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

by Harvey Ellsworth Newbranch

“You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country....

“My friends, we declare that this nation is able to legislate for its own people on every question, without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation on earth.... It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but three millions in number, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation. Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends, that will never be the verdict of our people. Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they say bimetallism is good, but that we can not have it until other nations help us, we reply that, instead of having a gold standard because England has, we will restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States has it. If they dare come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interest, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

SENATOR J. K. JONES

Mr. Bryan was nominated for President on the fifth ballot by a well-nigh unanimous vote, save for the 162 eastern delegates who, while holding their seats, sullenly refused to take any part in the proceedings. The demonstration following the nomination was even wilder and more prolonged than the memorable scene that marked the conclusion of his speech.

For Vice-President Arthur Sewall, of Maine, was nominated. With this ticket, on a platform declaring for free silver, opposing the issue of bonds and national bank currency, denouncing “government by injunction,” declaring for a low tariff, the Monroe doctrine, an income tax, and election of senators by a direct vote of the people, the democracy went before the country with a confidence and exuberance little anticipated before the convention met, and scarcely justified, as later proven, by the outcome.

The Populist and Silver Republican conventions met in St. Louis late in July. The latter endorsed the nominees of the Chicago platform and made them their own. The populists, however, while nominating Mr. Bryan, refused to nominate Mr. Sewall, naming for vice-president Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia.

The gold democrats met at Indianapolis on September 2, and nominated John M. Palmer, of Illinois, and Simon Buckner, of Kentucky, adopting the first gold standard platform ever presented to the people of the United States for endorsement. They called themselves “National Democrats,” but in the outcome carried but one voting precinct in the nation, and that in Kansas. Four votes were cast in the precinct, two for Palmer, and one each for Bryan and McKinley. In the precinct in Illinois where Mr. Palmer himself, with his son and coachman, voted, not a single ballot was cast for the nominee of the “National Democracy.” The fact was that a new party alignment was the inevitable result of the Chicago convention, the reorganized democracy gaining largely beyond the Missouri, but losing heavily east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. Hundreds of thousands of gold Democrats in the populous states, under the leadership of Grover Cleveland and John G. Carlisle, while pretending to support Palmer and Buckner, voted secretly for McKinley, whose platform was a virtual endorsement of the Cleveland administration, as Bryan’s platform repudiated and condemned it.

The campaign was remarkable not only for Bryan’s wonderful campaigning, but for the bitter feeling that pervaded both organizations. The Republicans particularly excelled in vituperative abuse. They began the use of billingsgate immediately after the Chicago convention had adjourned, applying to it such terms as “rabble,” “wild Jacobins,” “anarchists” and “repudiators,” while Bryan was characterized as a “boy orator” “a demagogue” and “an ass.” The Cleveland Leader said:

“Bryan, with all his ignorance, his cheap demagogy, his intolerable gabble, his utter lack of common sense, and his general incapacity in every direction, is a typical Democrat of the new school. His weapon is wind. His stock in trade is his mouth. Mr. McKinley’s election—and we apologize to Mr. McKinley for printing his name in the same column with that of Bryan—is no longer in any doubt whatever. We salute the next President. As for Bryan, he is a candidate for the political ash-heap.”