Sweat, steak, five o’clock shadows: How TV transformed political conventions in 1948

At the first widely televised political convention in 1948, a smiling Clare Boothe Luce stepped to the microphone with her blonde curls and white pearls shining under the bright lights. To delegates inside Philadelphia’s Municipal Auditorium, the former Republican congresswoman looked perfect.

But on black-and-white television screens, “her face, hair and dress were all one washed-out color and her gestures seeming ill-matched and awkward,” one columnist wrote.