One week later this mass meeting was met by the silver forces with one of their own at the same place which was addressed by John Gilbert Shanklin, the brilliant editor of The Evansville Courier, and former Congressman Benjamin F. Shively, who was, by long odds, the most eloquent champion of silver in the state.
The battle was on.
Seldom has a more turbulent, revolutionary convention ever met in Indiana than that which was called to order in Tomlinson Hall to fight out the party differences on the money question. Bynum, who had made himself a party idol by his mastery of the tariff question and his haughty defiance of Tom Reed, was hooted to silence repeatedly when he attempted to speak. He stood stubbornly minute after minute waiting for the lull in the storm that never came and finally took his seat. Later the motion of John E. Lamb of Terre Haute to grant him ten minutes for a hearing was hooted down. The gold delegation from Marion county (Indianapolis) was thrown out over the written protest of Kern, the only member of the committee on credentials who was not a silver man. Governor Mathews was indorsed for president, and only the personal plea of Shanklin prevented the convention from making him a delegate at large in the place of a gold man personally selected by the governor. Mr. Shively was nominated for governor and started out on his remarkable canvass in which his speeches were only approached in brilliancy by those of Bryan. Samuel M. Ralston also began his career in state politics as the nominee for secretary of state. And a little later at Chicago Bryan swept the convention off its feet with his famous “cross of gold and crown of thorns” speech and set forth on the most amazing canvass in the history of the republic.
Then the nation began to boil and bubble as never before. Silver men deserted the Republican party, and gold men proclaimed rebellion from the Democratic ranks. Families were divided and father arrayed against son and brother against brother. Nowhere was the schism more pronounced than in Indiana.
The Democratic state organization was disrupted and the state chairman thrown out in the midst of the campaign. Through the summer and on until the election in November great crowds surged and argued and fought at all the principal street corners of Indianapolis from early morning until night, and peaceful citizens were awakened from sleep at 5 o’clock in the morning by wrangling newsboys, embryo politicians, debating in loud and angry tones beneath their windows.
Many Democrats who had opposed the free silver men before the convention and remained within the party during the campaign found themselves the object of suspicion and distrust. Some of these stoically maintained silence. Others tried to make their party loyalty beyond question by promptly reversing themselves on the platform.
“Where are you going?” asked a friend of the eloquent Frank B. Burke, then United States district attorney.
“I am going down to Jeffersonville to answer an absolutely unanswerable speech against free silver made down there two weeks ago by a man named Burke,” drawled the district attorney without a smile.
Many, long prominent in the party councils, openly espoused the cause of Palmer and Buckner. Some crossed the twilight zone into the Republican party, where most of them remained.
The one Democrat in Indiana who had fought for gold whose fidelity to the party was never questioned after the Chicago convention spoke was John W. Kern.