The Convening of America

Welcome, delegates. You have been seen sauntering down Atlanta's Peachtree Street in funny hats, strolling doubleknit arm in doubleknit arm along Chicago's Michigan Avenue, wandering through Detroit's Renaissance Center freighted with hors doeuvre plates and plastic highball glasses, hanging on to San Francisco's cable cars, riding the escalators up and down Los Angeles' Century City still wearing your HELLO MY NAME is badges. And gawking at the tall buildings along Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas, snake-dancing through the streets of New Orleans' Vieux Carre, wearing aloha shirts in Waikiki, slapping old backs and cooking new deals in the hotel lobbies of Washington, Las Vegas, Seattle, Peoria and Everywhere, U.S.A.

Conventioneers have become a permanent subculture in American cities. By their badges you shall know them: Institute of Internal Auditors, Farm and Power Equipment Dealers, Norwegian Singers Association of America, National Sash and Door Jobbers, Odd Fellows, Jaycees, Telephone Pioneers, American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, Ancient Mystic Order of Bagmen of Bagdad, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (also Does), Knights of Pythias (also of Columbus, Equity, St. John, York and Templar), United Commercial Travelers, Automotive Dismantlers and Recyclers, neurologists, gynecologists, anesthesiologists, otorhinolaryngologists, Funeral Directors and Morticians, Sugar Beet Technologists and Hot Dip Galvanizers.

If the sidewalks around downtown hotels seem to be particularly thick with these visiting firemen nowadays, it is because the nation is in the grip of what can only be called convention fever. The symptoms: an eruption of hats, badges, buttons, sashes, brochures, luggage-strewn hotel lobbies, stackable ball room chairs, green baize tabletops, insulated plastic water pitchers, WELCOME banners, note-festooned message boards, firm handshakes, hearty guffaws, setups in the hospitality suite and dark circles under the eyes. The diagnosis: an insatiable urge to meet and greet, gather and blather with one's suppliers, customers, lodge members, old friends, perfect strangers, peers, inferiors and superiors. The cure: none yet discovered.

The fever is hardly a new affliction. The most enervating, enduring and escapist of social institutions, the convention is as American as rubber chicken, as ubiquitous as revolving hotel-top restaurants, as old as the nation itself. Our more perfect union was forged at a convention (Philadelphia, 1787), divided against itself at another (Montgomery, Ala., 1861), reunited at a rather intimate one (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865) and renewed quadriennially. Long before Sinclair Lewis chronicled the fictional convention high jinks of George F. Babbitt, boobus Americanus and prototypical conventioneer, other observers dis covered our penchant for gatherings. "As soon as several Americans have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite," observed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Editorialized the Nation in 1865: "If the Englishman can initiate no public enterprise without a public dinner, the American is equally helpless until he has called a convention . . . We are living in a very gregarious time."

No time has ever been quite as gregarious as the present. The number of conventioneers has grown steadily over the past decade. This year 26 million citizens gathered in solemn or profane conclave and there spent an estimated $15 billion. That is double the amount they spent ten years ago, and twice as much as Americans allot for amusements and spectator sports. There are some 28,000 trade, professional and other voluntary associations in the U.S., and by year's end they will have met nearly 250,000 times. The rage to meet has helped pack the nation's 37,410 hotels and motels to more than 70% of capacity, the highest room-occupancy rate in two decades. Some cities today are so over run with conventioneers that there is, quite literally, no room at the inn. Says Chicago's Jay Lurye, 55, one of a growing number of professional meeting planners: "The whole convention business is like a sleeping giant that has suddenly sprung."

Though typically American, convention fever is contagious. Europeans are picking up the convention habit (though Asians largely have not). And with the cheapening of the once-mighty dollar, foreigners are starting to find it attractive to meet here.

The U.S. passion for gathering may be an old one, but there are new reasons for the convention boom:

> the trend toward discount airfares, which makes distant meetings cheaper for companies and associations to sponsor;

> the inflationary creep of Americans into higher tax brackets, which makes tax-deductible convention trips about the only vacations many people can afford any more;

> the trend toward rewarding and motivating employees by scheduling company meetings in distant or otherwise exotic locales ("incentive travel," it is called);

> the increasing isolation in huge organizations of professional people like accountants and computer technicians, which makes their meetings particularly welcome and valuable;

> the steady march of consumerism and government regulation, which inspires trade and professional groups to meet more frequently to discuss compliance--or resistance. "Ten or 15 years ago, people considered conventions to be social outlets," says James Low, president of the 6,200-member American Society of Association Executives (which will have its own convention in St. Louis next August). "But with the dawn of Ralph Nader, suddenly everyone was under question. People wanted to know if businessmen were ethical, whether their products were safe. The business world turned in on itself. For the first time businessmen realized they needed their competitors."

One thing is certain: the convention is wreaking irreversible changes in the nation's topography, economy and patterns of social behavior. Consider the urban landscape. Cavernous convention centers, often municipally financed and usually little more than a big enclosed space, are popping up across the country like second-story men at a jewelers convention. Some 60 cities have built one of those concrete boxes, and another eleven are on the way. Meantime, hotels that cater to the convention trade are being expanded or else threatened by newer, larger ones. Las Vegas' 2,783-room Hilton, the nation's roomiest, has been expanded twice in the past five years. It will become the nation's second largest hotel if, as planned, the 2,131-room New York Hilton adds 800 rooms. A world-class convention center or convention hotel may soon replace a first-rate symphony orchestra or a winning professional sports team as coveted civic status symbols.

So important is the convention business that 117 U.S. cities employ professional staffs to attract meetings. New York City's Convention and Visitors Bureau has five traveling salesmen trying to persuade trade and professional groups to gather in the Big Apple. The Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau also has a field force of five convention hunters out plugging the Big Peach. Miami employs four to tout the Big Orange, while Waikiki sent a representative to Austria to bag the Lions International for the Big Pineapple.

The methods are as imaginative as those of any high-octane huckster. As part of New York City's bid for the 1976 Democratic National Convention, a city meeting scout carried a huge styrofoam apple filled with real apples to the site selection committee.

Houston sends potential customers little glass oil wells and packets of Texas chili mix. Says David Tester of the Milwaukee Convention and Visitors Bureau: "We are like civic whores. We'll do anything to bring a convention to our community."

Small wonder. Those billions that conventioneers sprinkle behind them are high-velocity dollars. The money remains the same, as Gertrude Stein put it, but the pockets change. Faster than you can say otorhinolaryngologist. According to some estimates, a dollar spent at a convention is respent locally five times over the subsequent two weeks. Better yet, convention spending is pure gravy for the host city. "Conventions don't pollute or put any burden on municipal services," says Frank Sain, president of the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau. Adds Hartford, Conn.'s Convention and Visitors Bureau Chairman David Heinl: "A convention is like a plane flying over and dropping money into a city for three or four days."*

Not every convention goes far afield. Only 9% of state associations ever meet outside their home state, according to the trade monthly Successful Meetings, though cheaper airfares are beginning to encourage more adventuresomeness. In the decade before 1977, 12% of national organizations met or scheduled future meetings outside the U.S. That percentage has slipped slightly because of section 602 of the Tax Reform Act of 1976. Americans can now deduct expenses for only two foreign meetings a year, and then only if they can prove that they spent at least six hours a day in working sessions. The American Psychiatric Association, which met in Toronto last May, issued each delegate IBM cards to be filled out after each session, dropped in a box, certified by an A.P.A. official and mailed back to the delegate so that he could submit them to the IRS. Convention-industry officials complain that the record-keeping requirements are onerous and that it invites retaliatory moves by foreign governments.

Only 9% of all meetings draw more than 1,000 registrants, and most conventions are small enough to fit in the Gold Room of your local Holiday Inn.

Only about 20 cities in the U.S. have enough hotel rooms and meeting space for truly major gatherings like the Offshore Technology Conference (78,000) or the American Medical Association (30,000). With site selection thus limited, those groups often book five, sometimes ten years ahead. If you find yourself in San Francisco during Jan. 26 to 30, 1985, drop in on the National Automobile Dealers Association. Ski Industries America has booked its conventions at the Las Vegas Hilton through the year 2000.

Some conventions are more sought after than others. Wealthy groups like the bankers, the medical associations and the auto dealers (who have a reputation as particularly free spenders) are hotly desired by local convention officials. They can be expected to spend triple the average conventioneer's $50 daily outlay. New York City went to extraordinary lengths to court and cater to the American Trucking Association this year (see box). Waikiki postponed its Aloha Week parade last October lest the road from the airport be blocked for the 15,000 delegates to the American Bankers Association (who spent $8 million in one weekend). Less sought after are religious sects, because their followers are often poor as church mice, and federal officials, who must live on the Government's average $35 per diem travel allowance. In between are teachers' groups which may be frugal but do meet in the industry's relatively slow summer and Christmas vacation months.* The only major conventions in New York City over the holiday weeks will be those of academic groups like the Modern Language Association and the American Philosophical Association. Says Wayne Dunham of Chicago's Convention Bureau: "These are the days when the poor liberals meet."

Like so much else nowadays, getting together is a big deal, a Major Industry in Itself. Conventions have become serious works of commercial theater, and they are programmed as tightly as a presidential trip. Indeed, for some major conventions, professional meeting planners will prepare detailed scripts, which can run to 300 pages: "Scene, ballroom banquet. 7:25, doors open. 7:40, waiters leave room for invocation. Stage, praying hands appear on movie screen . . . " Jay Lurye has hired a 120-piece marching band to awaken conventioneers for early morning sessions, and provided "pink elephant" breakfasts: a live baby pachyderm sprayed pink stands by while waitresses serve Alka-Seltzer.

There are at least 200 such professional convention consultants in private practice, about an equal number on the staffs of major associations. They will write speeches, build exhibits, put on skits with bona fide Equity actors, order food and drink, bribe hotel employees to be especially solicitous, arrange side-trips for spouses--or all of the above, typically for 10% of the meeting's cost. There are also convention specialists on the staffs of major.hotels who, like their counterparts in municipal convention bureaus, try to sell gregarious groups into meeting chez eux.

Both groups of specialists spend much of their time trying to satisfy the often peculiar demands that conventioneers sometimes make. So you want a naked lady to pop out of the cake? No problem. But New Orleans' John Abbott had to come up with two 100-ft. trees for a convention of chain-saw manufacturers to demonstrate their goods. Las Vegas decided to allow 26 aircraft to taxi down Paradise Road from McCarran Airport to the convention center for the Agricultural Aviation show.

Eugene Scanlon, manager of New York City's Waldorf Astoria, was asked by Electrolux to find a live cougar that would roam the ballroom and represent a real "go-getter" to the assembled salesmen.

Scanlon declined at first, but relented when Lloyd's of London agreed to insure its depredations. Three elephants at a time in the Waldorf ballroom have presented no problem, and three others are scheduled to be present at the Associated General Contractors convention in Bloomington, Minn., this winter. Sheraton-Waikiki Convention Service Manager Allan Woodrow recalls the day he was asked to accommodate a dead body for a gathering of morticians: it was sneaked in on a service elevator so none of the regular guests would become alarmed.

The American Linen Supply Association routinely asks hotels to remove all paper towels from their washrooms while the group is there; the American Dairy Association wants hotel kitchens to follow the association's own dairy-intensive recipes; the National Association of Tobacco Distributors requests hotels to remove all their NO SMOKING signs for the duration. The Mothers of Twins asked the Sheraton-Boston for free baby-sitting services, but the hotel found that request too taxing. Chicago's Lurye says he has bailed conventioneers out of jail, taken them to hospitals and, once, had to coax a convention employee to share her oral contraceptives. That latter mission came after Lurye spotted a man hanging over the balcony of an Acapulco hotel screaming, "Help! My wife ran out of birth control pills!"

Your typical convention opens on a Sunday, gently, with late-afternoon registration and an icebreaker cocktail party. Who said cocktail parties have to be dull? The American Dietetic Association, meeting last fall in New Orleans, added a bit of drama to its opening reception by hiring sword balancers, portrait artists, strolling musicians--48 acts in all.

The Mechanical Contractors Association of America, gathered in Beverly Hills last winter, had Hollywood stunt men stage cowboy gunfights, a man walking around on stilts and women circulating the room dressed as Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple.

Most association and company meetings have a theme, something self-evident and mildly inspiring, like "Change Is Our Greatest Challenge," or "A Taste of the Eighties." The theme is stated at an opening plenary session, which usually includes some reminder that the attendees are, of course, professionals with higher motivations than individual gain. Then the group moves into smaller rooms, called "breakout rooms" by hotel officials, for discussions of particular topics. Delegates typically reassemble at a working lunch, a late-afternoon reception and a dinner, every day until check-out time. There is a growing tendency to pack convention schedules tightly, for reasons of both productivity and social control; organizers want to keep delegates present and working. not wandering off to see the sights on their own. Says Sig Front, a senior vice president at the Sheraton Corp.: "You're lucky if you have time to read a newspaper."

A good convention, like a good novel, has rising and falling action and a socko conclusion that leaves customers eager to return next time. The International Fiscal Association spent $20,000 to hire Soprano Leontyne Price, Conductor Arthur Fiedler and the National Symphony Orchestra for the final evening's entertainment. The Hyatt Hotels Corp. offers ten "theme packages" for the concluding blowout, including Monte Carlo night, rodeo parties, an Arabian Nights banquet and a Tom Jones party, in which the ballroom is filled with trees, grass, live pigs, chickens, llamas and a tame tiger, while guests gnaw on turkey drumsticks and slurp wine out of goatskin bags. One group had an Arabian Nights party for its mostly male membership and held an auction of comely young "slave girls." Just as the successful bidders claimed their prizes, however, hotel employees dressed as commandos leaped from the balconies to rescue the maidens.

Despite the best-programmed efforts of convention planners, association executives, sergeants at arms, hotel officials, headwaiters, maintenance men and the army of other major and minor domos needed to conduct a convention, things do go bump in the night. And the morning, and the afternoon. In 1975 the American Bankers Association had planned to introduce its new board of directors on the revolving stage at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall. Each member was to be moved under the spotlight as the stage turned, but the power failed. When the board members were asked to walk around the stage and come under the spotlight one by one, the men, already standing in a circle, turned in different directions and bumped into one another. Slapstick comedy had returned. At a Law Day convention in Portsmouth, R.I., a dozen Boston policemen were discovered cavorting nude in the Ramada Inn pool; unfortunately, the discoverers were a group of visiting parochial school girls led by two nuns. And who can forget the sign that the Las Vegas Hilton hung for a reunion of former Navy aircraft-carrier jet pilots? It should have said, WELCOME TAILHOOKERS. It said, WELCOME HOOKERS.

The real work of conventions has always been accomplished in smoke-filled suites, in ballroom corners and anterooms, on couches in the lobby, over drinks at the bar.

That is because the real busi ness of conventions, as any rank-and-file registrant will at test, is not formulating industry-wide policies or discussing pressing issues of the day in open session, but gossiping, making contacts, winning contracts or finding a new job.

Surely somebody listens to all those scholarly papers read at the American Historical Association convention; however, the meeting is also the his tory business's most important floating job market, and thousands of resumes change hands there each day.

"Professionals are like migratory workers," says Sanford Dornbush, professor of sociology at Stanford University. "They move around more than most people, and conventions give them a sense of reunion, a chance to exchange common experiences, an opportunity to recharge themselves before they head back." Said Rick Bozarth, 28, of Watonga, Okla., after attending the annual conference of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in Washington, D.C.: "I'd come to one of these every year if I could. A lot of defenders and legal aid people burn out after a while because it's such depressing work. It's sometimes good to get away from the situations you see."

The business of conventions is also, still, raising hell. Conventions used to be hard-drinking binges of mindless hoopla wherein grown men behaved like adolescents. That has changed. Conventions today are more often hard-drinking binges of purposeful hoopla wherein grown men behave themselves because they have brought their spouses along. About two-thirds of all male delegates today are accompanied by their wives, and the growing number of women delegates often bring their husbands. Still, though time and opportunities for high jinks are now relatively limited, there is something about four days in another town that brings out the very best and worst in workaday Americans. "People tend to be less inhibited when they are away from home," observes Roy Young, sales director for Atlanta's Omni Hotel. Adds Stanford's Dorn--bush: "Conventions are occasions when the usual rules break down and people act like jackasses."

The annals of convention behavior are littered with acts of boisterous and irregular behavior: transient infidelities, purloined floral centerpieces, involuntary flights into the swimming pool, impromptu singing contests while the band tries to play, devilishly switched numerals on the doors, morning-after tales of wild excursions to local fleshpots. "For most people, conventions are a combination of vacation and learning experience," said Armand Seguin of Juneau, Alaska, at last week's American Vocational Association meeting in Dallas. "But this year I've definitely been here on vacation. I'm here to party."

Can the nation go on meeting like this? As entrenched as it has become in the mores, folkways and lower economics of contemporary living, the convention business faces a few hangovers of its own. One is the National Organization for Women's convention boycott of the 15 states that have not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. NOW officials say that organizations have yanked $100 million worth of meetings from non-ERA states, and that its boycott has become one of the most effective pressures so far in the drive to get the amendment passed. Missouri and Nevada are suing NOW on grounds that the boycott is an illegal restraint of trade. Says Eugene Hosmer, president of the 134-city International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus: "Business itself is not affected--it just goes somewhere else--but for some cities, the effect has been substantial." Laments Warren Ericksen, executive director of the Miami Beach Convention Bureau: "We get two letters a week from national organizations telling us 'no way' can they consider holding their meeting in a state that has not ratified the ERA. It's a shame."

Many hoteliers are less worried about the ERA than the IRS. The new foreign convention tax rule is troublesome enough, but some convention industry officials fear that the Carter Administration may try to extend those restrictions, on grounds that the tax deductibility of conventions is a boondoggle for the relatively well-to-do. A valid point; poor people do not go to conventions much. Frets the lACVB's Hosmer: "It's the whole three-martini lunch idea. They may eventually start saying that a convention delegate can only deduct a portion of his expenses when he's in this country. Any Government restrictions on tax deductions for attending conventions militates against the convention business."

A few professional convention watchers have suggested that, with the spread of swifter and cheaper electronic communication, the convention itself may some day become obsolete. After all, why spend four days in St. Louis when you can summon up all the data you need on your desktop video display terminal, and talk to whomever you want on your WATS line? "In the not-too-distant future people will be able to sit in their homes and watch as well as participate in conventions," says Leo Bonardi, Hilton's eastern regional director of sales. "But to my way of thinking, electronics will never replace the face-to-face meeting or the experience of traveling." Adds Peachtree Plaza's Bill Moyer: "People want the human touch."

That much they certainly get. As any delegate knows, no amount of packaging, commercialization, overscheduling or professional planning can squeeze the raw, sweaty, boozy, friendly humanity out of a convention. Such a celebration is well suited to an age when life has too often been stripped of drama, romance and the sense of limitless possibility. Says Rutgers Anthropologist Lionel Tiger (Men in Groups): "The convention is an effort, like the fair of old or the harvest feast, to generalize one's experience, to making something more meaningful of it."

There are other overtones. Says Sheraton's Sig Front: "When somebody from West Virginia sits down at the dinner table with somebody in the same business from Denver and New York and they learn how much they have in common, I think that helps jell a nation. I really do." A convention can be a profession's jungle drums, an industry's family reunion, a young person's rite of passage into the adult world of commercial or professional comradeship. A convention can also be a fresh opportunity to display talent, knowledge, oratorical skill or sales records, to reaffirm one's wealth and worthiness in the eyes of the world. No wonder 26 million Americans this year have hastened to put on their badges, their funny hats and their broadest smiles. Welcome, delegates.

-* Among those who pick it up: restaurants, retail shops, printers, electricians, florists, carpenters, security people and utility and telephone companies. Also advertising agencies and public relations firms, motor coach services, audiovisual equipment companies, duplicating and distribution services, auto rental and leasing, charter bus services and sightseeing tours, commercial and industrial equipment leasing, costume rentals and sales, court reporters and stenographers, entertainment booking and productions, exhibit design decorators, medical and first aid services, models, hostesses and talent services, photographers and, of course, hookers.

* October is the busiest convention month, followed (in rough order of activity) by May, June, April and September.

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