In the leadup to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, historians and pundits persistently drew ominous parallels to the disastrous Democratic convention of 1968, when police brutalized protesters of the Vietnam War and a divided party limped to defeat in November.
But Chicago has hosted more major party conventions than any other city, and there are plenty of other instructive precedents in history to explore. Especially as Vice President Kamala Harris generates excitement among young voters, it’s wise to look back to another Chicago convention, when a new candidate and a grassroots movement mobilized young people and changed the course of history.
In 1860, on the cusp of the Civil War, the Republican National Convention in Chicago not only took a chance on a one-term congressman named Abraham Lincoln, but introduced the nation to one of the largest, strangest and ultimately most consequential campaign organizations in U.S. history: the Wide Awakes.
Wide Awakes were something new in American politics: A massive, anti-slavery youth movement, uniformed in militaristic black capes and armed with torches, organized in “companies” that organized spectacular midnight rallies to protest slavery’s power over democracy. At a time when publicly criticizing slavery could get you egged, beaten or lynched — even in the North — the movement emerged ready to fight back. And some of them decided to make a show of force on the national scene at the GOP convention.
The test of the Democratic convention in Chicago this week is not just whether it will devolve into violence à la 1968, but whether it can galvanize voters like the Republican convention of 1860.
They began far from bustling Chicago, in orderly Hartford, Connecticut.
Launched by five white, working-class teens, they invented a striking uniform and electrified street-level campaigning with militaristic nighttime demonstrations. The founders were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, too young to vote at a time when the voting age was still 21. But they bristled at enemies near and far: the Southern enslavers who wielded massive power in government, the local Democrats who attacked Republicans in the streets and even the elders in their own party, “old fogies” who preached moderation and compromise on slavery.
Borrowing from 1850s slang for someone who was standing up against sleepy complicity, they called themselves “Wide Awakes,” and organized a force that could march, holler and fight. (Yes, Americans have used some version of “stay woke” since long before the term became a casualty of the modern culture war.)
Those teens happened to work in Hartford’s textile stores, and proved adept at designing, branding and marketing their outfit. Understanding fashion and commerce gave them a unique edge in making their strange club go the 19th-century equivalent of viral. Within a few months of their February 1860 formation, they were sending out uniform samples and how-to pamphlets, franchising their campaign club across New England and catching national newspaper attention.
The movement soon made its way to Chicago, then a booming young city with a surging population, eager to show off at the Republican National Convention that May. Though no one in town seems to have seen a real member of the Connecticut Wide Awakes, locals read the eastern papers and formed their own clubs. And the Chicago Wide Awakes made sure their companies fit the local environment. In a city that was 52 percent foreign born, the companies announced: “young men of all nationalities are cordially invited to become members.”
“The Chicagoans,” observed a jealous Pennsylvanian, “with their peculiar spirit of velocity, have already adopted the institution.” But the buzzing young city was doing more than organizing neighborhood clubs. Newspaper editors pushed the movement across the region, demanding: “Similar Clubs should be organized in every Town and Ward in the State. YOUNG MEN! you must put your shoulder to the wheel,” wrote the Central Transcript in Clinton, Illinois. Soon Wide Awakes were organizing in Wisconsin forests, Iowa plains and Illinois river towns, and making plans to converge in Chicago for a show of force.
By the time delegates rolled into town in mid-May, the region had several thousand Wide Awakes, a movement that did not exist west of Ohio just a few weeks before.
Republicans were blown away. The rag-tag party, just six years old, brought together moderately anti-slavery forces from a diverse and fractured North. In Chicago they experienced, in the words of one German immigrant, “one of the most interesting incidents in my life.” Huge crowds surged through the main streets as speakers shouted from hotel balconies. One-quarter of those present were outsiders in town for the convention, eager to plot a grand presidential campaign. Many partisan women mixed with the throngs of men. A dejected New York journalist complained that “the ladies here are all violent politicians” and that he could not “commence the smallest hint of a flirtation without defining his position upon the question of the power of Congress over slavery.”
Visiting delegates filtered into J. A. Smith & Co.’s Lake Street textile store and came out equipped with Wide Awake capes and torches, happy to fall in for drill. More Wide Awakes patrolled the massive “Wigwam,” a temporary event space that would host the convention, guarding against pro-slavery troublemakers. And as train-loads of Eastern delegates raced into town along the lake each night, they beheld something truly unusual: Formations of Wide Awakes in shiny black capes, holding flickering torches, ready to receive and defend them.
Inside the Republican Wigwam, the party chose Lincoln as nominee, after some complicated wrangling. Republicans selected him over several more established candidates, won over by his youthful verve and common-man appeal. Lincoln was not at the convention (he followed the tradition of the time and stayed home) but in the streets and hotels around the Republican Wigwam, thousands of Wide Awakes shared his youthful, populist appeal.
In fact, Lincoln had already synced up with the movement. Back in March, he’d become the first politician to be escorted by the Wide Awakes when he toured Hartford. And while his surprise nomination meant that he had no national campaign organization to speak of, the Wide Awakes were ready to stand in. Those kids in Hartford were busily sending out uniforms and pamphlets, constructing one of the largest grassroots campaign organizations in American history.
Chicago was a vector, spreading Wide Awake fever. As the RNC delegates returned home, they brought news of the thrilling new movement, along with uniforms purchased at J. A. Smith & Co.’s. In town after town across the North, Republicans organized Wide Awake clubs. Newspapers used admiration for Lincoln’s humble origins to recruit locals. The Evansville Indiana Daily Journal asked: “cannot our young men, who admire that kind of grit, organize a ‘Wide Awake Club’ in this city?”
Wide Awake clubs popped up in Camden and Cincinnati, Bangor and Brooklyn, stretching out from cities to towns to tiny rural villages. Ultimately, thousands of clubs formed, each made up of hundreds of young Republicans, eager to wake up. Ten days after the Wide Awake’s debut at the Chicago convention, a Buffalo paper extolled “their effect upon the public pulse … where the news has reached, it has had an electrifying effect upon the popular heart.” In a nation where political violence often suppressed criticism of slavery, the movement was assembling “a vigilant force of hundreds of political police.”
The 14 young men who organized a Wide Awake company out in Littleton, Iowa, were more succinct. Unimpressed by the elites who lectured at conventions, but thrilled by the grassroots movement Chicago introduced, these Wide Awakes penned a club constitution declaring: “while professed politicians talk, let the People work!”
Once again, a major-party convention is taking place in Chicago at a time when many worry about the future of democracy and fear civil disorder during and after the election. But 1860 offers a clear lesson: Conventions and campaigns — especially those with the power to inspire young people — are larger than candidates. Lincoln was not so well known in 1860. He didn’t go to Chicago. But the convention still ultimately helped build support for his candidacy because of young campaigners, often dressed in Wide Awake uniforms.
So far, Vice President Harris’ young campaign has proved adept at using design to build enthusiasm — not with black capes, but brat green and camo hats. Whether that will translate into the kind of pivotal youth support that followed the 1860 convention remains to be seen. If the Wide Awakes prove anything, it’s that a convention’s success is not solely determined by the candidate on the stage, but by the crowds around them.
