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]