REALIGNING AMERICA
American Presidential Elections
MICHAEL NELSON
JOHN M. MCCARDELL, JR.
REALIGNING AMERICA
MCKINLEY, BRYAN, AND
THE REMARKABLE
ELECTION OF 1896
R. HAL WILLIAMS
1896
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS
2010 by the University Press of Kansas
All rights reserved
Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, R. Hal (Richard Hal), 1941 Realigning America : McKinley, Bryan, and the remarkable election of 1896 / R. Hal Williams.
p. cm.(American presidential elections) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7006-1721-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-7006-2541-3 (ebook)
1. PresidentsUnited StatesElection1896. 2. United StatesPolitics and government18931897. 3. McKinley, William, 18431901. 4. Bryan, William Jennings, 18601925. 5. Political campaignsUnited StatesHistory19th century.
I. Title.
E710.W485 2010
973.8'8dc22
2009047245
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains 30 percent postconsumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.
For Linda, Lise, Scott, Lori, and Ella
contents
EDITORS FOREWORD
Every election seems critical at the time it is held. Few seem quite so consequential in the broad sweep of history. Yet most historians would agree that of the handful of American presidential elections worthy of the designation, that of 1896 is wholly deserving.
To make such an observation may seem to imply that there is nothing fresh to be said about the topic. And in fact the narrative, in general at least, is well known, often expressed as a series of either/or propositions: gold or silver, city or country, farmer or urban worker, east or west, McKinley or Bryan. Such a formulation draws heavily on what remains the chief rhetorical legacy of that campaign, William Jennings Bryans famous Cross of Gold speech, delivered before a rapt convention of Democratic party delegates who hastened to award him the presidential nomination. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, cried Bryan, 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.
That speech also introduced a view of the competing political parties that resonates in our own time. There are those who believe, Bryan charged, that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, he continued, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
Either/or. Surely a critical election.
The editors realized, early on, that any series on key presidential elections must include a study of 1896. But how revisit, and reconsider, so well known a tale? Much to our delight, R. Hal Williams, one of the preeminent scholars of the subject, someone who has over the course of an academic lifetime examined this election closely and carefully, agreed to take on this challenging assignment. Readers will, we hope, share our delight in the result.
For this is no mere rehash. Three interpretations stand out, and each is likely to be a bit controversial. The first involves Bryan. This is not simply a gifted speaker who takes the Democratic convention unexpectedly by storm. Williamss Bryan sees an opportunity and grabs it. The nomination is a prize he has had in view long before the convention, and by a combination of luck (the residue of design) and calculation, he wins it, as he predicts he will.
The second involves Mark Hanna, whose front porch strategy, actually suggested by the candidate himself, cannily guided his candidate, McKinley, to victory. Williams actually sees Hanna as a human being rather than a caricature, as the first modern political operative who grasps how politics is changing. He is not the one-dimensional fund-raising machine so often encountered but a shrewd, insightful politician who understands what is required to get his man elected.
Finally, there is the retiring incumbent, Grover Cleveland, who fares poorly. He is no portrait in courage but rather an increasingly out-of-touch, pathetically and increasingly irrelevant chief executive, whose party repudiates him in a way no other party has ever repudiated a sitting president.
It remains a riveting story, this clash of personalities, philosophies, and campaign techniques. Recalling the election years later in a famous poem, Vachel Lindsay wrote,
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle.
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.
There were real lines drawn.
A critical election, indeed.
AUTHORS PREFACE
The battle of the standards, the presidential election of 1896, ranks among the most important elections in American history.
This book tells the story of that election. Though it examines state and local patterns, it focuses on national events and figures, tracing the years party battles and the development of a national party system. Conflicting parties and philosophies fought it out in the 1896 election, with the Republicansthe party of central government, national authority, sound money, and activismdefeating the Democratsthe party of states rights, decentralization, inflation, and limited government. A third party, the Peoples party, added to the elections importance. Out of the decades party battles, patterns emerged that governed the nation until the 1920s and 1930s and beyond. In that sense, the election of 1896 became a critical watershed, one of a handful of key events marking the passage between an older era and a new.
The story actually began in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when conditions affecting American farms and factories helped produce the important trends that came together in 1896. Significant elections in 1890, 1892, and 1894 set the scene as well. The story culminated in one of the most hard-fought and compelling elections in the nations history, the stirring contest between William McKinley of Ohio and William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. It ended, tragically, in 1901 in Buffalo, New York, with the assassination of the man who had won in 1896, himself a symbol of the transition between eras. William McKinley, in many ways a modern president, was also the last veteran of the Civil War to sit in the White House.
People who lived through the election of 1896 knew somehow it was important; something recognizable as modern America was taking shape. Industrialism, large-scale enterprise, and specialized, mechanized agriculture signaled the way of the future, yet older economic patterns still held sway. Cities grew and captured the imagination, but the majority of Americans still lived on farms and in villages. Economic expansion, fueled by enormous resources and the labor of millions of workers, established new levels of production but seemed suddenly to vanish in the decades panic and depression, the worst depression in the nations history until the 1930s.
