WILLIAM SEWARD’S GREAT SPEECH ON THE “irrepressible conflict” embedded in the economic life of pre–Civil War America described its competing systems as slave labor and free labor. The free labor system, Seward declared, “conforms to the divine law of equality.” No person was property, even the humblest; all were free agents. “Therefore” free labor “is always and everywhere beneficent.”1
But was it? The nineteenth century saw changes in the nature of work that left many Americans slighted or vulnerable. There had always been apprentices and farm laborers, generally young, working for wages. But everyone hoped in time to set up on his own. Increasingly, however, men worked, in small shops or large factories, for wages lifelong.
Markets changed along with the workplace. Railroads spanned the continent; steamships crossed the ocean. As transportation costs dropped, crops and products competed with those grown or made in other states or on other continents. Your lifework became vulnerable to remote competitors.
There had always been rich Americans and the envy they excited. America’s oldest political party, the Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (later called Democrats), had been founded, in part, to combat “the opulent”—cronies of the rival Federalist Party, grown fat off its policies.2 But after the Civil War, there seemed to be so many more rich. Some presided over tangible enterprises—Cornelius Vanderbilt owned railroads, John D. Rockefeller refined oil—but others—Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew—made, or lost, fortunes by playing the stock market.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the suffering and the fearful focused their anxieties on the medium of exchange. The Civil War had been financed by printing paper money, which required all the skill of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase not to be inflated into worthlessness, as had happened to the paper money printed during the American Revolution. In 1873 America went on the gold standard, backing the dollar with precious metal—historically stable in supply and not subject to political manipulation.
But silver was another precious metal; strikes in the American west had unearthed plenteous amounts of it. Supporters of bimetallism—a monetary system based on both silver and gold—hoped it would have an inflationary effect similar to printing money.
Debtors welcomed the chance to pay their obligations in cheaper dollars. As the century wound down, many farmers found themselves in that position. Between 1865 and 1890, the number of farms in America had almost doubled; increased production drove prices down, while payment on loans and mortgages still had to be met.
The Bible says that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Maybe the monetary system itself was.
The struggle over silver would convulse politics for a season and inspire a speech that made a timeless statement.
In 1890 a new party arose, the Populists, calling for inflation, whether via paper money or silver (the policy of coining unlimited amounts of the latter was called “free silver”). Its candidates won local races in the West and South and five seats in the House of Representatives.
One winning candidate, not a Populist but a Democrat who ran with their support, was a freshman congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan.
Bryan, born in 1860, had grown up in small-town southern Illinois, son of a local politician. Bryan’s political idol was Thomas Jefferson; throughout his life, his favorite gift to celebrity acquaintances was a volume of Jefferson’s aphorisms, arranged by topic. He moved to Nebraska in 1887, with the intention of practicing law and running for office.
He seems almost to have backed into silver as an issue. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” he explained early in his career. “I will look up the arguments later.”3 Once he had mastered the arguments, however, free silver became his cause, his signature, and his passion.
In addition to his duties as congressman, Bryan became editor in chief of the Omaha World-Herald, the state’s highest-circulation daily. The actual editing was done by the publisher, and most of Bryan’s copy was ghosted by the Washington correspondent, but the job gave him a platform and an opportunity to write whenever he chose.
His true verbal medium, however, was speech. His natural instrument was powerful, a necessity for orators in those unamplified days; his wife, Mary, sitting in their hotel room while he gave one out-of-town speech, heard him clearly from three blocks away. Yet his voice was not raucous or strident: listeners called it “melodious,” “musical,” “soothing.”4 Edward Everett brought a text to his lecterns but never looked at it; Bryan spoke without notes at all. He used minimal gestures and few elaborate rhetorical figures. He seemed to be communicating one-on-one, even to audiences that numbered hundreds or, as he became famous, thousands. One newspaper clipping early in his career identified the source of his power as an “entire lack of artfulness.”5
Lack of artfulness took hard work. Bryan spoke so often that he had ample opportunity to test themes and applause lines. He practiced between appearances in front of a mirror, with his wife coaching; when she was in the audience, she would signal with nods or smiles when he was doing well.
These many tweaks, rehearsals, and prompts did not represent insincerity on his part. They were a form of exercise, of mental and physical training, the better to get his message across. The message itself was something that Bryan had come absolutely to believe. Imparting it—sharing it, when his listeners were disposed to agree with him—was his goal.
In 1892 the Populists ran James B. Weaver, a long-bearded Civil War veteran, for president; Bryan, despite running for reelection to Congress as a Democrat, backed him. Weaver won a million votes out of twelve million cast and carried five states, finishing a close second in Nebraska. Bryan won too, despite having been stuffed, via reapportionment, into a new, less congenial district.
It was a good showing for Populism, but a disaster a year later scrambled all political prospects. America, and the world, fell into a depression. Railroads and banks failed; unemployment soared. Economists and partisans trotted out pet theories to explain the debacle. Silverites blamed the gold standard, whose supporters blamed half measures that Congress had taken to placate silverites. Most blame stuck to the president, Grover Cleveland, a gold-standard Democrat. When the economy does well, the president takes the credit; when it crashes, he is the villain. Cleveland, and his allies in the Democratic Party, were doomed. But who would take their places?
The Republican Party held its 1896 convention in St. Louis in June. Its nominee was William McKinley, a fifty-three-year-old veteran of the Civil War and Ohio politics, as genial as he was shrewd. The Republican Party had been born out of a near-religious fervor to resist slavery, which carried other, less savory crusading impulses in its wake. McKinley took care to distance himself from bigots and moralists, hiring Catholics in state government, and soft-pedalling the issue of Prohibition. At the same time, he sharpened his stance on the currency, becoming a partisan of the gold standard, in part to offer a contrast to the man he expected the post-Cleveland Democrats to nominate, Missouri congressman Richard Bland. Bland, who would turn sixty-one in August, had been championing the silver cause so long and so devotedly that he had earned the nickname Silver Dick.
Bryan was determined that he should be the man the Democrats would nominate. In March 1895 he had turned thirty-five—the minimum age the Constitution requires for the presidency. That same month his congressional career had ended; he had hoped, after two terms in the House of Representatives, to represent Nebraska in the Senate, but the 1894 elections had given the state legislature, which made the choice, to the Republicans. Bryan spent his free time speaking and networking. He advised the Populist Party to hold its presidential convention after the two major parties did, so as to leave its choice open. He also declined an offer to be Nebraska’s favorite son at the Democratic convention, urging pro-silver states to endorse the cause, not local figures. He intended to be the favorite son of all the silverites at the convention.
The Democrats met in Chicago in July, in a coliseum built for a world’s fair three years earlier. The hall could accommodate football games, or twenty thousand people, and was the largest indoor exhibition space in the world.
Charles Dawes, a young Republican operative who had lived in Nebraska and knew Bryan personally, warned McKinley that if Bryan got a chance to speak, he would win the Democratic nomination.
Everything conspired to give Bryan his chance. Bitter Cleveland supporters had backed a delegation of progold Democrats to represent Nebraska in Chicago. But the convention seated a slate of silver delegates, including Bryan, instead. When the platform committee produced a document calling for free silver, gold Democrats responded with a minority report, which meant there would be a debate on the floor. Five men were picked to speak—three for gold, two for silver, with the silver supporters going first and last. Bryan and South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman were asked to speak for silver. Tillman wanted to close but said he would need a minimum of fifty minutes. Bryan told him their opponents would not accept a closing statement that long, and Tillman agreed to lead off. Bryan would have the last word.
The debate was scheduled for July 9, the convention’s third day. Anticipation was high—scalpers charged $50 for a seat—but the confrontation got off to a bad start. Tillman looked wild and uncouth—like a “train robber,” wrote one reporter.6 He was in fact a murderer who had got his start in politics by killing black Republicans. His speech was bullying and vituperative, an accurate reflection of his character. “I am from South Carolina, the home of secession.” Now it was time “to accomplish the emancipation of the white slaves.”7 He finished to a chorus of boos.
Senator David Hill of New York led off for gold with a speech that Bryan himself thought “very strong.”8 But he was followed by Senator William Vilas of Wisconsin and former Massachusetts governor William Russell. Vilas, bogging down in detail, was applauded only when he lost his voice; Russell could not be heard at all (he would die of heart failure a week later).
During this cavalcade of fustian, chaos, and boredom, so typical of great national conventions, a friendly journalist passed Bryan a note: “You can make the hit of your life.” Bryan wrote back: “You will not be disappointed.”9
Bryan had been preparing himself with speaker’s tricks—eating a sandwich to settle his stomach, sucking a lemon to stimulate his vocal cords. When it was his turn to speak, he took the steps of the podium two at a time, looking, wrote the poet Edgar Lee Masters, like a “boxer.”10 In his forties Bryan would start to lose his hair, but now he still had a dark shock.
He spoke for twenty minutes. He began by poor-mouthing himself, an old speaker’s gambit—Abraham Lincoln used it for years. “I would be presumptuous indeed to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities.” But humility was particularly suited to this cause and this moment. “The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal; and this has been a contest over a principle.” Some individuals were not quite atoms, though, for Bryan and the silver men were Davids fighting a golden Goliath. “The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.”
At times Bryan seemed to relish the ideological upheaval that he was advocating. “In this contest brother has been arrayed against brother, father against son. The warmest ties of love, acquaintance and association have been disregarded; old leaders have been cast aside when they have refused to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead, and new leaders”—like himself—“have sprung up to give direction to this cause of truth.” Years later, the novelist Willa Cather, raised in Nebraska, would publish a story, “Two Friends,” a remembrance of a young lawyer and an older rancher in a small western town who seemed to form a perfectly bonded yin and yang—the lawyer quick and ardent, the rancher sagacious and slow—until the election of 1896 and the crusade for free silver divided them politically and destroyed their comradeship. Bryan was describing the process in real time.
Elsewhere in his speech, he pulled back from incitement, wrapping himself in the familiar arguments of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party’s founding heroes. Each man had opposed an incarnation of the Bank of the United States, the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, a federally chartered institution that held the government’s deposits and issued currency. In 1791 Jefferson had argued, in vain, that the First Bank of the United States was unconstitutional; in 1832 Jackson had killed the Second Bank of the United States by refusing to renew its charter.
The Banks of the United States, though created by the federal government, had been run as private enterprises. Hamilton had warned that letting politicians issue paper money would be “seducing and dangerous.”11 Bankers with a stake in the game would be guided by their sense of what the market would bear; politicians would be guided by what their constituents wanted. Bryan updated the counterarguments of his party’s historic champions and applied them to the subject at hand. “Those who are opposed” to free silver “tell us… that the Government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of government, and that the banks ought to go out of the governing business.”
By recalling old party battles, Bryan sought to comfort, if not to convince, gold Democrats. But then he became aggressive again, spectacularly so. Hill and Russell represented eastern, urban states, and Bryan let them have it. “You come to us 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.” The Democratic Party’s most effective vote-getting machine was Tammany Hall of New York City; this apocalyptic imagery was not calculated to encourage its election-day efforts.
Bryan’s peroration was the hit he had promised. “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer [the Republican Party’s] 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.”
Bryan had said almost the same thing in a speech to Congress in December 1894: “The money centers”—the great cities and the bankers who inhabited them—demand “a universal gold standard. I, for one, will not yield to that demand. I will not help to crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. I will not aid them to press down upon the bleeding brow of labor this crown of thorns.” Almost the same thing, but not quite. Bryan’s first version was inferior in two ways. It reversed the Gospel chronology: Christ is crowned with thorns, then He is crucified. “And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head.… And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple from him, and put his own clothes on him, and led him out to crucify him” (Mark 15:17, 20). Bryan in 1894 had also put the lesser torment at the climax: the crown of thorns is derisive and painful, but it is the crucifixion that kills. In Chicago, the ever-tinkering craftsman got the sequence and the drama right.
The man who seldom used gestures now also made two, to galvanizing effect. As he spoke of the crown of thorns, he drew his fingertips down his temples, like trickling blood; then he stepped back and stretched out his arms to mime the cross. Protestants (Bryan was a devout Presbyterian) are supposed to be iconoclasts, worshipping in churches uncluttered by Catholic statuary. But here was a living Good Friday tableau.
This was the passage that gave his speech instant impact. The cross of gold would appear as a prop in political cartoons and is still the name by which the speech is known. Bryan, however, thought an earlier passage in his speech was better still, and he was right. It was no reworking of an old standby but a paragraph he had written fresh the night before, and it went beyond the money politics of the 1890s to make a point of permanent value. This passage took the form of a response to the progold debaters.
“We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the cross-roads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world. We come to speak of this broader class of business men.”
The structure of this passage was parallelism, though Bryan shifted his categories halfway through. The small town/big city attorneys and merchants were in the same line of work, different only in scale and location. He might have paired the farmer and the miner with a rancher and a mining engineer, little guys and big guys working on the land and within it, respectively. But then he would have lost his geographic dichotomy, since farmers/ranchers and miners/engineers all worked the same countryside. By introducing urban crop and currency traders, he drew a distinction between producers and profiteers—an old distinction, though always somewhat bogus, for farmers and merchants, large and small, also make bets on future demand for their crops and goods as much as speculators at the wheat pit or the gold exchange.
Bryan’s most important parallelism was his first: “the man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer.” This was applying the Declaration of Independence to economics. All economic men are created equal, however much they earn, whether by wages or profits.
This simple statement rebuked socialism, the theory (most developed in Europe but already established in America) of irreconcilable class conflict. Socialist gradualists hoped that the underclass—Bryan’s toilers—could overturn their oppressors peacefully, by democratic means. Victor Berger, a German-speaking immigrant from Transylvania, born the same year and month as Bryan, would build a socialist political organization in Milwaukee that, in the new century, would run the city government and send him to Congress (radicals would call him a slowcialist, or a sewer socialist, because he focused on issues like public utilities). Anarchists (revolutionary socialists) posited a violent overthrow of the existing order and hoped to bring it about by promiscuous acts of violence (the president of the United States would be murdered by an anarchist in 1901). Followers of Karl Marx, who had died in 1883, foresaw a more disciplined struggle (led by themselves).
Bryan was also contradicting the wilder flights of his hero Jefferson—and of William Jennings Bryan, class warriors both. Jefferson and the first Republican Party had railed against “the opulent.” Bryan and the Democratic Party he hoped to lead invoked burned-out cities and grass-grown streets. But one problem with declaring a class war is the difficulty of drawing the battle lines. Where does virtue end and villainy begin? Jefferson was himself a man of opulent tastes—after serving a diplomatic posting in Paris he brought 288 bottles of wine back home with him—but because his wealth came from owning land and the people who worked it, it was, according to his peculiar calculus, more virtuous than the wealth of Hamilton’s investor class. Bryan spoke of the crown of thorns pressing on the brow of labor, but his life experience little prepared him for addressing America’s workers, who mostly labored in cities. The Bryan who wrote his favorite paragraph said instead that we are all in business together.
Bryan’s credo makes a moral point; therefore, cynics might say, a useless one, for when have avarice and ambition ever paused before morality? But it offers a warning against economic stratification and the terrible arrogance that the very rich, and their hangers-on, can fall prey to. The marketplace—like the Jamestown General Assembly, the free world the Manumission Society wished to broaden, the electorate the Seneca Falls Convention asked to join—is a forum of equals. Some men and women do better than others—they make more money, win elections, see their ideals prevail. One idea that should never prevail in America is that success places them in a different order of being.
After Bryan finished speaking, there was silence. He feared for a moment that he had failed. Then the hall erupted. People who heard the sound compared it to Niagara Falls or artillery. Delegates and spectators laughed and wept, screamed and cursed, embraced, stood on chairs, threw hats, canes, and coats in the air. Silver delegations marched around the hall as the convention’s band played “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” carrying Bryan shoulder-high like a trophy or an idol. The pandemonium lasted half an hour, longer than the words that had set it off. John Peter Altgeld, governor of Illinois and a supporter of Richard Bland, spoke for everyone when he exclaimed that it was “the greatest speech I have ever listened to.”12
The convention picked its candidate the next day, July 10. In the nineteenth century, almost all political conventions were multiballot affairs, the tides of momentum that now play out in polls, caucuses, and primaries over weeks and months, then rising and falling on the convention floor. Bryan’s tide carried him to victory fairly rapidly, on the fifth ballot. The Populist Party, meeting in St. Louis in mid-July, cross-endorsed him, as he had hoped.
He tried to win the election as he had his nomination, by speaking his way to victory. Traveling by train, he covered eighteen thousand miles, speaking over six hundred times, in halls, on platforms, or at stations wherever the train stopped. For two and a half months he bought his tickets himself, until his cash-strapped party finally provided him a private car, laughably named “The Idler.”
The Republicans took the opposite tack, bringing audiences to their candidate. McKinley stayed at home in Canton, Ohio, where 750,000 supporters arrived by train in precisely scheduled delegations, marched to his house, heard him speak from his porch, then marched back to the station, their places taken by the next cohort. The Republicans also deluged the country with over two hundred million pamphlets, the equivalent of fourteen for every voter.
On election day Bryan’s Herculean effort won him 6.5 million voters, a million more than any presidential candidate had ever gotten. But McKinley won over 7 million. Bryan carried twenty-two states in the West and South; McKinley swept the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Electoral College.
One factor that hurt Bryan in the homestretch was a spike in wheat prices, caused by shortages in India, Russia, and Argentina. According to Bryan’s theories about the deflationary curse of gold, this was not supposed to happen; the hard-eyed men in the back rooms of the great cities would not permit it. But McKinley had all but predicted it in one of his porch talks. “Free silver will not cure over-production nor under-consumption.… Free silver will not remove the competition of Russia, India and [the] Argentine Republic.… Free silver will not increase the demand for your wheat, nor make a single new consumer.”13 There was more in heaven and earth than was dreamed of in Bryan’s economics. Worldwide gold strikes at the turn of the twentieth century would have a loosening effect on the money supply, further weakening the case for free silver.
Bryan would run for president twice more, in 1900 and 1908, losing again to McKinley (and thus ceding to him the distinction of being assassinated by an anarchist gunman), then to William Howard Taft. He would remain in public life for almost twenty years after he stopped running, as secretary of state and as a Chautauqua speaker, and though he would repeat the Cross of Gold speech for auld lang syne—recordings of it that are available online are of such reminiscent performances—free silver was never again his primary issue.
The Cross of Gold speech gave the wrong answer to an ancillary problem. But it remains noteworthy—not only for its best paragraph but for the myriad responses it and its author elicited. During the 1896 campaign, Bryan was deluged with gifts and mementoes. The most stirring were two bald eagles; the oddest was a fungus in the shape of his profile. Two sets of parents gave their triplets the names William, Jennings, and Bryan.
Bryan also got letters—two thousand a day, rising to three thousand in early November, a quarter million pieces of mail during the course of the campaign. (By contrast, McKinley as president got about a hundred letters a day.) Bryan and his wife threw most of them away—how could they have kept them?—but five thousand pieces survive. Four-fifths of them were from men, the rest from women and children.
“In all times of great peril to the people,” wrote D. D. Hatfield, miner, “God has raised up a leader to save them from their errors and lead them… to a knowledge of their rights and duties.”
“I have felt the pangs of hunger,” wrote Willis N. Shaw, railroad brakeman, “and if humanity in the United States were as deeply interested in the welfare of this nation as I am you would be elected by the largest majority that any man ever received for any office.… May the God of the widow and the fatherless—the God of the poor and the oppressed—be with you and guide you.”
“God has brought you forth,” wrote W. B. McCormick, furniture salesman, “… to lead the people out of this state of oppression and despondency and into the Canaan of peace and prosperity.”14 Only one correspondent, of those whose letters survive, threatened violence if Bryan lost. The vast majority wrote to cheer him on.
He had acknowledged them as Americans, businessmen, equals. They returned the compliment. They are the equivalents of the Jamestown burgesses, the Zenger trial jurors, the Seneca Falls signers—the ordinary people who accompany the history-makers and make history happen. They are us.