Whatever happened to "Happy Days Are Here Again"? Democrats cancelled the FDR theme song, just like the Jackson and Jefferson Day fundraising dinner.
Do not speak their names.
“Happy Days Are Here Again,” was Franklin Roosevelt’’s 1932 theme song. It was a deceptive choice because Americans—the Greatest Generation— faced the Great Depression and World War II.
Nonetheless, the song was played at Democratic National Conventions for years, actually decades. I heard it growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. It was like a trademark, long after World War II.
And yet… I didn’t hear it at the 2024 DNC in Chicago this year. Maybe I missed it because—to keep my sanity—I didn’t watch the whole thing. I did an internet search, but came up empty. Not a single word, not a single note.
I thought I hit pay dirt when I found this: “DNC 2024: Here’s every song that was played during the music-themed roll call.” Heard a lot of good tunes there, but nothing about happy days. (Is it possible that “happy” wasn’t good enough to describe Kamala Harris’ “joy”?
I sure missed hearing the song, sung while the delegates marched around the smoke-filed convention floor, carry signs, singing and shouting.
That reminded me that I hadn’t recently heard anything about a traditional annual, big deal fundraiser: The Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. It was in honor of presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson who were widely considered to be founders of the Democrat Party.
Modern sensibilities have led to the cancellation of that hallowed tradition also. Jefferson was a slaveowner and Jackson engineered the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of some 60,000 indigenous Americans from their ancestral homelands. State after state continued a variation of the dinner, usually calling it something more acceptable to current thinking.
It’s hard to contemplate either event—the cruelty, racism and greed of it. Never mind whatever other accomplishments the two men achieved. I’m living in Jacksonville, Florida, and I’ve heard—thankfully— very few expressions about changing the city’s name.
I respect every generation to define itself as it wishes. But I fear that cashiering the song and dinner had something to do with that generation’s ignorance of history. How sad that would be.
Related: A fascinating story about how conventions used to be. In particular the 1952 Democratic convention in Chicago that nominated Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver.