... a witches' dance of idiocy and adult hypocrisy. DuPont, for instance, and his wonderful grandfather, and grand old state of Ohio, and the golden state of Iowa, and the flag, red, white, and blue, all its stripes, all its stars, and the flag a thousand times over, and Americanism till your ears ached, and the slaves and the tariff, and Abraham Lincoln, mauled and dragged about and his name taken in vain, and his spirit degraded, prostituted to every insincerity and used as window-dressing for every cheap politican. The incredible sordidness of that convention passes all description. It was a gathering of unsanitary callous men who blasphemed patriotism, made a mockery of Republican government and filled the air with sodden and scheming stupidity.
Walter Lippman on the 1916 Republican Convention