William Jennings Bryan: A Concise But Complete Story of His Life and Services

by Harvey Ellsworth Newbranch

In explanation of this phenomenon it may be said that of all the functions of government none is more important than the power to regulate the quality and quantity of its circulating medium; none more freighted either with prosperity or disaster to its people; and none more liable to make demagogues of statesmen and knaves and hypocrites of those in authority.

The first overt act in the fight against bimetallism, which theretofore had been insidious, was the demand of the Cleveland administration and the powers that were behind it for the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman Act. The clause which was aimed at provided for the purchase by the government of bar silver sufficient for the annual coinage of $54,000,000. With its repeal would disappear from the Federal statute books the last vestige of authority for the coinage of silver money other than subsidiary coins.

In the fight against the administration over this measure Mr. Bryan took a leading part. He was one of the public men whose professions and practices in the matter of financial legislation were not at variance. In his first campaign for Congress, in 1890, he had inserted in his platform this plank, written by himself:

“We demand the free coinage of silver on equal terms with gold and denounce the efforts of the Republican party to serve the interest of Wall Street as against the rights of the people.”

In 1891 he had secured the adoption of a free silver plank in the Nebraska Democratic platform. In 1892 he made a hard fight for a similar plank in the state platform, but lost by a very close vote. On the day before the national convention which nominated Mr. Cleveland for president, Mr. Bryan was renominated for Congress on a platform in which free coinage was made the paramount issue, and throughout the campaign he devoted to it the major portion of his time. In this way, from free choice and impelling conviction, Mr. Bryan had committed himself to the doctrine of bimetallism and had declared his plan for putting it into practice.

Mr. Bryan made his first speech in Congress against unconstitutional repeal on February 9, 1893. In it he said:

“I call attention to the fact that there is not in this bill a single line or sentence which is not opposed to the whole history of the Democratic party. We have opposed the principle of the national bank on all occasions, and yet you give them by this bill an increased currency of $15,000,000. You have pledged the party to reduce the taxation upon the people, and yet, before you attempt to lighten this burden, you take off one-half million of dollars annually from the national banks of the country; and even after declaring in your national platform that the Sherman act was a ‘cowardly makeshift’ you attempt to take away the ‘makeshift’ before you give us the real thing for which the makeshift was substituted.... Mr. Speaker, consider the effect of this bill. It means that by suspending the purchase of silver we will throw fifty-four million ounces on the market annually and reduce the price of silver bullion. It means that we will widen the difference between the coinage and bullion value of silver and raise a greater obstacle in the way of bimetallism. It means to increase by billions of dollars the debts of our people. It means a reduction in the price of our wheat and our cotton. You have garbled the platform of the Democratic party. You have taken up one clause of it, and refused to give us a fulfilment of the other and more important clause, which demands that gold and silver shall be coined on equal terms without charge for mintage.

“Mr. Speaker, this can not be done. A man who murders another shortens by a few brief years the life of a human being; but he who votes to increase the burden of debts upon the people of the United States assumes a graver responsibility. If we who represent them consent to rob our people, the cotton-growers of the South and the wheat-growers of the West, we will be criminals whose guilt can not be measured by words, for we will bring distress and disaster to our people.”

In thus boldly and positively aligning himself against the policy of the dominant wing of his own party, which would soon be backed by the incoming Cleveland administration, Mr. Bryan acted with his characteristic devotion to principle. He could not help seeing that all the odds were apparently against that faction of his party with which he threw in his fortunes. Mr. Cleveland and most of the old, honored, and powerful leaders of democracy, it was known, would join in the fight against silver. They would have the powerful aid of the great Republican leaders and be backed by the almost united influence of the hundreds of daily newspapers in all the large cities. Wealth, influence, experience, and so-called “respectability” were all to be the property of the Cleveland wing. Many trusted leaders of the old-time fight for silver succumbed to the temptation and identified themselves with the dominant faction. Not so Mr. Bryan. On the failure of the bill to pass he returned home and devoted all his time to a thorough study of finance and of money, making the most careful and complete preparation for the fight which he saw impending.

The great struggle, which Mr. Bryan has termed “the most important economic discussion which ever took place in our Congress” was precipitated by President Cleveland when he called Congress to meet in special session on August 7, 1893. Mr. Wilson, of West Virginia, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, introduced in the House the administration measure for the unconditional repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman Act.