McKinley’s nomination was therefore received by Godkin and his associates with hostility. Not since 1860, they wrote, had the nation so needed a man of strong character and clear views; yet the Republicans had chosen a trimmer of uncertain mental operations. The gold plank in the platform was admirable, but it simply emphasized the fact that McKinley was, at the time he was named, a total misfit. Nevertheless, Godkin tried to be optimistic:
Nothing marks more clearly than McKinley’s nomination the mistake of turning nominating conventions into vast exciting crowds, doing their work under the eyes of a larger crowd, more excited still. There can be little doubt that the gold in the platform was forced on the convention by the business men, and that, had the convention been a deliberative body, McKinley’s unfitness to stand on any such platform would have been recognized. But the pledges given by the delegates before they ever met or compared notes, made it impossible to choose any other. About the platform they were free, but about the candidate they were tied up, so that they were compelled to put him astride a body of doctrine with which he had never been in thorough sympathy. But the formal recognition of the doctrine by the party at least insures discussion, and encourages us to hope that there will be no more difficulty in killing the silver heresy through the country by free debate than there has been in getting such a collection of politicians as met at St. Louis to declare for the gold standard.
If the Evening Post was frigid toward McKinley, it was filled with angry contempt by the nomination of Bryan. He was totally unknown to the country at large; he had not even been a regular delegate to the convention; he made a windy speech to the roaring mob of repudiators which called itself the Democratic party, and was nominated because he was of the stamp of Tillman and Altgeld, with a more attractive personality—so ran its verdict. The decadence of the great party of Jackson, Benton, Tilden, and Cleveland seemed to it confirmed by the platform, which Horace White pronounced “baser than anything ever avowed heretofore by a political party in this country outside of the slavery question.” The free coinage plank, he said, with the silver dollar really worth 52 cents, meant the repudiation of the half part of all the debts incurred since 1872, when the gold dollar had been made the unit of value.
One of the campaign achievements of the Evening Post was truly spectacular. Immediately after Bryan’s nomination its financial editor, Mr. A. D. Noyes, began publishing a series of editorials called “A Free Coinage Catechism.” This question-and-answer presentation of controversial subjects was a familiar one in the Evening Post ever since Godkin assumed control, but it was never more effectively used than in July and August, 1896. Mr. Noyes slashed directly into the errors of the Democrats, as a single brief excerpt will show:
Q. What is the fundamental contention of the free coinage advocates? A. That the amount of money in circulation has been decreasing since the demonetization of silver, and that this decrease has caused a general fall in prices.
Q. Is it true that the money supply has been decreasing? A. It is not.
Q. What are the facts? A. So far as the United States is concerned, there has been an enormous increase. In 1860 the money in circulation in this country was $442,102,477; in 1872 it was $738,309,549; by the Treasury bulletin, at the beginning of the present month of July, it was $1,509,725,200.
Q. What does this show? A. It shows that our money supply has increased 240 per cent. as compared with 1860, and 104 per cent. as compared with 1872.
These editorials were immediately issued by the Evening Post in a sixteen-page pamphlet, and by Sept. 4 a first edition of 1,350,000 copies had been sold. A new edition with two new chapters and other additional matter was then brought out, and by Nov. 2 the total sale had reached 1,956,000 copies. Horace White’s pamphlet, “Coin’s Financial Fool,” continued to sell, and was supplemented by the publication in leaflet form of a public address which he had made in Chicago in 1893 upon “The Gold Standard: How It Came Into the World, and Why It Will Stay.” It can safely be said that the most important campaign documents issued in behalf of sound money were these by Mr. Noyes and Mr. White.
Less spectacular, but no less effective, were Horace White’s editorials throughout the summer. As reprinted by the Nation, they reached editors and other leaders of opinion the land over, and filtered down to the public by a thousand channels. Godkin wrote upon the more general political aspects of the campaign, leaving the hard day-to-day arguing mainly to Mr. White. During the whole campaign the paper managed to attack Bryan and Democracy without open advocacy of McKinley and the Republican Party. When McKinley published his letter of acceptance, the Post wholeheartedly praised its financial passages, and declared that they defined the one real issue of the campaign. But its distaste for McKinley’s personality, its aversion for his high-tariff views, and the repugnant character of the dominant Republican leaders—Hanna, Platt, Quay, Lodge, Frye, and others—prevented it from giving more than implied and tacit approval to his candidacy. Godkin himself voted the Gold Democratic ticket.
The New York press approached nearer to unanimity that summer than in any Presidential campaign since the era of good feeling. The Journal was Bryan’s one important supporter. When he was nominated, the World turned its back upon him, saying: “Lunacy having dictated the platform, it was perhaps natural that hysteria should evolve the candidate.” Though Dana called himself a Democrat, the Sun was more fervently anti-Bryan than the Tribune. Bryan called New York “the heart of what seems to be the enemy’s country.” His attempt to invade it in mid-August, when he journeyed 1,500 miles to Madison Square Garden to be notified of his nomination, was a dismal failure. The night was one of intense heat, the notification speech of Gov. W. J. Stone of Missouri was intolerably long, and the very character of Bryan’s address was a disappointment. He had been expected to display the eloquence which had so dazzled the Chicago Convention. Instead, he read from manuscript a long speech on the model of Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, dealing in the dry tone of a student with what he imagined to be economic facts and governmental principles. Many hearers left early. But the Post explained his failure, not by his refusal to attempt eloquence, but by the fact that his dreary discourse abounded in “the most grating self-contradictions, the grossest blunders in matters of fact, the emptiest platitudes and vaguest assertions”; and by the fact that while Lincoln had appealed to national honor, the young man from the Platte argued “the cause of private dishonesty and public disgrace.”
Some newspapers indulged in downright ferocity. The Journal spoke of the plutocrats, the monopolists, the great corporations, and their protector Hanna, in characteristic Journal fashion. The Tribune called Bryan a “wretched, addle-pated boy posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness”; a man “apt ... at lies and forgeries and blasphemies”; a “puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the anarchist” and of others who made up a “league of hell.” The Sun applauded the Yale students who tried to break up a New Haven speech by Bryan. Even the Post spoke in the harshest tones of those Western farmers the genuineness of whose hardships no one now denies, and characterizes the struggle as one between “the great civilizing forces of the republic” and “the still surviving barbarism bred by slavery in the South and the reckless spirit of adventure in the mining camps of the West.” Such overstatements show how intense was Eastern feeling over the election. Though the Post’s attitude toward McKinley tempered its rejoicings in the result, it nevertheless hailed it as “the most impressive vindication of democracy governing according to law and order that the country has ever seen.”