Transcript
Arms Out
July 9, 1896
Chicago, July 1896. About twenty thousand people, one hot hall, and a thirty-six-year-old from Nebraska.
William Jennings Bryan …you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.
William Jennings Bryan You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
For a moment, nobody made a sound. He was talking about money. Whether a dollar should be backed by gold alone, or by silver too. It sounds like a question for a jeweler.
By 1896 it had become a bigger question: whom is the government for? Go back twenty years, to a country that loved politics and decided almost nothing.
Which Was Which?
1868–1892
Election day meant a brass band and a beer wagon. Nearly four in five eligible voters turned out.
No secret ballot. Each party printed its own colored ticket. Everyone saw how you voted. And winners handed out government jobs.
Republicans knew exactly what to tell Union veterans.
Robert G. Ingersoll Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat.
Robert G. Ingersoll Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat.
Plenty of Democrats had fought for the Union, too.
Democrats held the Solid South, where Black men were increasingly kept from voting.
Northern Democrats had the big cities: immigrants, Catholics, and everyone tired of sermons about beer. Republicans had business, veterans, Protestant farmers, and Black voters.
Elections were coin flips. In 1876 and 1888, the man with fewer votes became president. In 1880, fewer than ten thousand votes separated them.
Most years, the parties split control of Washington, so big laws were rare.
Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison. In a 1934 story, Thomas Wolfe asked: Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides: which was which?
The one real fight was the tariff. Republicans wanted it high, to protect American factories. Democrats said it made everything farmers bought cost more.
In 1880, Democratic nominee Winfield Scott Hancock told a newspaper: The tariff question is a local question. He lost.
Honest Graft
1868–1883
Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt called his politics honest graft.
In the cities, the party wasn't an idea. It was a man on your block. He found you coal and work. Then he wanted your vote.
George Washington Plunkitt If a family is burned out I don't ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats…
George Washington Plunkitt It's philanthropy, but it's politics, too—mighty good politics.
Plunkitt's Tammany had once belonged to William M. Tweed. Estimates of what his Ring stole run from thirty million dollars to two hundred million.
The county courthouse was budgeted at $250,000. It cost about twelve million.
The county paid $7,500 for thermometers. The Times valued them at about $158. Plunkitt's bootblack stand was in that building.
Thomas Nast drew the Ring for Harper's Weekly. You didn't have to read to get the joke.
Tweed escaped to Spain, where officials at Vigo recognized him from a Nast cartoon.
Washington had its own version. Railroad insiders sold congressmen cheap shares in Crédit Mobilier. Oakes Ames handed them out. One buyer was James Garfield.
Charles Guiteau wrote a speech called "Grant against Hancock." Garfield won the nomination, so Guiteau retitled it, decided it had won the election, and demanded the Paris consulship.
On July 2, 1881, Guiteau shot the president in a Washington train station. Garfield died eleven weeks later.
His successor, Chester Arthur, had run the patronage machine at New York's Custom House until President Hayes fired him.
In January 1883, Arthur signed the Pendleton Act. Some federal jobs now went by exam. Workers couldn't be squeezed for campaign money.
George Washington Plunkitt This civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age.
So the parties found new money: corporations and the very rich. Remember that in 1896.
Burn This Letter
1884
Republicans nominated James G. Blaine, whom Robert Ingersoll had called a "plumed knight." Letters suggested that as Speaker of the House he'd done favors for a railroad.
In one, he asked a Boston businessman to sign a statement clearing him. It ended, "Kind regards to Mrs. Fisher. Burn this letter." Fisher kept it.
Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland, New York's reform governor, famous for vetoes and honesty.
In July, a Buffalo paper reported that he had fathered a child with Maria Halpin. Cleveland told his friends to tell the truth.
Republican reformers who couldn't stomach Blaine backed Cleveland. Their critics called them Mugwumps, after an Algonquian word for a big chief.
By late October, New York City was marching every night.
Cleveland carried New York by 1,149 votes, out of more than a million. New York decided the election.
Maybe it was the minister's insult, or the millionaires' dinner that night. Maybe the Prohibition vote, or rain upstate. With a margin that small, any of them could have done it.
Cleveland became the first Democrat elected president since before the Civil War.
Though the People Support the Government
1886–1890
In 1886 a drought left Texas farmers with no seed to plant. Congress voted ten thousand dollars. Cleveland vetoed it.
Grover Cleveland I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution…
Grover Cleveland …the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.
Congress already spent a hundred thousand dollars mailing free seed to voters. He suggested sending that to Texas.
He vetoed 414 bills in one term.
Government was never hands-off. It picked sides. It gave railroads land, factories tariffs, and lenders a dollar tied to gold.
Cleveland gave his 1887 message to cutting the tariff.
Grover Cleveland It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory.
He lost in 1888. In 1890 the McKinley Tariff pushed rates near fifty percent.
In 1886 the Supreme Court said only Congress could regulate rates on freight crossing state lines.
So Congress did. The 1887 Interstate Commerce Act demanded “reasonable and just” rates and created the first federal regulatory agency.
Did it work? A railroad president asked his lawyer whether to demand repeal. The lawyer said no.
Richard Olney It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal.
Ten weeks later, Olney became attorney general.
In 1890 the Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed any combination “in restraint of trade.”
July 2 · July 14, 1890 Two Sherman laws
Twelve days later came a second Sherman law, about silver. Keep it in your pocket. The courts would decide whether any of it had teeth.
Walrussia
1867–1890
In 1867 William Seward bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. Under two cents an acre. This is the Treasury's warrant.
The war was over, Europe was grabbing colonies, and American farms needed buyers. Reading a document against that bigger story is called contextualization.
Critics jeered at “Walrussia” and “Johnson's Polar Bear Garden.” Most papers backed the deal. The Tlingit, who lived there, weren't asked.
Steamships needed coal, so the Navy claimed Midway in 1867. Rights to Pago Pago in Samoa and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii followed.
In 1889, American and German warships faced off at Samoa. A cyclone wrecked both squadrons. More than fifty Americans and about ninety Germans died.
In 1889 James Blaine hosted the first Pan-American Conference. He wanted Latin American markets. Delegates refused a customs union but opened a trade bureau.
In 1883 Congress began paying for a steel navy: the four ABCD ships. Where they sailed is the next unit's story.
Sixteen to One
1862–1890
In 1870 this Kansas family borrows a thousand dollars. Wheat sells for about a dollar a bushel.
By 1894 wheat brings forty-nine cents. The debt is still a thousand dollars. In 1870 the debt was 960 bushels. Now it’s 2,000. That’s deflation.
Part of the cause: dollars were scarce. Per American: about thirty-four dollars in 1865, twenty in 1875.
Civil War greenbacks were paper backed by nothing but trust. Bankers wanted hard money, backed by gold. Debtors wanted soft money: plenty of it.
In 1875 Congress promised gold for greenbacks and began pulling them in. The Greenback Party of debtors won about a million votes in 1878.
In 1873 Congress quietly stopped coining silver dollars. Hardly anyone noticed.
Then Western miners struck silver by the mountain-load, and its price fell. Silver men called the 1873 law “the Crime of ’73.”
Their fix was free silver, at sixteen to one. The Mint would coin all the silver anyone brought in.
By 1896 an ounce of gold bought about thirty ounces of silver. Free silver meant more dollars, each worth less. That was the point.
Borrowers wanted cheaper dollars. Lenders and savers wanted dollars that held their value. So did many city workers, who feared prices would rise faster than their pay.
Congress split the difference. Bland–Allison, in 1878, had the Treasury buy and coin silver every month. The engraver, George T. Morgan, was no relation to the banker J. P. Morgan.
In 1890 Western silver senators made a trade with Eastern tariff men. The West got the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The East got the McKinley Tariff.
It wasn’t enough. By 1894 cotton brought less than five cents a pound. Farmers stopped waiting for either old party to fix it.
Tramps and Millionaires
1890–1892
By 1890 the Farmers' Alliances had about a million members and were winning elections. Kansas sent 'Sockless Jerry' Simpson to Congress. He wore socks.
Newspapers said Mary Lease told Kansas farmers to 'raise less corn and more hell.' She denied it. Later she said it was good advice.
On the Fourth of July, 1892, they met in Omaha as a new national party: the People's Party.
Ignatius Donnelly wrote their preamble. He'd also written a best-seller about Atlantis.
Reading clerk, People's Party convention From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.
Here's their list. You're a delegate. The real convention adopted the platform whole, not plank by plank.
When it passed, the hall roared for forty-one minutes, by one reform paper's clock. The Minnesota men beat both heads out of a bass drum.
The ticket: James Weaver, a Union general, and James Field, a Confederate who'd lost a leg. That was the argument: farmers North and South had more in common than the war that split them.
In Georgia, Tom Watson took that argument across the color line.
Thomas E. Watson You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.
H. S. Doyle, a young Black preacher, made sixty-three speeches for Watson. When a mob threatened him, Watson took him in. By one count, two thousand armed farmers stood guard.
In Texas, John B. Rayner, born enslaved, organized Black voters for the People's Party.
Georgia's Democrats answered with fraud, intimidation and murder. In Augusta the count ran to about twice the legal voters. By one estimate, fifteen Black Georgians were killed.
Within a decade, Southern states had taken the vote from most Black men. Watson later became one of the country's most vicious racists and antisemites. In 1915 his newspaper helped incite the mob that lynched Leo Frank.
Weaver won more than a million votes and 22 electoral votes, all in the West. Cleveland won back the White House.
Hard Times
1893–1895
Cleveland had been president again for two months when Wall Street came apart.
In the Panic of 1893, overbuilt railroads went bankrupt, the Union Pacific among them. Hundreds of banks closed. It was the worst depression the country had yet seen.
By 1894, somewhere between one worker in eight and nearly one in five had no job. Nobody knows which. The government wasn't counting.
Investors swapped paper dollars for gold. The Treasury's gold reserve fell under a hundred million. Cleveland got Congress to repeal the silver purchases. The drain went on.
In February 1895 the Treasury sold bonds to J. P. Morgan's syndicate for sixty-five million in gold. It saved the gold standard. Many farmers decided Washington answered to Wall Street.
Jacob Coxey, an Ohio quarry owner, wanted jobless men hired to build roads, paid with new paper money. Five hundred million dollars of it. Newspapers called his marchers Coxey's Army.
Coxey set out from Massillon on Easter Sunday, 1894. His baby son was named Legal Tender.
On May 1, 1894, about five hundred marchers reached the Capitol. Police arrested Coxey for walking on the grass, before he could give his speech.
Jacob S. Coxey Up these steps the lobbyists of trusts and corporations have passed unchallenged…
Forty years later, in another depression, Washington hired millions of jobless Americans to build roads and schools.
That July, over the Illinois governor's objection, Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago to break the Pullman strike.
Congress did pass one thing farmers wanted: an income tax. Two percent, on incomes over four thousand dollars. Almost nobody earned that much.
Between January and May 1895, the Supreme Court ruled three times. One company refined nearly all of America's sugar. The Court called refining manufacturing, not commerce, and left it alone.
In May it struck down the income tax, then upheld Eugene Debs's jail term. The Sherman Act had failed against sugar but backed the Pullman injunction. Workers and farmers saw a pattern.
Coin's Financial School sold hundreds of thousands. In it, a boy lectures Chicago's bankers on silver. Many readers thought the lectures were real. Some pictures blamed the Rothschilds, recycling an old hatred of Jewish bankers.
By 1896 the silver men didn't need a third party. They were about to take over one of the old ones.
Cross of Gold
June–July 1896
In June, Republicans nominated William McKinley of Ohio, the tariff man, on a platform for gold. Silver Republicans from the West walked out.
In July the Democrats met in Chicago, and the silver men had the votes. Cleveland’s gold delegates sat and watched their party leave them.
The debate over the platform ended with a thirty-six-year-old from Nebraska.
William Jennings Bryan The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer.
Later, the cheering got so loud he had to ask for quiet.
William Jennings Bryan I have only ten minutes left, and I ask you to let me occupy that time.
William Jennings Bryan I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic.
William Jennings Bryan But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in this country.
William Jennings Bryan Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.
William Jennings Bryan You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
The next day they nominated him for president, on the fifth ballot. About a hundred and sixty delegates, mostly gold men, sat out the vote.
Test his claim the way the AP exam will ask you to. Support: in 1890, about three-quarters of what America sold abroad came from farms.
Complicate it: by the mid-1880s, American factories were producing more value than American farms. Refute it? Wait for November.
The Populists were trapped. Run their own candidate and split the silver vote, or back Bryan and disappear into the Democrats.
They backed Bryan, but not his running mate, Arthur Sewall, a Maine shipbuilder and banker. They named Tom Watson instead. Bryan ran with two.
The Front Porch
1896–1900 (→ 1913)
Bryan campaigned like no candidate before him. He covered about eighteen thousand miles by train and gave more than six hundred speeches.
McKinley stayed home in Canton, Ohio, and let the country come to him. Cheap railroad excursions brought some 750,000 visitors. Souvenir hunters carried off his fence in pieces.
His manager, Mark Hanna, raised millions from bankers and corporations that feared free silver. Hanna spent it on pamphlets and speakers across the country.
Some employers told their workers the plant would close if Bryan won. That fall the price of wheat rose, and Bryan's best argument got harder to make.
McKinley won, 271 electoral votes to 176. He took the Northeast, the Midwest and nearly every big city. Bryan had said the cities rest on the prairies. The cities outvoted them.
Republicans won seven of the nine presidential elections from 1896 through 1928. The People's Party faded within a few years.
Then the money question settled itself. Strikes in South Africa and the Klondike more than doubled the world's gold output in the 1890s.
Prices rose. The farmers got their inflation after all, from gold. In 1900, Congress made gold the official standard.
But look at the list they wrote in Omaha. A federal income tax. Senators elected by voters. A secret ballot.
Postal savings. Regulated railroads. An eight-hour day. The Populists lost the election. Within a generation, reformers called Progressives had passed much of their list.
Whichever badge you pinned in Chicago: gold won the vote, and silver got its rising prices anyway. Since 1971 the dollar hasn't been backed by gold or silver. It's backed by the government.
The fight over metal was a fight over whether government should act for the people who were losing. After 1896, that question never left American politics.