History of the United States, Volume 5

by Elisha Benjamin Andrews

Parade of the Sound Money League, New York, 1900. Passing the Reviewing Stand.

Then there was the awkwardness with which the Administration had treated the Filipinos. In 1900 it seemed clear that these people could never be brought under the flag otherwise than by coercion. Anti-imperialists were not alone in the conviction that Aguinaldo’s followers had been needlessly contemned, harassed, and exasperated, and that had greater frankness, tact, and forbearance been used toward them they would, of their own accord, have sought the shelter of the Stars and Stripes. Moreover, our measures toward the Filipinos had alienated Cuba, so that the voluntary adhesion of this island to the United States, so desirable and once so easily within reach, was no longer a possibility; while the coercion of Cuba, in view of our profession when we took up arms for her, would be condemned by all mankind as national perfidy.

The sympathy of official Republicanism with the British in the Boer War tended to solidify the Irish vote as Democratic, but—and it was among the novelties of the campaign—Republicans no longer feared to alienate the Irish. The Government’s apparent apathy toward the Boers also drove into the Democratic ranks for the time a great number of Dutch and German Republicans. Colored voters were in this hegira, believing that the adoption of the “subject-races” notion into American public law and policy would be the negro’s despair. The championing of this movement by the Republican party they regarded as a renunciation of all its friendship for human liberty.

The Republican campaign watchword was “Protection.” Press and platform dilated on the fat years of McKinley’s administration as amply vindicating the Dingley Act. “The full dinner pail,” said they, “is the paramount issue.” Trusts and monopolies they denounced, as their opponents did, but they declared that these “had nothing to do with the tariff.” There was wide and intense hostility toward monopolistic organizations. They were decried on all hands as depressing wages, crushing small producers, raising the prices of their own products and lowering those of what they bought, depriving business officials and business travellers of positions, and working a world of other mischief politically, economically, and socially. They had rapidly multiplied since the Republicans last came into power, and nothing had been done to check the formation of them or to control them.

Why, then, was not Democracy triumphant in the campaign of 1900? When the lines were first drawn a majority of the people probably disapproved the Administration’s departure into fields of conquest, colonialism, and empire. Republicans themselves denied that a “full dinner pail” was the most fundamental of considerations. Few Republican anti-imperialists were saved to the party by the venerable Senator Hoar’s faith that after a while it would surely retrieve the one mistake marring its record. Nor was it that men like Andrew Carnegie could never stomach the Kansas City and Chicago heresies, or that the Republicans had ample money, or yet that votes were attracted to the Administration because of its war record and its martial face. Agriculture had, to be sure, been remunerative. Also, before election, the strike in the Pennsylvania hard coal regions had, at the earnest instance of Republican leaders, been settled favorably to the miners, thus enlisting extensive labor forces in support of the status quo; but these causes also, whether by themselves or in conjunction with the others named, were wholly insufficient to explain why the election went as it did.

A partial cause of Mr. Bryan’s defeat in 1900 was the incipient waning of anti-imperialism, the conviction growing, even among such as had doubted this long and seriously, that the Administration painfully faulty as were some of its measures in the new lands, was pursuing there absolutely the only honorable or benevolent course open to it under the wholly novel and very peculiar circumstances.

A deeper cause—the decisive one, if any single cause may be pronounced such—was the fact that Mr. Bryan primarily, and then, mainly owing to his strong influence, also his party, misjudged the fundamental meaning of the country’s demand for monetary reform. The conjunction of good times with increase in the volume of hard money made possible by the world’s huge new output of gold, might have been justly taken as vindicating the quantity theory of money value, prosperity being precisely the result which the silver people of 1896 prophesied as certain in case the stock of hard money were amplified. Bimetallists could solace themselves that if they had, with all other people, erred touching the geology of the money question, in not believing there would ever be gold enough to stay the fall of prices, their main and essential reasonings on the question had proved perfectly correct. Good fortune, it might have been held, had removed the silver question from politics and remanded it back to academic political economy.

Probably a majority of the Democrats in 1900 felt this. At any rate the Kansas City convention would have been quite satisfied with a formal reaffirmation of the Chicago platform had not Mr. Bryan flatly refused to run without an explicit platform restatement of the 1896 position. His hope, no doubt, was to hold Western Democrats, Populists, and Silver Republicans, his anti-imperialism meanwhile attracting Gold Democrats and Republicans, especially at the East, who emphatically agreed with him on that paramount issue. But it appeared as if most of this, besides much else that was quite as well worth while, could have been accomplished by frankly acknowledging and carefully explaining that gold alone had done or bade fair to do substantially the service for which silver had been supposed necessary; for which, besides, it would really have been required but for the unexpected and immense increase in the world’s gold crop through a long succession of years.

The Republican leaders gauged the situation better. Mr. McKinley, to a superficial view inconsistent on the silver question, was on this point fundamentally consistent throughout. With all the more conservative monetary reformers he merely wished the fall of prices stopped, and such increment to the hard money supply as would effect that result. The metal, the kind of money producing the needed increase was of no consequence. When it became practically certain that gold alone, at least for an indefinite time, would answer the end, he was willing to relinquish silver except for subsidiary coinage.