NEW YORK (AP) — Republican Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday follows a long string of political events at New York City’s storied arena.
The Garden has hosted both Democratic and Republican National Conventions since the 19th century, and in 1939 thousands of people participated in back-to-back pro-Nazi and Communist party rallies in the lead-up to World War II. Marilyn Monroe took the stage in 1962 to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, adding to the lore surrounding what the New York Knicks announcer called “the most famous arena in the world!” mentions.
Here are some highlights from the political history of Madison Square Garden, which has occupied four buildings over time.
Grover Cleveland is making a comeback
Grover Cleveland is the only American president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Trump hopes to become the second.
After the 1892 Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago and nominated Cleveland—then out of office after serving from 1885 to 1889—he accepted the nomination with a speech at Madison Square Garden—the second—in his home state of New York.
The Evening World reported that “a band stationed on one of the balconies played popular broadcasts, with the audience joining in the chorus of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ and ‘Four years more of Grover.’
Cleveland promised to cut tariffs, while Trump has said imposing massive tariffs on foreign goods would boost the U.S. economy. Cleveland went on to defeat Republican Benjamin Harrison to become both the 24th and 22nd president.
A record number of 103 ballots
The Democratic Party that convened at the second Madison Square Garden in 1924 was deeply divided over immigration, Prohibition, and the growing prominence of the Ku Klux Klan. The race was deadlocked between William Gibbs McAdoo of California and New York Governor Alfred E. Smith, whom the Klan opposed because he was Roman Catholic.
From June 24 to July 9, vote after vote failed to produce a nomination. The Associated Press reported on July 2 that McAdoo had “reached the coveted goal of 500 votes thanks to a lot of hard work and persuasion and maneuvering on the part of his floor managers, who declared that they had not yet completed their work.”
It wasn’t enough. After both McAdoo and Smith dropped out, a compromise candidate, former West Virginia Congressman John W. Davis, was nominated on the 103rd ballot; he later lost to Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Speeches by Hoover, Roosevelt
While the first two gardens were near Madison Square—where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at 23rd Street—the third was located northwest of that neighborhood, at Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street. It opened in 1925 and hosted both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during their campaigns.
Facing Roosevelt, a Democrat promoting “a New Deal for the American people,” Hoover, the incumbent Republican president, said in an October 21, 1932, speech that he opposed “the proposal to change the entire foundations of our national life ‘.
Roosevelt defeated Hoover and then spoke at the Garden again during his 1936 and 1940 campaigns.
In a fiery speech delivered on October 31, 1936, he denounced “the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopolies, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profits.” “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as now,” Roosevelt said. “They are unanimous in their hatred of me – and I welcome their hatred.”
Nazis and communists meet
More than 20,000 people attended a rally at the Garden on February 20, 1939, organized by the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that hung swastikas next to a huge portrait of George Washington.
The group’s national secretary, James Wheeler-Hill, claimed that if the first American president were still alive, he would be “friends with Adolf Hitler.” Wearing a Nazi armband, Bund leader Fritz Kuhn called for “a socially just, white, governed United States” and “Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-led domination.”
A Jewish protester, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, stormed onto the stage. The AP reported on what happened next:
“Immediately a dozen or more Storm Troopers attacked him, knocking him down and beating him as he held his head in his arms, his black, wild hair flying. A team of police pushed the Storm Troopers aside, grabbed him from the floor of the platform and, holding him high above their heads, ran toward an exit. Most of his clothing was torn from his body. He was later booked for disorderly conduct.”
The 1930s were also the height of the Communist Party’s American popularity. Police estimated that 16,000 to 17,000 people attended a communist meeting in the Garden a week after the Bund meeting. CPUSA Secretary General Earl Browder said allegations that American communists took their orders from Moscow constituted “a slanderous attack” spread by supporters of “the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo anti-Comintern alliance of war makers,” the AP reported.
Presidential birthday party
A Democratic Party and John F. Kennedy birthday fundraiser, during which Marilyn Monroe wore a form-fitting dress to serenade the president, was held during the Garden’s third edition on May 19, 1962.
It had been the hottest May Day in New York City history, with temperatures reaching 99 degrees (37 degrees Celsius). “Heat waves were still brewing in the Garden when, after a sultry rendition of Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday,’ the president remarked, ‘I can retire from politics now,’” the AP reported.
Monroe and Kennedy were both dead within a year and a half, she from a drug overdose and he from a hitman.
George Wallace campaigns in New York
The current Garden opened in 1968, about a mile south of its predecessor, home of the NBA’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers, and hosts musical performances, prizefights and other spectacles.
George Wallace, the former and future governor of Alabama, gave a speech during his 1968 presidential race as a candidate for the American Independent Party, with a “Stand Up for America” pitch for the kind of populist nationalism that Trump’s “Make America Great” defines. Again” movement.
The Wallace campaign was less explicitly racist than the one in Alabama, but he insisted on law and order: when protesters interrupted the Garden rally, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders were “caving in to these anarchists.”
“We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot there, and the first one to pick up a rock gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all,” Wallace said.
Republican Richard Nixon then defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Wallace to win the presidency.
Convention site for Democrats, Republicans
This garden was also the site of the 1976, 1980 and 1992 Democratic National Conventions and the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Jimmy Carter alluded to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal when he accepted his appointment. “Our country has been through a time of torment,” Carter said. “Now is a time for healing. We want to have confidence again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.”
Carter returned in 1980 and faced a challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who did not have the necessary delegates. AP reporters noted that Kennedy’s “futile struggle to turn the tides was symbolized at the convention center, where his small suite of rooms contrasted with five large, white trailers decorated in Carter’s campaign green, from which the president’s men conducted the convention. ”
Carter won the nomination, but lost the election to Republican Ronald Reagan.
When Democrats reconvened in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted his nomination in a 52-minute speech that “challenged the attention of many in the partisan crowd,” according to AP political writer David Espo. Clinton promised “a government that is leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy.”
The Republican Party held its only Madison Square Garden convention in 2004, when New York was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center.
“We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will stop us,” said President George W. Bush.
In the city beyond, more than 1,800 people were arrested for demonstrating against the war in Iraq and for other reasons.
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Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.
