and Won’: The 1892 Republican Convention.” Hennepin History (Fall 2006): 16-29.

Nathanson, Iric. “African Americans at the 1892 Republican Convention.” Minnesota History, Summer 2008.

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