To the extent that there was a front-runner in what was a broad and unruly group, it was Richard “Silver Dick” Bland, a US representative from Missouri whose nickname reflected his commitment to the populist metal. Bland had been the coauthor of the important Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which required the US government to buy millions of dollars’ worth of silver every month, to be minted and circulated as coins. He had not lost his passion for the cause of silver; in March he had referred to Cleveland’s gold standard as “a stench in the nostrils of the plain people.” Bland’s chances for the presidency, however, were slim; he was considered, at nearly 61 years of age, too old for the job. Out of arrogance or indifference, Bland chose not to attend the Chicago convention in early July, staying instead on his farm in Lebanon, Missouri, and communicating with his well-organized team via telegraph.
Bryan’s plan could not have been more different. He traveled from Lincoln with the feisty Nevada Democrats in a multi-railcar convoy, festooned with banners reading “Nebraska First to Declare 16 to 1” and “The William Jennings Bryan Club.” The convention was held in the Chicago Coliseum, at the time the largest permanent exhibition space in the world, with a floor of five-and-a-half acres and seating capacity for 20,000 people.
For years, the silver forces had been gaining steam and appealing to a mass audience. A colleague of Bryan’s had produced a pamphlet called Coin’s Financial School, which leaned heavily on the “Crime of ’73” and depicted European bankers (“The Rothschilds”) as an octopus that ruled the world by owning half of all its gold and enforcing a gold standard; it sold over a million copies. The pamphlet spawned several sequels and imitators, making the 1890s a kind of “silver age” for pot-stirring, populist mass literature, much of which depicted the behavior of eastern bankers as a plot against farmers and workers, and some of which spilled over into anti-Semitic stereotypes.4
For all the silver movement’s prominence, the raucous, radical environment in Chicago startled the gold men. When William C. Whitney—one of the wealthiest men in America, who had managed Cleveland’s 1892 campaign and was considered a viable pro-gold candidate for ’96—arrived in Chicago, the ceaseless carnival of silver hats and banners made him dispatch a team to take the temperature of the crowd as he hunkered down in his hotel suite. Upon return, one of his men said, “For the first time I can understand the scenes of the French Revolution!” The influence of the would-be Jacobins was everywhere. Even the choice of the convention’s temporary chairman—normally a formality—was subject to the silver-gold litmus test, and the silverites won the battle.
In the maelstrom, Bryan could see a chance to seize the nomination, or perhaps a cabinet seat or the vice-presidential slot. But one man whose blessing he needed, Illinois governor John Altgeld, proved difficult to persuade. Weeks before the convention, Bryan showed Altgeld his sample speeches and asked for comment and support. Altgeld’s response typified the reaction that many Democrats had to Bryan: “You are young yet. Let Bland have the nomination this time. Your time will come.”
The pro-gold forces seemed to know that they were licked. Defense of gold at the convention was not especially robust, and was notably practical rather than passionate or moral. On the third day of the convention, July 9, David Bennett Hill, a New York senator who supported bimetallism in theory but aligned himself with Cleveland politically, spoke for the East Coast gold supporters, declaring himself “a Democrat, not a revolutionist.” The issue of a monetary standard, Hill asserted, was simply not one that Americans were capable of solving on their own. “We should not attempt the experiment of the free and unlimited coinage of silver without cooperation of other great nations,” Hill said. “It is not a question of patriotism, it is not a question of courage, it is not a question of loyalty. It is a question of finance. It is a question of economics. It is not a question which men, ever so brave, can solve.” International bimetallism might be the best course, Hill said, but without cooperation from the rest of the world, a single gold standard was best. “I know that it is said by enthusiastic friends that America can mark out a course for herself. I know that that idea appeals to the pride of the average American, but I beg to remind you that if that suggestion be carried out to its legitimate conclusion, you might as well do away with our international treaties.”5 Leaving aside the economic merits of this internationalist argument, its most fascinating aspect is that it would be rejuvenated throughout the twentieth century—but as an argument against the gold standard and in favor of some more expedient monetary regime.
Although tepid, Hill’s speech and those of his colleagues were better received than the defenses of silver, which failed to ignite most of the sympathetic crowd. Bryan had maneuvered to be the last speaker on the main topic. He had been practicing versions of the speech for years; some of the best-known metaphors had even been delivered on the floor of Congress. But this was a combustible combination of speaker and audience. Bryan’s speech was a masterpiece of Americana, an appeal for a vital if nostalgic vision of the nation’s past wrapped in a plea for inclusivity. The trouble with the “gold men,” Bryan argued, was that they had defined the interest of the businessman too narrowly. “The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—and who begins in the spring and toils all summer—and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country created wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain,” Bryan said. Here was a class distinction and a theory of value to warm the hearts of any socialist—the ruling class makes its money from speculation on the backs of the workers. The agrarian man is virtuous and creates true value, the urban dweller is speculative and parasitic. The latter scores his victory with piles of gold, while the former demands justice in silver.
And lest there be any doubt what happens when the classes conflict, Bryan offered an almost Biblical prophecy: “You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. 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. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” It is worth remembering that the primary targets for this tirade were Bryan’s fellow Democrats.
Bryan’s themes hit precisely the contours of historian Richard Hofstadter’s definition of progressivism as “the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine, and with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was also believed to have been lost.”6 What Bryan achieved was to fuse this sentiment to a monetary policy: gold was the corrupting modern influence that could be defeated only by virtuous silver.
As Bryan built to his conclusion, he invoked one of the giants of the Democratic Party: “What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of organized wealth.” Jackson, of course, had been a steadfast supporter of gold, but Bryan managed to borrow Jackson’s energy while switching his signature metal. “If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. 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. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
With these final lines, Bryan pressed his fingers against his temples to illustrate a crown of thorns, and stretched his arms out perpendicular to illustrate a crucifixion—a pose he held for a full five seconds. After a moment of stunned silence, the hall exploded with cheers. Bryan’s political club had been given red bandanas that morning, and now they were enthus
iastically swirling them in the air to the sounds of whooping and chanting. As Bryan walked through the hall past the Nebraska delegation, he “was caught in the whirlwind of frenzied enthusiasm and lifted high on the shoulder of delegates.”7
Whomever the delegates would end up nominating, the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson, with its moralistic insistence that gold was the only true money and all forms of debt and paper currency were sins, seemed to be dead. That cause, going forward, would now be championed by the Republicans, who themselves were not entirely ready to embrace it uniformly. For his part, Bryan felt himself like a great conductor of men. “The audience seemed to rise and sit down as one man,” Bryan recalled in a memoir. They “acted like a trained choir—in fact, I thought of a choir as I noted how instantaneously and in unison they responded to each point I made.”8
The political reality, however, was less harmonious. Despite the acclaim the speech brought, it took five ballots before Bryan won the nomination. The Democrats were hopelessly factionalized; if they had been more united, even in favor of silver, it seems unlikely that Bryan would have been the nominee. In order to balance the ticket, Bryan added a millionaire shipbuilder and railroad executive, an odd choice for the candidate of the working class. Outside the Chicago hall, some heard in the silverite rhetoric the stirrings of secession; others felt that for a national party to stray so far from the true path of gold was disastrous. “The Chicago platform invites us to establish a currency which will enable a man to pay his debts with half as much property as he would have to use in order to pay them now,” scolded Charles Dana, the influential editor of the New York Sun, who had been one of Grover Cleveland’s most loyal supporters. “This proposition is dishonest.” “The Democratic party has simply committed suicide,” lamented the Minneapolis Tribune. The paper predicted that a sizable group of Democrats would vote for Republican William McKinley “as the most effectual mode of defeating the most unblushing and dangerous conspiracy against the public credit and the faith and honor of the country that was ever organized into a political movement.”9
The Tribune was correct; almost immediately after Bryan’s nomination, a group of more conservative, pro-gold Democrats hastily formed a “National Democratic Party.” While its chosen presidential candidate did not win a single state, the party was nonetheless able to run in all but seven states and to field congressional candidates in twenty states—a remarkable feat given the severe time constraints. In addition, the short-lived party attracted the support of many in the Democrats’ more conservative wing, including a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson.10
The turnout was high and the election was reasonably close—McKinley won about 600,000 more votes than Bryan, and the state count was 23 to 22—but more importantly, for the first time since 1872 the victorious candidate had actually won a popular and electoral majority. There were reports of bosses pressuring workers to vote Republican, and allegations of fraud, though it is difficult to know whether these phenomena were more pronounced in 1896 than in an “average” presidential election. The voices of silver had spoken with the most eloquent tongue available, but had still not captured most Americans. The country reacted in a time of high factionalism, akin to wartime patriotism, by rallying around gold.
From the very beginning of McKinley’s presidency, he made it clear that “hard money” was his priority. In his inaugural, McKinley restated the old prejudices against nonmetallic money: “The several forms of our paper money offer, in my judgment, a constant embarrassment to the Government.” And yet, despite the gold-fueled Republican victory at the polls, a full-on embrace of a unimetallic standard was not quickly accomplished. One crucial factor was support from the business and financial community. The Morgan coziness with Grover Cleveland’s Democratic administration did not extend to the Bryan wing of the party. Throughout the 1890s, bankers and business owners waged an unprecedented campaign to convince at least part of Bryan’s potential audience to support “sound money.” This effort included a multiday monetary convention in Indianapolis and the funding of several magazines and pamphlets designed to compete with Coin’s Financial School and similar silverite publications. This clash of ideas represented the first time that both major political parties acknowledged that an urban, industrialized nation of working and middle classes was a permanent feature of American society, and the battlefield on which future campaigns would be fought.11
Yet the most decisive factor in moving the United States to a gold-only standard was the discovery of new troves of gold in both North America and South Africa. Indeed a second gold rush, even more improbable and treacherous than the first, began in the late 1890s. A month after Bryan’s speech, an American prospector discovered gold in Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River in the Yukon Territory of Canada. Starting the next year, an estimated 100,000 people in both Canada and the United States set off for the Yukon territory in what was known as the “Klondike Stampede.” “The image of rivers filled with gold was, in the uncertain and difficult economic times of the late nineteenth century, a compelling one, sure to attract endless interest among the continent’s legions of unemployed and disillusioned.”12 Men worked in temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero, with scarce food and expensive sled dogs. And those were the ones who made it—most never got to the goldfields, and most of those who did never found gold. Gold was flowing from South Africa as well. Not in half a century had the monetary stock of the nation increased so rapidly. On the day that Bryan delivered the cross of gold speech, there was just over $500 million in monetary gold in the United States; three years later it was $859 million, a staggering increase of 70 percent.13
Especially after the Senate elections of 1898, which gave the Republicans a powerful legislative majority, the conditions were ripe to move away decisively from a bimetal standard. When the new Congress convened, it took up a currency act that confirmed gold as the basis for US money, a position the Republicans largely backed. The Bryan element remained; several pro-silver legislators argued that to demonetize silver officially would take money out of the hands of farmers and laborers. William V. Allen, a one-term Nebraska senator from the Populist Party, said, “The bill is one of spoliation and confiscation, and to increase and perpetuate the national debt.” The Senate vote of 44 to 26 was almost entirely along party lines.
The bill became known as the Gold Standard Act of 1900. It made silver officially a subsidiary currency and allowed for the remaining greenbacks to be fully redeemed for gold. When specie payments had resumed in 1879, there had been no dedicated gold fund to pay for the notes; an important provision of the new law was that Treasury was to maintain a fund of $150 million in gold coin and bullion to be used to redeem US and Treasury notes. Using a more complicated version of the Bank of England’s practice, the act provided that the reserve fund would be replenished with gold from Treasury’s general fund, and that if the reserve dipped below $100 million, Treasury would be authorized to use bonds to buy gold back from the public. President McKinley signed the bill into law using a brand-new gold pen, furnished to him by Jesse Overstreet, the Indiana congressman who had introduced the bill.
When twenty-first-century advocates talk of returning to a gold standard, they are generally referring to a system akin to what passed in 1900: gold is convertible to paper money, and a minimum amount of gold is required to back up the currency. And faith in such a system hearkens back to the doubt-free pronouncements that allowed Republicans to dominate the early part of the century. The McKinley administration and the financial interests pushing sound money believed that they had scientifically solved a problem that eluded most of human civilization. Two months after the Gold Standard Act became law, Treasury Secretary Ellis Roberts gave a speech to a banking group in which he was nothing short of triumphant. “On the face of all our money, paper and coin, white and yellow; on all our bonds, all wages, all trade, all banking, all business, it brands deep and sure, the pledge of gold.”14 American credit was th
e best in the world, and the “endless chain” problem that had plagued Cleveland had been solved, because no gold could leave Treasury unless it was replaced by gold. And thanks to recent mining discoveries at home and abroad, Americans were practically swimming in the stuff. “For three years, more than ever before has the yellow metal been thrusting itself into our markets, our vaults, into the pockets of the people.” The country was adding gold in circulation at a rate of some $100 million a year. “Our Government commands unlimited treasure at rates unknown to finance and astounding to all the bourses from London and Berlin to Hong Kong,” Roberts boasted. “The Treasury of the United States is thus richer in gold than any other nation or any corporation or combination.”
That same month—May 1900—bookstores began stocking a fanciful new work from a Chicago-based author who described his book as “written solely to pleasure children of today.” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written by L. Frank Baum, a playwright and journalist who had paid close attention to the presidential campaign of 1896. The book features a Kansas girl whose home is ripped from its moorings by a cyclone, who finds that she has landed in a strange land called Oz, where she is given silver shoes to walk on a road made of golden bricks to reach the Emerald City. The book, with its prodigious sales—some three million copies were sold by the time the book entered public domain in 1956—and the MGM movie version released in 1939 and featuring Judy Garland in a career-making role, has become one of the most recognizably classic tales in all of American history. Although the film was not a blockbuster hit in its original theatrical release, it found its true home on television beginning in 1956; many critics and scholars believe that the Wizard of Oz is the most-watched television movie of all time, with a viewership that probably extends to the billions.
One Nation Under Gold Page 8