A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan--Kazin

Introduction: The Romance of Jefferson and Jesus

For many of his correspondents, Bryan was not merely a favorite politician. They believed him to be a godly hero who preached that the duty of a true Christian was to transform a nation and world plagued by the arrogance of wealth and the pain of inequality. That could only mean a radically progressive interpretation of the Gospels, so that, as the Pennsylvanians [xiii] phrased it, "our gaping social wounds may be healed...and class distinction leveled." [xiv]

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that other leading progressives only "sensed popular feelings; Bryan embodied them." [xiv]

...the Great Commoner would be free to thunder against corporate "predators" and to champion the unalloyed demands of small farmers and wage earners. [xiv]

That creed married democracy and pietism in a romantic gospel that borrowed equally from Jefferson and Jesus. A leveling faith had dominated the nation's religious life since the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, which spawned thousands of new Protestant churches and made the passion of evangelicalism the common discourse of most Americans. The idea that anyone, regardless of learning or social background, could "come to Christ" dovetailed with the belief in equal rights emblazoned in the Declaration of Independence. This synthesis of evangelical Protestantism and republicanism was found in no other nation--at least not with such passionate conviction nor for such a long period of time. [xiv]

Bryan gained a reputation as an agrarian rebel, and it is natural to assume that this explains his affinity for Jefferson. The squire of Monticello had famously intoned that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God," and described "great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man." But Bryan's own speeches and writings contain no such references to his idol's views. Instead, he applauded Jefferson in universal terms--as a militant defender of popular democracy and the scourge of privilege, whether it stemmed from an accident or birth or the favoritism of public and private authorities. Nothing was said about the Virginian's ownership of slaves or his elaborate apologies for an institution that mocked his egalitarian principles and those of every other nineteenth-century Democrat. Bryan's favorite gift to other public figures was a hefty reference book, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, which served up the great man's opinions in short paragraphs, organized alphabetically by topic. When asked in the 1920s to name ten books that "affected my life and influenced my conduct," Bryan placed only the Bible ahead of it. [xv]

During the late nineteenth century, when Bryan was a young man, evangelical rhetoric saturated nearly every mass movement in America. Spokesmen for the Knights of Labor, which had over a million members in the 1880s, cursed "the money power" as the "anti-Christ" that only a "new Pentecost" could humble. Father Edward Glynn, a charismatic labor priest excommunicated for his vigorous defense of the Knights, portrayed Christ as "an evicted peasant" who "came to preach a gospel of liberty to the slave, of justice to the poor, of paying the full hire to the workman." The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest women's group in the nation, claimed that its work to close down saloons, improve prison conditions, shelter prostitutes, and support labor unions for women were all examples of "God in politics." The [xv] altruistic sisterhood, wrote one member, "continually opens its windows toward Jerusalem and prays the government to make it easy for the people to do right and hard for them to do wrong." The two-million-strong Farmers' Alliance held mass encampments identical in form to the revival meetings common in the South and Great Plains. From Colorado to the Carolinas, rebel lecturers told their audiences, "God has promised to hear the cry of the oppressed," and preached that "no man in this nation can live a consistent Christian life" unless he threw himself into the agrarian insurgency. [xvi]

Bryan was the first leader of a major party to argue for permanently expanding the power of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans from the working and middle classes. With the [xviii] backing of his followers, he preached that the national state should counter the overweening power of banks and industrial corporations by legalizing strikes, subsidizing farmers, taxing the rich, banning private campaign spending, and outlawing the "liquor trust.".... HIs one great flaw was to support, with a studied lack of reflection, the abusive system of Jim Crow--a view that was shared, until the late 1930s, by nearly every white Democrat. [xix]

 But after Bryan's death in 1925, most intellectuals and activists on the broad left rejected the amalgam that had inspired him: a strict, populist morality based on a close reading of Scripture. The only barriers to a just society, he believed, were man-made; God was always on the side of common men and women. Liberals and radicals from the age of FDR to the present have tended to scorn that credo as naive and bigoted, a remnant of an era of white Protestant supremacy that has, or should have, passed. [xix]

Bryan railed against financiers, saloonkeepers, and evolutionists--all of whom have prospered quite nicely despite his best efforts. For decades after his death, influential scholars and journalists depicted him as a self-righteous simpleton who longed to preserve an age that had already passed. "It is probably true that in the modern climate of opinion no man who can genuinely understand Bryan will be capable of writing his biography," wrote a respected historian at the end of the 1950s. [xix]

The private Bryan we can learn about was a rather simple man. He showed little interest in literature, art, or philosophy and borrowed many of his political ideas and proposals from others. [xx]

...I have tried to avoid judging either Bryan or his loyalists and enemies by the standards of the present, whose own blinders sit quite firmly in place. [xx]

In many ways, he does belong to an age we have lost--when few Americans could vote if they weren't male and white, when farmers were a pivotal interest group, and when traveling lecturers and other performers offered thrilling diversion to millions of people who otherwise might have gone without. [xx]

Chapter One: Education of a Hero, 1860-1890

"Salem is rapidly improving," boasted the local weekly in 1854, "and its elements of wealth and prosperity are now being rapidly developed." Soon it would be "a commanding point...where industry, sobriety, and honesty will surely thrive; where good health may be found, where long life may be enjoyed and where all the concomitants of competence and oppulence [sic] are inevitable." [3]

And he never wavered from the gospel of the Democratic Party. It was a potent mixture of egalitarian principle and racist fear. Democrats in the nineteenth century often spoke as class warriors, American style. They preached that every small farmer and wage earner was equal to the rich and the well-born, and that the "producers" who fed, built, and clothed the nation deserved access to every opportunity society could offer. Yet Democrats also vowed to defend the livelihood, moral values, and families of the white majority against black Americans who refused to accept their servile destiny. As late as the 1870s, the party filled its campaign broadsides with images of "popeyed, electric-haired and slack-jawed" black men straight from the minstrel shows that were the most popular form of theater in nineteenth-century America.
These ugly stereotypes serviced a populist purpose. Updating and hardening Jefferson's anti-elitist suspicions, Democrats accused their political enemies of shedding tears for unworthy blacks but sneering at the language and manners of the productive white majority. In the party's demonology, [4] New England divines and schoolmarms mocked the Irish-born men and women who built and cleaned their houses, while speculators made quick fortunes manipulating markets instead of gaining a just reward after "years of patient industry." Good Democrats believed their task was to uphold the libertarian principles of the early republic. The Democracy--as the party was commonly known--stood tall, a pillar of resistance against well-born zealots who wanted to shut off immigration, prohibit drinking and other private amusements, and increase the powers of the federal government to enrich their friends. [5]

...like most Americans in the Gilded Age, both father and son were convinced that character underlay good governance as well as sound religion. [6]

As a child, he was also unfamiliar with the afflictions and joys of an increasingly polyglot and industrial society. In Salem, Will probably met few people of a religion or ethnic group different from his. In 1860, a large majority of the thirteen thousand inhabitants of Marion County were native-born white Protestants of British or Irish heritage who farmed modest plots of corn and raised pigs and cattle. A few small mills finished lumber or ground cereals; by 1870, one lone shop in Salem turned out wooden plows and carriages. Schoolteachers and store clerks outnumbered day laborers and servants. [6]

The year Abraham Lincoln was elected president, census takers found only nine black people living in all of Marion Country.
European immigrants were almost as rare. In the crowded port cities of the East, Know-Nothings raged against an influx of "Papist hordes." But Salem had just one small Catholic church, serving a few score of Irish and German residents. Tolerance toward whites from abroad seems to have come rather easily to town notables. Salem Democrats published campaign literature in German as well as English, and the town's religious life was relatively free of rancor. As a child, Will witnessed regular visits to his home by ministers of every denomination; Silas reserved a guest room for traveling divines, as well as politicians, and annually donated a load of hay to every local church, including the Catholic one. [7]

The few surviving photos of Mariah Bryan, grimly posed in high collar and tight bun, betray no hint of her independent spirit. Raised as a Methodist, she refused for twenty years after marriage to "take her letter" to the local Baptist congregation in which Silas was a leading elder. Mariah was active in the local chapter of the WCTU and the Royal Templars, another temperance group, though the precise nature of her work is unknown. But her membership alone suggests she welcomed the state as a moral guardian--a notion that made most good Democrats cringe.
Neither did Mariah confuse piety with prudishness. She played the piano often and well, and liked to tell stories about acquaintances who took their religion a bit too seriously. When Will asked his mother's opinion of his first political speech, a long-winded plea in 1880 to support the local Democratic congressman, she responded, "Well there were a few good places in it--where you might have stopped!"
Mariah's relaxed attitude may have influenced her son's choice of a church. Instead of becoming a Baptist like Silas or a Methodist like Mariah, Will embraced an option of his own. At the age of thirteen, he attended a revival led by a traveling minister from the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and then helped establish a small congregation with about seventy [7] other teenagers. Cumberland Presbyterians--who took their name from the Kentucky town where the sect was founded in 1813--discarded the Calvinist idea that God "elected" a minority at birth and left all others to face the prospect of hell. Although the Cumberland way prohibited drinking, dancing, gambling, and other enticements to evil, it brimmed with hope for the salvation of all Americans and, following that, the world. As an adult, Will often attended services of other denominations, and most Cumberland congregations, including that in Salem, joined the larger Presbyterian Church in the U.S. in 1906. Still, he clung to the expansive vision of his first spiritual home for the rest of his life. [8]

The boy from downstate never touched alcohol or played cards and was often seen with a Bible tucked under his arm. Affable talk about character came as easily to him as breathing. "He was very good," a classmate remembered, "but for some [9] reason Bryan's goodness was not the kind that rubbed against you and turned the fur the wrong way. [10]

As Mr. Dooley--the Irish-born saloonkeeper invented by a wry Chicago journalist--commented at the turn of the century, "Ivry thrue-born American regards himsilf as a gr-reat orator." [11]

Most newspapers were unabashed advocates of a political party; the creed of "objectivity" made few converts until the twentieth century. [11]

That nearly every American in the Gilded Age could imagine him- or herself a speechmaker does not mean that most speeches were models of reason and clarity. Indeed, sentimentality was the hallmark of Gilded Age rhetoric. Few orators dispensed with the mawkish mode, although it regularly invited derision from the unsmitten. After quoting a speaker who rambled on about "th' most gloryous people that iver infested th' noblest counthry that th' sun iver shone upon," Mr. Dooley snapped, "I guess a man niver becomes an orator if he has anything to say." [11]

 "Law will be his profession," Will wrote to Mary in 1880, referring to himself in the oracular third person, "his aim, to mete out justice to every creature, whether he be rich or poor, bond or free. His great desire is to honor God and please mankind." He also confessed a desire "to stand with Webster and Clay." As it had been for those giants of the antebellum Senate, the rhetoric of American ideals would be his ticket to immortality. [15]

Either by design or accident, Bryan left few records of his sojourn in the metropolis of middle America, whose population had doubled to over six hundred thousand since the terrible fire of 1871. His letters to Mary, now lost, evidently portrayed Chicago as a vast den of inequality and sleaze. He complained to his fiancee about manufacturing trusts that crushed their [15] small competitors and impoverished workers, a Democratic machine that cared only about staying in power, and a justice system plagued by careless police and selfish residents. [16]

Bryan's indictment echoed that of such Social Gospelers as Washington Gladden and W.T. Stead, who were fashioning a new theology of protest and healing for industrial cities. But these activist voices--and more secular ones such as Jane Addams and Henry Demarest Lloyd--were intensely attracted to the drama and color of Chicago, its ethnic neighborhoods, and its narratives of ingenuity as well as exploitation. Bryan just seemed disgusted and homesick. [16]

Bryan's aversion to Chicago prevented him from exploring the contentious, creative world of labor politics that thrived there in the early 1880s. Thousands of socialists and anarchists, most of them immigrants from Central Europe, organized unions where they worked and squabbled at radical meetings and in the press over whether the proletariat ought to abolish the state or take it over. The Knights of Labor ran a cooperative grocery store, and the cigar makers' union operated a factory that employed four hundred of its members, Irish nationalists demanded the freedom of their homeland and inspired boycotts by laborers of every political tendency and both genders. [16]

Such activists could have taught the pious young man from downstate that big-city workers were not merely victims of the new corporate order. To win their hearts, one had to spend less time preaching about "character" and more time appreciating their deep awareness of class and their need to organize for economic self-defense. Although Bryan sympathized with anyone bruised by the big money, he never quite learned that lesson--and it probably cost him votes and sympathy in the years to come. [16]

 ...Will, beardless once again, looked forward to using the local knowledge he had gained during his six years of schooling in the city. He was also prepared to bend his moral preferences to build a clientele.
One of his first clients was a saloonkeeper named John Sheehan. During Will's college days, the man had done odd jobs around the Jones house and grown fond of the boy. Now he promised "to bring" Bryan "all the business that he could." Would the young lawyer mind first collecting some unpaid bills? Bryan didn't hesitate. "I told him that I did not drink myself nor advise drinking, but that I thought those who bought liquor ought to pay for it." Instead of a necessary compromise, the Sheehan story became, for Bryan, a quasi-spiritual lesson in the value of tolerance. He recalled, "This was one of the earliest instances--they have been numerous since--where I saw the return of bread cast upon the waters." As any politician knows, one can never have too many friends. [17]

Lincoln was well suited to Will's ambitions and personality. ...also home to the University of Nebraska, which pleased Mary's intellectual side, and to flourishing Presbyterian and Methodist churches and thirteen temperence societies, which gratified the pious new parents. True, Republicans ruled both city and state, with a leadership of Union army veterans. But Nebraska's mushrooming variety of immigrants--from Ireland and Germany, Bohemia and Scandinavia--might give a friendly, tolerant Democrat a chance. [18]

Although the Democrats had won just one presidential election since the Civil War, they were not without power. Bryan's party was well entrenched in the commercial metropolises of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco as well as in the South and most border locales, such as Bryan's home county. The swelling of immigration from Catholic Europe to the urban North and fear of "Negro domination" in Dixie strengthened the party's appeal in those regions. One consequence was that the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives through much of the 1870s and 1880s and kept the GOP's majority in the Senate to a handful of seats. The party was also competitive in such key industrial states as New York and Illinois, where it fought back efforts by well-born, old-stock Republicans such as Francis Parkman and E.L. Godkin to strip the franchise from hew immigrants and men without property.
And the Democracy was a lively party indeed. Urban machines, while they made their bosses rich, also bestowed jobs and charity on working-class residents at a time when federal welfare payments went mainly to veterans of the Union army and their nearest kin. Tammany Hall, largest and most notorious of the breed, was a prodigious fount of municipal jobs and contracts; in the late 1870s, one of every twelve family men in New York held a position with the city. [19]

After his election in 1884, President Grover Cleveland managed to keep his party united by taking stands that pleased each of its major constituencies. The white South cheered him for naming former Confederate officers to his cabinet, northern workers and merchants shared his anti-trust fervor, and state and city bosses loved his willingness to replace thousands of Republican postmasters--even if the president did try to avoid giving the jobs to obvious hacks. After Cleveland was defeated for reelection in 1888, Bryan wrote him a letter declaring, "We would rather fall with you fighting on and for a principal [sic] than to succeed with the party representing nothing but an organized appetite." Why not move to Nebraska? asked the young lawyer. "As a Western man with friends you have in the East, we can elect you [in 1892]." [20]

But beneath such gestures of harmony simmered a clash of views and interests that would tear the Democracy apart over the next decade. Bryan's vow of support for Cleveland was an ephemeral oddity, signifying a hope for future partisan triumphs more than a true commitment to the fallen leader. At the end of the 1880s, two species of Democrats--conservatives and reformers--were emerging from a shared ancestry of Jeffersonian ideals and a resentment of Republican rule. [20]

 Dominant on the party's right were men from the North and certain border states who were skillful at making money and holding on to their local bailiwicks. For them, Jefferson's old passion for "equal rights" had cooled into the boilerplate of banquet speeches. [20]

"Bourbons," they got branded by contemporary critics fond of metaphors from European history, and subsequent historians have echoed the term. Certainly no one could match the ardor of these men for safeguarding the powers of individual states, curbing federal finances, and opposing agitators for such moral causes as prohibition and the redistribution of wealth. In Dixie, their partners were ex-Confederates who had erected a "redeemed" social order that terrorized black voters it could not control and eviscerated funding for education and medical care. Yet the conservatives had learned how to translate traditional principles into a governing philosophy. And their tactical alliances with Irish Catholic urban bosses demonstrated a respect for cultural pluralism that many on the left of the party did not yet share.
A growing corps of insurgent Democrats accused the Bourbons of peddling a flawed analysis of the nation's ills and having too little sympathy for citizens in trouble. Most of these rebels were legislators, state and federal, who came from areas peripheral to the metropolitan East and the industrial Midwest. In their districts, it was impossible to ignore the anguish of farmers who couldn't pay their mortgages or afford to transport their goods to market, of railroad workers fired for union organizing, and of small-town merchants shackled by high interest rates. Mushrooming insurgencies such as the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance gave a degree of collective voice and muscle to the protests. [21]

 The swiftness and novelty of corporate manipulation of the economy and national politics demanded a modest break with tradition. One's political survival might also be at stake. Across the South and West, agrarian and labor movements were spawning a welter of third parties that made such radical demands as protection for union organizers, public jobs for the unemployed, and a financial plan that would allow farmers to use their own staple crops for collateral, thus bypassing banks altogether. While still small, these independent parties [21] could tip the balance in close elections. For most Democrats outside the Northeast, the Bourbon way seemed both economically callous and electorally idiotic. [22]

Morton was a principled conservative, dedicated to keeping government out of the marketplace, whether for whiskey or textiles. Like most Bourbons, he was a devotee of free trade and viewed high tariffs as a "diabolic" tax on American consumers as well as a violation of the natural laws of the economy. Bryan also despised the tariff, but his vision of reform was larger than that. And he [22] was beginning to see that the Bourbon gospel offered no remedy for the problems of ordinary Nebraskans. [23]

At the close of the 1880s, a nasty mix of calamities, natural and man-made, put an end to good times. A massive blizzard in January 1888 killed stock animals across the northern plains, ruining Nebraskans who had invested nearly everything they had in pigs and cattle. Two years later, the worst drought since the Civil War destroyed millions of acres of corn, wheat, and oats. The health of Nebraska's urban economy depended upon the bounty of its farms. Bankrupt businesses and unfinished buildings scarred the streets of Lincoln and Omaha.
A growing number of rural Nebraskans had begun to rail at a human scourge as deadly as the elements. they called it by a variety of names--"monopoly," "the money power," "Wall Street," or "organized wealth." But the indictment was simple enough: a powerful conspiracy was robbing small farmers of the fruits of their labors. They accused the railroads of imposing sharp and unfair hikes in freight rates, bankers of committing a legal form of usury, and the political establishment of serving the rich and the cities at the expense of productive families in the countryside. Men and women who had broken the prairie sod, expecting it to yield them an independent life, if not always a comfortable one, were forced to mortgage their farms and sometimes even their plows and animals to stay in business. [23]

...in 1889, a bumper harvest of corn--Nebraska's biggest crop--resulted in the lowest prices in memory. Some farmers resorted to burning their corn for fuel instead of selling it to buy coal. City newspapers blamed the crisis on too many ears chasing too few buyers and blandly predicted the market would readjust itself in time. But a hundred weekly papers from the rural counties told a more dramatic story, and skilled lecturers from the alliance helped drive it home. [23]

Bryan did not immediately join the agrarian rebellion. In his law practice, he was more engaged with collecting debts for suppliers than with serving as an advocate for farmers struggling to escape them. And, as a neophyte politician, he origianlly thought to expand his party's core electorate instead of courting a new one. Immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and the Slavic lands--most of whom were Catholic--formed the base of the Nebraska Democracy. They viewed the party as a wall of defense against native-born moralists who wanted to shut down saloons and require that only English be spoken in public schools. Occasional support for the state's small, hard-pressed labor unions and swipes at railroad "monopoly" had gained the Democrats few votes. This left jousts at the tariff and what Morton called the "radical pulpit-hangers" of the GOP as the Democrats' sole rhetorical strategy. [24]

 Bryan had quickly learned to decipher the party loyalties of ethnic voters. When he spoke to Irish or German audiences, Bryan assumed he was among friends. Some confused his name as "O'Brien," and he laughed instead of objecting. [24]

...Bryan was careful not to alienate the base of his own party. The Republican legislature had placed a prohibition amendment on the fall ballot. Omaha, the biggest city in the state, lay in his district, as did the third largest distillery in the nation. Fear of the dry army drove a good many of its residents to vote Democratic. The party's candidate for governor, the wealthy Irish-born meatpacker James E. Boyd, came from Omaha. And Boyd was "a sopping wet" who could count on the backing of whiskey makers and saloon owners organized in the Personal Rights League.
As a strict Presbyterian and the son of a temperance worker, Bryan loathed the "liquor traffic." In precampaign speeches at the Lincoln YMCA and the chapel of the state prison, he had called for its eventual abolition. But when he stumped through the immigrant wards of Omaha, he stopped by saloons and had an aide buy beer for all the customers--while he quaffed a glass of soda water. Somehow, his adversary failed to exploit the contradiction. (see footnote 85) [26]

Nationwide, Democrats gained seventy-six seats in the House, enough for an ample majority. Their campaign harped on grievances held by whites in different regions--GOP reliance on black voters in the South and border states; temperance, high tariffs, and English-only schools in the East and Midwest. Across the Plains, the agrarian rebels, who were beginning to call themselves "Populists," had split the normal Republican constituency and elected nine congressmen and two senators of their own. [27]

Chapter Two: Speaker in the House, 1891-1894

Each morning, the reverent Catholic from Country Cork kneeled in prayer next to the faithful Presbyterians from Nebraska. For the rest of his life, Dan Bride was devoted to the man he had met at the dawn of a celebrated political career. He believed Bryan possessed "some Supernatural power" that enabled him to fight off a legion of "contemptable" foes. [30]

In mid-January, Bryan delivered his first speech on the House floor. It lasted only a few minutes but made a strong impression. Ignoring the caution expected of new members, Bryan spoke out sharply against spending $100,000 to charter a ship to bring relief supplies to Russia, where millions were suffering from famine. Why, he asked, had Congress not responded to Nebraska's plea for help during the "unparalleled drought" of 1890? Bryan urged private citizens to donate crops and currency to "those subjects of the Czar who bear the double burden of want and persecution." But he objected to setting a precedent for public aid abroad while neglecting the misery of Americans at home. [31]

...the rhetorical method he had prized since his schoolboy days: ethical content garbed in stirring, melodramatic prose. [32]

...William McKinley, who hailed from a manufacturing district in Ohio. With the GOP still in charge of the White House and Senate, Bryan and his colleagues had no hope of abolishing the long, arcane schedule of import taxes. So they decided to focus on a handful of raw materials used by ordinary people, particularly those who toiled on the land: wool, twine, barbed wire, iron fence posts, salt, and lumber. Bryan would argue for liberating the first two commodities from the protectionists' grip. [32]

He insisted that a graduated income tax should be the main source of federal revenues, which underscored his main point. The tariff was nothing more than a massive subsidy to some of the wealthiest, best politically connected men in America. It was an outrage, in dire need of reform, if not outright abolition. [33]

After noting how a policy of free trade had benefited England, he quipped, "Someone has said that the onion is a vegetable that makes the man sick who does not eat it. It would seem that protection does the greatest good to the country that does not have it." [33]

Reporters across the political spectrum agreed. Ignoring Bryan's barbs at the wealthy, they focused almost exclusively on his oratorical prowess. The New York Times, a leading organ of conservative Democrats, remarked, "His voice is clear and strong, his language plain, but not lacking in grace. He uses illustrations effectively and he employs humor and sarcasm with admirable facility." [34]

...all seemed emblems of the rising West--its entrepreneurs as well as its angry Populists. [34]

The tariff speech ensured Bryan a wide audience for whatever he chose to say. He made the fateful decision to speak out for the free coinage of silver. No issue carried so strong a charge in the politics of time. High material stakes and fervent symbolic ones made for a combustible mix. Through the 1860s, both gold and silver had been recognized as legal tender, with the white metal pegged at one-sixteenth the value of its more valuable counterpart. [34] But gold dollars circulated far more widely than ones based on the alternative specie. During the Civil War, a cash-poor federal government had issued greenbacks based on nothing more than faith in a Union victory.
In 1873, a solidly Republican Congress retired the old silver dollars and placed the nation exclusively on the gold standard. When the economy fell into depression soon after, critics blamed the act for constricting the nation's money supply--stabilizing prices and exchange rates, which made creditors happy. Debt-ridden farmers and anyone else who felt the rules of the financial system were rigged to deny affordable capital to hardworking "producers" on the land and in the factory believed they were the creators of all tangible wealth. "The Crime of '73" became a rallying cry for a disparate congeries of outsiders--labor unionists, Populists, self-taught economists, and romantic pamphleteers. "The money monopoly is the parent of all monopolies--the very root and essence of slavery," charged Andrew Cameron, editor of a national labor paper. [35]
By the time Bryan got to Washington, few politicians could avoid taking a stand on the matter. Unlike the tariff, the money debate split each of the parties along regional lines: within the northeast quadrant, hub of the nation's industry and commerce, gold sentiment reigned supreme, but everywhere else, most politicians backed a currency based on both precious metals. In 1890, Congress had passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the Treasury to purchase several million ounces of silver every month. This did not fully reinstate a policy and bimetallism, but it was enough to convince nervous investors at home and abroad to convert their greenbacks into gold, lest they be stuck with wads of inflated silver certificates. Conservatives fretted as the gold reserve fell below $100 million, the legal minimum set a decade before. But advocates of silver urged advancing toward the "free" or unlimited coinage of silver rather than retreating back to the gold standard. [35]

So in 1892, Bryan ran, in all but name, as a Populist. He confessed to having "strong Alliance tendencies" and secretly dispatched his campaign manager to solicit donations from silver mine owners in the mountain West. [36]

Across the nation, the campaign of 1892 marked the end of an era. Each major party nominated for president a respected but colorless figure--Cleveland and the incumbent, Benjamin Harrison--who abstained from campaigning for himself. [36]

James Weaver ran a courageous campaign, braving rocks and rotten eggs in the South and a blackout of coverage by GOP papers in the Midwest. Despite the animus of the old parties, he gained over a million ballots--almost 9 percent of the total--and twenty-two electoral votes in the Plains and Rockies. Although they failed to win over many eastern voters, the joyful insurgents expected greater successes in the years to come.
It was not to be. The People's Party first presidential campaign was its last as a serious contender. The Populists inherited a rich legacy of Gilded Age protest against immoral "monopolists" and financiers that had fueled earlier campaigns by Greenbackers, Union Laborites, and the Prohibition Party. However, the major parties grew increasingly adept at absorbing mass insurgencies before they could harden into competitors. In the future, every alternative national ticket of significance would feature either an ideologue on the left (Eugene Debs, Robert La Follette, Henry Wallace, Ralph Nader) or a protestor from the right (George Wallace, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan).
Grover Cleveland had no time to savor his return to power. ... It was the worst economic crisis since the birth of the republic. [37]

True to its convictions, the administration offered only the remedy of bankers. "Though the people support the government," Cleveland had once [37] intoned, "the government should not support the people." The culprit must be silver. Repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, urged the president, and newly confident businessmen would renew the health of the economy. [38]

Bryan quickly emerged as a leader of the opposition to Cleveland when the House convened in August. His closeness to Populists and his break with Morton had gained him a reputation as a rebel, and his oratorical renown had grown steadily since the tariff speech seventeen months before. [38]

Few doubted that Cleveland would win repeal of the Silver Purchase Act. The phalanx on his side was simply too powerful and well connected. [38]

The president mobilized his entire cabinet and the Democratic leadership of Congress behind what he saw as a test of loyalty and resolve. He could also count on nearly every Republican from the East and Midwest. In the final vote, repeal carried by more than a two-to-one margin. [38]

He delivered a call to moral combat, liberally sprinkled with the particulars of monetary history. Standing in a packed House chamber, Bryan began by invoking a historic Christian triumph: Charles Martel's defeat of Muslim invaders at Tours in 732. This battle, "historians tell us...[,] determined the history of all Europe for centuries." Bryan went on, "A [battle] greater than Tours is here! In my humble judgment the vote of this House...may bring to the people of the West and South, to the people of [38] the United States, and to all mankind, weal or woe beyond the power of language to describe or imagination to conceive." (see footnote 30) It was a grandiose opening. How would the young crusader back up his claim?
For the next three hours, Bryan portrayed the cause of free silver as a defense of hardworking Americans and the sovereignty of the nation itself. [39]

So far, Bryan had avoided venting the regional hostility that infected the writings of many silver advocates. He realized he could not win over the country by demonizing the large and growing population of the urban Northeast. But then he let fly a memorable blast at eastern elitists, for which his targets would repay him in the future by muddling the distinction between the interests of their class and of their region. Referring to lawmakers who favored bimetallism only if the British government agreed, Bryan asked, "Are we an English colony or an independent people? If there be some living along the Eastern coast--better acquainted with the beauties of the Alps than with the grandeur of the Rockies, more accustomed to the sunny skies of Italy than to the invigorating breezes of the Mississippi Valley--who are not willing to trust their fortunes and their destinies to American citizens, let them learn that the people living between the Alleghanies and the Golden Gate are not afraid to cast their all upon the Republic and rise or fall with it." Holding up a silver dollar minted in 1795, Bryan demanded "the restoration of the money of the fathers." [39]

For the rest of his life, the image of a man in love with his words but heedless of rigorous argument would dog Bryan's campaigns for president and for a variety of causes, political and religious. Oratory, the only endeavor in which he routinely excelled, also became one of his greatest obstacles to gaining power.
Repeal of the Silver Purchase Act improved neither the American economy nor Cleveland's political standing. Unemployment and business failures only increased as investors hurried to exchange their silver certificates for gold coins. Then, in the summer of 1894, the president sent two thousand troops and five thousand federal marshals to break a national railroad strike that had begun as a conflict between the makers of Pullman sleeping cars and their autocratic employer. This angered many wage earners and reformers and made railway union leader Eugene V. Debs a working-class hero. In the fall, the administration took the humiliating step of asking J.P. [40] Morgan and a handful of other Wall Street bankers to shed some of their excess bullion for $50 million in government bonds. This was a logical act, given Cleveland's fealty to gold. But it further inflamed Populists and rebel Democrats, who already suspected the president of being a lacky of the "money power." [41]

Encouraged by public regard, Bryan added to the roster of reforms for which he was willing to fight. The depression was increasing class feeling among ordinary Americans, making it feasible, even popular, to stand up for causes that only agrarian radicals and urban socialists had advocated before. Free silver was only the most prominent issue that separated the Bourbons, in their shaky dominance of the party, from the growing army of insurgent Democrats who sounded more and more like Populists. Through the remainder of his term in the House, Bryan spoke out for a graduated income tax and federal insurance for bank deposits. He denounced the court injunction that had allowed Cleveland to intervene in the Pullman dispute and endorsed, perhaps for the first time, the freedom of workers to join a union and go on strike. [41]

Soaring on the gale of change, Bryan persuaded a majority of Democrats at their state convention to take a daring step--to endorse the Populist candidate for governor and two of his brethren running for Congress. The People's Party returned the favor by nominating nobody for Senate. Outraged by Bryan's perfidy, conservative Democrats, led by J. Sterling Morton, bolted the convention and nominated their own splinter ticket of men loyal to Grover Cleveland and the gold standard. They seemed not to care that in 1894 the president was about as popular in Nebraska as a corn virus. [42]

Across the nation, the Republican Party was celebrating a historic, triumph. From the cities of the Northeast to the shores of the Pacific, voters punished the Democrats for stumbling and squabbling in Washington as wages declined, jobs disappeared, and the currency contracted. Republicans gained 121 seats in the House, the largest increase ever, and wrested back the majority they had lost the year Bryan was first elected to Congress. The tide swept over pro-silver Democrats in Nebraska as well as stalwarts of Grover Cleveland, who still held the reins of most state parties. Throughout the Midwest, apex of partisan conflict, the GOP elected eighty-six out of eighty-nine representatives, almost doubling their numbers in the region. The sole Democratic victor in all of New England was John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the Boston Irishman whose future grandson was John F. Kennedy. Champ Clark, a Bryan admirer who lost his own seat in Missouri, described the 1894 election as the greatest slaughter of innocents since Herod. Only in the South did the party of Jefferson--and of Jim Crow--remain supreme. [43]

 With Cleveland's forces thoroughly discredited, the way was now clear to capture the national party. [43]

Bryan had not always been a paragon of public character; those saloon visits in 1890 revealed the dross of pure ambition that lay beneath the glint of ethical rhetoric. But to a growing number of admirers, there was no one who spoke more clearly, more vigorously, or more often about the reasons why the country was in trouble than the young orator from Lincoln. [43]

In her concern, Mary foretold the defeats that lay ahead. But she was asking her husband to change his personality, to become an ordinary man--shorn of an ambition intertwined with the creed of character. [44]

Chapter Three: In the Armor of a Righteous Cause, 1895-1896

The contest of 1896 was different. In his campaign, Bryan was challenging more than a man and an opposing party. Speaking to and for a legion of admirers, he voiced a romantic, class-aware protest against an order increasingly being governed by the intellectual assumptions and material might of big corporations, in both finance and manufacturing. More inchoately, he proposed an alternative regime of Christian decency, one that would consider the well-being of farmers and wage earners before the anxieties of big investors. His campaign endeared him to countless Americans who came to regard him as a godly hero. And in his advocacy of a [45] stronger, more interventionist state, Bryan calmed his party's ancestral dread of federal power. Every Democratic president from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson would reap the benefits of his apostasy.
For their part, Bryan's lavishly funded opponents believed his victory would deliver the country to a mob of anarchists and fools. Free silver would undoubtedly ruin the economy for years to come. [46]

Bryan spoke both widely and wisely, choosing locations that would do his presidential ambitions the most good. On several occasions, he repeated resonant lines from the final speech he had given in Congress at the end of December 1894: "The money centers present this insolent demand for further legislation in favor of a universal gold standard. I, for one, will not yield to that demand. I will not help to crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. I will not aid them to press down upon the bleeding brow of labor this crown of thorns." (see footnote 3) [47]

Bryan's magnetism lifted him above the ranks of the typical Gilded Age politician whose florid words smacked of artifice and insincerity. In his widely read book about heroes, Thomas Carlyle wrote that "a deep, great, genuine sincerity is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic." Bryan's ability to give carefully rehearsed addresses that seemed to come from his heart won him the affection of audiences, even when some in the crowd took exception to his positions or his reasoning. Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land. [49]

But in the mid-1890s, most Americans assumed that wealth consisted largely of products that were tangible and visible--crops, livestock, iron, coal, textiles, real estate. When calamity struck, they naturally fell to arguing whether the fault lay in a surplus or shortage of the shiny commodities, or specie, on which their dollars were based. Because creditors, industrialists, and the Bank of England favored gold, ordinary Americans who resented their power, and often found it mystifying, rallied to the promise of free silver. They were groping for a flexible currency, tailored for a fast-growing economy, but they trafficked in the argot of conspiracy. [50]

Gold advocates held no less fervently to their own position and were no more restrained in their attacks. "A sound currency is to the affairs of this life what a pure religion and a sound system of morals are to the affairs of the spiritual life," intoned Republican senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts in 1893. Silver was "an inferior metal" that encouraged inflation, speculation, and a lackadaisical attitude toward debt. To its propagandists, the battle of standards became an elemental struggle between right and left, and both sides wrapped themselves in the mantle of tradition. Harvey saw the fight for free silver as a battle to restore economic democracy in America. Hoar viewed it as a tumult of cranks and anarchists who would destroy the character and economy of the republic. The argument had reached such an emotional pitch that no compromise was possible. Only political warfare could resolve it.
Gold versus silver was not the only issue driving the battalions into combat readiness. In 1894, when the Democrats still controll Congress, they had passed the first peacetime income tax as an amendment to the lengthy Wilson-Gorman bill, which lowered tariff rates across the board. Bryan drafted the amendment, which provided for a flat levy of 2 percent on incomes over $4,000, and debated its merits with his customary vigor and sensitivity to class differences. Those citizens who get the most from government, he argued, should pay for it: "Who demands a standing army?" he asked. "Is it the poor man as he goes about his work, or is it the capitalist who wants that army to supplement the local government in protecting his property when he enters into a contest with his employees?"
Since fewer than a hundred thousand Americans earned tough to qualify, the tax, which Cleveland signed into law, was largley a symbolic swipe at the wealthy. Bryan himself would have preferred a graduated income tax that would replace the tariff entirely. But a year later, the Supreme Court, in its Pollock decision, struck down the law; Justice Stephen Field called it a "stepping stone" toward "a war of the poor against the rich." The Court rarely overturned acts of Congress, and the decision angered social reformers in general and Populists and like-minded Democrats in particular.
Most of the same people had already been denouncing the justices for openly siding with the big money. That January, the Court gutted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act with an argument that seemed to violate the spirit of the first serious federal attempt to regulate corporate power. [51]

In May, the justices voted unanimously to uphold the injunction Attorney General Richard Olney had used to crush the Pullman strike, the act that landed Eugene Debs and his fellow railway union leaders in jail. According to the justices, these dangerous "rioters" had conspired to throttle the nation's commerce, which was a clear violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Whether Cleveland appreciated the irony is not recorded. At the age of eighty-two, Lyman Trumbull, Bryan's old mentor, helped Clarence Darrow argue Debs's defense before the Court.
By the spring of 1896, with business still stagnant, the accumulated grievances of money, taxes, and labor had convinced a variety of insurgents to break with the old political order. ... The Populists, at the behest of James Weaver and other top leaders, decided to delay their national convention until the major parties had held theirs--the better to scoop up disgruntled renegades or assemble a fusion ticket. In February, Bryan declared in the World-Herald, "The Democratic party cannot serve God and Mammon; it cannot serve plutocracy and at the same time defend the rights of the masses." Most Democratic delegates from the West and South agreed. They would either rescue the party from the grasp of Cleveland and his ilk or organize a militant alternative. [52]

But this would be a rare convention, one that clashed more over principles than personalities. A clear majority of delegates came to Chicago pledged to ratify a free-silver platform; they could hardly wait to snatch the party away from the Bourbon minority. A month before, the Republicans had nominated William McKinley for president on a platform of high tariffs and "sound money." GOP delegates jeered, "Go to Chicago!" at [53] twenty-three pro-silver delegates from the West who tearfully walked out in protest. The conservative Nation smirked, "Silver is, we think, the first raw material that has ever been wept over." (see footnote 23) There was no longer much doubt that the fall campaign would be fought over the issue of money, with all its encrusted emotions and symbols. [54]

Around them in the streets and hotel lobbies of downtown Chicago gathered advocates for causes that reached beyond a change in the currency. Henry George, eloquent prophet of the Single Tax on land, came to file his impressions for Hearst's New York Journal. Also on hand were crusaders for woman suffrage, prohibition, socialism (both secular and Christian), civil rights for Chinese immigrants, and many Populists--including James Weaver and Ignatius Donnelly, the party's best-known orator. The Sunday before the convention, a prominent Baptist minister warned his congregation, "The Populist and the anarchist...have planned deliberately to use this opportunity to press their dangerous doctrines as far as they may be able." (see footnote 24) Newspapers all over the country reported his genteel shudder.
Even before the first gavel fell at the Chicago Coliseium, the convention was turning into a disorderly, quarrelsome affair. At Cleveland's request, the dapper William Whitney, former secretary of the navy, sped to Chicago on a private train stocked with gourmet food and wine to rally the forces of sound money and conservative government. But silverites spat on his aides and disrupted his first public meeting with loud cheers for Altgeld, who had been the Bourbons' favorite bogeyman since protested the smashing of the Pullman strike. "For the first time," exclaimed a goldbug Democrat, "I can understand the scenes of the French Revolution!" (see footnote 25) [54]

The silverites won every vote and seemed eager to humiliate their rivals. After Bryan and his friends replaced [54] their goldbug opponents, they hounded them off their seats on the floor and up to the galleries. [55]

The platform was suffused with the same spirit. Unlike the typical document of the era, which concealed internal party differences under a blanket of downy cliches, it shouted defiance at Cleveland and his futile policies. As the "paramount" issue, the money plank came first. One of three sections that Bryan helped draft, it charged that the act of 1873, passed "without the knowledge or approval of the American people," had resulted in deflation and higher taxes, "the enrichment of the money-lending class," and the "impoverishment of the people." It stated flatly that the gold standard was "not only un-American but anti-American" because it placed the nation's economy under England's heel. Without mentioning the president's name, the next plank, against issuing government bonds during peacetime, condemned "trafficking with banking syndicates"--Cleveland's deals with J.P. Morgan and friends that had shored up the gold reserve. For that matter, the federal government ought to issue each note of currency, instead of allowing banks to share the task, "in derogation of the Constitution."
The rebellion against authority didn't stop there. Of course, the platform acknowledged, the Republicans would try to restore McKinley's tariff if they took back the White House. However, "until the money question is settled," all "agitation" on that issue ought to cease. But Congress should "use all the Constitutional power" it could muster to reverse the Supreme Court's nullification of the income tax. The judicial branch, in other words, should not be the final arbiter of the public welfare. [55]

...the issues for which they chose to fight in 1896 set the Democrats [55] on a course that led away from their laissez-faire past and toward the liberalism of the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society. To demadn that the government control the money supply, tax the rich, and defend the right to strike was not quite a blueprint for a regulatory state. But the platform officially declared that Democrats were in favor of beginning to redistribute wealth and power in America. In rhetoric at least, the party has never gone back.
The old guard was not going to yield without a struggle. [56]

The majority would lead off the debate and complete it, sandwiching two of its best orators--Ben Tillman of South Carolina and William Jennings Bryan--around a trio of worthies from the opposing faction. [56]

Tillman was unable to separate his ire against the Bourbons from his hatred of their region, home to Wall Street and erstwhile foe of the Confederacy. "I am from South Carolina, which was the home of secession," he announced, drawing loud hisses from conservatives and easterners in the crowd. Tillman inflamed them further when he vowed to divide the Democratic Party again, as in 1860, but this time "to accomplish the emancipation of the white slaves" from the tyranny of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. "I want to say to you here that we have at last recognized in the South that we are mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, while the great states I have named have eaten up our substance." With his fists in the air and his clothing a sweaty jumble, Tillman appeared to one unfriendly reporter to be "the incarnation of the mob." A biographer later marveled, "He made the ghost of secession walk!" (see footnote 32) Such future southern demagogues as Eugene Talmadge, Theodore Bilbo, and Lester Maddox would follow in his footsteps, winning acclaim within their region and scorn nearly everywhere else. [57]

 No Democrat, Hill suggested, could be elected president without carrying New York; only one ever had. This year, defeat would surely come if bimetallism became "a question of patriotism" or "bravery" instead of "a question of business" and "economics." (see footnote 34) [58]

 Bryan quickly added, "But this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty--the cause of humanity."
In three elegant sentences, Bryan had summarized the argument of his speech--and, as it happened, the theme of the ensuing campaign. Free silver may have been the "paramount issue," but that is because of who advocated it and who opposed it. The issue was thus not really the issue.
Bryan and his fellow insurgents believed they were battling over nothing less than the fate of democracy and the welfare of "humanity." Bryan felt he was serving his part in a grander conflict that began with Christ and showed no sign of approaching its end. [59]

In counterpoint, Bryan mocked, "You come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests.... We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application." This began as stirring a defense of "the common man" as had ever been uttered in American politics. But it was a Jeffersonian's plea for moral equity, not a radical's demand for power:
"The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer, the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day...and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world."
No other passage in the speech, until the famous peroration, drew more applause. From the gallery came shouts of "Go after them, Willie" and "Give it to them, Bill." (see footnote 42)

But Bryan lavished his words of praise entirely on rural and small-town Americans. The only wage earners he singled out were miners, most of whom toiled in company towns quite dissimilar from the [60] swelling metropolises where factory hands and building tradesmen lived and worked. This silence highlighted, unintentionally, a major weakness of the insurgents' cause. Bryan exacerbated it several minutes later when he said, "You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." Like most pledges of defiance, it probably made few converts. [61]

Bryan then stepped forward a few inches and straight into the headlines of American history. "Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere," he declared, before raising his hands to his temples and stretching his fingers out along his forehead for the penultimate phrase, "we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brown of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." As he spoke the final words, Bryan stunned the crowd with an inspired gesture of melodrama. He stepped back from the podium, pulled his hands away from his brown, and extended them straight out from his body--and held the Christlike pose for perhaps five seconds. (see footnote 43) [61]

Bryan's theatrical tour de force had made him an instant hero.
Yet, contrary to historical legend, the speech did not ensure him the presidential nomination. The following morning, thirteen other candidates were on the first ballot, and the New York delegation sullenly refused to cast any votes at all. [62]

However, the rank and file inside the hall could not long be denied. For over a year, Bryan had assiduously wooed Democrats in states outside the Northeast, and since no other candidate was able to gain momentum in the early balloting, his speech's wild reception convinced many that his time had come. ... The next day, in a hasty attempt to balance the ticket regionally and secure funds for the campaign, Arthur Sewall--a wealthy shipbuilder from Maine who favored both free silver and the income tax--was chosen for vice president. [62]

Compared to the fury of party conservatives, Altgeld's diffidence was a mild thing indeed. Many Cleveland supporters responded to Bryan's scorn by declaring him a fanatic and a socialist, no true follower of Jefferson. The revivalistic quality of his rhetoric filled them with particular contempt. The New York World likened the Chicago convention to a camp meeting "where religious exhorters work upon the sensibilities of their hearers until hysterical women fall into a state resembling catalepsy." The New York Times headlined a front-page story about the proceedings "The Silver Fanatics Are Invincible: Wild, Raging, Irresistible Mob Which Nothing Can Turn from Its Abominable Foolishness." Grover Cleveland was grateful to them and hoped the bolters would aid McKinley. But as "president of all the people" he refrained from taking part in the campaign. (see footnote 48) Throughout the Northeast and upper Midwest, Democrats who couldn't stomach their party's new platform and the rhetoric of its new leader made plans to defeat them. In early September, they convened, as the National Democratic Party, to nominate a ticket committed to the gold standard and a last-ditch defense of the incumbent administration.
In the days following Bryan's nomination, scores of urban newspapers that had backed every Democratic candidate for a generation announced that this year they would urge their readers to vote against him. The bolters included the World, whose circulation of nearly eight hundred thousand was the largest in the country, and the most popular dailies in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Louisville, Detroit, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The great majority of the German-language Zeitungen--serving a large and politically engaged constituency--joined the exodus, afraid that free silver would lead to higher prices and a breakdown of the social order that sheltered old-stock immigrants. (see footnote 49) Few southern papers deserted Bryan, but this was often due more to expedience than to conviction. For white voters in Dixie, the GOP still conjured up fears of "Negro rule." Thus, at a time when most journalists relished taking sides, Democrats began the campaign knowing the urban press outside the solid South would be overwhelmingly arrayed against them. [63]

Bryan's emotional appeal to Americans disgusted with the nation's politicial and economic establishment also earned him the staunch opposition of anyone who identified with elite rule. "There are two ideas of government," you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them." Moved by self-interest and conviction, millions of voters viewed this idea as a threat of upheaval instead of the promise of justice it was meant to be.
And they were blessed with two clever, resourceful leaders. For years, William McKinley had thoroughly schooled himself in the art of inoffensiveness. A Civil War major who never led a charge or fired a shot, he made his name as a champion of the protective tariff, which he always draped in patriotic bunting. He avoided other controversial issues whenever possible and only declared his support for the gold standard just before the convention that nominated him for president. Thomas Reed, the acerbic House Speaker and an intraparty rival, remarked, "McKinley isn't a silver-bug, McKinley isn't a gold-bug, McKinley is a straddle-bug." A Methodist elder and Sunday-school teacher, the major guarded his incorruptible image and spoke in a plain, patient manner that put listeners at ease but seldom inspired them. (see footnote 55) [65]

Republicans derided their opponents as "Popocrats" who would repudiate the Supreme Court, wreck the economy, and, in an echo from the 1860s, tear the nation apart by class and region. At the same time, they promised that "a full dinner pail" awaited voters who chose McKinley, "the advance agent of prosperity" and of social harmony. To symmbolize both themes, the GOP distributed millions of American flags and flag buttons and organized hundreds of marches to display them in cities large and small. The cost was beyond all precedent. [66]

In the end, the Republican National Committee raised at least $3.5 million (which would be about $50 million today) and didn't even spend it all. (see footnote 60) Against this juggernaut, the primary weapon that Democrats and Populists possessed was the voice of one man. [67]

But outside the silver-mining states in the Rockies, they were unable to explain why hard-pressed urban wage earners should embrace a third-party program designed to serve the inflationary needs of cotton and wheat farmers. Perhaps an eloquent Democrat who had spent most of his life in midsized midwestern cities could do better. [69]

But Bryan's appeal to principle underlined an uncomfortable reality of his campaign: labor had nothing concrete to gain from free silver and would only suffer if a change in the currency drove up prices for food and other necessities. His hope that urban wage earners would unite with his agrarian supporters depended almost entirely on his ability to persuade them to vote their ideals and their consciences rather than their fears and their wallets. [69]

 Corporations responded with a blast of economic realism. In September, railroads in the Midwest told employees they would go bankrupt if forced to pay bondholders in inflated silver dollars; other businesses in the region warned that layoffs would be inevitable if Bryan won. Meanwhile, Hanna hired several union officials to stump for McKinley, and the Republican candidate repeatedly tied joblessness to Democratic policies, reminding laboring men that the protective tariff was their friend.
By the final month of the campaign, the two experienced politicos became increasingly confident that, come Election Day, most workers would make the practical choice. (see footnote 71) [70]

Rarely did Bryan give a campaign speech devoid of biblical invocations and metaphors. While he didn't repeat the stagecraft of the Cross of Gold speech, he persisted in describing the race as a battle for the nation's soul. Bryan told a crowd in Hornellsville, New York, "The Bible speaks of certain persons who love darkness rather than light...because their deeds are evil." At a meeting of Jewish Democrats in Chicago, he likened the Republicans to a pharaoh who "lives on the toil of others and always wants to silence complaint by making the load heavier." Before an audience of women in Grand Rapids, he justified bimetallism with the claim that "the Almighty Himself" he created both precious metals "to meet the needs of man." (see footnote 73) [70]

To ministers and devout laymen who disliked Bryan's politics, such statements reeked of blasphemy. Their Christianity was a religion of individual salvation and moral order; it required deference to legitimate [70] authorities and the quelling of mobs. How dare Bryan posture as Jesus and cite the Bible to glorify his repudiation of debt and defiance of the Supreme Court? Thousands of clergy returned the "Popocrat's" rhetorical fire with spiritual grapeshot of their own, surpassing their partisan involvement in past campaigns. In mid-September, the Reverend Cortland Myers of Brooklyn's Baptist Temple announced that "the blood-stained banner of the cross" was endangered by the "anarchist" Chicago platform--a document "made in hell." Scores of clergymen in other eastern cities agreed, although usually in cooler terms. (see footnote 74) [71]

In response, Bryan sought to emulate the spirit of apostolic Christianity. Like St. Paul and every itinerant preacher in his wake, he took to the road, speaking "unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort." The great evangelist Dwight Moody, while endorsing McKinley, marveled at Bryan's "crusade" and compared it to that of Peter the Hermit, the peasant inciter of medieval Europe. Indeed, the Democrat seldom missed a chance to stump for Jesus as well as free silver. At one stop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, an admirer shouted, "I am not a Christian, but I am praying for you." Bryan adroitly responded that the outburst gave the "community an additional reason for desiring my election, because, if they could convince the gentleman of the efficacy of prayer, they might make a Christian out of him."
The campaign made compelling news. Most papers outside the Deep South and the Rockies supported McKinley, but his front-porch campaign lacked drama and spontaneity. In contrast, nearly every day with Bryan supplied an occasion either to ridicule the statements and habits of the "boy Orator," to marvel at his skill and endurance, or both. Reporters gleefully disclosed that the candidate ate as many as six meals a day and refreshed himself with an alcohol rub on hot afternoons, which made the lifelong teetotaler smell as if he had spent the night in a saloon.
The giddy reporting in the New York World often clashed with the disapproving tone of its editorials. On the front page of Pulitzer's flagship daily, Bryan spoke to ecstatic crowds in Cleveland, jousted with heckling Yale students "dressed in golf outfits" on the New Haven green, and sang along with [71] an adoring choir at a church service back in Jacksonville, Illinois. The World, like most urban papers, also printed large helpings of th Democrat's speeches. All this free publicity helped offset the GOP's huge advantage in funds. "It used to be the newspapers educated the people," Bryan told a crowd in Des Moines, "but now the people educate the newspapers." His frankness with and fondness for journalists, a fraternity he had joined two years before when he became editor of the Omaha World-Herald, no doubt sweetened the coverage. Bryan was probably the only presidential nominee of his era to praise by name each "of the newspapermen [a few of whom were female] with whom I was thrown." (see footnote 77)
The few big-city papers that endorsed him returned the compliment in vigorous and often creative ways. On their front pages, the St. Louise Post-Dispatch and Denver's Rocky Mountain News frequently ran multicolumn cartoons depicting Bryan as Lincoln, Paul Revere, a champion pugilist whipping goldbug bullies, and David hurling a fatal rock at the forehead of a top-hatted, monopoly-girded Goliath. In New York City, William Randolph Hearst directed the staff of his Journal to exploit every positive angle. He sent Winifred Black, his star woman reporter, to cover Mary Bryan's travels, writing at length about her couture and child-rearing techniques. Cartoonists drew both candidate and wife looking fit, handsome, and visionary, while memorably depicting Mark Hanna as a fat, pompous ass in a tight suit checkered with dollar signs. At one point, the Journal's search for fresh political copy even led it to the Central Park Zoo, where twin pumas had just been born. Keepers named the elder cat Bryan because "it possessed a pleasant voice and agreeable manners...and had crawled to every part of its cage." His younger brother got dubbed McKinley after he "showed a strong aversion to moving about, and persisted in not uttering a sound." (see footnote 78) [72]

No other political leader in Bryan's era was graced, or burdened, with such a flood of mail. As candidates, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley received only a trickle of letters from anyone other than businessmen and fellow politicians, and this pattern continued during their stints in the White House. [73]

The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash--Magliocca

The most important question about the 1896 election, at least for the purposes of this book, is, Why did the Populists lose? [99]

A common misconception about Bryan is that he was an unknown who won the presidential nomination with one fantastic speech. In fact, he spent most of 1895 and 1896 speaking around the country to Democratic activists and kept in touch with the fusionists. [101]

The triumphal moment, of course, was Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech on behalf of a silver platform, which provided a memorable statement of the agrarian creed. Aided by a baritone voice that could reach an entire arena in an era before microphones, Bryan defended the role of farmers in society: "The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." He also lashed out at the "few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world" and expressed the anger that activists felt about the resistance they had faced over the past few years from the president and from the Court: "We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have [102] been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer. We entreat no more. We petition no more. We defy them!" He ended with this famous rallying cry: "Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" Though this speech did not guarantee Bryan's nomination (he did not win until the fifth ballot), it clearly played a big role in his selection. [103]

...fusion was achieved, but at a high cost. First, President Cleveland and what was left of his party machine actively [104] opposed the national ticket, which was not helpful for Bryan. Second, the existence of two vice presidential candidates reinforced the sectional split within the Populist coalition. Indeed, Watson used many of his campaign speeches to attack Sewell rather than to praise Bryan. This was emblematic of the alienation of the middle-of-the-road faction and its unenthusiastic support for the ticket. Third, Bryan's emphasis on the silver issue, the subject of the Cross of Gold speech, proved to be a mistake because it had no appeal beyond his rural base. In November, McKinley would win every significant city except for New Orleans. Such a dreadful result was not surprising, since Populists generally thought that cities were part of the problem, not part of the solution, and they did little to reach out to unions or to the urban bosses that were critical in turning out the Democratic vote. All of these structural flaws contributed to Bryan's defeat. [105]

Today we are accustomed to direct campaigns, but it was then considered undignified for presidential candidates to ask for votes, which is why there are no general election speeches from Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln. Bryan's decision to break with that long-standing practice was in keeping with the turbulent times, and his approach soon became the standard and enhanced the power of the president within the constitutional design--yet another example of how the necessities of political competition created new [105] doctrines and traditions in the 1890s. The tactic also reinforced the popular character of Bryan's movement and created a vivid contrast with the Republican Party. [106]

Conservatives were stunned by Brvan's nomination. Their resistance had brought reformers into control of a major party rather than burying them. The New York Times ran blazing headlines-- "Bryan the Demagogue" and "Logical Candidate of the Party of Fantastic Ideas"--and contended that Bryan "must at any cost and by whatever means are most effective be beaten." (see footnote 33) [106]

Much like Bryan, McKinley has an undeservedly poor reputation. Although he is often portrayed as nothing more than a tool of Mark Hanna, his wealthy campaign manager, McKinley was an adept politician who excelled at backroom deals and at reading public opinion. Consider his famous "front-porch" campaign strategy in 1896. McKinley knew that he could not match Bryan on the stump and that the traditional view that candidates should not speak for themselves was appealing to many voters. At the same time, he could not just let Bryan monopolize the public stage. His solution to this dilemma was clever. Instead of going to the people, he brought the people to him. Hundreds of thousands of supporters made a pilgrimage to McKinley's home in Ohio, where he greeted them with a speech from his porch. [107]

Whereas McKinley was simply responding to Bryan's pioneering campaign organization. Mark Hanna, who thought that the "Chicago convention from beginning to end was in the hands of a clique of radicals and revolutionists," used the fear of a Democratic win to put together the first massive [107] fund-raising machine. (see footnote 41) He drew up a schedule of recommended "assessments" for every major corporation and put that money to work, employing a blizzard of paid volunteers, handing out leaflets, and planting essays in the press to support McKinley. Bryan was unable to match this flood of money and wast outspent by about ten to one during the campaign. Once again, the process of mutual  transformation was forcing each side in this generational fight to launch ever more powerful responses--legal or political--to match what the other was doing.
Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of the presidential campaign, I want to focus on the leading constitutional question between Bryan and McKinley: the plank of the Democratic/Populist platform that criticized Pollock and, because it expressly mentioned "the court as it may hereafter be constituted," was read as a pledge to pack the Supreme Court with radicals. There [108] are two famous examples of Court-packing in U.S. history. One was Franklin D. Roosevelt's unsuccessful effort to increase the membership of the Court in 1937. The other was Andrew Jackson's success in expanding the number of Justices in 1837. Most lawyers know about the first case; the second is not so well known but did serve as a precedent for anyone who wanted to take the Court-packing route in the 1890s.
Conservatives saw the Pollock plank as a "smoking gun" indicating that Bryan was bent on destroying the Constitution. Gold Democrats argued, for instance, that Bryan "assails the independence of the judiciary by a covert threat to reorganize the courts whenever their decisions contravene the decree of the party caucus." In their view, the Supreme Court's "independence and authority to interpret the law of the land without fear or favor must be maintained. We condemn all efforts to degrade that tribunal or impair the confidence and respect which it has deservedly held." The Gold Democratic vice presidential nominee added that Bryan "would wipe virtually out of existence that Supreme Court which interprets the law, forgetting that our ancestors in England fought for hundreds of years to obtain a tribunal of justice which was free from executive control."
Pamphleteers and journalists who backed McKinley made similar criticisms. One campaign book attacked the Democrats as "zealots" who "propose among their early doings to reorganize the Supreme Court of the United States." Another said that it "is not the fact that the Chicago platform criticized the  judiciary that [109] has brought down our condemnation, but it is the unwisdom and the un-Americanism of their implied threat to reconstruct the Supreme Court for partisan purposes." Harper'sy Weekly wrote that "Mr. Bryan's government would destroy that safeguard by packing the Supreme Court with judges who would agree with the Constitutional views of the legislative branch if that branch happened to be in the hands of the Populists." Not to be outdone, the New York Times told its readers that Bryan wanted "a packed Supreme Court." (see footnote 50) And another conservative lawyer wrote: "There are two places in this country where all men are absolutely equal: One is the ballot-box and the other is the Supreme Court. Bryan proposes to abolish the Supreme Court and make it the creature of the party caucus whenever a new Congress comes in."
Republicans also pounced on this issue, but their argument offered a more sophisticated synthesis of constitutional law. In the party campaign manual, the Republicans held that from "the days of Marbury v. Madison to those of the income-tax cases, there have been many criticisms of the opinions of the Supreme Court, but the platform at Chicago is the first party assault upon the constitutional tenure of the Justices." This statement is fascinating because it demonstrates that the rediscovery of Marbury now reached well beyond the Court. What began as clever rhetoric by Joseph H. Choate to talk the Justices into rejecting their own precedent on direct taxes was now becoming part of mainstream political discourse. The Populists responded by attacking Chief Justice Marshall, with one writing in the [110] American Law Review that Marbury was a "usurpation by the Federal courts of the legislative power" and could not justify Pollock. 
The view that Bryan was going to pack the Court was depicted by a cartoon on the cover of Harper's Weekly dated September 12, 1896, entitled "A Forecast of the Consequence of a Popocratic Victory to the Supreme Court of the United States." In it, the Court sits under the Jolly Roger and a "fifty-cent bunco dollar" made of silver. The Constitution lies trampled on the ground, and the four busts above the bench depict Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield, and three of the anarchists convicted in the bloody Haymarket Riot of 1886. The Justices include Governor Altgeld as Chief Justice (in the center); "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the free-silver governor of South Carolina; Eugene Debs (wearing the "King Debs" crown); and Jacob Coxey (wearing the "King Debs" crown); and Jacob Coxey (wearing a helmet of Coxey's Army). The message was clear: Bryan's Court would validate a scary agenda that should be rejected at the polls. [111]

What stands out about the 1896 debate about Court-packing is the willingness of both sides to engage the electorate in [113] defining the constitutional stakes. The cycle of escalation begun by President Cleveland's decision to oppose the Populists in 1893 had culminated just three years later in a sharp ideological polarization that forced the American people to consider first principles anew, up to and including the role of the Supreme Court. The voters now gave their answer. [114]

Even though definite proof was lacking at the time, the evidence would grow that "the switching voters were not coerced into voting for McKinley; they were converted." In other [114] words, the traumatic events that preceded the 1896 election branded a political identity on a new generational cohort that would dominate the constitutional cycle until the Great Depression. That group of voters continued to refer back to the dark days of the 1890s in future elections and to vote in a similar way, much as the Democrats and Whigs did following the 1830s and the Republicans and Democrats did following the 1860s. This gut-level association and the partisan loyalties created by it was reinforced by the Democrats' decision to nominate Bryan for president again in 1900 and 1908, which let Republicans, much to their delight, run the 1896 campaign over and over. [114]

Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 - R. Hal Williams

Editor's Foreword

Every election seems "critical" at the time it is held. Few seem quite so consequential in the broad sweep of history. Yet most historians would agree that of the handful of American presidential elections worthy of the designation, that of 1896 is wholly deserving.
To make such an observation may seem to imply that there is nothing fresh to be said about the topic. And in fact the narrative, in general at least, is well known, often expressed as a series of "either/or" propositions: gold or silver, city or country, farmer or urban worker, east or west, McKinley or Bryan. (ix)

Three interpretations stand out, and each is likely to be a bit controversial. The first involves Bryan. This is not simply a gifted speaker who takes the Democratic convention unexpectedly by storm. Williams's Bryan sees an opportunity and grabs it. The nomination is a prize he has had in view long before the convention, and by a combination of luck (the residue of design) and calculation, he wins it, as he predicts he will. (ix)
The second involves Mark Hanna, whose "front porch" strategy, actually suggested by the candidate himself, cannily guided his candidate, McKinley, to victory. Williams actually sees Hanna as a human being rather than a caricature, as the first modern political operative who grasps how politics is changing. He is not the one-dimensional fund-raising machine so often encountered but a shrewd, insightful politician who understands what is required to get his man elected.
Finally, there is the retiring incumbent, Grover Cleveland, who fares poorly. He is no portrait in courage but rather an increasingly out-of-touch, pathetically and increasingly irrelevant chief executive, whose party repudiates him in a way no other party has ever repudiated a sitting president. (x)

Author's Preface

Political scientists and historians call it a critical election, one of a handful (1800, 1828, 1860, and 1932 were the others) that brought fundamental realignments in American politics. New voting patterns replaced the old, a new majority party arose to govern the country, and national policies shifted to suit the new realities. (xi)

Chapter 1: 1896-The Party Background

In an extraordinarily mobile society, political parties often transcended state and territorial orders, and people moving into new areas could carry with them the party slogans, rituals, and identifications they had known back home. They adjusted to the new, in short, by taking with them important parts of the old.
Belonging to a political party, people had discovered, gave them a feeling of community, "an internalized sense of history, tradition, and common values." Once perceived as divisive, as they were by Jefferson and many others, the parties became schools instead, teaching "seasonal courses in how to be Americans." (2)

Reflecting these developments, the decades that followed the Civil War became in the eyes of historians and political scientists "the party period," the time of greatest attachment to political parties in the country's history--and no wonder: Civil War loyalties, Republican or Democratic, often lasted a lifetime. (4)

In 1896, the year of McKinley and Bryan, another innovation reflected the country's commitment to public politics, the arrival of the celluloid pinback button, which then spread more rapidly than any other single item in the history of American politics. (5)

The Australian secret ballot laws, which did in fact emerge from Australia, revolutionized the methods and processes of voting. The idea spread quickly. Massachusetts first adopted it in 1888, and by 1892, three-fourths of the states had followed. Under the new system, the state, not the party, printed the ballots, making sure they came in a uniform format regardless of party, for voters to mark in private and place, again in private, in a ballot box. Ballot reformers, of course, were delighted, but like many reforms, the secret ballot brought unforeseen consequences. Australian laws almost always called for "blanket" ballots that listed on a single ballot the candidates of all parties instead of just those of one party, a system that discouraged split tickets and third parties. Since a candidate's name, by law, could appear only once on a single ballot, the blanket ballot made it harder to "fuse" separate tickets in a strategy that had once enabled minority parties to combine various candidates in order to win. It also made it harder for poor whites, immigrants who could not read or write, and southern blacks to vote. In unexpected ways, it helped in the long run to decrease voter turnout. [6]

To get these large turnouts, politicians in the period perfected the "army" or "military style" of campaigning, which got its start in the 1850s and then grew dramatically in the decades after the Civil War. It seemed natural enough: people of the era had lived, after all, through the massive battles of the Civil War, and there were hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate veterans who could not wait to march.
In this new military style, elections became battles, the two parties formed armies, voters were troops and the polls were the battlefield. "Even the language of politics," as one historian has noted, "was cast in military terms." At the opening gun of the campaign, the standard-bearer, along with his fellow warhorses, rallied the rank and file around the party standard. Precinct captains set their phalanxes to mobilize voters; party headquarters used their war chests to enlist supporters; party literature armed men for battle; and, on election day, the well-drilled ranks overwhelmed the opponent's camp and claimed the spoils of victory.
The military style lasted roughly through the late 1880s, though remnants of it could be seen many years later, including an impressive flare toward the close of William McKinley's 1896 campaign. Since virtually everyone belonged to one party (army) or the other, the party's task was not so much to convert voters to the cause as to get them out on election day. To do that, it employed badges, uniforms, parades, and mass gatherings to draw crowds to listen to party speakers. Fireworks and cannon fire simulated the battlefield. [9]

On October 31, 1896, well after the military style had begun to wane, over 100,000 people marched for Republican candidate William McKinley in a "sound money" parade down Broadway in New York City. [10]

Republicans took immense pride in their party's record. Large differences in outlook and issues set them apart from their Democratic opponents. Whereas Democrats stressed the local and negative, Republicans pursued a national vision, in which local interests merged into nationwide patterns and government became an instrument to promote moral and material [11] growth. Reed captured some of the distinction with his usual wit: "The Republican party does things, the Democratic party criticizes; the Republican party achieves, the Democratic party finds fault." It was a partisan judgment but one that outside observers confirmed. Beatrice Webb, the British socialist, noted that Republicans "represented a faith in centralized power, in the capacity of the few who are in authority at the centre of the state or the municipality to regulate the many and manage the affairs." [12]

In 1888, to Republican delight, that faith in the party's values seemed to be rewarded at last. Benjamin Harrison, the Republican presidential nominee, won the White House, and the Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress, a twin victory that neither party had been able to claim since Reconstruction, a dozen years before. Electing Reed as Speaker of the House, House Republicans adopted over bitter Democratic objections new and controversial parliamentary rules that expedited business and blocked Democratic obstructions. The famed Fifty-first Congress passed a flood of important legislation that measured the Republican vision.
It enacted the McKinley Tariff, which raised tariff rates to new levels, but included imaginative "reciprocity" provisions that enabled the president to lower rates on specific products to stimulate overseas trade, particularly with Latin America. For the first time, too, the act also offered high duties on a handful of "infant industries," such as manufacturing tinplate, used in the growing canning business, to create an entirely new domestic industry, in this case drawing on recently discovered tin ores in South Dakota's Black Hills.
The Dependent Pensions Act granted liberal pensions to Union army veterans, their widows, and their children. Both Republicans and Democrats joined in passing the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the first federal attempts to regulate big business. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act responded to widespread agitation for the use of more silver in the currency, directing the Treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver a month and to issue legal tender in the form of Treasury notes in payment for it. Finally, Republicans in the House courageously passed a federal elections bill, which Democrats dubed the force bill, to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. Unpopular in much of an increasingly racist country, the bill showed the ongoing commitment among many Republicans to older ideals of racial progress. [12]

...in an era in which large numbers of voters distrusted the power of the federal government, the session posed large risks for Republicans, which Democrats happily seized upon. "From its organization down," a Democrat immediately complained, "this Congress has been a raging sea of ravenous legislation.... The friends of the people have only a moment to cry out before they are swept overboard to make their moans to the winds and the waves. It is not hte voice of the people. It is an instrument of tyranny." [13]

So, in a sense, had the Republicans in several states in the Midwest, especially in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. There, as on the national level, they had used the power of government to pursue party ideals. They had goverend in ways that intruded in private affairs and offended large numbers of voters. In Iowa, Republicans fought for Prohibition, hoping to end the evils of drink as they had earlier ended the evils of slaveryl In Illinois and Wisconsin, they passed public school laws, well-intentioned measures that required children to attend school a prescribed number of weeks each year.
All three states illustrated broader Republican trends, since at the same time Republicans in Boston and elsewhere were "reforming" public school laws, and Republicans in Ohio, Indiana, and Nebraska were working for temperance. In cities and states across the nation, Republicans were trying, as a prominent Iowa Republican put it, "to make a police sergeant out of the party," and now, in November 1890, they were discovering that thousands of voters recoiled from the idea.
In particular, many voters did not like the way the party's measures reflected certain religious precepts. Religious views, especially the tensions between liturgicals and pietists, strongly shaped political alignments in late [13] nineteenth-century America. Members of liturgical religions--Catholics, German Luthernas, Episcopalians, orthodox Calvinists, and others--stressed the institutions and rituals of the church, assigned the church responsibility for individual morality and salvation, and consequently restricted the role of the state in prescribing personal morality. As a rule, they tended to cast their lot with the Democratic party, which also set limits on state authority.
Members of pietist churches, by contrast, tended to prefer the Republican party, with its expansive, activist outlook. Pietists--Methodists, Congregationalists, some Presbyterians, and others--played down church ritual and believed in individual salvation, confirmed in a life of pure behavior. The state, they thought, was an appropriate instrument to achieve those ends. It should promote morality and purify society, through Prohibition, Sunday-closing laws, and other measures. [14]

In Iowa, Republican pietists took control of the state party during the 1880s and pushed Prohibition measures through the legislature."A school house on every hill, and no saloon in the valley" became their slogan. Soon there were also fewer Republicans in Iowa hills and valleys, as angry German Lutherans and Catholics flocked in protest to the Democratic party. ... Liturgically minded voters, including the region's German immigrants, numbering in the tens of thousands, were aghast. The Republicans were threatening church, family, and language.
Democrats skillfully exploited the opening, pointing out the larger pattern. In both nation and state--whether it was the McKinley Tariff, Prohibition, the force bill, Reed's tyrannical rules, or the Bennett law--the Republicans seemed bent on abusing power and encroaching on individual liberties. [14]

At the time, however, there was no hiding the devastation. Across the nation, voters in 1890 deserted the Republican party in droves. "IT IS REVOLUTION," headlined the St. Louis Republic. "On the face of the first returns, it is hard to see what the Republicans have left." The Repbulicans, in truth, had virtually nothing left. They lost 78 seats in the House, a reversal of political fortunes rarely equaled in the history of congressional elections. Instead of 166 Republican members, the next House would have 88, the Democrats 235. The totals were stunning, as was the extent of the damage. Republican candidates were overwhelmed even in areas of traditional party strength. They lost badly in New England, the Midwest, and on the plains. The force bill and other issues inflated the usual Democratic majorities in the South. Dazed, President Harrison called it "our election disaster" and hoped it indicated only the midterm reversal customary to American politics. [15]

Defeats were numerous. The Republicans lost six House seats in Wisconsin, seven in Illinois, four in Iowa, one in Indiana, six in Michigan, nine in Ohio, five in Kansas, three in Nebraska, and four in Missouri. As older faces disappeared, new politicians vaulted into sudden prominence, including a young man from Lincoln, Nebraska--William Jennings Bryan, who was swept into Congress by the Democratic landslide of 1890.
Attuned to farm problems, Bryan and others welcomed evidence that the Farmers' Alliance, a rapidly growing organization of reform-minded farmers, had scored heavily in the elections. Alliance leaders boasted that the movement had influenced or controlled 2.5 million votes, almost a quarter of the total votes cast for president in 1888. No one could confirm the figure, but it was impressive nonetheless. Leonaidas L. Polk of North Carolina, the eloquent and tireless president of the alliance, claimed thirty-eight avowed alliance men elected to Congress, with at least a dozen more pledged to alliance principles. The National Economist, the official newspaper of the order, raised the estimate to forty-four alliance members in Congress and sympathetic senators from six states.
Farmers in the South and West were fed up--with low crop prices, high railroad rates, and mortgages they could scarcely bear. In the South, they called the official history of the alliance The Impending Revolution, and they meant it. "The spirit of rebellion against the many evils is growing" it said. "Thousands of men who have already lost all hope of a peaceful solution to the great question of human rights are calmly waiting the issue." "The farmers of the United States are up in arms," another observer wrote. "They are the bone and sinew of the nation; they produce the largest share of its wealth; but they are getting, they say, the smallest share of its wealth; but they are getting, they say, the smallest share for themselves."
Southerners were particularly angry, victims of a regional economy that lagged far behind the rest of the nation. By 1890, many of them had had their fill of its chief characteristics: crop liens, depleted lands, cheap cotton, sharecropping, and living standards comparable to those of European peasants. [16]

Alliance growth, swift and startling, upset political patterns and dismayed politicians in the South and West. As a southern Democrat said: "I don't know how it is in the West, but in my country these blatant demagogues that the Farmers' Alliance send out have raised the very deuce." Republicans knew very well how it was in the West. Farmers were breaking away from the Republican party, with a determination that resisted the normal blandishments. "I never seen the time before but what I could soothe the boys down and make them feel good," a Dakota Republican wrote in July 1980, "but seemingly this fall they are not to be 'comforted.'" [17]

In Kansas, the alliance-related People's party, organized just a few months before, shocked the Republicans in the 1890 election. It elected four congressmen, took control of the lower hosue of the legislature, and deposed Senator Ingalls, "the innocent victim," he said, "of a bloodless revolution--a [17] sort of turnip crusade, as it were." William A. Peffer, a prominent Populist attorney and newspaper editor, took Ingalls's place and gained instant national prominence. Elsewhere in the Midwest, Nebraska elected a Democratic governor for the first time in its history.
Aggressive farm leaders emerged in both the South and the West. In Georgia, it was Thomas E. Watson, a talented orator and organizzer, a small and active, hot-tempered man with a thin face and dark-red hair brushed back from his forehead. In 1890, fed up with the desperate conditions of 'Georgia farmers, he won a race for Congress as an "independent" candidate on the Democratic ticket. Across Watson's South, the alliance won a swath of victories based on "the Alliance yardstick," a demand that Democratic party candidates pledge support for alliance measures in return for the organization's endorsement. When the elections were over, alliance leaders claimed on that basis a majority in eight southern legislatures, as well as six alliance-elected governors, including those in South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas.
In the West, Jeremiah Simpson of Kansas, one of the most able of the newcomers, won a seat in Congress in 1890. Reflective and well read, a follower of the single-tax reformer Henry George, Simpson pushed for social and economic change. "We reformers," he said, "are fighting for a mud ball as big as a boulder; what we permanently win will be no larger than a diamond, but it will be a diamond."
Mary E. Lease--"Our Queen Mary," her alliance friends called her--joined Simpson on the Kansas lecture trail. Thirty-seven years old, tall and slender, she had trained herself as a lawyer and become interested in woman suffrage, temperance, and other reform issues. On the lecture platform, she sparkled, hurling sentences "as Jove hurled thunderbolts." One of those sentences, urging Kansas farmers to raise less corn and more hell, became famous nationwide, though she may never have said it. Lease made 160 speeches during that alliance summer of 1890, calling on farmers to rise against Wall Street and the manufacturing East.
Annie L. Diggs, also from Kansas, attracted a sizable following in a movement remarkably open to female leadership. Farther north, in Minnesota, Ignatius Donnelly brushed aside other leaders to take charge of the burgeoning movement on the northern plains. Donnelly was restless and irascible, a nationally known social critic who wrote several utopian novels, dabbled in reform politics, and "proved" that Shakespeare had not written his own plays. In 1890, he pushed long-cherished reforms and had large political ambitions, which the alliance movement might satisfy. [18]

As Harrison and other Republicans recognized, the year's devastation indicated dramatic shifts in voting patterns, perhaps even the onset of Democratic hegemony. Clearly, it thrust the Democrats far into the lead for the presidential election of 1892. Somehow, since 1888's remarkable victory, Republicans had lost touch with voters, something they would have to remedy if victory were to come again. On one level, they needed to take a close look at that "police sergeant" impulse toward moral and social reform, which seemed to alienate more people than it converted. On another, they needed to review the work of the Fifty-first Congress, its measures and outlookk, and the way both had been presented to the people. And finally, they needed to evaluate the challenge in the Midwest and West of this new People's party. Public opinion seemed clear, at least for the moment. The Republicans had gone too far, raised tariffs too high, imposed values too widely, legislated too much. The judgment galled party leaders, who believed they had adcted constructively in a fashion rarely seen in the past. [19]

Chapter 2: The Democrats in Power, 1893-1896

Building on his party's triumphs in the 1890 elections, Cleveland could celebrate an impressive victory in 1892, the most decisive victory, in fact, since the first election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. He won 5,555,426 votes to Harrison's 5,182,690, a margin of nearly 400,000 votes, large by the era's standards. He carried the South; many of the doubtful states, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, [21] and Indiana; and part of the electoral vote of several other states, including California. He also took Wisconsin and Illinois, the first Democratic candidate to do so since the 1850s. The Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. A large share of the labor vote and increased strength in the cities gave added significance to their achievement. Gaining strikingly among immigrant, Catholic, and labor voters, they carried New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Harrison's own Indianapolis, and other cities. Disgruntled Republicans complained that "the slums of Chicago, Brooklyn and New York" had decided the election, but the complaint measured envy as much as anything else. The Democrats had won votes virtually everywhere. [22]

The Democrats not only had capitalized on Republican weaknesses but also had beaten back the continued challenge of the People's party in the South. The Populists had opened the campaign with high hopes. At an emotional convention in Omaha, Nebraska, in July, they adopted a spirited platform calling for the free coinage of silver, an improved banking system, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the means of transportation and communication, and other reforms. Determined to cut away from the old parties, many of them planned to nominate for president North Carolina's Leonidas L. Polk, the popular and energetic head of the National Farmers' Alliance, who was telling friends that an independent Populist ticket would carry eight southern states and at least fourteen northern ones. But Polk, to people's dismay, died suddenly in June, and the Omaha convention had to turn elsewhere--to James B. WEaver of Iowa, a former congressman, Union army general, and third-party candidate (on the Greenback Labor party ticket) for president in 1880. [22]

An experienced campaigner, Weaver immediately took the stump to make up for the Populists' lack of an extensive organization and party press, much as William Jennings Bryan would do on a far larger scale four years later. He found the going difficult, especially in the South, where Democrats did not tolerate dissent. Night riders and hired toughs jostled his audiences and intimidated Populist sympathizers. The situation deteriorated as Weaver intimidated Populist sympathizers. The situation deterioriated as Weaver moved farther into the South, until a mob in Macon, Georgia, hurled rotten eggs, tomatoes, and rocks at the candidate and his wife. [22]

At that, Weaver regretfully called off the rest of his southern campaign and, accompanied by the fiery Mary E. Lease--"she could recite the multiplication tables and set a crowd hooting and hurrahing at her will," an opponent once conceded--focused on the plains states and silver-mining regions of the Far-West. There, audiences listened more respectfully to the Populist [22] message. "We have a system of [financial] slavery here today as inimical to human life as that which enslaved an emancipated people," Weaver told an enthusiastic crowd in Aspen, Colorado. "We wiped that out and we are on a second crusade today." [23]

The rising sun, in truth, appeared to be Democratic that year. The nation's discontented, those fed up in one way or another with current conditions and Republican rule, had voted for the Democrats, not the Populists, a signal of the basic failure of the People's party campaign. Among the Populists, discouragement began to set in. Farmers' Alliance membership lunged dramatically in 1892, for the second year in a row. The organization, once the breeding ground of the People's party, was shattered. Still, Populist leaders rallied the forces and pointed hopefully to elections in 1894 and 1896. That was the attraction of politics: another election, another chance, always lay ahead. [23]

"The Democratic party, of course, is indestructible, because it rests on a basis of permanent principles that make [sic] it the natural enemy of every successive new programme of innovation that comes up demanding accomplishment through active governmental agency." (see footnote 12) [24]

Continuing through 1897, the depression of the 1890s was the decade's decisive domestic event. It changed lives, reshaped ideas, altered attitudes, uprooted deep-set patterns. The human costs were enormous, even among the prominent.... The convulsion renewed questions about the costs of industrialization; sparked labor unrest and class antagonism; and in pointing up economic interdependencies, shifted the country's focus from the local to the national. Everywhere, older assumptions gave way to newer patterns and nagging doubts. (see footnote 26)
The depression, vast and unsettling, offered sudden opportunity to the Republicans and Populists, who might lure the discontented and build new coalitions. It strained sectional ties and strengthened complaints of monetary conspiracies--gold in the Northeast, silver in the South and West--to take over the land. [29]

Businessmen pleaded for quick action to shore up the finances and restore confidence, especially for a special session of Congress to repeal the damaging Sherman Act. Several times, Cleveland decided to follow the advice, then pulled back at the last moment. [31]

On June 26, there was more startling news--India had closed its mints to silver--and Cleveland met far into the night with Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle. India's action, which left Mexico the only country in the world with free silver coinage, was the event the two men had been waiting for. It threw silverites on the defensive, illustrated once again the primacy of gold in international money markets, and swung public opinion toward the repeal camp. Even moderate silver journals began to waver, wondering if repeal might help after all. (see footnote 29) [31]

Its solution was equally simple: the unconditional repeal of the Sherman Act. Always sure of himself, Cleveland had staked everything on a single measure--a winning strategy if it succeeded, a devastating one if it did not. Characteristically, too, he would brook no opposition and instructed [31] subordinates to withhold patronage from Democrats who "oppose our patriotic attempt to help the country and save our party." [32]

Fervid silverites were fighting back, stung by the demand for unconditional repeal. They had, to be sure, no special affection for the Sherman Act, which had failed to add as much silver to the currency as they had hoped. But repeal without an effective silver substitute was another matter. "I never did think that the Sherman Bill was a wise piece of legislation," a California senator wrote, "but I believe that if it is unconditionally repealed, ...silver will be permanently demonetized."
That was exactly the point, silverites felt. Eastern and European financiers had joined in a selfish plot to demonetize silver, "a gigantic conspiracy...to establish finally and forever the single gold standard, and to extend it over the world." They had subverted the Sherman Act, dictated the closing of the Indian mints, and caused the collapse of the American economy. Now they had even enlisted the president, who tamely did their bidding. (see footnote 34) [32]

In such a battle, the stakes were high, silverites were sure, higher than at any time since the Revolution. The working masses were pitted against the parasitic rich, the producers against the speculators, the money of the people against the golden Baal. "The war has begun," Davis H. Waite, the Populist governor of Colorado, shouted to a large rally in Denver on July 11, 1893. "Our weapons are argument and the ballot," but should those not succeed, "it is better, infinitely better, that blood should flow to the horses' bridles than our national liberties should be destroyed." (see footnote 35) The angry rhetoric, repeated again and again as the repeal struggle approached, alarmed supporters of the gold standard, who, in turn, ridiculed the "Populist cuckoos" abroad in the land. By the time Congress convened, feelings had hardened on both sides of the currency question. Each side laid sole claim to "sound [32] principles," and respectively blamed the "gold trust" or the "silver inflationists" for the nation's economic ills. (see footnote 36) [33]

The message never mentioned the touchy word gold and hinted that quick repeal might lead to an international agreement to boost silver. Cleveland had set out to soothe tempers. (see footnote 37) [33]

The silver lines bent under the pressure. On August 16, William Jennings Bryan, the attractive young Nebraskan, tried to stiffen resolves. [33]

The end in sight, senators turned back a silverite proposal to restore the 1878 Bland-Allison Act, 37 to 33, then defeated a free silver amendment, 41 to 31. Ominously for the Democratic party, 22 Democrats voted for the free silver amendment, 20 voted against. Ominously, too, the delegations from sixteen states, all in the South and West, voted unanimously for free silver, whereas the delegations from twenty-one states, almost all in the Northeast and MIdwest, voted unanimously against. The lines in the free silver drama were tightening and not in the Democrats' favor. Early in the evening of October 30, the Senate turned at last to the repeal bill itself, which it passed, 48 to 37. The Republicans voted more than two to one for repeal; the Democrats again divided evenly. The gold reserve that day stood at $84,000,000. Cleveland was pleased, and he was the focus of the victory. "He has brought the entire Senate to his feet," one newspaper remarked. On November 1, 1893, he signed the bill into law and ordered the mints to stop purchasing silver. The great repeal battle of 1893, an event that would reshape the politics of the decade, was ended. (see footnote 46) [35]

Spurred by repeal, silver sentiment grew swiftly during 1893 and 1894, sweeping through the South and West and appearing even in the rural regions of New York and New England. Prosilver literature flooded from presses and filled newspaper columns. Pamphlets, some of them distributed by the millions, touted silver's virtues. People read, discussed, and believed. It was a time for solutions, with the economy slumping once more. During 1896, unemployment again shot up; farm income and prices fell to the lowest point in the decade. "I can remember back as far as 1858," said an Iowa hardware dealer that February, "and I have never seen such hard times as these are." Silverites offered a solution, simplistic but compelling: the free and independent coinage of silver at the ratio of sixteen to one. (see footnote 49)[36]

Free coinage meant that the mints would coin all the silver offered to them. Independent coinage meant that the United States would coin silver regardless of the policies of other nations, nearly all of which were on the gold standard. The ratio of sixteen to one pegged silver's value at sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold, a formulation based on the market prices of the two metals back in the 1830s. [36]

The silverites believed in a quantity theory of money: the amount of money in circulation determined the level of activity in the economy. A money shortage--there was not enough gold to support economies around the world--meant declining activity and depression. Silver meant prosperity. Added to the currency, it would swell the money stock and quicken the pace of economic activity. Farm prices would rise. "The blood of commerce will again flow through the arteries of business; industry will again revive; millions of men will find employment; [and] the hand of greed will be stricken from the throat of prosperity."
By 1896, silver had become a symbol. For many, it had moral and patriotic dimensions and stood for a wide range of popular grievances. Cleveland and his fellow gold adherents never understood that. With skillful work, they could have drawn some of the movement's sting, but instead they adopted policies that sharpened its symbolism. Cleveland anointed silver in trying to kill it. For many in the society, silver reflected rural values rather than urban; suggested a welcome shift of power away from the Northeast; gave the nation, acting independently of other countries, a chance to display its growing authority in the world; and spoke for the downtrodden instead of the well-to-do. It represented the common people, as the vast literature of the movement showed. In article after article, pamphlet after pamphlet, farmers and financiers, thrown together in accidental circumstances, debated the merits of silver and gold, with results obvious to all who knew the virtues of common folk and common sense. [37]

 Like Coin, silver profited from illusion. It fed on fears and grew with apprehensions. Its supporters, like the "goldolators" they despised, tended to oversimplify the issue, appeal to emotions, imagine conspiracies, and cast [37] events in terms of good and evil. They also tried to respond constructively to public need and economic hardship. Silver was a social movement, one of the largest in American history, but its life span turned out to be remarkably brief. As a mass phenomenon, it flourished between 1894 and 1896, then succumbed to defeat, prosperity, and the onset of fresh concerns. But in its time, it spoke a mood and won millions of followers. It altered the course of politics. Silver reshaped sectional alignments, changed party outlooks, and helped topple a president. It presided at the birth of a "new" Democratic party. [39]

The 1893 state and local elections turned Democrats out of office across the country. The Republicans prospered, as large numbers of Democratic voters either remained at home or voted Republican. Significantly, the Populists again failed to attract the discontented, except in some areas of the South.
The Republicans swept New York and Pennsylvania. In Massachusetts, they ousted Governor Russell, Cleveland's close friend and once the symbol of Democratic hopes in New England. In Iowa, they defeated Governor Horace Boies, a similar symbol in the Midwest and on the plains. In Ohio, William McKinley crushed his Democratic opponent and won a second term as governor by 81,000 votes, the largest margin in an Ohio gubernatorial race since the 1860s. Ohio and Massachusetts displayed patterns that delighted Republicans. In both states, Republican candidates simply did well everywhere: in rural areas, small towns, and cities among both old-stock and immigrant voters. They made substantial inroads in Boston, Fall River, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, and other urban-industrial areas. (see footnote 55) [39]

The Democrats' spirits dwindled, then reeled under a decisive blow in late March 1894. Looking for a way to soothe silver sentiment and reunite the party, the Democrats in Congress passed a bill authorizing the coinage of the silver seigniorage in the Treasury. The bill was little more than a gesture. It added relatively small amounts of silver to the currency and found its strongest support among Democrats from prosilver districts who had rallied to Cleveland's call for repeal the summer before. A seigniorage law, though largely ceremonial, might placate constituents and answer criticism that the Democrats had no positive approach to the depression. [40]

...Cleveland vetoed it as unwise and inopportune. It would sap business confidence and weaken the benefits of repeal. On Capitol Hill, reporters had never seen congressmen so angry. Silver Democrats clustered in the cloakrooms and lobbies, cursing Cleveland and complaining of a presidential tyranny that violated Democratic precepts of limited executive power.
Outside the Northeast, the seigniorage veto was a stunning blow to Democrats, a landmark event in the process of party alienation from Cleveland that led to Bryan's nomination for hte presidency in 1896. It further isolated Cleveland, confirmed his apparent rigidity, and renewed charges that he pursued a "purely obstructive" policy toward the depression. Moderate Democrats despaired of ever reuniting the party. Retreating into self-righteousness, Cleveland began to complain of the "misconception and prejudice and ignorance and injustice" around him. "There never was a man in this high office so surrounded with difficulties and so perplexed, and so treacherously treated, and so abandoned by those whose aid he deserves, as the present incumbent," he wrote a friend bitterly a few weeks after the veto. [40]

Hit with soldiers and injunctions, the union never had a chance. By late July, the Pullman Strike was over, with Debs headed for jail, charged with violating the court order. In some quarters, Cleveland for a moment enjoyed public acclaim, but praise came mainly from the comfortable and well-to-do, who lauded Cleveland and voted Republican. Many workingpeople turned against Cleveland and the Democrats, particularly as later investigations documented and administration's collusion with the railroad companies in the strike. Altgeld was bitter. Democrats did not send troops into states capable of handling their own affairs. That smacked of centralized power, Republicanism, and REconstruction. Relentlessly, Altgeld set out to discredit the hated Cleveland, organizing dissident Democrats in a movement to repudiate the president in 1896.
As if Pullman were not enough, the party reeled again in the debate over its long-promised tariff reform bill. Known as the Wilson-Gorman bill, it had awaited Cleveland's action on repeal of the Sherman Act, then stalled through July 1894 in a House-Senate conference committee. Tempers flared amid the turmoil of the Pullman Strike, and the public's patience began to run out. On July 19, Cleveland intervened, apparently thinking he could bludgeon the Senate as he had in the repeal battle the year before. The bill fell "far short" of desired reform, he wrote in a public letter to William L. Wilson, the bill's sponsor in the House, and amounted to "party perfidy and party dishonor."
Writing the letter was a major blunder, reflecting Cleveland's growing isolation from the party's center. Senate Democrats, including many of his staunchest supporters, erupted in anger and dismay. Cleveland immediately tried to back down, but it was too late. [41]

Cleveland was "depressed and disappointed," he said, uncertain whether to sign the Wilson-Gorman bill. Finally, on August 28, 1894, he let it become law without his signature, ignoring warnings that such a course would further isolate him from his party. William L. Wilson called the new law "a substantial beginning," but people knew better. It was instead a disheartening end, a dismal conclusion to the Democratic party's tariff reform crusade. "The Democrats have given an exhibition of fairly colossal incompetence," Theodore Roosevelt (TR) remarked happily. [42]

Sadness and a sense of impending disaster settled over the Democrats. Voters linked them to the depression and to the failure of silver repeal, Cleveland's panacea, to cure it. Republicans were confident, certain the tariff fiasco had sealed their opponents' fate. [42]

Republican and Populist strategists forecast massive defections among normally Democratic voters. Silverites were unhappy with repeal and the seigniorage veto; businessmen and merchants resented hte uncertainties of a year's tinkering with the tariff; sheep growers feared hard times from the removal of duties on wool in the Wilson-Gorman Tariff. [42]

Twenty-four states elected no Democrats to Congress; six others chose only one Democrat each. A single Democrat (Boston's John F. Fitzgerald, the grandfather of President John F. Kennedy) represented the party's once-bright hopes in New England. [43]

The returns discouraged the Populists. Their hopes had again been high as the campaign opened. Hard times might at last break old-party allegiances, moving the large numbers of discontented into the Populist fold. [43]

"The People's Party will come into power with a resistless rush," wrote Eugene V. Debs from jail. Working with Debs and others, the Populists wooed labor and the unemployed, particularly in areas where the Pullman Strike and other labor disturbances had left workers restless and dissatisfied. In the South, they often fused with the Republican party and nominated joint tickets to oppose the dominant Democrats.
None of the plans worked quite as the Populists had hoped. Nationwide, they increased their vote by about 42 percent over 1892 totals, an attractive figure but far short of expectations. They made striking inroads in parts of the South, especially in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, and also gained in Nebraska, Minnesota, and California. Encouragingly, they improved in some urban areas, including Chicago and San Francisco, and did well among miners and railroad workers. (see footnote 71) 
Still, it was far from enough. In a year in which thousands of voters were switching allegiances, the Populists elected only four senators and four representatives. They lost Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, and Idaho, all Populist states in 1892. Governor Waite failed in his bid for reelection in Colorado. Ignatius Donnely lost his Minnesota state senate seat. Thomas E. Watson lost another race for Congress in Georgia. The Republicans swept Kansas, once a focus of the Populist movement. Everywhere, the results were disheartening. In Georgia, Alabama, and other southern states, the Democrats continued to use fraud and violence to keep Populist totals down. In the Midwest, the Populists doubled their vote in 1894 yet still attracted less than 7 percent of the vote. From Indiana to California, the discontented had tended to vote for the Republicans, not the Populists. With that, the Populist challenge, once so large with promise and possibility, was nearly over. (see footnote 72) [44]

Attention turned now to the long-awaited presidential election of 1896, an election made even more important by the events of the past few years. Candidates and platforms were yet to be determined, but the issues were already clear, and the stakes were high. Populist prospects looked dim, but elections could always surprise. The silver issue, thanks to Cleveland and the depression, had acquired large and unanticipated importance. The Democratic party had suffered badly but had strong ties to voters in the South and elsewhere. The depression's enormity had changed many voters' views, to which Republicans had responded so far with gratifying success. Confident, they understood they had prospered on the newer issues in 1894 and counted on doing so again in 1896, little knowing that the Democrats still had some important surprises in store. [45]

Chapter 4: Democrats Divided-The Democratic Convention at Chicago

That was an interesting thought, this making of money: in 1895, the nation Cleveland led continued to suffer under grave economic hardship. It was the third year of depression. Millions remained unemployed; many had lost hope. Farmers went bankrupt, their farms auctioned off to pay their debts. [67]

Rarely in American history has a political party repudiated its sitting president. It happened to Grover Cleveland in 1896.
It started early. In 1894, more than twenty Democratic state platforms came out for free silver. That fall, the elections accelerated the trend, decimating the Democrats in the Northeast and Midwest. Power within the party suddenly shifted to the South, where it remained for decades. [68]

In August, silver Democrats formed a Bimetallic Democratic National Committee, a "shadow" group to parallel the Cleveland-run regular committee. It monitored administration activities and lobbied for free silver platforms. [68]

In 1890, [Bryan] won election to the House. A low tariff Democrat who switched to free silver, he symbolized his party's transition during the 1890s. He supported Cleveland in 1892, then broke with him over the depression [69] and the currency. Seeing the mounting public interest in silver, Bryan studied the issue and made it his own. Opponents thought him shallow and unsophisticated, a creation of his own voice, but he attracted a growing following. In 1893, he helped lead the fight against unconditional repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and a year later, the object of Cleveland's bitter hostility, he retired from Congress to work full-time for silver. Between 1894 and 1896, Bryan canvassed the nation, courting editors, wooing potential delegates, and fanning interest in the silver cause. He turned down few invitations and spoke in almost every state. As always, his speeches built on each other, progressively bringing together favorite ideas and sentences from previous efforts. In December 1894, Bryan found a phrase he liked--"I will not help to crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"--and saved it for future use.
Unlike McKinley, Bryan drew on the Jeffersonian tradition of rural virtue, suspicion of urban and industrial growth, distrust of central authority, and abiding faith in the powers of human reason. Jefferson, he once said, "placed man above matter, humanity above property, and spurning the bribes of wealth and power, pleaded the cause of the common people." Bryan pleaded the same cause. He believed in human progress, but unreflective, he never thought deeply about its processes or ends. He ably led and only dimly understood. Professionals scoffed at his presidential ambitions, and Bryan himself recognized the distant odds. His prospects depended on silverite control of the party ad luck at the national convention. As 1896 approached, he seemed no more than an attractive dark horse, with strong ties to the discontented in the South and West, helpful friends among the Populists, and a broad network of party allies built up during years of relentless campaigning. In retrospect, he was the logical candidate, the embodiment of the forces reshaping the Democratic party. (see footnote 10)  [71]

In February, Democrats in Congress voted almost two to one for a free coinage bill, an initial victory for the silverites. ...Cleveland lashed back, determined to hold the party for gold. He was sure the Democrats would lose that year, but he wanted a sound money candidate and platform to keep the record clean. [71]

Bryan: "So that you may both sleep well tonight, I am going to tell you something. I am the only man who can be nominated. I am what they call 'the logic of the situation.'" He alone, he said, had the kind of broad appeal to discontented farmers and laborers, silver Democrats, Populists, and silver Republicans that could win the election. [81]

In the end, the delegates chose Arthur Sewall of Maine, who was sixty-one years old, a well-to-do shipbuilder, and a board member of a Maine railroad and bank, two entities many Bryan Democrats and most Populists did not like. In his favor now, he was one of a few significant business figures in the country who openly supported silver. [90]

To many such as Masters, Bryan seemed a new Thomas Jefferson, perhaps a new Andrew Jackson, a man who could lead a nation once again on a crusade against privilege. [91]

White's reflections were generous, but they happened to have come years later. In July of 1896, he felt quite differently: "I was moved by fear and rage.... To me, he was an incarnation of demagogy, the apotheosis of riot, destruction, and carnage." [91]

Chapter 5: Bryan Takes the Stump

"The new Christ of Humanity," the "father of our Country," "the hope of the Republic--the central figure of the civilized world": these were heady words, and many candidates would have taken pains to sidestep them. Not Bryan, who saw himself, in fact, in those very terms. He believed his candidacy was the "first battle," as he later put it, in people's hope to improve their lot, fend off those hated gold barons, and regain their rightful role in a swiftly changing society. [94]

Phrases about the "enemy" were harmless enough when muttered in private but unfortunate when used in public. As the Bryans left Lincoln for the trip to New York, he told the crowd at the railroad depot that he had wanted to accept the nomination at home but had decided instead upon New York, "in order that our cause might be presented first in the heart of what now seems to be the enemy's country, but which we hope to be our country before this campaign is over." The phrase the enemy's country, so lightly said, haunted him through election day. (see footnote 8) [95]

Significantly, David B. Hill satyed away, as did all but a handful of New York State's Democratic leaders. Conservatives were openly apprehensive, fearful that Bryan might rouse the unemployed to a new pitch of discontent. [95]

For two hours, he did his best to rate peassure voters that he and his platform offered no menace to private property, traditional institutions, or the social order. There was no plan to abolish the Supreme Court, as some opponents were already claiming, just a hope it would reverse its decision on the income tax. He explained at length his views on the money question and urged sectional unity and national honor. 
Opponents charged that he stood for revolution, but Bryan emphasized, but he did not. 
"Our campaign has not for its object the reconstruction of society. We cannot insure to the vicious the fruits of a virtuous life; we would not invade the home of the provident in order to supply the wants of the spendthrift; we do not propose to transfer the rewards of industry to the lap of indolence. Property is and will remain the stimulus to endeavor and the compensation for toil." (see footnote 13)
...Some friends wished he had not read the speech and taken advantage of the compelling speaking skills that, after all, had drawn the thousands to the Garden. Friendly newspapers wished, too, that he had spoken at greater length on the income tax or the use of court injunctions against labor, both popular topics among urban workers. Instead, he had dwelled on silver, "the paramount question of this campaign," as he had told his listeners. Opponents, of course, had an easy time making fun of him. [96]

The criticism did not faze Bryan at all. Though a deeply sincere man, he was also fairly unreflective, sure of his mission, wedded to his moral purposes, and certain that he stood for the right. [97]

In early September, gold Democrats meeting in Indianapolis named a separate presidential ticket, obviously designed to take votes away from him. Democratic newspapers were deserting him in droves. In New York City alone, the World, Sun, Herald, Times, and Evening Post had already repudiated him, as did the Herald, Globe, and Post in Boston; the Times and Record of Philadelphia; and the News and Sun in Baltimore. With the defection of the Chicago Chronicle, the Democrats had no spokesperson at all in that city. In the South, the Louisville Courier-Journal, New Orleans Picayune, Charleston News and Courier, and Richmond Times refused to support Bryan and Sewall. All were widely read; all could usually be counted on to back the Democratic ticket. Hearst's New York Journal became the only Democratic newspaper in New York City and virtually the only paper in the whole Northeast that supported Bryan. (see footnote 16) [97]

Traditional Democratic donors were sending their money to McKinley or watching from the sidelines, eager for Bryan's defeat. [97]

As expected, Hearst and the New York Journal made one of the largest contributions to the campaign, nearly $41,000, Hearst himself chipping in $15,000 of the total. Marcus A. Daley, a Montana silver mine owner, reportedly sent $50,000, but contrary to campaign legends, little support came from the owners of silver mines. [97]

All told, Bryan collected about $300,000 for his entire campaign, a dramatic contrast to McKinley's fund of $3,500,000. Those two figures alone measured some of the enormous challenges Bryan faced.
Lacking money, Democrats could do little in the way of distributing campaign documents, only a small fraction of the materials the Republicans were sending out. In all, they managed to distribute only 10 million speeches and pamphlets, fewer than the Republicans mailed every few days, and 125,000 copies of Coin's Financial School, the prosilver pamphlet, once widely popular, that had just about outlived its usefulness. The National Silver party managed to add some 8 million documents, a woeful amount in this important campaign year. [98]

...Bryan chose Senator James K. Jones of Arkansas, head of the Bimetallic Democratic National Committee, to lead his campaign. The choice was tricky because Jones had the benefit of close ties with silverites but very difficult relations with southern Populists, whom he had once advised to join with "the negroes where they belong," a statement he quickly denied. Jones had also never led a campaign, a disadvantage that became clear at several points during the canvass. (see footnote 22) [98]

The party was badly split between the Cleveland and Bryan wings; it suffered from voters' perception of its inability to deal with the hardships of the depression, and it had the task now of figuring out what to do about the challenge of the People's party. This, it was clear from the start, would not be an easy campaign. [98]

First, bypass traditional party organizations and pull on the help of the thousands of silver men and silver clubs he had met in his years of campaigning. Second, forget all the newspapers that were deserting him; if he made enough news [98] on the stump, they would have to send reporters along on his train, print his speeches, and cover his campaign. Third, finance the campaign by minimizing expenses and inviting small contributions. And finally, place Bryan the candidate on the national stump, where the same alluring voice that had helped him win the nomination might just land him in the White House. [99]

"Nobody is on our side except the people." (see footnote 25) [99]

But he was the first presidential candidate to make a systematic tour of the states he needed for election.... "It used to be the newspapers educated the people," he said to an August rally in Iowa," but now the people educate the newspapers." (see footnote 26) 
Reporters who accompanied him never knew whether to scoff or praise. [99]

In early October, the Democratic National Committee finally leased a private railroad car for him, named The Idler--"a most inappropriate name, it seemed to me," Bryan said--which added both to his comfort and to his efficiency.... Leaving home again on September 9, Bryan spent every day except Sundays campaigning. [99]

"Living near him is like living near Niagara," Willa Cather, his fellow Nebraskan, said. "The almighty ever-renewed force of the man drives one to distraction." [101]

Bryan was an evangelist by nature, and his campaign had many of the hallmarks of a revival meeting. [101]

...he would say in apology that "a large portion of my voice has been left along the line of travel, where it is still calling sinners to repentance," a line that nearly always drew a laugh. [101]

It did not matter that he only spoke for a few minutes, a historian of the campaign has noted. "Everyone knew his arguments anyway; the people had come to marvel at his appearance, to stand near the man who promised to redeem the land they loved from the grasp of the forces of Evil." [102]

The problem, so serious that it ultimately contributed to his defeat, surfaced first in Chicago, where he had adopted the rhetorical technique of "polarization"--an attempt to persuade his listeners to abandon the middle ground and commit to him and his cause--to win over the delegates. The technique had worked well in Chicago, helping him to gain the presidential nomination, but it fared less well in front of a national audience. (see footnote 34)
During his speech at the convention, he had employed strong rhetorical strokes. He had reminded listeners of the language of the Civil War ("In this contest brother has been arrayed against brother, father against son"); used military metaphors ("We are fighting in the defense of our homes, of our families, and posterity"); compared silver Democrats to Christian crusaders at war with the infidels; spoken approvingly of "the avenging wrath of an indignant people"; and blamed the nation's problems on the well-to-do ("What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of aggrandized wealth"). From start to finish, his language was consciously defiant: "We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them." (see footnote 35)
There was one truth, Bryan had said at Chicago, a theme he repeated over and over during his campaign. "If there is one lesson taught by six thousand years of history it is that truth is omnipotent and will at last prevail," he announced in Salem, on the lawn of the courthouse where he had first practiced law. "You may impede its progress, you may delay its triumph; but after awhile it will show its irresistible power, and those who stand in its way will be crushed beneath it." (see footnote 36) [102]

Bryan spoke that way throughout his campaign, in words and phrases that were often confrontational--crushed beneath it, extermination, warfare, and war, war, war--reinforced in turn by his frequent comparisons of himself and his cause to stories in the Bible, stories his Bible-reading audiences knew by heart. In Chicago, he had taken on the role of Jesus Christ himself, "crown of thorns," "cross of gold," and all. On other occasions, he summoned images of himself as David against Goliath, as Moses, as Saint Paul, or as Solomon, the wise rule-giver. Opponents he likened to Judas Iscariot, and though warned against it again and again, he continued throughout the campaign to call them "enemies."[103]

A party leader in Illinois happily reported that many Republicans "have come forward like sinners in a religious revival and joined us with public denunciations of their old party affiliations." Other spoke of "evangelists in the cause" and "converts." [103]

...but in this national campaign, it tended to drive people away. Many religious leaders questioned it, especially its use of sacred images for political purposes, and they delivered sermon after sermon against it. Many voters did not like it, a fact that McKinley and the Republicans quickly exploited. (see footnote 43) 
In his own campaign, McKinley purposely established a different tone. "It is their intelligence we seek to reach," he said of those who might vote for Bryan; "it is their sober judgment we invoke; it is their patriotism to which we appeal.... It is to persuade, not to abuse, which is the object of rightful public discussion." (see footnote 44) [105]

McKinley, no less than Bryan, believed deeply in personal salvation, but he described the experience in terms that were tolerant and inclusive. Bryan thought otherwise. "If this [being born again] is true of one [person], it can be true of any number," he argued again and again. "Thus, a nation can be born in a day if the ideals of the people can be changed." Bryan's campaign aimed for exactly that: a nation that had been "born again," resting on bedrock values, acting on one "truth," conscious always of a sacred cause. (see footnote 45) [105]

"Probably the only passage in the Bible read by some financiers is that about the wise men of the East," he burst out. "They seem to think that wise men have been coming from that direction ever since." [106]

Without an adequate money supply, farmers were poor and restive, and "the farmers of the country are the Samsons, and when they fall they will pull down the pillars of the temple with them." [106]

Remarkably eloquent, he could carry audiences to new levels of thought, as he did in a speech in St. Louis in October:
"I was born after the war. I belong to that generation which has never had an opportunity to prove its love of country upon the battlefield; but, oh, my countrymen, never in the history of this country has there ben such an opportunity as there is today for the citizen to prove his love, not only of his country but of all mankind and of his God. The battle that we fight is fought upon the hilltop, and our contending armies are visible to all the world. All over this globe, in every civilized nation, the eyes of mankind are turned toward this battlefield. Show me, anywhere, a man oppressed, show me a man who has suffered from injustice, show me a man who has been made the victim of vicious legislation, and I will show you a man from whose heart goes up a silent prayer that we may win. (see footnote 56) [107]

The size of the crowds had also worried Republican leaders, including John Hay, who wrote a friend: "The last week of the campaign is getting on everybody's nerves. There is a vague uneasiness among Republicans.... I do not believe defeat to be possible, though it is evident that this last month of Bryan, roaring out his desperate appeals to hate and envy, is having its effect on the dangerous classes." (see footnote 58)
Those "dangerous classes," in fact, had heard Bryan speak less to hate and envy than to hope and possibility, to the liberating potential of silver, to priorities that offered hope to the downtrodden, to the intervention of government in national problems. He spoke to those people, as he often put it, who were sure that "there are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them"--and argument that would resonate through Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. [108]