In the years running up to the 1896 election, the Democratic Party was pulled apart by economic and sectional forces. Republicans rejoiced as Cleveland’s hold over his party disintegrated and new radical leaders rose within it, and the GOP regained its strength in Congress. Surely the White House would fall to the Republicans next time. But politics rarely moves in a simple, sure line. What Republican leaders did not yet grasp was that the new movement growing inside the Democratic Party could splinter old allegiances and remake the political system, and not to the GOP’s advantage.
The high point of Democratic unity came on March 4, 1893, when Cleveland was sworn in for his second, nonconsecutive term. For the first time since James Buchanan, the Democratic Party controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress.1
But political power doesn’t equate to political equanimity, let alone unity. In the waning days of the Harrison administration, the Panic of 1893 erupted, plunging the country into severe economic hardship. Cleveland returned to the White House facing an immediate economic crisis. He and many in his circle saw a strict adherence to the gold standard as the best way to shore up the economy. Others, including many Democratic leaders in the West and South as well as farmers and workers, believed prosperity would return only by increasing the money supply through expanded use of silver. This group came to strongly disagree—even hate—how the president addressed the growing depression.
Cleveland, who was not adept at forging unity within his party, began his second term by calling for sound money—meaning gold—and then spent the next several months further infuriating silverites. The approach ignited a political civil war within the ranks of the Democrats. How that war unfolded, how it ended, and who emerged on top would have serious repercussions for the nation’s politics for decades to come.
THE WAR WITHIN THE Democratic Party was sparked by a sharp decline in the Treasury Department’s gold reserves. If those reserves fell too low, it was possible that the Treasury might not have enough of the yellow metal if people wanted to exchange too much of the country’s $524 million in greenbacks or silver notes for gold. If that happened, the value of the dollar would collapse, exports and imports disappear, the economy crater, and people reduced to barter.2
At the time, it was generally accepted that the Treasury needed to maintain at least $100 million in gold reserves to ensure the currency was not in danger. By April, they dipped below the $100 million mark. Cleveland blamed the dropping gold reserves for all the bad economic news that followed that year—the stock market’s collapse in May, a wave of bank failures across the South and West, a meltdown in Western silver mining states when India abandoned the silver standard, and growing unemployment as thousands lost their jobs daily. But instead of worrying about declining gold reserves, many Americans blamed the president’s inaction for the economy. Soup kitchens were soon called “Cleveland Cafes.”3
The president and Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle believed the culprit was the 1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act. They knew silver notes issued under the Sherman Act to purchase bullion were recycled for gold coin, which held greater value. By undermining confidence in the dollar, the law also led European investors to sell American investments, thus drawing down U.S. gold reserves as foreigners took their profits home.4
So the president called on Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Act, arguing the panic resulted from “unwise laws.” Prosperity would not return until the Treasury stopped trading valuable gold for less precious silver. Bad money was driving out good. The president committed political capital to repeal the Sherman Act to halt the panic—and thereby pushed off his planned tariff reforms, an issue he campaigned on in 1892.5
He was savaged by Free Silver supporters. Their leader, Missouri representative Richard P. Bland, denounced Cleveland’s call for repeal as part of “a conspiracy” between English banks and Wall Street. America’s reliance on the gold standard, Bland claimed, led to the depression by shrinking the money supply, causing prices to drop and money to become too dear.
Some silver leaders threatened violence. Colorado Populist governor David H. Waite told a rally in July that “it is better infinitely that blood should flow to the horses’ bridles than our national liberties be destroyed,” earning him a nickname—“Bloody Bridles Waite.”6
As Congress argued over the Sherman Act for the next three months, the country’s economic situation deteriorated. Drought and falling prices devastated farmers, while factory and rail workers, miners, and store clerks lost their jobs. In August, Bradstreet reported on the “enforced idleness of nearly 1,000,000 wage-earners.” Economists estimated two million were unemployed, one of every six workers.7
Williams Jennings Bryan, a young sophomore Democrat in the House from Nebraska, was one of Cleveland’s most vocal critics, arguing the gold standard meant lower prices for U.S. goods and would make the nation “an English colony.” The people wanted more silver, he argued, because it would restore prosperity. Cleveland stood with “the moneyed interests, aggravated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant and compassionless.” Democrats must decide between the “work-worn and dust-begrimed” people and the plutocrats.8
Despite silver rhetoric like that of Bryan, the House repealed the Sherman Act, with Democrats split 138 in favor to 78. For now most Democrats stood with the president, though he had to threaten some with assorted political punishments.9
Senate rules allowing unlimited debate and the bipartisan opposition organized by Tennessee Democrat Isham Harris and Colorado Republican Henry Teller made the upper chamber rougher sailing. By late October, most Senate Democrats wanted a compromise that would placate the silver faction and released a letter outlining one, believing Carlisle supported it. Cleveland was livid, telling the press the law “should be unconditionally repealed” and threatening uncooperative Democratic senators.10
On October 30, the Senate capitulated and repealed the Sherman Silver Act by 48 to 37. Democrats were split, 26 to 18, with all but three of the negative votes from Southerners. The House concurred, but only after Bland accused Cleveland of encouraging the panic in order to force the country under the gold standard and Bryan condemned his own party for ignoring the people. Half the grand bargain of 1890—the silver purchase law that enabled passage of the McKinley tariff—was gone and Democrats were bitterly divided.11
Repeal temporarily stopped the gold reserves’ decline at $84 million, but it raised the political stakes for Cleveland. Now that he had signed the remedy he said would relieve the nation’s distress, the economy was his and the Democratic Party’s responsibility.
The grim economic news kept coming. Joblessness, hunger, and homelessness grew and the confidence of consumers and businesses remained low and political tensions increased. By year’s end, 600 banks and 15,000 companies had closed, major railroads entered bankruptcy, and the American Federation of Labor pegged unemployment at 3 million. These were not the results Cleveland promised.12
In January 1894, the gold reserves dipped to a new low—$62 million—and Cleveland responded by using debatable legal authority to issue $50 million in bonds, paying a hefty 4 percent interest rate in gold. Financiers, foreign banks, and Wall Street snapped them up. Silver advocates were enraged. Kansas Populist senator William A. Peffer accused the president of selling “the people’s credit to appease . . . these misers of Wall Street.” Silver men in Congress retaliated, passing a bill increasing the money supply by requiring all the silver bullion in the mints—$55 million worth—to be turned into coins. Cleveland vetoed it, saying, “Sound finance does not commend a further infusion of silver.” Gold Democrats sustained his veto.13
The veto further alienated silver Democrats. Bland predicted “people will elect a President in sympathy with them—someone not so tender of the interests of the bulls and bears of Wall Street.” A South Carolina Democratic congressman said Cleveland was “worshipping at the shrine of the golden calf of Wall street.” Bryan warned, “The South and West will get together and rid themselves of Eastern domination.”14
THE ECONOMY DID NOT improve in 1894, especially on the Plains, which were suffering from drought and lousy farm prices. That summer, a Kansas farm wife wrote her governor, begging for help.
I take my Pen In hand to let you know that we are Starving to death. Hail destroyed our crops. My Husband went away to find work and came home last night and told me that we would have to Starve. He has bin in ten countys and did Get no work. . . . I haven’t had nothing to Eat today and It is three oclock.15
There was growing civil unrest, including a protest march of thousands of unemployed men on Washington who demanded $500 million in new greenbacks to put the jobless to work on construction projects. The protest collapsed in May when its organizer, Jacob “General” Coxey, was arrested for trespassing on the Capitol grounds. But even if Coxey came off as a crank, the administration appeared coldhearted for its handling of the affair.16
Cleveland gained a particularly vicious enemy who would turn the party against its sitting president over his sending 12,000 federal troops and 3,600 federal deputies to restore order in Chicago and protect railroad traffic throughout the Midwest. This was ostensibly to guarantee the U.S. mail’s delivery, but it was actually to stop violence and break a sympathy strike of railroad workers called to support Pullman Car Company employees who had walked off the job in a wage dispute.17
Cleveland’s actions made Illinois Democratic governor John Peter Altgeld furious. The wiry, slight man with a closely cropped beard was a politician who called officeholders a “cowardly hang-on class.” He boasted of spending “his whole life in the enforcement of the laws,” but gained notoriety by pardoning anarchists found guilty of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. A wealthy real estate developer, he was an economic radical who hated the money power and was thoroughly silver in his views. German-born, Altgeld was intense, angry, and tough, and he hated Cleveland’s interference in his state.
The day after the army arrived in Chicago, Altgeld sent Cleveland a blistering letter calling the action “unjustifiable,” prompted by “men who had political and selfish motives,” namely railroad magnates whose trains were not running. Cleveland had violated “a fundamental principle of our Constitution.” Altgeld argued “the exercise of the police power and the preservation of law and order” was a state, not a federal, prerogative, and demanded “the immediate withdrawal of these troops.”18
Cleveland’s reply was just 128 words. “Federal troops,” he telegraphed the governor, “were sent to Chicago in strict accordance with the Constitution and laws” to end the “obstruction of the mails.” This was “not only proper, but necessary.”19
This angered Altgeld more. He accused the president of violating “the principle of local self-government,” imposing “military government,” and acting like the Russian czar. Altgeld again demanded a withdrawal. Cleveland’s response was even more terse. He had the authority and the situation demanded “active efforts.” The president’s new foe would soon attack him with more than words.20
THAT SUMMER, CLEVELAND GAINED another enemy and the silver movement a powerful education tool with the publication of a thin, twenty-five-cent book titled Coin’s Financial School, the fictional account of lectures delivered by a mysterious teenage financial genius who demolished the arguments of the nation’s leading gold advocates.
Essentially a graphic comic book, the book was the work of William Harvey, a lawyer turned silver prospector turned pitchman for the “Elixir of Life” turned silver lobbyist with a Chicago publishing business on the side devoted to Free Silver. Americans purchased a million copies, leading a Democratic gold congressman to complain about the “little free silver book . . . being sold on every railroad train by the newsboys and at every cigar store” and “read by almost everyone.”21
CLEVELAND’S SUPPORT FROM CONGRESSIONAL Democrats declined with the economy. He had an opportunity with tariff reform to find common ground with silver Democrats and boost his party before the midterm elections, but failed when Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman Tariff in August 1894. When Ways and Means Committee chairman William L. Wilson drafted the bill the previous December, he had put raw materials, such as coal, copper, iron ore, lumber, and wool, on the free list and reduced duties on manufactured items by roughly 15 percent. On the floor, rural Democrats, many strong silver men, amended the bill to put sugar on the free list and create a federal income tax.
But over the next five months, Maryland Democratic senator Arthur P. Gorman added 634 amendments restoring many duties to their levels in the McKinley bill. Cleveland protested, calling this “party perfidy and party dishonor.” However, the Senate ignored him and the House concurred with Gorman’s revisions. A cartoon titled “A Humiliating Spectacle” depicted the president in chains being dragged behind a chariot driven by a triumphant Gorman, crushing a tiny figure under his wheels—Wilson in a professor’s cap. Cleveland was disgusted by the bill and let it become law without his signature. He wanted tariff reform, and if he had vetoed Wilson-Gorman, the McKinley Tariff would have remained on the books.22
The attempt at reform turned into a political fiasco. It kept Cleveland from placating Democratic silver senators and congressmen who supported cutting tariffs and it robbed Democrats of an achievement to run on in the fall elections.23
But not even good tariff reform could have saved Democrats in 1894 unless it sparked an immediate economic turnaround. Democrats controlled Washington, and Cleveland had promised that repeal of the Sherman Silver Act would restore prosperity. With unemployment still high, wages stagnant, business and consumer confidence shattered, and America racked by hunger, homelessness, and deprivation, Democrats were demolished in the midterms. In twenty-four states, no Democrat won national office.24
Ironically, while the Democrats lost many of their congressional seats in the North, the party’s silver wing was left largely intact because it was centered in the South and West. So the defeat strengthened the silverites within the party. Bryan, however, would not be among the Democrats returning to Washington. He had barely won reelection in his previous election, and knowing the year would be tough on his party, declined to run for another term. He would depart the House in March 1895, harboring bigger ambitions.25
When a second round of gold bonds failed to stabilize the gold reserves, Cleveland asked Congress to authorize the issue of fifty-year gold bonds by public sale, to require customs duties to be paid in gold and to retire greenbacks and silver notes when they came to the Treasury. This last provision would prevent paper currency from being recycled to purchase gold bonds but would also reduce the money supply. Democrats who had earlier stood with Cleveland were no longer in office or were too frustrated with his economic failure to aid him. Most senators opposed his proposal, but House Democrats beat them to the punch, defeating the bill, 125 ayes to 243 nays.26
Carlisle then opened direct negotiations with J. P. Morgan and August Belmont, a New York financier who represented the Rothschilds and European financial houses—the kind of moneymen Bland, Bryan, and Free Silver Democrats had lambasted. Carlisle planned to issue bonds using his existing authority, but asked the bankers if they would guarantee that gold would come from abroad and financiers’ storehouses, rather than from exchanging silver notes for Treasury gold or withdrawing gold the bankers had on deposit at the Treasury. Cleveland himself met with Morgan and Belmont to discuss the issue. He could not afford another bond issue that drained the reserves.27
The financiers agreed. The Morgan-Belmont syndicate kept its word, importing gold and drawing on its stockpiles to prevent any further drain on the Treasury’s reserves, which soon rose to $107 million, above the $100 million floor. The infusion of gold came just in time. At one point, the New York subtreasury was down to $9 million in gold and was about to receive a check to withdraw $12 million. Had that check arrived before the new gold reserves, the government could not have paid it.28
On February 20, the Morgan-Belmont syndicate sold on the open market the bonds it had purchased for a profit of $7 million or more. Wall Street didn’t begrudge Morgan and Belmont their profits for averting calamity and shoring up confidence in the government’s finances. But to many in the South and West, the deal proved Cleveland was in thrall to the money power. Democratic Free Silver men raged at this latest evidence of America’s subservience to foreign financial powers. Bryan assailed “insidious bankers” and “foreign financiers” before arguing that Democrats owned “no great debt of gratitude” to the president. “What has he done for the party? He has attempted to inoculate it with Republican virus, and blood poisoning has set in.”29
EACH OF CLEVELAND’S ACTIONS on currency had angered silver Democrats. Now they decided to end gold’s domination and restore “the Dollar of the Daddies,” as Bland and others called a silver currency. That required winning the presidency in 1896, which in turn required beating the incumbent Democrat for the party’s nomination.
In early March, American Bimetallic League president Adoniram Judson “A. J.” Warner tried providing a way to do that. The former Ohio Democratic congressman and Union general organized the Silver Party, which he hoped would attract white metal Republicans and Democrats. The new party called currency “the dominant issue,” lashed both parties for “subservience to the gold power,” and recommended Joseph C. Sibley for president in 1896. He was a one-term Pennsylvania congressman beaten for reelection in 1894 and, unusual for an Eastern Democrat, was for Free Silver. He now raised horses, after selling his oil refinery to John D. Rockefeller.
The Nevada congressional delegation of two Republican senators and a Democratic congressman immediately signed up for the new Silver Party, but there were few other high-profile recruits. Democratic silver men were particularly unimpressed. These insurgent Democrats were more confident about taking over their own party than they were about winning with a fledgling party bankrolled by Western Republican mine owners.30
Not wanting to desert the Democratic Party, Bryan tried summoning congressional Democrats to discuss reorganizing it along Free Silver lines. Texas silver representative Joseph W. Bailey not only disliked Bryan, but considered his focus too narrow, saying, “Man cannot live by bread alone. A party cannot succeed with naught but silver.” Others agreed. Bryan had to settle for a letter signed by thirty-one Democratic representatives, mostly those retiring from the House like Bryan or defeated like Silver Dick Bland. The manifesto asserted, “The money question will be the paramount issue in 1896” and urged the Free Silver Democratic majority “to take charge of the party organizations” and make them “an effective instrument in the accomplishment of needed reforms.” Less than what Bryan wanted, it was nonetheless the first public declaration that silver men would try seizing control of the Democratic Party.31
ONE OF CLEVELAND’S TOUGHEST enemies agreed silver Democrats must mount a coup, and he had an idea how to do it. After refusing an invitation to honor Cleveland on Jefferson’s birthday by saying, “To laud Clevelandism on Jefferson’s birthday is to sing a Te Deum in honor of Judas Iscariot on a Christmas morning,” Altgeld started a national drive to reorganize the party on a strictly Free Silver basis by ordering the Illinois Democratic Party to call a special state convention to decide its position on the money issue.32
Democratic state chairman and Illinois secretary of state William H. “Buck” Hinrichsen and Altgeld knew that Illinois Democrats, especially outside Chicago, were strongly pro-silver. They wanted to attack the sitting Democratic president by rejecting his currency policies. They hoped this would spark other state conventions across the country to rebuke Cleveland and commit to sending delegates to the national convention who would support a Free Silver platform. Altgeld and Hinrichsen knew the Democrats’ national convention rules gave them a better shot at pushing a pro-silver plank through than at nominating a pro-silver candidate. The platform required a simple majority of delegates while the nomination required a two-thirds supermajority. They believed that a silver platform would bind the eventual nominee and attract the million Populist voters who showed up in 1892. Hinrichsen also believed a pro-silver plank would also be attractive to 30 percent of Republican voters, thus guaranteeing a Democratic victory.33
Cleveland responded to Altgeld by issuing a public letter to the Chicago Honest Money League dinner calling for gold Democrats to attend the convention in force, but Bland blasted the gold standard as “a stench in the nostrils of the plain people” and Altgeld criticized the letter, saying, “Its weakness almost excites pity.” A week later the Honest Money League threw in the towel and urged its members not to attend the special convention, knowing they would lose badly.34
Still, the special convention was seen nationally as a showdown, not only between gold and silver, but also between Cleveland and his enemies. The Illinois State Register welcomed delegates to Springfield with an editorial bashing the president for breaking the 1892 Democratic platform’s pledge to use gold and silver as money with equal purchasing power.35
At the convention in the state Capitol, a parade of silver leaders abused Cleveland for his manifold sins. Among them was William Jennings Bryan, whom Hinrichsen had invited. They knew each other from Bryan’s college days. Wearing a light-colored cashmere suit and tan shoes, the Nebraskan was greeted by a demonstration as men cheered and women in the galleries waved handkerchiefs. In an hour-long speech, he described the gold conspiracy as “international in extent and destined . . . to produce more misery than war, pestilence, and famine.” He called Cleveland an “instrument in the hands of concentrated wealth,” saying the president was “not the Democratic party—Democracy is greater than any man.”36
Delegates called for Altgeld, who was not scheduled to speak. Thunderous applause and cheering shook the chamber when he appeared. The governor offered an impromptu defense of Free Silver, arguing the gold standard had reduced wages for workers, prices for farmers, and sales for merchants while keeping taxes, interest, and fixed costs high. Republicans would not solve the nation’s economic woes. “They believe in the doctrine that it is the business of the government to help enrich people and let those few rich people throw a few bones to the poor.” He called for “the uprising of an indignant and a wronged people,” saying, “The Democratic party must again stand for Democracy, and no longer for plutocracy!”37
The convention approved a platform that demanded “the free and unlimited coinage” of gold and silver “at the ratio of 16 to 1 without waiting for the action of any other nation,” and pledged to reorganize the Illinois party on a Free Silver basis. Illinois’s example led seven more state parties to similarly reorganize themselves. Several were expected—Colorado and Utah were both silver mining centers. But Mississippi and Louisiana were surprises.38
The most important special state convention besides Illinois was in Missouri in early August, a result of a letter of encouragement Altgeld had sent to Governor William J. Stone. Missouri was significant because it was home to the leader of the silver movement in Congress, Richard P. Bland, who was the presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
The convention opened at noon, a giant arch hanging over the stage, inscribed “16 to 1” and featuring a bimetallic keystone, half silver, half gold, its columns covered in large silver-and-gold-painted dollars. Bland declared, “Missouri and Illinois in 1896 should fire the first gun” in the battle to control the national Democratic Party. More speakers denounced Cleveland and his policies before the convention adopted a platform that warned of a secret conspiracy that fastened the gold standard upon America without the people’s approval. There was a move to endorse Silver Dick for president, but Bland had the old-fashioned view that the office should seek the man more than the man the office. Silver Democrats solidified control by voting to double the state committee and then named silver men to the new slots. From their regular convention in Fort Worth, Texas, Democrats wired a message of solidarity “for true bimetallic coinage and against a single gold coinage” as they, too, endorsed Free Silver.39
The special state conventions, as important as they were in consolidating and energizing Free Silver support in states that held them, did not constitute a national movement. They were isolated events, without much coordination or follow-up. So the Central Bimetallic League tried creating a national movement when 2,200 Free Silver men met in Memphis in mid-June. Twenty states—every Southern one, most of the West and Midwest, some territories, and Pennsylvania—were represented.40
The case for reorganizing the Democratic Party along Free Silver lines was made in a diatribe by newly elected U.S. senator from South Carolina Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman. Never a man for subtlety and a vicious racist, Tillman eviscerated Cleveland as “first cousin to Benedict Arnold,” described the president’s congressional allies as “cuckoos,” and predicted the Midwest, Plains, and West would join the Solid South in 1896 in electing a Free Silver Democrat as president. Tillman had received his nickname after calling Cleveland “an old bag of beef” and threatening to go “to Washington with a pitchfork and prod him in his old fat ribs.”41
The meeting considered a draft platform that declared “a conspiracy of selfish interests” had caused “widespread depression and suffering” by imposing the gold standard. It called for a coordinating committee of a man from each state to “devise measures to advance the cause of bimetallism.” Delegates enthusiastically approved the document, but it was meaningless. The crowd was divided between advocates of silver men in each party seizing power, backers of the new Silver Party, proponents of fusion between the Democratic and Populist parties, and silver Democrats intent on taking over their party. There was no chance a coordinating committee could resolve the fundamental disagreement over the best way to advance the silver cause.42
After adjournment, three Democratic senators—Arkansas’s James K. Jones, Indiana’s David Turpie, and Tennessee’s Isham Harris—met at the Gayoso Hotel to discuss how they could gain control of the Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee had been elected at the 1892 convention and was narrowly controlled by Cleveland. A parallel structure was needed to counter it, not the new Silver Party or a nonpartisan group. The senators agreed to create a Bimetallic Democratic National Committee of one man from each state. Its goal would be “a thorough organization” of the party on a Free Silver basis as “a necessary and proper means of controlling” the 1896 national convention. Harris suggested this group coordinate with silver Democrats in every state so “none but pronounced advocates of the white metal will be in the national convention.” The three urged interested states to send representatives to Washington in two months to perfect the new Bimetallic DNC.43
On August 14, 1895, silver men from thirty-seven states and territories assembled in Washington’s Metropolitan Hall with Jones in the chair and Hinrichsen as secretary. Speakers drummed home the message that silver Democrats must organize to defeat the administration and gold Democrats, then passed a resolution to undertake “a thorough and systematic organization of the Democratic masses,” and formed a national committee of one man per state, each charged with organizing his state, every county, and every precinct.
Reporters and some pro-Cleveland Democrats did not take the new organization seriously because few participants had national reputations. But leaders of most insurgencies are fresh, and while many involved in this one were not known nationally, they were young rising stars within their states.44
This movement was focused on an idea, not personalities. The men involved were intent on grabbing control of the local, state, and, eventually, national Democratic Party machinery to elect a national convention to write a platform endorsing free coinage of silver at 16-to-1. Then they would worry about who should stand on that platform.
This Free Silver principle was their primary concern, the man who would be their nominee a distant second. Principle first, candidate second. Cleveland and sound-money Democrats may not have yet realized it, but they had a major problem. A band of Rebels was coming and all hell was about to break loose.