By james art NEW YORK (AP) — Republican Donald Trump’s rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden follows a long line of political events at the storied New York arena.
The garden has hosted Democratic and Republican National Conventions since the 1800s, and in 1939 thousands joined pro-Nazi and Communist Party rallies on the eve of World War II. Marilyn Monroe took the stage in 1962 to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, adding to the legend surrounding what a New York Knicks spokesman called “the most famous arena in the world!”
Here are a few highlights from the political history of Madison Square Garden, which has occupied four buildings over time.
Grover Cleveland is back
Grover Cleveland is the only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Trump hopes to become second.
After the 1892 Democratic National Convention met 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 songs, the audience joining in choruses of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ and ‘Four years more of Grover.’
Cleveland has promised to cut tariffs, while Trump has said imposing huge tariffs on foreign goods would boost the US economy. Cleveland then defeated Republican Benjamin Harrison, becoming the 24th and 22nd presidents.
A record 103 ballots
The Democratic Party, which gathered 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 a Roman Catholic.
From June 24 to July 9, ballot after ballot failed to secure a nomination. The Associated Press reported on July 2 that McAdoo “passed the coveted 500-vote goal through a lot of frantic work and persuasion and maneuvering by his managers, who said they weren’t done yet.”
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 of Hoover, Roosevelt
While the first two gardens were near Madison Square—where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet at 23rd Street—the third was northwest of that neighborhood, at Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street. It opened in 1925 and hosted both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on their campaigns.
Facing Roosevelt, a Democrat promoting a “New Deal for the American People,” Hoover, the Republican incumbent, said in a speech on October 21, 1932, that he opposed “the proposal to change all the foundations of our national life.”
Roosevelt defeated Hoover, then spoke at the Garden again during his 1936 and 1940 campaigns.
He opposed “the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, divisiveness, war profiteering” in a fiery speech on October 31, 1936. “Never before in our entire history have these forces been as united against one candidate as they are today,” Roosevelt said. “They are unanimous in their hatred of me – and I welcome their hatred.”
Rally Nazis, Communists
More than 20,000 people attended a February 20, 1939, rally in the Garden organized by the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that hung swastikas next to a giant portrait of George Washington.
The group’s national secretary, James Wheeler-Hill, claimed that if the first US president had lived, he “would have been friends with Adolf Hitler”. Wearing a Nazi armband, Bund leader Fritz Kuhn called for a “socially just, white, unequally-governed United States” and “Gentile-controlled trade unions, free from Moscow-directed Jewish domination.”
A Jewish protester, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, rushed to the scene. The AP reported what happened next:
“Immediately a dozen or more stormtroopers pounced on him, knocking him down and beating him as he held his head in his hands, his black wild hair flying. A squad of police pushed the stormtroopers aside, lifted him off the platform floor, and, holding him high above their heads, ran for the exit. Most of his clothes were torn from his body. He was later tried for disorderly conduct.”
The 1930s were also the height of the Communist Party’s popularity in the United States. Police estimated that 16,000 to 17,000 people attended a Communist rally in the Garden a week after the Bund rally. CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder said the accusations that American Communists were taking their orders from Moscow were a “slanderous attack” spread by supporters of the “anti-Comintern Rome-Berlin-Tokyo alliance of warmakers,” the AP reported.
President’s Birthday Party
A Democratic Party fundraiser and celebration of John F. Kennedy’s birthday, with Marilyn Monroe wearing a form-fitting dress to serenade the president, was held at the third iteration of the Garden on May 19, 1962.
It was the hottest May Day in New York City history, with temperatures soaring to 99 degrees (37 degrees Celsius). “Heat waves were still rising 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 dead within a year and a half, she of a drug overdose and he of an assassin’s bullet.
George Wallace campaign 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, prize fights and other spectacles.
George Wallace, the former and future governor of Alabama, gave a speech during his 1968 presidential race as the American Independent Party candidate that included “Stand Up for America” about the kind of populist nationalism that defines Trump’s “Make America Great” Again” motion.
Wallace’s campaign was less overtly racist than in Alabama, but he insisted on law and order: when protesters disrupted the rally at the Garden, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders were “kowtowing to these anarchists.”
“We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, the first one to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s it,” Wallace said.
Republican Richard Nixon then defeated Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Wallace to win the presidency.
Congressional 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 mentioned the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal while accepting his nomination. “Our country has lived through a time of torment,” Carter said. “Now is the time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.”
Carter returned in 1980, facing a challenge from Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, who lacked the necessary delegates. AP reporters noted that “Kennedy’s no-nonsense battle to turn the odds was symbolized at the convention center, where his small suite of rooms contrasted with five large, white trailers decked out in Carter’s campaign green from which the president’s men ran the convention.” “
Carter won the nomination but lost the election to Republican Ronald Reagan.
When Democrats reconvened in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted the nomination in a 52-minute speech that “tested the attention of many in the partisan audience,” according to AP political writer David Espo. Clinton promised “a government that is weaker, not more evil; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy.
The Republican Party held its only convention at Madison Square Garden 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 outside, more than 1,800 people were arrested demonstrating against the war in Iraq and for other reasons.
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Researcher Rhonda Schaffner contributed to this report.