“And not the King’s image,” I filled in. “It is a pity when the clay image has a living heart.”
The Story of a Suppressed Populist Newspaper
BY THOMAS H. TIBBLES
People’s Party Candidate for Vice-President
AT one time there were fifteen hundred weekly papers advocating the principles of the Omaha platform. Some of them had large plants, some only a few cases of type and a Washington press, but all were actuated by one purpose—to make conditions easier for those who toiled on farms, in shops, factories, mines and mills. Among those still fighting up to the first of April of this year was the Nebraska Independent. Many such papers were crushed by various devices, chief among which was that the great advertisers of the land, all being allied with Wall Street, refused to give them any business. Numerous instances could be cited where Populist papers were refused advertisements given to plutocratic papers not having one-tenth the circulation, and paid for at a higher rate than the proprietors of the Populist papers would have taken. In the files of the Nebraska Independent may be found scores of letters from advertising agents, who had been solicited for business, saying: “If you will make your paper an exclusively agricultural journal we will be glad to give you a good line of business, but we cannot patronize it as long as it advocates Populism.” Every reform editor has had the same experience.
Thirteen years ago the agricultural papers everywhere were publishing articles defending Populist principles. Then all at once such articles were seen in their pages no more, and immediately the papers were flooded with high-priced advertising. The religious press was caught in the same trap. It is strange that the devout readers of those papers never once had their suspicions aroused when they saw so many display advertisements of trusts, banks and promotion schemes in their modest little religious journals. Notwithstanding all such schemes, the Nebraska Independent lived and its circulation gradually extended into every state and territory. It became evident that to get rid of it other tactics would have to be employed. To destroy the paper was not the objective. It was to destroy the People’s Party. With the Independent in hostile hands the political fortifications built up by it in Nebraska and other states would be deserted and the Bryan, Belmont, Sheehan and Tom Taggart Democratic Party could walk in and take possession.
The main battle was fought in the Populist state convention August 10, 1904. The proposition to force a fusion with the Democrats under the lead of the most disreputable end of Wall Street, fresh from its victory in St. Louis, on the face of it was most absurd. But the doing of absurd things never ruffles the placid countenance of Mr. Bryan. The idea that there could be any real opposition to his imperial will in Nebraska, aside from the Republican Party, never seemed to enter his mind. Heretofore when Mr. Bryan entered a Democratic or Populist convention, the Fusion Populists and Democrats immediately bowed and worshiped. The only thing that convention had to do was to find out what Mr. Bryan wished and then proceed to do it with all possible haste. It became evident that this convention would have to be handled differently. Mr. Bryan all the winter, spring and summer had been denouncing Judge Parker as a “dishonest candidate, running on a dishonest platform,” and then he had come home from St. Louis, sat down at his desk and the first words that he wrote were: “I shall vote for Parker and Davis.” The Populists remembered how for eight years he had been coming to their conventions, and in his sweet and winning way telling them how noble they were to put principle above party and vote for men of another party if they thought they could advance reform by so doing. Many of them, who had always supported Mr. Bryan since he first appeared on the battlefields of politics, thought that the time had come when he should practice what he preached. Mr. Bryan realized that there was trouble ahead, but it was thought if the Nebraska Independent would support the Bryan plan that a fusion legislature could be elected that would send Mr. Bryan to the United States Senate.
The editor of the Independent was obstreperous. He had had enough of fusion with a party half of which was more disreputably plutocratic than the Republican Party, and whose “irrevocable” rules were so rigid that they required a man, upon a vote of a convention, to come out boldly before the people and advocate a policy he had denounced by pen and voice for eight years. All sorts of schemes were devised to bring this obstreperous editor into subjection to the imperial will of Mr. Bryan. The first was to send all the leading men of the state, from the Chief Justice down, to use persuasion. That failed. Then Mr. Bryan’s personal daily organ in the state tried a new deal. It poured out on Mr. Tibbles the most fulsome flattery day after day. It said if he would only say “fusion” every Populist in the state would obey his command. When all that failed Mr. Bryan came himself. The proposition that he made was that a fusion electoral ticket be put in the field composed of four Populists and four Democrats, Mr. Bryan saying that, “in the event of their election, each party could count the full vote as its own.” The proposition was instantly rejected. Others followed. Mr. Bryan came to the Independent editorial-room four different times, using all his eloquence and persuasive powers to get the editor to consent to and advocate a fusion with a party that had nominated Parker, and whose campaign was put into the hands of the most disreputable gang that ever sought Wall Street favor.
Mr. Bryan gave orders that everything visible, clear to the political horizon, and other things invisible lying behind the floating clouds, should be offered to the Populist convention providing that the Populists would fuse. The battle was fought out on the convention floor. Many Democrats had secured seats as delegates. One Democrat came over from his own convention and answered to the call of Thurston County in the Populist convention which had no delegates present, and voted the fifteen votes that county was entitled to every time for fusion. Out of the hell-broth brewed in that all-night session there floated upon the fusion scum Bryan, Belmont, Sheehan, Tom Taggart and, remember this last name, George W. Berge.