Although some historians disparage both William Jennings Bryan and the demand for free silver, few deny the significance of the election of 1896. The cry for reform, raised sporadically since the late 1860's, had grown into a massive roar. Instead of continuing the duet about the tariff that economic conservatives had sung meaninglessly at every election for a generation, the new elements which had captured the Democratic party clamorously advocated change. Frightened friends of the status quo rallied behind the comfortable conservatism of William McKinley and his astute manager, Marcus A. Hanna. The mere possibility of the changes threatened by the Bryan Democracy drove a large faction of Cleveland Democrats out of the party and into either direct or indirect support of McKinley. The overwhelming majority of the American people at the time, on both sides of the politico-economic fence, believed deeply that the issues involved were fundamental ones.
The story of the first Bryan-McKinley campaign is complicated, however, by the fact that the People's party played a significant role in it. The Populists were important in the rise to ascendancy of the silver question; they were a factor even in the Democrats' selection of Bryan; and they figured largely in the campaign and election that brought his first defeat for the presidency. Although much has been written about the clash of the "silverites" and the "goldbugs," [1] misunderstanding and plain error have persisted concerning the role of the Populists. [see footnote 1, p. 2: A critical discusssion of the most important printed works that deal with the Populists in the election of 1896 is given in the Note on Sources. Two full-length studies that are available to scholars should be mentioned here: Marian Silveus, "The Antecedents of the Campaign of 1896," unpublished dissertation at the University of Wisconsin (1932), is useful in many respects but collapses in its treatment of the Populist convention. Relying only on the New York Times for the story, Silveus admits (p. 225) that it was "impossible to tell just what did happen." Joseph Schafer, Jr., "The Presidential Election of 1896," unpublished dissertation at the University of Wisconsin (1941), also has merit but, with respect to the Populist convention and its action, closely follows the interpretation of two important leaders, Henry D. Lloyd and Tom Watson. For reasons that are explained below, both of these men had highly distorted views of the matter.]
Basic to any understanding of 1896 is the currency question. Some weeks after the Populist convention Henry Demarest Lloyd, a leading reformer and famed author, called free silver "the cow-bird of the Reform movement." "It waited until the nest had been built by the sacrifices and labour of others," Lloyd charged, "and then it laid its eggs in it, pushing out the others which lie smashed on the ground." [see footnote 2, p. 2: Lloyd to A.B. Adair, October 10, 1896, in the Lloyd MSS, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.]
Influential historians have quoted and endorsed Lloyd's interpretation, but his denunciation of the silver issue is misleading in several ways. [see footnote 3, p. 2: Selected examples of historians who incorporate Lloyd's "cow-bird" thesis are, in order of publication: C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, 278; Matthew Josephson, The Politicos, 1865-1896, 684; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, 189; Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform, 56; Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform and Expansion, 1890-1900 in the New American Nation series, 199; and Paul W. Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People, 163 and passim.] Lloyd was a socialist, committed to government ownership of the means of production and distribution as the great principle that would bring justice to all. He joined the People's party in an effort to unite under its banner both industrial workers and agrarians and [2] to lead the Populists to a gradual acceptance of socialism. [see footnote 4, p. 3: Caro Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd, 1847-1903, I, 241-43.]
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Although the Populists had incorporated a demand for government ownership of the railroads and telegraphs in their Omaha platform of 1892, neither they nor the Farmers' Alliance men were doctrinaire socialists. ~contradicts Sanders's account? They were, rather, angry agrarian capitalists who found themselves unprotected by government from exploitation by the railroads. They responded with a pragmatic demand for government ownership, a demand that made many of them uncomfortable but which persisted until federal regulation became a meaningful reality in the twentieth century.
Lloys, on the other hand, advocated government ownership to establish a different economic and social order. Even in comparatively urban Illinois, Lloyd's efforts came to naught many months before the Populist convention in 1896. (see footnote 5) Herman E. Taubneck, chairman of the Populist national committee, spoke both for the agrarians and for some of the urban workers when he greeted Lloyd's collectivist proposal with the declaration that if "this is what you came into the People's party for, we don't want you. Go back where you came [from] with your socialism." (see footnote 6) [3]
Though Lloyd persisted, the national convention of the American Federation of Labor, meeting in Denver late in 1894, rejected his collectivist proposals. Lloyd did better at a conference of Populist leaders at St. Louis in December 1894, when he was one of the spokesmen who helped lead the majority to stand by the comprehensive and many-sided Populist platform of 1892 rather than retreat to the silver-only position that some of the western Populists favored. But despite the fluctuations in his hopes, Lloyd's plan to unite workers and farmers in a party dedicated to socialism failed even in the area and under the circumstances most auspicious for the effort. [4]
Tom Watson of Georgia, perhaps the best known figure among the Populists of the South, spoke for the bulk of his party late in 1895 when he vowed that he would go no further toward "Socialism and Radicalism" than the Georgia Populists had gone. That group, Watson reported to Marion Butler, had given the "cold shoulder" even to the doctrines of Jacob S. ("Good Roads") Coxey of Ohio and had adopted the "most conservative" platform that the party had ever had. Watson urged that Butler and others who favored a moderate course should begin to use their newspapers to educate public sentiment and thus make it impossible for extremists to control the forthcoming national convention. [5]
...to most Populists the real, late-coming "cow-[5]bird" of 1896 that tried to capture the Populist nest was socialism. As Professor Chester Destler has concluded, the fate of the "attempt to graft an alien collectivism into the traditional pattern of American democratic radicalism had been clearly foreshadowed in Chicago." (see footnote 10) Lloyd would not know how completely that attempt had failed until the Populist convention in July 1896. His widely quoted and influential comments about the action of that body reflect his own final, bitter disillusionment more accurately than they do the truth about the Populist convention and the free silver movement. [6]
The demand for the free coinage of silver was not a late addition to the reform movement of the 1890's. A free silver plank was always among the numerous demands first of the Farmers' Alliance and then of the People's party. Agitation of the question reached back to the 1870's; and from 1868 on there was opposition to the federal government's deflationary moves that led to the steady appreciation of the dollar's value. Events rather than planning by any person or group forced the silver issue irresistibly to the front in the mid-1890's.
Two of these events were the catastrophic depression that followed the panic of 1893 and the stubbornly conservative, deflationary, probusiness, and party-splitting policies of the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland. Neither the Populists nor the Bryan Democrats created the popular clamor for the restoration of silver to its historic place in the currency. Rather, the leaders of both groups were led by popular sentiment to emphasize the issue. [6]
Long before the silverites captured the Democratic party in 1896, the Populists had discovered in the campaign of 1892 that among their numerous demands the silver plank had the greatest popular appeal. (see footnote 12) [7]
In addition to farming, Butler conducted an academy for the schooling of his younger brothers and sisters together with the children of neighbors. When the Farmers' Alliance movement, destined to become the most militant agrarian combination in American history, spread from the Southwest into North Carolina in the late 1880's, Marion Butler immediately joined the organization, which provided him a ladder of political opportunity that he climbed with amazing speed. Possessing the formal education and literate articulateness which so many of his fellow farmers lacked, he quickly became president of the Sampson County Alliance, bought a weekly newspaper in the county seat of Clinton (the newspaper was subsequently moved to Goldsboro and then to Raleigh), and in 1890, at the age of twenty-seven, the voters sent him to the state senate as an Alliance Democrat. (see footnote 14) [8]
The "Farmers' Legislature" of 1891 in North Carolina produced an impressive number of important reform measures, such as the creation of a commission to regulate the railroads and the establishment of new state colleges for women and Negroes. Through his dynamic leadership in the legislature, Butler established a statewide reputation. He became president of the State Farmers' Alliance in 1891, and was made, first, vice president and then, in 1893, president of the National Alliance. The Democratic nomination of Grover Cleveland in 1892, despite the former president's known hostility to silver and his essential conservatism, was a major factor behind the organization of the People's party in North Carolina in the summer of 1892. Another factor was the insistence of the leaders of the North Carolina Democratic party that no member could "split the ticket," that is, vote Democratic in the state and local elections but not in the presidential race. Thousands of members of the Alliance, [8] now led by young Butler after the death of Colonel Leonidas L. Polk in June 1892, took a step that required considerable courage and even desperation in the South after Reconstruction: they walked out of the "white man's party," the party that had "redeemed" the South from Republican rule in the Reconstruction era, and they joined the new third party that had already developed in the West and was now appearing in both the upper and deep South. (see footnote 15) [9]
The Populist presidential candidate in 1892, General James B. Weaver of Iowa, polled over a million popular votes and won twenty-two electoral votes, which was an impressive showing for a new third party. In North Carolina the Populists entered the campaign too late to hope for much, yet the Tarheel Populists and Republicans together polled a larger vote than the Democrats, whose penny-pinching economies and exclusive claims to "honesty and good government" during the two decades since Reconstruction had clearly lost much of their appeal. Marion Butler now emerged as the nemesis of North Carolina Democrats, who tagged him "the sly fox of Sampson county," for in the state elections of 1894 he led the Populists into cooperation with the Republicans.
Both Populists and Republicans deeply resented the tricky, even dishonest, election laws and procedures the Democrats had utilized to remain in power since Reconstruction; both also scorned the centralization of all political power in the legislature whereby Democrats monopolized local offices in numerous counties where their opponents had strong majorities. In order to gain reforms in these and other state matters, and simply for the satisfaction of beating the Democrats, the Populist-Republican "fusionists," as their enemies called them, joined together in the state elections of the non-[9]presidential year and swept to an astonishing victory that gave them safe majorities in both houses of the legislature. In other states the Populists in 1894 were not generally so successful as in North Carolina. But the election of a Populist governor in Nebraska, other scattered victories, and a sharp increase across the nation in the total Populist vote cast encouraged the party leaders. Most important, the acute economic stagnation after the panic of 1893 and President Cleveland's unyieldingly conservative policies led to astonishing defeats for the Democratic party throughout the country. True, the Republicans were the prime beneficiaries in 1894 from the increased unpopularity of the Democrats. But Populists, looking ahead, saw the Democratic party gradually disappearing, as had other major parties in American history, and the People's party emerging as the great national party of reform and the rival of the Republicans. Marion Butler was only one of many Populist spokesmen who envisioned such a bright future for the new party. (see footnote 16) [10]
Unlike some of the Western Populists, however, Butler disapproved of obliterating other demands in order to emphasize the silver issue. He admitted that government ownership of the railways was not widely popular but insisted that no great reform was ever popular at first. He thought that the correct solution of the railway problem was almost as important as that of the financial question. But the depression and money shortage had awakened the public to the silver issue and made the time ripe "for concentrating under one banner" those who supported reform. After winning the silver victory, Butler concluded, "I shall favor making a war to the finish on the greedy, grasping, private monopolies, which to-day are using and abusing the great functions of [11] government that should be owned by the people and used by the people." (see footnote 19) [12]
In short, what Butler and many other Populist leaders across the nation thought they had found by 1894-1895 was the common denominator that is essential in the life of a major political party in the United States. State and sectional groupings that differed widely because of differences in history and in economic interests might, with the right and lucky denominator, join together to win national victory. Doctrinaires and dogmatists saw the matter differently, but most of the Populist leaders were politicians who hoped to ride the financial issue to that first victory. (see footnote 20) [12]
Hindsight adds to the difficulty of understanding why such Populist leaders as Butler, along with numerous others, proceeded so confidently. The truth was that most of the Populist leaders, as well as large numbers of Republicans and Democrats, expected both of the old parties either to reject free silver outright or to equivocate. Either way, the Populists knew that their party stood to gain, for thousands of members [12] of the old parties were in no mood for the stale, ritualistic discussion of the tariff. [13]
Comforting to the Populists was the fact that the Democratic convention would meet under long-standing rules that required a vote of two-thirds of the delegates to name a presidential candidate. The Populists thought it almost certain that the Cleveland administration, with its power over patronage and the other resources of the executive branch, would have sufficient support from eastern delegates to block the nomination of an unequivocal friend of reform. A year before the Democratic convention met, Harry Skinner, Populist congressman from North Carolina, pointed to the two-thirds rule that Democrats as the sure guarantee that the true friends of silver would have no recourse save to become Populists. [see footnote 22] [13]
The two-thirds rule of the Democrats made it vastly easier for General James B. Weaver, the Populist presidential candidate in 1892, Chairman Taubeneck, Senators Butler and Allen, and others to continue to insist on the necessity of putting the silver principle above party and to call and work in a variety of ways for a union of all the silver forces in 1896. [14]
Two minority factions within the People's party, for quite different reasons, expressed misgivings about the silver-first strategy and the constant calling for cooperative action of all the friends of silver. The socialist followers of Lloyd, while numerically small and unrepresentative, derived their significance from the brilliance and literary skill of Lloyd himself. The other minority was much larger and consisted principally of Populists in the South, especially the deep South, who, for sectional reasons, disliked the idea of any cooperation between Populists and Democrats.
Since real Republican organizations scarcely existed in some of these southern states, Populists standing alone had to contend with the high-handed and often dishonest machinations of the long-entrenched Democrats. Not for silver, or for that matter any other essentially national issue, were these Populists willing to blur the distinction between themselves and the Democrats. Opposing all fusion on principle, they styled themselves "middle-of-the-road" Populists. As sincere as most of them were in their Populism, the truth was that they did not love the Populist party and its program more [14] than did the silver Populists--they only loved it differently and for different reasons. (see footnote 23)
The first signs of the uneasiness of the "midroaders" in 1896 became evident in selecting a time for the Populist national convention. A Populist convention before either of the other two conventions would lessen the chances of cooperation or fusion, or cause the fusion, if any, to take place strictly on Populist terms with Populist candidates. The Populist national committee had already scheduled their convention for St. Louis on June 16. The Democratic national committee met on January 16 and decided to hold their convention in Chicago on July 7. (see footnote 24)
Marion Butler, like most of the national leaders of the party, favored a late convention. The Populist state chairman of Nebraska had urged, as early as August 1895, that the Populists hold their national convention after both of the old parties had "unquestionably turned their backs upon the white metal." (see footnote 25)
On the other hand, from Thomson, Georgia, Watson's home, a Populist national commiteeman sent Butler his proxy along with regrets that he could not be in St. Louis and expressed the hope that the committee would call the convention for early spring and meet in some Southern city, [15] preferably Atlanta. (see footnote 26) The Populist national committee, apparently reflection the sentiment of the majority of the party membership, decided to hold the convention in St. Louis on July 22, and invited all opponents of the two old parties to cooperate with the Populists. (see footnote 27)
Counting on the Democrats' two-thirds rule to be the final making of the Populist party, Butler and the other leaders worked diligently for the silver cause throughout the spring of 1896. In the Senate Butler attacked the party-first Democrats and Republicans who claimed to be silverites. The Atlanta Constitution thought that he had secured "a hearing hardly ever given to a Populist" and "smoked out of the bushes men who have been playing a hide-and-seek game with their constituencies for years" (see footnote 28).
In North Carolina an increasing number of Democratic leaders became converts to silver, sometimes from conviction and sometimes for expediency's sake. Despite this growing Democratic shift, Butler received encouraging signs for Populism too. A Negro voter wrote: "I am a colored man and a Republican and have been for seventeen years; but be it thoroughly understood that I am not married to any party that will dodge from justice to the people and yeild to the few who want to enslave the country by a single gold standard law." He advised every Negro voter to take the Caucasian and "stop going around howling 'straight Republican ticket.'" (see footnote 29) [16]
A white democrat, preparing to bolt to the Populists, wanted to know why it was not "more patriotic and wise" to bolt now than it had been for the Southern Democrats to bolt the national party in 1860. "The issue confronting the American people to-day is the liberty of the laboring people, both white and black," the Tarheel declared, "an issue of vastly more importance than the enslavement or freedom of the negro ever was." Nor had the depression abated to make the cry for reform less urgent. One old farmer reported: "If Miss Prosperity has made her appearance in this section, she certainly has appeared wrong end forward, for there never has been, since Adam was a boy, such weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth known here among the poor." (see footnote 30)
The Republican convention that opened on June 16 declared itself "unreservedly for sound money" and opposed to the free coinage of silver "except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the earth, which agreement we pledge ourselves to promote." The Republicans also equivocated on their candidate by naming William McKinley of Ohio, who preferred to talk about the beauties of the high tariff because he had in the past been friendly to silver. Senator Teller of Colorado, Senator Richard F. Pettigrew of South Dakota, and other silver Republicans from the far West bolted the party and announced their intention to organize the Silver Republican party. (see footnote 31) [17]
The plan of the Silver Republicans and the Populist leaders was to rally around Senator Teller as the ideal candidate for the united silver forces. He had favored the income tax and a few other reforms and had stood for years as one of the most widely respected spokesmen for silver. If the eastern friends of the Cleveland administration had the votes to force [17] a compromise candidate on the Democratic convention, true silver Democrats by the thousands would come to the silver banner that would be primarily the proper of the Populists. If, on the other hand, the admittedly powerful silver wing of the Democrats should be in control sufficiently to name the candidate as well as to write the platform, the Silver Republican and Populist leaders insisted that no candidate would be as acceptable as Teller if the silver Democrats were sincere about wanting to unite all the silver forces. Taubeneck, Butler, Pettigrew, Senator Fred Dubois of Idaho, Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, and others worked arduously for Teller to receive the Democratic nomination. (see footnote 32)
But a veritable revolution had occurred in the Democratic party; its full extent could not be measured until the fervent silverites began to flock into Chicago for the convention on July 7. "The Democratic movement toward silver in the last six months before the Chicago convention," Professor Allan Nevins has written, "was like an avalanche: a mere whisper at first, than a half-imperceptible shift in the landscape, and suddenly a roar, a crash, an irresistible cataclysm." (see footnote 33)
Cleveland's last hopes for blocking the nomination of a genuine reformer were pinned on William C. Whitney, his millionaire adviser and former secretary of the navy. Whitney loaded up his "special train of three handsome parlor cars" [18] with loyal eastern followers of Cleveland and headed for Chicago. Upon arrival there one of these Cleveland Democrats left the special train, with its ample supply of "comestibles and drinkables," to mingle with his assembled fellow-Democrats. He soon reported to Whitney, "For the first time I can understand the scenes of the French Revolution." (see footnote 34) [19]
The jubilant and determined silver Democrats, in easy control of the proceedings as soon as the convention opened, did want to unite the various reform parties but to antagonize as few conservative Democrats as possible in the process. Consequently, they rejected Teller despite all the pressure that the Populists and Silver Republicans could exert. Teller himself had never believed it possible that the Democrats would nominate him, and his repeated public statements that such an action on their part might be "injudicious" added to the difficulty of his supporters' task. Teller also announced that he would give his support to any one of several prominent silver Democrats. [19]
More important, leading silver Democrats, especially Altgeld realized that silverite control of the convention would mean a bolt from the party by eastern followers of Cleveland, a more serious and sizable bolt than the silverites had inflicted upon the Republican party. The nomination of Teller would only aggravate the problem of holding as many Democrats as possible in the party. Altgeld's public statement the day the convention opened that he doubted if Teller could carry Illinois was a major setback for the Teller boom. [19]
Populist Chairman Taubeneck's public statement that the Populists would not support such partisan Democrats as Congressman Richard P. ("Silver Dick") Bland of Missouri or Governor Horace Boies of Iowa was one factor that worked [19] against those two leading contenders for the nomination. This situation together with William Jennings Brayn's careful preconvention work for support among the delegates, his outstanding record in Congress as an able friend of reform, his clear record of friendliness to and cooperation with the Populists in his home state, and, lastly, his magnetic qualities as displayed in his famed address to the convention led to the young Nebraskan's nomination by the Democrats. (see footnote 35) [20]
Not only had the Democrats named the most exciting and dynamic presidential candidate in well over a generation but the platform, in addition to the call for free silver and other financial reforms, bore the stamp of Governor Altgeld in its denunciation of Cleveland's action in the Pullman boycott and of "government by injunction as a new and highly dangerous form of oppression." Too often remembered only for its assaults on the "anti-American," "British policy" of gold monometallism, the Democratic platform also demanded stricter federal regulation of the railways, an end to national banknotes, a tariff for revenue only (after the money question was settled), an income tax, the protection of American labor by prevention of the "importation of foreign pauper labor," stricter enforcement of antitrust legislation, and various other reforms. (see footnote 36) For all the Populists who since the party's birth had cried "principle above party" a cruel moment of decision had arrived. [20]
National history made it clear by 1896 that an important [20] third party faced one of two fates: it died after growing strong enough to force one of the major parties to embrace its ideas and the bulk of its membership, or, given the right set of circumstances, it might become in a time of general party disintegration and chaos one of the two major parties. The Democrats in 1896, however, had not equivocated and dodged in the face of an overwhelming national question as the Whigs had tried to do in the decade before the Civil War. [21]
Although no Populist planned or wished the party's death, the western Populists could accept the possibility of this national fate for the party with a certain equanimity and a redoubled resolve to work for Bryan, silver, and then other reforms. Populists in many western states had early begun the practice of cooperating or "fusing" with Democrats in political battles against Republicans, who were dominant in the West. In 1892, in fact, the Democrats, who were almost as weak in some of the western states as the Republicans were in the South, had helped to elect Grover Cleveland to his second term by voting for the Populists' presidential candidate, General James B. Weaver. Seeing that their only chance of keeping a number of the western states out of the Republican electoral column was through support for Weaver, thousands of Democrats in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and other western states voted for the Populist electoral tickets and helped the third party to win twenty-two electoral votes, an impressive achievement for the national debut of a new political party in the United States. [21]
Nor were the Populists the only beneficiaries of this cooperative politics in the West. Democratic candidates on state and congressional tickets frequently received endorsement by the Populists. Bryan, for example, shared many of the reformist views of the Populists, and they had helped reelect him to Congress from Nebraska in 1892. Given this background, western Populists could hardly be shocked by [21] the possibility of Populist cooperation with, and possible absorption on the national scene by, the revitalized Democratic party of 1896. (see footnote 37) [22]
To the southern Populist, however, absorption by the Democrats was a fate too unspeakable to be contemplated. No matter what the historic pattern concerning third parties or the logic of the national situation might be, sectional exigencies in the South demanded the preservation of a separate and distinct Populist party. The situation that faced the Populists after the Democratic convention in Chicago, therefore, seemed to be this: if the Populists did not fall in line behind Bryan and free silver, the bulk of the western strength of the party would be lost as Populists there left the party to march under the Democratic banner of reform. If the Populists did nominate Bryan, and run the risk of having the Democrats swallow the third party on the national level, the southern Populists to save their local political lives and for largely sectional reasons would be sorely tempted to bolt the national Populist party. [22]
Either way, in the short interval between the conclusion of the Democratic convention and the opening of the Populist meeting in St. Louis on July 22, the split between the pro-Bryan Populists and the southern midroaders seemed to augur the certain dissolution of the People's party. [22]
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