This platform received the support of President Cleveland, who, in response to an invitation to attend the meeting at which the candidates were to be notified, said: "As a Democrat, devoted to the principles and integrity of my party, I should be delighted to be present on an occasion so significant and to mingle with those who are determined that the voice of true Democracy shall not be smothered and who insist that the glorious standard shall be borne aloft as of old in faithful hands."
In their acceptance speeches, Palmer and Buckner devoted more attention to condemning the Chicago platform than to explaining the principles for which they stood. General Buckner said: "The Chicago Convention would wipe virtually out of existence the Supreme Court which interprets the law, forgetting that our ancestors in England fought for hundreds of years to obtain a tribunal of justice which was free from executive control. They would wipe that out of existence and subject it to the control of party leaders to carry out the dictates of the party—they would paralyze the arm of the general government and forbid the powers to protect the lives and property of its citizens. That convention in terms almost placed a lighted torch in the hands of the incendiary and urged the mob to proceed without restraint to pillage and murder at their discretion."
The Campaign
The campaign which followed the conventions was the most remarkable in the long history of our quadrennial spectacles. Terror is always a powerful instrument in politics, and it was never used with greater effect than in the summer and autumn of 1896. Some of Mr. Bryan's utterances, particularly on the income tax, frightened the rich into believing, or pretending to believe, that his election would be the beginning of a wholesale confiscation. The Republicans replied to Mr. Bryan's threats by using the greatest of all terrors, the terror of unemployment, with tremendous effect. Everywhere they let the country understand that the defeat of Mr. McKinley would close factories and throw thousands of workingmen out of employment, and manufacturers and railways were accused by Mr. Bryan of exercising coercion on a large scale.
To this terror from above, the Democrats responded by creating terror below, by stirring deep-seated class feeling against the Republican candidate and his managers. In a letter given out from the Democratic headquarters in Chicago, on September 12, 1896, Mr. Jones, chairman of the Democratic national committee, said: "Against the people in this campaign are arrayed the consolidated forces of wealth and corporate power. The classes which have grown fat by reason of Federal legislation and the single gold standard have combined to fasten their fetters still more firmly upon the people and are organizing every precinct of every county of every state in the Union with this purpose in view. To meet and defeat this corrupt and unholy alliance the people themselves must organize and be organized.... It will minimize the effect of the millions of dollars that are being used against us, and defeat those influences which wealth and corporate power are endeavoring to use to override the will of the people and corrupt the integrity of free institutions."
Owing to the nature of the conflict enormous campaign funds were secured. The silver miners helped to finance Mr. Bryan, but their contributions were trivial compared with the immense sums raised by Mr. Hanna from protected interests, bankers, and financiers. With this great fund, speakers were employed by the thousands, newspapers were subsidized, party literature circulated by the ton, whole states polled in advance, and workers employed to carry the Republican fight into every important precinct in the country. The God of battles was on the side of the heaviest battalions. With all the most powerful engines for creating public sentiment against him, Mr. Bryan, in spite of his tremendous popular appeal, was doomed to defeat.
Undoubtedly, as was said at the time, most of the leading thinkers in finance and politics were against Mr. Bryan, and if there is anything in the verdict of history, the silver issue could not stand the test of logic and understanding. But it must not be presumed that it was merely a battle of wits, and that demagogic appeals to passions which were supposed to be associated with Mr. Bryan's campaign were confined to his partisans. On the contrary, the Republicans employed all of the forms of personal vituperation. For example, that staid journal of Republicanism, the New York Tribune, attributed the growth of Bryanism to the "assiduous culture of the basest passions of the least worthy member of the community.... Its nominal head was worthy of the cause. Nominal because the wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness, was not the real leader of that league of hell. He was only a puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the anarchist, and Debs, the revolutionist, and other desperadoes of that stripe. But he was a willing puppet, Bryan was,—willing and eager. None of his masters was more apt than he at lies and forgeries and blasphemies and all the nameless iniquities of that campaign against the Ten Commandments." That such high talk by those who constituted themselves the guardians of public credit, patriotism, and the Ten Commandments was not calculated to sooth the angry passions of their opponents needs no demonstration here.
Argument, party organization and machinery, the lavish use of money, and terror won the day for the Republicans. The solid East and Middle West overwhelmed Mr. Bryan, giving Mr. McKinley 271 electoral votes and 7,111,607 popular votes, as against 176 electoral and 6,509,052 popular votes cast for the Democratic candidate.
The decisive defeat of Mr. Bryan put an end to the silver issue for practical purposes, although, as we shall see, it was again raised in 1900. The Republicans, however, delayed action for political reasons, and it was not until almost four years had elapsed that they made the gold dollar the standard by an act of Congress approved on March 4, 1900. Thus the war of the standards was closed, but the question of the currency was not settled, and the old issue of inflation and contraction continued to haunt the paths of the politicians. From time to time, the prerogatives of the national banks, organized under the law of 1863 (modified in 1901), were questioned in political circles, and in 1908 an attempt was made by act of Congress to give the currency more elasticity by authorizing the banks to form associations and issue notes on the basis of certain securities. Nevertheless, no serious changes were made in the financial or banking systems before the close of the year 1912. The attention of the country, shortly after the campaign of 1896, was diverted to the spectacular events of the Spanish War, and for a time appeals to patriotism subdued the passions of the radicals.