“The Democratic party has won the greatest success in its history. Standing upon this victory-crowned summit, will it turn its face to the rising or the setting sun? Will it choose blessings or cursings—life or death—Which? Which?”

The bill passed the House by a considerable majority and went to the Senate. In two months it came back with Senate amendments. So earnest and determined was Mr. Bryan in his opposition to the measure that he resorted to dilatory tactics, employing every legitimate parliamentary weapon to obstruct its progress. When finally even the enemies of the bill would no longer assist him in the fight for delay, Mr. Bryan determined to abandon the fight in Congress to carry it before the Democracy of the nation. In concluding his last speech on the bill he said:

“You may think that you have buried the cause of bimetallism; you may congratulate yourselves that you have laid the free coinage of silver away in a sepulchre, newly made since the election, and before the door rolled the veto stone. But, sirs, if our cause is just, as I believe it is, your labor has been in vain: no tomb was ever made so strong that it could imprison a righteous cause. Silver will lay aside its grave clothes and its shroud. It will yet rise and in its rising and its reign will bless mankind.”

Though defeated in the first great contest, the silver advocates were far from dismayed. They began at once a systematic fight to wrest from the administration the control of the party organization. The factional fight within the ranks of Democracy gave early promise of becoming exceedingly bitter. The feeling was accentuated from the start by the personal efforts of President Cleveland in behalf of the repeal bill. In the Senate the silver men had what was considered a safe majority, and it was to overcome this and secure the passage of the bill that the President had directed his energies. His great weapon was Federal patronage, and he used it as a club. Never before in the history of popular government in the United States had the executive so boldly and so openly exerted the tremendous influence of his position in an attempt to force a coordinate branch of government into unwilling compliance with his wishes. Mr. Cleveland’s interference, which finally accomplished its purpose, was angrily resented by the Silver Democrats, and the lines between administration and anti-administration were early closely drawn.

Mr. Bryan, while the repeal bill was still under discussion in the Senate, attended the Nebraska State Democratic convention as a delegate, on October 4, 1893. In the convention the administration wing of the party was regnant, imperious, and arrogant. A platform endorsing the President and his fight against silver was adopted by a large majority. Bryan was even denied a place on the resolutions committee, although endorsed therefor by his Congressional district, which almost alone had sent silver delegates. His course in Congress was repudiated and himself personally received with but scant courtesy or consideration on the part of the great majority of the delegates. When the gold men, flushed with victory, were about to complete their conquest, the discredited young Congressman sprang to the platform to address the convention. His whole person was quivering with emotion, and as he spoke he strode up and down the platform with a mien of unconcealed anger and defiance. Never was he more truly the orator, and never was tame beast so abject and so pitiful under the scourge of the master as was that convention, mute and defenseless, under his scathing excoriation. The following extract will give an idea of the substance of the speech, though the flashing eyes of the orator, the tense and quivering frame, the voice now ringing with defiance, now trembling with emotion,—these may never be described.

“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention—We are confronted to-day by as important a question as ever came before the Democracy of the state of Nebraska. It is not a personal question. It is a question that rises above individuals. So far as I am personally concerned it matters nothing whether you vote this amendment up or down; it matters nothing to me whether you pass resolutions censuring my course or endorsing it. If I am wrong in the position I have taken on this great financial question, I shall fall though you heap your praises upon me; if I am right, and in my heart, so help me God, I believe I am, I shall triumph yet, although you condemn me in your convention a hundred times. Gentlemen, you are playing in the basement of politics; there is a higher plane. You think you can pass resolutions censuring a man, and that you can humiliate him. I want to tell you that I still ‘more true joy in exile feel’ than those delegates who are afraid to vote their own sentiments or represent the wishes of the people, lest they may not get Federal office. Gentlemen, I know not what others may do, but duty to country is above duty to party, and if you represent your constituents in what you have done and will do—for I do not entertain the fond hope that you who have voted as you have to-day will change upon this vote—if you as delegates properly represent the sentiment of the Democratic party which sent you here; if the resolutions which have been proposed and which you will adopt express the sentiments of the party in this state; if the party declares in favor of a gold standard, as you will if you pass this resolution; if you declare in favor of the impoverishment of the people of Nebraska; if you intend to make more galling than the slavery of the blacks the slavery of the debtors of this country; if the Democratic party, after you go home, endorses your action and makes your position its permanent policy, I promise you that I will go out and serve my country and my God under some other name, even if I must go alone.”

But Mr. Bryan was not destined to be driven from the Democratic party. He returned to Washington to persistently fight the financial policy of the administration until the Fifty-third Congress had adjourned. The withdrawal of the greenbacks, the granting of additional privileges to national banks, the Rothschild-Morgan gold-bond contract—these he opposed with the full measure of his mental and physical powers. In the meantime the Silver Democrats began the work of organization and propaganda in every state in the Union. In 1894 Bryan triumphed over his enemies in Nebraska in a convention whose platform declared, “We favor the immediate restoration of the free and unlimited coinage of gold and silver at the present ratio of 16 to 1, without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation on earth.” The Gold Democrats bolted the platform and the ticket. And until the last delegate was elected to the National convention which was to meet at Chicago in July, 1896, the Silver Democrats continued everywhere their efforts. They fought boldly and outspokenly against the administration they had helped to elect, and which was nominally Democratic. The result of their fight was the instruction of almost two-thirds of the delegates for an unambiguous free silver plank, with a certainty that the Gold Democrats, headed by President Cleveland, Secretary of the Treasury Carlisle, and hundreds of the leaders of the party, would bolt the action of the convention.

Thus torn and rent by dissentions, with little hope or prospect for success, the Democracy faced that remarkable convention which was to repudiate the administration itself had placed in power.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
(1896)

In the fall of 1896, within the period of one hundred days, William J. Bryan traveled eighteen thousand miles. He delivered over six hundred speeches to crowds aggregating five millions of people. Reduced to figures more readily comprehended, he averaged each day one hundred and eighty miles of railroad travel, interrupted by the stops necessary for the delivery of six speeches to crowds of over eight thousand each and fifty thousand in all. This was his personal service in the “first battle” for the restoration of bimetallism, acting as the standard bearer of three political parties.