allowed party members to make strategic deals with the Devil, by emphasizing the importance of
common action over ideological purity. Of a less sinister candidate, New York Democrat
Thomas Benedict argued that millions of Democrats hostile to the 1896 platform, “voted for Mr.
Bryan last year on the ground of his regularity.” Recognizing this, Bryan himself had “appealed
to tens of thousands of hearers to stand regular with the actions of their chosen delegates in
convention.”
It was on this basis that Croker could promise
that. . . Tammany. . . will largely aid in organizing victory for the national ticket next November is beyond
question. The national Democracy is free to choose whatever candidate it may prefer. Tammany has no
desire to dictate or control the choice; its part in the conflict is to elect the candidate after he shall have
been named.
Regularity thus underlined the party moralism that “the. . . party was greater and nobler than any
man or any organization in it, and its success was of vastly more importance than the
gratification of the spites and revenges and passions of factions or individuals.”
Procedural
conflict made sublimation of this sort possible, and thus kept the parties competitive; more
ideologically-charged party conflicts may well have rendered the Jacksonian organizations too
fractious to be successful. In this way the procedural formalisms of party regularity substituted
for ideology as the fundamental battle lines of intra-party conflict.
Party regularity across the nation had its keynote in the convention, and it was here that
Conkling’s logic of “deferential compromise” most completely played itself out. Conventions
were not decisive national councils that reflected consensus among national party-in-the-
electorate; rather they were a congress of distinct organizations, each seeking to secure its own
interests within the party through compromise on national issues. The result was that
nominations were based more on the contingencies of bargaining between sub-national
organizations than on the accurate expression of the preferences of the national party-in-the-
45
“Memorandum of Conversation with Hon. Th. E. Benedict,” enclosed in Lawrence Gardner to William Jennings
Bryan, September 15, 1897, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Box 20, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
46
Croker, “Tammany Hall and the Democracy,” 230.
47
“The Democratic Problem,” New York Times, September 22, 1882, 5.
19
Convention