Florida's First and Still Most Important Political Convention

For those keeping the score: With the Republican National Convention heading to Tampa in 2012, Florida will now have hosted four national political conventions. But as important as Richard Nixon winning the 1968 GOP presidential nomination in Miami Beach was, and as dramatic as the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami Beach was, the most important political convention in Floridas history has long since been forgotten.

Discontented farmers from a number of organizations from across the nation gathered in Ocala in December 1890 to hammer out what become the basis of the Populist Party platform -- abolishing national banks, taking the U.S. off the gold standard, fair government, lowering the tariff, establishing a fair income tax and direct election of U.S. senators.

Sound familiar? While the men and women who helped shape the Populist Party never quite became the force they hoped for and their enemies feared, a good deal of their ideas were enacted by the federal government over the 20th century -- thanks in large part to politicians from the other parties (namely three-time Democratic presidential nominee and sometime Floridian William Jennings Bryan) bringing those ideas to the political mainstream.

While the farmers who met in Ocala didnt win the immediate political battles, they won the war -- their ideas were adopted.