The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

When the Fifty-fourth Congress met in 1895, Reed was again enthroned as Speaker, but the spread of silver sentiment had undermined party loyalty. Cleveland's annual Message contained the usual range of items upon government and foreign relations, and devoted several pages to a résumé of the financial operations of the Treasury and the currency problem. It closed with an appeal to the enthusiastic multitude that approved free coinage to reëxamine their views "in the light of patriotic reason and familiar experience." It gave no hint that any other topic was likely to pass free silver in the public view. Fifteen days later, on December 17, 1895, the President sent a special Message to Congress, in reference to an old dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela, that startled the world, upset the stock markets, and brought to life once more the Monroe Doctrine.

For many years the unsettled boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana had been a source of irritation. The pretensions of both claimants were great and vague, while the continuous encroachment of British miners alarmed the weaker country. For nearly twenty years Venezuela had vainly appealed to the United States, asking that the dispute be arbitrated. The United States had taken a mild interest in the wrangle, but no one before Cleveland had felt vitally concerned. He undertook, in the summer of 1895, to persuade Great Britain to accept an arbitration, and pressed Lord Salisbury in a series of notes drafted by Richard Olney, Secretary of State.

The contention of Olney was that the dispute was suitable for arbitration because of the difference in physical strength between the two countries, and that the United States had an interest in an equitable territorial adjustment. He stated the doctrine that John Quincy Adams had advanced in the Administration of Monroe, that interference with the destiny of the South American Republics affects the United States, and asserted that this was now a part of the public law of the United States. He listed the precedents in which it had been advanced since 1823, finding none in which it had been flatly checked. His long arguments upon the interests and proper supremacy of the United States in all American questions failed to convince the British Foreign Office, which denied both Olney's correctness in applying the Monroe Doctrine and the binding force of the doctrine itself. Arbitration was declined, and Cleveland, in submitting the correspondence to Congress, urged that an American court be created to ascertain the true boundary and that the United States afterward maintain it. "In making these recommendations," he admitted, "I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow."

The threat of war conveyed in the Message drove silver from the public mind. Business was aghast, and judicious publicists either questioned the value of the Monroe Doctrine or denied the propriety of its application. The general public supported the President without question, but many of his closest advisers turned against him. His political enemies charged him with raising a foreign issue to reunite his party, or with creating a scare to help his speculations in stocks. Great Britain blustered in her press, but opened her archives to the American Venezuelan Commission. In 1897 she allowed an arbitration to take place, and the affair passed over.

Whatever Cleveland's motive in the Venezuela Message, it did not establish more than a transient calm in either party. His own was doubly split by silver and the tariff, while Republican plans for 1896 had become badly deranged. That party had organized to play upon protection, but found interest in its chosen subject silenced for the time.

In spite of its defeats in 1890 and 1892, the Republican organization had kept up its fight for protection. Quay had in 1888 completed the partnership between the manufacturers who had a cash interest in the tariff and the Republican voters. In manufacturing communities the doctrine had been accepted that prosperity and protection went together. Ruin was prophesied if the Democrats should win. The panic of 1893 seemed to prove this, and when the Democrats passed the Wilson Bill the Republicans asserted that the fear of this had caused the panic. In private, the leaders agreed with the president of the Home Market Club, who wrote in his memoirs, "The bill ... was much less destructive than there was reason to fear." "Our business was not unprofitable during these lean years, but much less profitable than it had been and ought to have been." Prosperity was clearly lacking and to be desired, and among the candidates for the nomination in 1896 was the author of the McKinley Bill, in whom an Ohio cartoonist had discovered the "Advance Agent of Prosperity."

Associated with the name of William McKinley, of Canton, Ohio, was that of Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a citizen of Cleveland who had acted on the borderland between business and politics since 1880. Hanna had been among the earliest to see the financial interest of the manufacturers in the tariff and to capitalize it for political purposes. For several years he had collected money in Ohio for campaign funds, assessing the manufacturers according to their interests and impressing upon them the duty of paying on demand. It had been a business transaction. Hanna had no extraordinary stake in the result, but combined a genuine interest in politics with business standards of the prevailing type. About 1890 he became a friend of the Ohio protectionist and worked steadily thereafter for his election to the Presidency.

McKinley was a tactful and successful Congressman. He believed in the tariff, spoke convincingly in its favor, had few enemies and many warm friends, and was widely advertised by the Tariff Bill of 1890. In public places after 1893 he was repeatedly hailed as the next candidate, but as the silver issue rose it appeared that there might be great difficulty in adapting his record to the new problem. He had favored bimetallism and free coinage in so many debates that the East, where lay the strongholds of the party, distrusted his soundness on the currency question. Yet if he abandoned free silver it was doubtful if he could hold the West. For months his friends, steered by Hanna, who spent his own money freely, endeavored to keep the tariff in the foreground, while the candidate preserved a discreet and exasperating silence upon the dominant issue of free silver.

The most important rivals of McKinley for the nomination were Harrison and Reed, but neither of these possessed a manager as shrewd and resourceful as Hanna. McKinley was nominated on the first ballot at St. Louis, with Garrett P. Hobart, of New Jersey, a corporation lawyer who believed in the gold standard, as his associate.

The nature of the Republican platform had been in debate throughout the spring of 1896. The organization was reluctant to take up the silver issue and the predetermined candidate was uncertain upon it. In the Platform Committee there was a contest involving the opportunists, who wanted to continue the policy of evasion; the Westerners, who felt that silver meant more to them than the party; and the representatives of the populous commercial East, who were devoted to the gold standard. Bimetallists had progressed in their education until most of them saw that bimetallism must be international if it could be at all. Various committeemen later assumed the credit for the plank that was finally adopted. After castigating the Democrats for producing the panic and renewing the pledge for protection, the party denounced the debasement of currency or credit. It opposed the free coinage of silver, asserted that all money must be kept at a "parity with gold," and pledged itself to work for an international agreement for bimetallism.