Four days into the 1920 Republican National Convention in Chicago, voting was deadlocked among six candidates, none of them close to a majority. That night, party chairman Will Hays invited to his Blackstone Hotel suite “senators and party leaders [who] wandered in and out at random, poured themselves drinks, and talked indecisively through the perfecto smoke,” according to Francis Russell’s 1968 book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove.
The GOP pooh-bahs settled on Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. He had finished no higher than third in the balloting but had no enemies, looked presidential, and came from a state that had voted for every Republican president. The next day, after Harding was nominated at the convention, a United Press reporter wrote that he had actually been chosen in a “smoke-filled room.” The term has since come to describe decisions made by political insiders outside of public view — fitting for something originating in Chicago.
The 9th floor suite, now referred to as the Smoke-Filled Suite, “remains one of the hotel’s most popular accommodations,” according to a publicist — though, ironically, the Blackstone is smoke-free these days.
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