Published October 26, 2024
By Kent Hull
On October 24, 1896, William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party nominee for President, spoke to what the Quincy Weekly Whig called a “vast multitude” in appearances at Courthouse Square, Washington Park and the Emporium Theatre. The event was the “first time a presidential candidate has ever visited Quincy,” the Whig reported, and Bryan’s audiences wanted to see the man “whose eloquence had swept a national convention off its feet and captured” the party’s nomination weeks earlier in Chicago. Bryan was thirty-six years old, just meeting the requirement of Article II, section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution that presidents must be at least thirty-five years old.
At the convention, Bryan had been the “boy orator” Nebraska delegate, but he was well acquainted with downstate Illinois. Born in Salem, Illinois in 1860, he graduated from Illinois College in Jacksonville, studied law at Union College in Chicago, then returned to Jacksonville to join former U.S. Senator Lyman Trumbull’s law office.
Bryan’s Illinois law practice was undistinguished, and in 1888 he moved to Nebraska with his wife Mary, of Perry, Illinois, who became an attorney and suffragette. He entered Nebraska politics, winning election to Congress in 1890, where thereafter and throughout his political career, he advocated principally for one constituency: distressed American farmers.
The farmers’ slogan “ten cent corn and ten percent mortgages” summarized their problem. Mechanization and railroad transportation had transformed American agriculture in the late nineteenth century. Farmers required operating credit as the former cash economy disappeared. Crop harvests in 1893 and 1894 had been poor, with farmers losing buying power just when they faced increased debts. What they could have purchased with 1000 bushels of wheat in 1865 required 3000 bushels in 1895, observed historian Richard Hofstadter in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.
Bryan promised his Quincy listeners “cheap money,” the Whig wrote. For at least two decades farmers and local businesses dependent on the rural economy had urged Congress to enlarge the national money supply by recognizing both silver and gold—not just gold alone—as the basis for the country’s monetary system. The result of “bimetallism” or “free silver,” they argued, would increase the cash available to farmers, thereby strengthening their buying power.
Opposition to free silver came from farmers’ creditors—primarily east coast banks and lenders—who contended bimetallism would allow “hard money” debts, based on the gold-based dollar, to be repaid with inflated free silver currency, i.e., cheap money. The question divided the Democratic Party which, after the Civil War had elected only one President, Grover Cleveland of New York, an ally of the business interests opposed to monetizing silver.
Cleveland’s position alienated rural Democrats in the South, Midwest and Far West, while some midwestern and western Republicans formed a “free silver” bloc. On August 28, 1896, the Quincy Herald reported that southeast of Quincy, the village of Plainville, Illinois saw both a “Bryan club” and a “silver Republican” group forming. In the South and West, a third-party–the Populists– campaigned and defeated the two-party establishment.
Bryan faced contemporary and later criticism that “free silver” economics was simplistic and ineffective against the complex problems facing farmers. The Populists, as well as leaders of the emerging urban labor union movement, argued that the free silver crusade would not counter monopolistic practices of corporations, result in better regulation of predatory railroads or reduce high tariffs which increased costs for farmers and workers. These critics viewed government as subsidizing railroads with land grants and public bonds, which burdened taxpayers, while tariffs supported some manufacturers by protecting them from foreign competition.
Farmers, the Populists argued, received no comparable government support or protection, and their party aided Bryan’s campaign reluctantly. He answered that monetizing silver would begin to shift economic control from the eastern banks and that he doubted the American public would accept such Populist goals as public ownership of railroads.
Bryan’s 1896 campaign, in which he traveled thousands of miles by train and spoke before voters who had never seen a presidential candidate, marked a new era in American politics. His Republican opponent, former Gov. William McKinley of Ohio, remained on his front porch in Canton. McKinley followed the traditional practice of presidential candidates, passively awaiting pre-arranged visits from specially selected delegations who asked questions prepared by the candidate’s managers, to which the candidate delivered scripted replies. Confidentially, McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, acknowledged the effectiveness of Bryan’s campaign and mobilized corporate support and money against Bryan. One McKinley campaign tactic was to urge manufacturing employers to tell workers that a victory by Bryan would ruin the company and destroy their jobs.
McKinley won the election narrowly, with 51% to Bryan’s 46.7% of the popular vote, carrying the Electoral College by only one state (23 to 22). “Free silver” became a less urgent matter because later discovery of gold deposits in Alaska’s Klondike allowed expansion of the gold-based currency.
Bryan remained the leader of the Democratic Party as its nominee, losing again in 1900 and 1908. He was able to guide the party’s 1912 nomination for Gov. Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, who won and, in recognition of Bryan’s stature, appointed him secretary of state. Bryan later differed with Wilson, considering the president’s policies too aggressive as World War I approached, and resigned from the State Department.
By the time of Bryan’s death in 1925, reforms consistent with his 1896 campaign positions had been achieved: a federal farm credit lending program; the Federal Trade Commission to enforce antitrust laws against monopolies and to protect consumers from fraud; significant reduction of tariffs; and the Federal Reserve system to oversee money supply. Within a decade of Bryan’s death, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to help farmers recover from the Great Depression, followed by more permanent programs to address continuing difficulties in American agriculture.
Kent Hull, a retired lawyer living in South Bend, IN, is a long-distance member of the Historical Society. He grew up in Plainville and graduated from Seymour High in Payson, Illinois.
Sources:
“Crowds to See Bryan.” Quincy Weekly Whig, October 29, 1896. p. 1.
“Melrose in the Harness.” Quincy Herald, August 28, 1896, p. 1.
Coats, John D. “A Question of Loyalty: The 1896 Election in Quincy, Illinois.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, (Summer, 2015), p. 122.
Goodwin, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Hicks, John D. The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers Alliance and People’s Party. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931.
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.
Newkirk, Joseph. “Scopes 1925 ‘Monkey Trial’ Polarized Local Public.” Herald Whig, September 27, 2020, p. 9A.
Nevins, Allan. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. New York, 1932.
Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South 1877—1913. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press,1951.
