Authors: Scott Farris
He served two terms representing Nebraska in Congress and lost a bid for the U.S. Senate. This was the sum of his political experience, and although he was only thirty-six years old in 1896, he was as certain that he would be nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as he was of the divinity of Christ. Despite his short tenure in Congress, he had become known in much of the country as an exceptional orator. He was also a brilliant tactician and blessed with keen political instincts. But more than anything, he had empathy. He could feel the pain and the near frantic desire for relief that existed in the many parts of the nation that had been in economic crisis for most of the previous twenty years.
Beginning in 1873, the year the United States officially went on the gold standard, farmers in the South and Midwest suffered from a seemingly never-ending period of deflation. Year after year, American farmers saw prices continue to go down. Corn that had sold for 83 cents a bushel in 1881 sold for 28 cents a bushel in 1890. A farmer who could have paid a debt with one thousand bushels of wheat in 1865 needed three thousand bushels to repay the same sized debt thirty years later. Tens of thousands of farmers went broke and lost their farms.
Credit that might have helped some farmers weather the hard times was almost impossible to find, and when it was available, the interest rates were exorbitant. Rates of 18 to 24 percent were typical, and in the South interest rates in excess of 40 percent were not uncommon. There was simply no money available that could circulate and stimulate the economy. All the currency in circulation in the state of Arkansas, for example, came out to just thirteen cents per resident! By 1893, the nation was facing the greatest economic depression in its 117-year history.
Out of this anguish, the People's Party, better known as the “Populists,” was born. While some Populist leaders were colorful characters, urging farmers to raise more hell than corn, they were not unsophisticated rubes. They understood that there were causes for their problems beyond whatever constraints the gold standard placed on the money supply, and they proposed a wide range of reforms to deal with the crisis, including state regulation of railroads, utilities, and grain elevators. Farmers even engaged in collective action, similar to their urban brethren who formed labor unions, by creating the Grange movement, which allowed them to try to coordinate and control production, storage, transportation, and ultimately prices.
But central to the Populist platform was expanding the money supply. The Populists proposed that silver be coined as well as gold at a ratio of sixteen-to-one. The coinage of silver would increase the supply of money, but by coining it rather than using it to back the issuance of more paper money, the Populists hoped to avoid creating the inflation experienced during the Civil War. Scholars then and since have derided the free coinage of silver issue as a simplistic response to a complicated financial crisis, but the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes later wrote that the Populists were not wrong to believe currency reform was part of the answer to the nation's problems and that the United States' stubbornness in remaining on the gold standard until 1933 severely limited the government's ability to deal with the Great Depression.
Bryan, then and now, was also ridiculed for adopting the free silver issue as his own. When first asked about free silver as a young congressman in 1891, he famously admitted that he was not entirely certain why the minting of silver made sense. All he really needed to know, Bryan said, was that his Nebraska constituents favored free silver: “I will look up the arguments later.” He did and two years later gave a three-hour speech, without notes, before the House in which he offered a sophisticated explanation of monetary policy, full of facts and details, and which included, in addition to free silver, such ideas as the creation of a federal reserve system for banking, a managed currency, and federal insurance for bank deposits. Despite this and other displays of intellect, Bryan was repeatedly tagged as someone who just gave pretty speeches, and histories of the election of 1896 almost always focus solely on the silver issue.
Seldom explained is that Bryan's strategy was to use the silver issue to advance a broader agenda. Silver was the issue that resonated with the crowds who came to hear him speak and Bryan was a politician who needed votes; if advocating silver monetization provided an audience to educate on other reforms, so be it. Bryan had toured the country throughout 1895 and early 1896, speaking before groups large and small, and meeting party leaders and potential national convention delegates. By the time the Democrats gathered for their national convention in Chicago in July 1896, Bryan reckoned he had personally met with more convention delegates than any other potential candidate, which enhanced his confidence that, if given the right opportunity, he would win over the convention and his party's nomination.
The opportunity came when Bryan cleverly arranged to be the final speaker in the debate over a free silver plank at the convention. A supporter scribbled a note of encouragement to Bryan, saying, “This is a great opportunity.” Bryan, fully aware of his gifts as an orator, wrote a short note back. “You will not be disappointed.”
The young Bryan, slender but broad-shouldered, moved with the grace of an athlete, bounding up the stairs, two at a time, to reach the rostrum. His physical energy further galvanized the crowd's attention. He began quietly but was still easy to hear even in the farthest reaches of the massive Chicago Coliseum. Bryan had a mesmerizing baritone voice that could be heard clearly without amplification from a distance of three city blocks. In the days before microphones and loudspeakers, it gave him an extraordinary advantage over other speakers.
Bryan had another advantage; he was a talented writer who wrote all of his own speeches, every word. He had tried and refined large portions of the speech in other places, and he knew the reaction each line would generate. Knowing that the audience was with him from his opening words, Bryan would later write that he could actually see the crowd react “like a trained choir,” responding “instantaneously and in unison . . . to each point made.”
The address featured many memorable points. Scoffing at those who insisted protecting business meant protecting the rich, Bryan said, “The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer,” and deserved the same considerations. He ridiculed those who seemed to believe the problems of the farmer were less important than those of the industrialist. You could burn down the cities, but as long as people had something to eat, the cities would rise again “as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
The crowd roared its approval again and again as Bryan built up to his peroration and the most electrifying moment in the history of American presidential conventions.
“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” Bryan thundered in conclusion, first bringing his hands to his temples, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” He then extended his arms wide in the near sacrilegious pose of a man crucified upon a crossâa pose he held for a full five secondsâwhile the convention sat in stunned silence before erupting into pandemonium with delegates deliriously shouting, crying, and stomping their feet for a full forty minutes, twice as long as Bryan had spoken.
The reaction was akin to religious ecstasy. “Everyone seemed to go mad at once,” the
New York World
reported. A delegate who had come into the convention an avowed opponent of Bryan and the free silver movement pulled a still unconvinced companion out of his seat and screamed, “Yell, for God's sake, yell!” The next day, on the fifth ballot, the convention nominated Bryan as its presidential candidate, the youngest person, at age thirty-six, ever nominated by a major party. Later, the People's Party decided to make Bryan their nominee as well. Adopting the Democratic nominee as their own ended the Populists as a serious third party challenge to the established order, but they had found a worthy champion in Bryan.
Thus began one of the most class-conscious and overtly religious campaigns in American history. “The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor,” Bryan said, “but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use.” The journalist William Allen White, writing from the heartland of Kansas, said, “It was the first time in my life and in the life of a generation in which any man large enough to lead a national party had boldly and unashamedly made his cause that of the poor and the oppressed.”
Religious imagery abounded. Bryan supporters proclaimed his campaign led the nation to witness “a new Pentecost” and a “new baptism of fire.” Others were scandalized. Bryan was accused of sacrilege, with one cartoon proclaiming, “No man who drags into the dust the most sacred symbols of the Christian world is fit to be president of the United States.” Others stood amazed, either appalled or inspired, that anyone would try to apply the Golden Rule to practical politics. Even the influential twentieth-century historian Richard Hofstadter, who was no fan of Bryan or the Populist movement, acknowledged that Bryan “swept away much of the cynicism and apathy that had been characteristic of American politics” for the previous thirty years.
There was no apathy on Wall Street. Big business interests were terrified of the possibility of a Bryan victory. The Republican National Committee alone raised and spent the equivalent of fifty million in today's dollars campaigning against Bryan. Other sources spent one and a half times as much. Republicans mailed out 120 million pieces of campaign literature printed in ten languages to a nation of fourteen million voters, and hired fourteen hundred professional speakers to stump for the Republican McKinley, who stayed in Ohio and campaigned from his front porch. There were allegations of employers threatening employees with dismissal if Bryan won and other charges that workers who supported Bryan were transferred to new plants in the days before the election so they would be disqualified from voting by residency requirements.
Against this array of Republican political might, the Democrats countered with Bryanâ“one man, but such a man!” as described by Anna Lodge, the wife of Republican stalwart Henry Cabot Lodge. Writing to an English friend, Mrs. Lodge noted that Bryan had been able to raise but a half-million dollars, perhaps no more than 5 percent of what the Republicans had gathered. Bryan was unable to tap the resources of the Democratic establishment as many conservative Democrats, including Grover Cleveland, aghast at being swept aside by the populist Bryan, not only refused to campaign for Bryan, they announced they intended to vote for McKinley. And most urban newspapers, even those that had been reliably Democratic in the past, abandoned him and endorsed the Republican.
So Bryan did what had not been done since Stephen Douglas; he campaigned for himself at a pace that would be difficult to match even with today's means of travel. He traveled eighteen thousand miles through twenty-six states and spoke an average of eighty thousand words a day. He drew crowds as large as seventy thousand. In West Virginia, it was estimated fully half the voters in the state attended a Bryan speech at least once, and his total audience during the campaign was estimated at five million people. Further, his speeches “spoke to the heart and intelligence of the people, with a capital âP,'” Mrs. Lodge said. After Bryan, the tradition of the “front porch” campaign, in which the voters went to the candidate instead of the other way around, was dead. Given all Bryan's disadvantages, he ought to have been buried in a landslide; instead, he carried twenty-two Western and Southern states and won more than 47 percent of the popular vote.
As shrewd as he was pious, Bryan had a simple explanation for his defeat. “I have borne the sins of Grover Cleveland,” he said, noting that he ran as a Democrat when a Democratic president was presiding over an economic depression. Tellingly, in regard to his future plans, Bryan titled his campaign memoirs
The First Battle.
Nominated unanimously at the next Democratic convention, he lost in his rematch against McKinley in 1900. With the economy having improved modestly (in part due to the discovery of gold in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, which loosened the money supply), Bryan focused the new campaign on criticizing McKinley's “imperialist” designs in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. The United States, having freed the archipelago from Spanish rule, declined to grant its independence, which led to an ugly and now largely forgotten four-year guerilla war with Filipino insurgents. More than four thousand American soldiers were killed, as well as twenty thousand Filipino combatants; another two hundred thousand Filipino civilians succumbed to famine and disease caused by the war. The American public in 1900 cared more that the economy was improving and followed the cry of McKinley's campaign to “let well enough alone.”
In 1904, Bryan stepped aside to let conservative Democrats try their luck once more. They nominated New York appellate court judge Alton B. Parker, who lost in a landslide to Theodore Roosevelt, the White House resident since McKinley's assassination in 1901. In the past, Roosevelt had accused Bryan of “communistic and socialistic” ideas; Bryan in turn now tweaked TR for earning the title of a progressive by passing watered-down versions of Democratic reform measures.
In 1908, the Democrats turned once more to Bryan to run against Roosevelt's handpicked successor, his secretary of war William Howard Taft. It was a lackluster campaign that Bryan had thought he could win. In the end, he actually received fewer votes than he had in 1896. His lasting accomplishment that year was winning the endorsement of the previously nonpartisan American Federation of Labor, and organized labor has remained a bedrock constituency of the Democratic Party ever since.