NEW YORK — Republican Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden follows a long line of political events at the storied New York City arena.
The Garden has hosted both Democratic and Republican National Conventions since the 1800s, and in 1939, thousands joined back-to-back pro-Nazi and Communist Party rallies in the lead-up to World War II. Marilyn Monroe took the stage in 1962 to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, adding to the lore surrounding what the New York Knicks announcer calls “the world’s most famous arena!”
Here are a few highlights from the political history of Madison Square Garden, which has occupied four buildings over time.
Grover Cleveland is the only U.S. president to have served two nonconsecutive terms. Trump hopes to become the 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 one — in his home state of New York.
The Evening World reported that “a band stationed in one of the balconies played popular airs, the audience joining in the refrain of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” and “Four years more of Grover.”
Cleveland promised to lower tariffs, whereas Trump has said imposing huge tariffs on foreign goods would boost the U.S. economy. Cleveland then defeated Republican Benjamin Harrison, becoming both the 24th and 22nd president.
The Democratic Party that met 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 Gov. Alfred E. Smith, whom the Klan opposed because he was 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 much sought goal of 500 votes by dint of much frantic work and persuasion and maneuvering on the part of his floor managers, who declared they hadn’t finished their work 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.
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, on Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street. It opened in 1925, and hosted both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in their campaigns.
Facing Roosevelt, a Democrat promoting “a New Deal for the American people,” Hoover, the incumbent Republican president, said in an Oct. 21, 1932, speech that he opposed “the proposal to alter the whole foundations of our national life.”
Roosevelt beat Hoover, then spoke at the Garden again during his 1936 and 1940 campaigns.
He railed against “the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering” in a fiery Oct. 31, 1936 speech. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” Roosevelt said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
More than 20,000 people attended a Feb. 20, 1939 rally at the Garden organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group that hung swastikas alongside a huge portrait of George Washington.
The group’s national secretary, James Wheeler-Hill, claimed that if the first U.S. president were alive, he “would be friends with Adolf Hitler.” Wearing a Nazi armband, Bund leader Fritz Kuhn called for “a socially just, white, gentile-ruled United States” and “gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”
A Jewish protester, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage. The AP reported on what happened next:
“Instantly, a dozen or more Storm Troopers set upon him, knocking him down and beating him as he held his head in his arms, his black, wild hair flying. A squad of police pushed the Storm Troopers aside, picked him from the floor of the platform and, holding him high above their heads, ran to an exit. Most of his clothing was torn from his body. Later, he was booked for disorderly conduct.”
The 1930s also were the high point of the Communist Party’s U.S. popularity. Police estimated that 16,000 to 17,000 people attended a communist rally at the Garden one week after the Bund gathering. CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder said accusations that American Communists took their orders from Moscow constituted “a slanderous attack,” spread by supporters of “the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo anti-comintern alliance of war makers,” the AP reported.
A Democratic Party fundraiser and John F. Kennedy birthday celebration, with Marilyn Monroe wearing a skintight dress to serenade the president, was held at the Garden’s third iteration on May 19, 1962.
It had been the hottest May Day in New York City history, with temperatures rising to 99 degrees (37 Celsius). “Heat waves still rose in the Garden when, after a sultry rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ by Marilyn Monroe, the President remarked: ‘I can now retire from politics,’” the AP reported.
Monroe and Kennedy were both dead within a year and a half, she from a drug overdose and he from an assassin’s bullet.
The current Garden opened in 1968, about a mile south of its predecessor, home to the NBA’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers, and host to 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 candidate of the American Independent Party, featuring a “Stand Up for America” pitch for the kind of populist nationalism that defines Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
The Wallace campaign was less explicitly racist than it had been Alabama, but he was pushing law and order: When protesters interrupted the Garden rally, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders “kowtow to these anarchists.”
“We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all,” Wallace said.
Republican Richard Nixon then beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Wallace to win the presidency.
This Garden was also the site of the 1976, 1980 and 1992 Democratic National Conventions and the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Jimmy Carter alluded to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal as he accepted his nomination. “Our country has lived through a time of torment,” Carter said. “It is now a 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 Sen. Ted Kennedy, who lacked the needed delegates. AP reporters observed that Kennedy’s “futile battle to reverse the odds was symbolized at the convention center, where his tiny suite of rooms contrasted with five large, white trailers decorated 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.
As Democrats met again in 1992, Bill Clinton accepted his 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 leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy.”
The Republican Party held its only Madison Square Garden convention in 2004, when New York was still shaken by the attacks at the World Trade Center.
“We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back,” President George W. Bush said.
In the city outside, more than 1,800 people demonstrating against the Iraq War and for other causes were arrested.
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Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.