You know what we haven't had in these parts recently, if ever? An easy trivia question. So I thought I'd try one of these, which I think will be pretty obvious. I had thought that the practice of holding acceptance speeches out doors was a new invention. I don't ever remember hearing about it before Obama gave his 2008 speech in Denver. Turns out there were others -- I just hadn't heard about them, or if I'd heard about them I forgot about them. Kennedy's 1960 acceptance speech was in the LA Memorial Coliseum. And before that a nominee gave an acceptance speech before -- it is alleged 100,000 people -- in the stadium I picture here. (The reason I say alleged is because the stadium lists a capacity of something like 50,000 people today -- though I understand that it used to be larger and there were temporary stands added to the stadium. But still, 100,000? I'm doubtful.) Who was it, when, and what stadium is it? I don't think I'm making this too easy by saying that one of my favorite lines -- though not the one for which the speech is known -- is "the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales." (Sorry about the quality of the picture -- this isn't the best of the ones I took, but it's one of the few where the location isn't completely obvious from signs in the picture.)
FDR. 1936. Franklin Field in Philadelphia.
Posted by: Jason Mazzone | July 27, 2016 at 08:04 PM
Yes, that's exactly right, Jason. As soon as I saw your name I knew you'd have this one.
I was surprised to learn about this. I dimly recall knowing that the 1936 convention was in the Civic Center (now torn down). But the Franklin Field piece of this I didn't remember. This is all the more surprising because I took a course on modern American history in a building that was -- literally -- a stone's throw from Franklin Field. And we read Eric Goldman's Rendevous with Destiny, which takes its title from the most famous line in FDR's acceptance speech. Looking back on this earlier in the week I realized that we had just passed the 80th anniversary of the speech and I realized that I was on the Penn campus that very day. (My friends over at Drexel have been hosting me this summer, while I've been in Philly, which is where I grew up. So I've been on the Penn and Drexel campus a ton this summer. It is astonishing to me how much West Philly has changed since I lived here thirty years ago.)
On a separate note, I think there's a lot in the speech that fits with a long-running theme of "property rights" and "human rights."
Posted by: Al Brophy | July 27, 2016 at 08:42 PM