American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Times of heightened social pressures and political conflict often demand extraordinary leadership; the alternative may be chaos and worse. The mid-nineties produced not one but two remarkable leaders who were pitted against each other in one of the great dramas of American politics.

  By this time, William McKinley had become an experienced and effective party politician and officeholder. Both political and personal setbacks had seasoned him. After six terms in the House, where he took leadership of tariff battles and served as chairman of Ways and Means, he was engulfed in the Democratic landslide of 1890, but he rebounded in 1891 by winning election as governor of Ohio. Then while governor he suddenly found himself nearly $130,000 in debt because an old friend who had once helped McKinley had failed in business and left notes countersigned by the governor. Wealthy friends bailed him out, with minimum publicity. One of the leaders in this effort was Mark Hanna, a Cleveland banker and traction magnate, who had consecrated himself to the mission of making McKinley President.

  By 1896, as a leading spokesman for a Republican tariff, as a friend of Hanna and other men of money, and as a veteran legislator, executive, and party man coming from the most strategic of states, McKinley was the front runner for the Republican nomination. But his strength lay deeper than this. He had inherited, in H. Wayne Morgan’s words, “the political tendencies of a whole generation. The ideals of party unity and loyalty, outlined when Rutherford B. Hayes sat in the White House, found a logical spokesman in the man who championed every aspect of Republican nationalism, and mastered the arts of political leadership in a confused and fragmented era. He was fatalistic about success; an air of predestination hung about his apparent victory. But he and Hanna insured that destiny with years of hard work, cultivation of mass opinion, and close attention to a new, widened industrial constituency.”

  As McKinley headed for a first-ballot nomination in the spring weeks of 1896, the press was anticipating a far more open convention for the Democracy. Increasingly, though, they were watching the rise of a young Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan, who had taken vocal leadership of the silver Democrats. Like McKinley, he had been born and educated in the Midwest. Both men had started their professional careers as small-town lawyers and had turned to politics; and both, in Paul Glad’s view, “were steeped in the moralistic tradition of American Protestantism.” They had played congressional Box and Cox when Bryan had won appointment to the House Ways and Means Committee just after McKinley had left it. But there the resemblances ceased. Seventeen years younger than McKinley, Bryan had been only an infant during the Civil War. He differed sharply with the Ohioan on silver, tariff, and most other key issues. If both shared small-town moralities, Bryan was positively steeped in the rural virtues, in the agrarian myth of the independent, liberty-loving yeoman, in the Jeffersonian concept of simple, grass-roots democracy. And if McKinley was a good-looking, well-set-up man who fitted the image of a President, Bryan was positively charismatic— “a tall, slender, handsome fellow,” Robert La Follette remembered, “who looked like a young divine.”

  Sure enough, the McKinley machine, well fueled by Hanna’s energy and ample funds, rolled to a smashing victory on the first ballot in the Republican convention in St. Louis. Assembling three weeks later in Chicago, the Democratic convention in form followed the traditional pattern of the great national enclaves: there was the usual crush of delegates, hangers-on, and spectators in a big overdecorated hall; the usual stentorian speeches; and the usual battle over the platform, with the silverites on this occasion winning a plank calling for the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the 16 to 1 ratio. But it was one of those occasions when none of this mattered very much, when a single event dominated the convention both at the time and in retrospect. That event was merely a speech—but a speech that itself became a mobilizer of people and a ganglion of history. Like most such events, it was an act carefully contrived and long rehearsed, an act taken boldly and at just the right moment.

  Just the right moment was during the debate on the platform, when William Jennings Bryan sprang from his seat and bounded up to the rostrum, as a great wave of applause and exultation rolled across the floor and into the galleries. He stood before them dressed in his black sack suit of alpaca, a low-cut vest, trousers slightly baggy at the knees, his head thrown back, left hand on the lectern, his right hand free for grand gestures. The address contained little new of substance, but few present on that day would forget the magnificent sentences.

  “I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.

  “With a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit, our silver Democrats went forth from victory unto victory until they are now assembled, not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment already rendered by the plain people of this country.”

  Bryan was speaking effortlessly, hardly raising his voice, yet reaching the farthest seats in the convention hush.

  “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.”

  The crowd was now rising and shouting as Bryan drove his points home. When the gold men, he said, charged that the silver forces disturbed their business interests, “we reply that you have disturbed our business interests”—workers, attorneys, merchants, farmers, all these were as much businessmen as the “man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain.”

  The crowd was in a near-frenzy as Bryan came to his peroration:

  “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 their 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.”

  After a series of dramatic roll-call votes, Bryan bested Silver Dick Bland and went on to win the Democratic presidential nomination on the fifth ballot.

  Bryan’s nomination left the Populists in bitter disarray. Fusionists, expecting the Democrats to cling to gold, had insisted on holding their convention after the Democrats so that they could scoop up the droves of Democrats who would desert the party of Cleveland. Now, with their plans turned topsy-turvy, they decided that they must nominate Bryan—and the Maine banker and railroad man Arthur Sewall, who had been chosen for Vice-President. Anti-fusionists saw Bryan’s nomination and the Democrats’ plagiarizing of the Populist platform as a plot to cripple both the Populist movement and party. And they could not stomach the “anti-labor” Sewall.

  “If we fuse we are sunk,” Henry D. Lloyd summed up the dilemma: “If we don’t fuse, all the silver men we have will leave us for the more powerful Democrats.” At a convention racked with pandemonium and bitter debate, the fusionists won the nomination for Bryan, and—despite a telegram from the Commoner refusing the nomination unless he could run with Sewall —named Tom Watson for Vice-President. During the fall campaign both Bryan and the Populist hierarchy cold-shouldered Watson, who swallowed insult and ridicule as he barnstormed the country for Bryan and himself.

  The other candidates followed their own strategy. McKinley remained in his hometown of Canton, receiving delegations as part of his front porch campaign. This was not a matter of sitting in a rocker and chatting with individual visitors. Rather, delegations poured into Canton by the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands, marched to McKinley’s home behind clamorous bands and huge banners, and received in turn a short, carefully phrased talk from the candidate. On one day, he gave speeches to a total of 80,000 persons. All the while Hanna & co. saturated the country with millions of leaflets and pamphlets, 1,400 orators, and arguments against free trade and free silver. The national committee reportedly spent the unprecedented sum of $4 mi
llion, probably much more.

  Bryan went to the “plain people” he apotheosized. Covering over 18,000 miles by train, speaking sometimes thirty or more times a day, he reached perhaps 5 million persons in twenty-seven states. He encountered an avalanche of criticism from the eastern press, which pictured him as an anarchist and revolutionist. For his part, Hanna was labeled “Dollar Mark,” and this hurt him. But the Republican party, deeply bottomed organizationally and mobilized for action, appealed directly to all members of its grand coalition—labor, farmers, small businessmen, veterans, blacks.

  On election night, Bryan sat imperturbably in his home as three telegraph operators brought in bulletin after bulletin spelling his defeat. In Canton, McKinley sat at his desk analyzing returns, smoking cigar after cigar, and then heard the first sounds of crowds nearing to cheer and serenade him amid dazzling fireworks. A telegram arrived from Bryan: “We have submitted the issues to the American people, and their word is law.” At his home, Bryan told reporters: “The fight has just commenced.” Watson, emotionally broken, mourned the death of the Populist party. Fusion, he said, had killed it.

  Triumphant Republicanism

  When the newspapers proclaimed a great Republican victory next day, the outcome at first seemed to be merely another party switch—the fourth in the presidency since 1884. As more returns were telegraphed in from the rural West and North, however, it became clear that not only was the White House to change occupants but a momentous shift had occurred in party fortunes and electoral patterns. Voting turnout, for example, had jumped from 12 million in 1892 to nearly 14 million four years later. And as the years passed, analysts realized that 1896 was one of the crucial elections in American history, leading to a “critical realigning era” that would reshape American politics and government for decades.

  McKinley’s majority over Bryan in the popular vote—7.1 million votes to 6.5 million—was the biggest presidential margin since Grant, but the significance of the vote lay less in its numbers than in its geographical distribution. Despite the Republican denunciations of Bryan for arousing the hatred of farmers and workers and “setting class against class,” there was far less economic than regional polarization. The geography of the election results was indeed quite remarkable. As usual the Democrats had carried the South and the Republicans had swept the northern tier, but, in between, McKinley carried every state east of the Mississippi, including the border states of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The great electoral heartland bordered by Illinois and Wisconsin on the west and New York and Pennsylvania on the east—the pivot of most presidential contests—had swung to McKinley by an enormous margin. Even across the Mississippi, Bryan had lost Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, and California. As the head of the Democratic ticket failed in state after state, he dragged down with him hundreds of state and local Democratic candidates.

  Bryan had simply failed to attract two of his great potential constituencies—eastern urban labor and midwestern farmers. Not a single county in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or Wisconsin, James Sundquist noted, showed a gain in its Democratic percentage over the combined Democratic-Populist strength of 1892. Cleveland’s unpopularity, Bryan’s inability to appeal to industrial labor, McKinley’s coalition politics, and Hanna’s massive propaganda campaign had left the grand old Democracy a shrunken remnant. Many voters had simply been scared away by Republican orators and editors. “To the image of the Democrats as the party of rum, Romanism, rebellion, and economic recession,” in Sundquist’s words, “was added another R—radicalism.”

  Not only did the GOP emerge as a grand new party combining its old business, farm, veterans, and black support with widened labor backing; it was emerging also as a powerful governing instrument in Washington and in many of the state capitals. Whether tested by the quality of the GOP’s national leadership in McKinley, Hanna & co., its explicit platform speaking out forthrightly on major issues (save woman’s suffrage!), its year-round organizational structure building up from town and precinct committees, its ability to mobilize electoral support, its high capacity for raising money and commanding publicity, its congressional leadership and cohesion, the “redeveloped” Republican party was in a position, according to Paul Kleppner, to control most of the nation’s policy-making institutions after 1896.

  It was easy for Bryan Democrats, silverites, and Populists to denounce the GOP as the party of plutocrats, tariff-mongers, monopolists, and gold bugs, because in part it was. But Republicanism was much more than this. The party not only reflected the interests of big capitalists; to a marked degree it disciplined those interests—in the party’s own interest, of course. The party would limit immigration even though many big employers wanted to import cheap foreign labor; the party would restrict trusts to some degree; above all, the party would maintain its appeal to farmers and workers by returning to a “free homestead policy,” restricting immigration, creating a National Board of Arbitration to mediate labor disputes. Furious at Frick and other industrialists who provoked fights with labor, Republican party leaders would not let them dominate party councils.

  So the McKinley Republicans prepared to govern in 1897 in a spirit of self-confidence and high expectations. Within four months of inauguration, McKinley signed the Dingell tariff bill raising rates higher than ever but also authorizing reciprocity negotiations with other countries. A year later, Congress passed the Erdman Act providing for limited mediation of railroad labor disputes—a belated response to the Pullman strike. But there was no rush of legislation—the Republicans had no interest in passing a lot of laws. Rather, McKinley and his congressional leaders ran a tight ship, at least in domestic policy. Especially notable was McKinley’s firm but delicate touch—with assists from Hanna—in curbing the power of old-time Republican state bosses such as Thomas C. Platt of New York and Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania.

  Not all the groups in McKinley’s big coalition fared well during his presidential term. Lower-income labor, striking workers, and poor farmers received little help from the White House. As usual, the most forgotten group was blacks, North and South. Despite the GOP’s “unqualified condemnation of the uncivilized and barbarous practice” of lynching in its 1896 platform, lynch law took more and more victims in the nineties. In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation in railroad carriages, in Plessy v. Ferguson; two years later it sustained the poll tax and literacy tests in Williams v. Mississippi. Few were around to offer militant protest. Frederick Douglass had died in 1895, and Booker T. Washington accepted segregation. “In all things that are purely social,” Washington liked to say, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to our mutual progress.” Carnegie called him the most remarkable man alive, noting that Negro illiteracy had been almost cut in half in thirty years and that black land ownership had expanded.

  Certainly Carnegie was satisfied with McKinleyism. “Triumphant Democracy is once more Triumphant,” he had written a Scottish friend after McKinley’s election. “All is well.” Later he would break with the President on foreign policy, but domestically McKinley stood for the things the steel magnate believed in. They both believed in liberty, but a negative liberty to be achieved against government and not through it. “The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these,” said Carnegie; “it is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, which the Declaration of Independence claims….” They both believed in Horatio Alger individualism, competitiveness, getting ahead, in the self-made man rising from rags to riches. They both believed in majority rule, perhaps in part because majorities had tended to vote the “right way.”

  Majority rule—that was the test. Populists, left-wing Democrats, socialists had long dreamed the dream of a coalition of the poor that would use their only political resource, votes, to win control of government and convert it into an instrument of social and economic justice. Third parties had mobilized minorities, not majorities. Bryan had utterly failed to pu
t together a mighty coalition of the have-nots. And even if a truly popular coalition had won control of government, checks and balances against the majority within the government—the power of a money-dominated, unrepresentative Senate, for example—would have thwarted true majority rule. Few of the have-nots would have found any triumphs in Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy. The have-nots were “ready to question whether, indeed, there was a democracy, when the courts could halt their strikes by injunctions, jail their labor leaders, declare laws taxing men of wealth unconstitutional, and smile indulgently on monopolistic trusts,” in Joseph Wall’s view. “Congress seemed eager only to protect those who were already secure, and the President looked to Wall Street, not Main Street, for support and guidance.”

  Triumphant Democracy? McKinley, Carnegie, et al. seemed really to believe in a very Republican Republic. And soon people would charge that McKinley, at least, seemed to believe in a most imperial Empire.

  In Havana, late in January 1898, the Maine swung slowly at anchor in the middle of the harbor, the increasingly tense crew confined on board. Armed sentries were posted on deck, ammunition piled by the guns, steam kept up. Still the men aboard waited week after week, as officials in Washington considered bringing the big battleship home.

  The arrival of the Maine in Havana had been just one more step toward American involvement in the Cubans’ war for independence from Spain. That struggle had resumed in 1895, after a truce of two decades, and by 1898, more than a hundred thousand men had fallen on both sides of the conflict. Spain, with nearly 200,000 soldiers on the island, controlled Havana and the other major cities; the revolutionaries, with only a fifth as many men in the field at any one time, dominated most of the countryside. The pleas of the revolutionaries received considerable support in the United States. As meetings to support Cuba Libre mushroomed across the nation, sympathy for the rebels was compounded by indignation at the apparently heartless countermeasures of the Spanish.