Our Man in Arlington

Richard Barton

The inside stories of several Iowa caucuses in the news media reminded me of an Arlington mass meeting eons ago where Your Man in Arlington learned the nitty gritty of caucus politics when he was chairman and the Arlington Democratic Committee. (They called us “chairmen” and “chairwomen” in those days, not “chair,” which is too inert a term for my taste.)

The Democratic Nomination for President in 1972 was a hotly contested race nationwide and in Virginia. George McGovern and Edmund Muskie led the field, with a multitude of candidates running closely behind. These included Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Senator Eugene McCarthy, New York Mayor John Lindsay, Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, former Attorney General Ramsay Clerk, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, Indiana Senator Vance Hartke, 1968 presidential candidate Humphrey, former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, Arkansas Representative Wilbur Mills, and, (remember this?), Alabama Governor George Wallace. A robust field, to say the least.

Not all of these were in contention in Arlington, but enough of them were to make it a feisty and remarkably complicated nomination season.

Virginia had not yet moved to a primary system to select committed delegates to the Democratic National Convention. They ultimately were selected in congressional district and state conventions. But the first step the way was election of local delegates to these conventions. These delegates were committed to presidential candidates in the proportion the presidential candidates were selected in the local caucuses. At least, that was the way we did it in Arlington.

The negotiations for the rules to govern the caucus were extensive and excruciating. The final set of rules was probably as long as the Virginia State Constitution, which is no slouch as constitutions go. A presidential candidate could get a committed delegate to the state convention if he or she received the votes of only one percent of those attending the mass meeting. This worked out fairly well, since Arlington was entitled to slightly over one hundred delegates, as well as I can remember.

The caucus was held on a Saturday, in the auditorium of Wakefield High School. The weather was good and the interest high. More than 1000 people showed up, cramming every nook and cranny of the auditorium, and overflowing into the hall. The first order of business was to break into presidential candidate caucuses. The larger groups – Muskie and McGovern – met in the auditorium, the gymnasium and the cafeteria. Others met in classrooms. When members of a caucus discovered that it did not have enough members to warrant a delegate, they wandered the halls looking for a new home. And there was some shifting from caucus to caucus as friends collared one another for their candidates. Finally, after about an hour, everyone settled in and the counts were taken.

It became immediately clear that the McGovern supporters were carrying the day. Fifty-four percent of the attendees (if memory serves) declared for McGovern. This was a stunning defeat for the Muskie forces.

During this time, the Muskie sample ballots disappeared, only to reappear a little later stamped HUMPHRY- MUSKIE CONSERVATIVE COALITION. We were not happy campers.

The individual caucuses finally dissolved, and the mass meeting reconvened. The next procedure, which took a couple of hours, was to cast ballots for more than 100 Arlington delegates to the congressional district and the state conventions.

The vote count took several hours longer. About 800 ballots were counted, most of whom cast close to 100 votes. Counting 80,000 votes by hand (no computers here!) was a formidable task!

While we were counting, a local TV station arrived to cover the announcement of the final vote count – having heard that McGovern had carried the day, a big story for Virginia. So there I was on the eleven o’clock announcing our defeat in front of a couple of hundred screaming McGovern devotees. Not one of my better days!

But the process was an exciting example of grassroots democracy at work in all of its messiness. Thirty years later, the Iowa caucuses showed again the vitality of that grassroots process.