It was the tipping point. In a time of deep depression, the ordinary people were sick of party fat cats. They supported McKinley as the candidate against what was even then being called the machine—the grinding apparatus of party corruption. As Charles Dawes, one of McKinley’s young campaign aides put it, McKinley’s men would “make the machine sick before we get through with them.”
Once nominated, however, McKinley’s real enemy was William Jennings Bryan. The charismatic Nebraskan had stolen his party’s nomination with his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, in which he advocated an expanded supply of money and silver coinage to alleviate the woes of working people. Bryan argued that “tight money”—money in which each dollar was backed by its equivalent in gold—was keeping farmers and those deeply in debt from being able to make a decent living, while those bankers who controlled the gold wallowed like Scrooges in chambers of wealth.
“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 thundered, and he was joined by not only Democrats but also the Populist Party, who later nominated him for president and became known as Popocrats.
The Republicans who feared Bryan’s western populism branded him as an anarchist who would bring economic ruin to the country. During the summer of 1896, attacks on Bryan in GOP newspapers mounted in hysteria. Bryan, the New York Tribune snarled, “was a wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness.” Theodore Roosevelt, stumping for McKinley, compared Bryan to “the leaders of the Terror in France in mental and moral attitude.” (Some Republicans also likened him to Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin.) Bryan’s followers were labeled by one Philadelphia paper as “hideous and repulsive vipers.” Anti-Semitic caricatures abounded in editorial cartoons—silver-loving Shylocks who would be “Sure Winners if Bryan Is Elected.”
Like most political campaigns, however, the Republican efforts worked on many levels. Cheap shots in newspapers were all to the good, but party organization and discipline were just as important. Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, came up with a brilliant strategy. Instead of trying to beat the peripatetic Bryan by stumping all over the country (not McKinley’s style, in any event), Hanna had his candidate stay home in Canton, Ohio, and arranged for people to visit him. These front-porch meetings surpassed those of Benjamin Harrison’s and were as orchestrated as any “town hall” meeting in today’s electronic village. Hanna’s railroad connections provided free excursion passes to Canton for carefully chosen groups of students, workers, farmers, merchants, ex-soldiers, and others. The night before each event, the audience could submit questions in writing, and McKinley would respond the next day in short, carefully scripted speeches.
Leaflets extolling McKinley were printed in the millions (in seven or eight languages) and distributed nationwide. McKinley buttons were manufactured by the thousands. Billboards with McKinley’s picture were planted alongside miles of roads. Fourteen hundred speakers were enlisted, ready to be sent into action if an area seemed to be going Democrat. McKinley’s men aimed right at the breadbasket in these hard times—they boasted that McKinley was the man with the “Full Dinner Pail.” He was “The Advance Agent of Prosperity.” He was solid and dependable.
Democrats tried to fight back. They attacked Mark Hanna as “the most vicious, carnal, and unrelenting oppressor of labor … in existence” and hinted that he was capable of murder to achieve his ends. Bryan stumped so hard that he lost his voice. But in the end, as is almost always the story in American politics, money talked. Bryan’s campaign purse was, at most, a million dollars; McKinley had three times that amount, maybe more.
THE WINNER: WILLIAM MCKINLEY
McKinley beat Bryan handily, 7,108,480 votes to 6,511,495, with an electoral margin of 271 to 176. McKinley had managed the stupendous feat of keeping the upper middle class in his corner and garnering the votes of urban blue-collar workers, who would now form the core of the revised Republican Party.
Bryan had polled well in the West and, in fact, later estimated that appearances were deceiving. Had 18,000 votes in key states gone his way, he would have been president. Bryan’s brand of Populist politics would change the Democratic Party forever (even though Bryan himself, intimidated by the Southern voting base, would never do much for African Americans). Regardless, the Great Commoner began calling 1896 the “first” battle. He knew he would be back.
THE MADMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE In September, just as the election was heating up to a fever pitch, the McKinley-supporting New York Times published an interesting little article entitled “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” The story examined a number of the Democratic candidate’s utterances and claimed that they were not the workings of a rational mind. The Times editors also included a letter from a distinguished alienist stating that if Bryan won the election, “there would be a madman in the White House.”
Not content with this, the paper interviewed several more alienists and published the results two days later. These eminent medical geniuses said that Bryan suffered from megalomania (delusions of grandeur), paranoia querulent (complaining too much), and querulent logorrhea (talking about complaining too much). One other “expert” simply said, “I don’t think Bryan is ordinarily crazy.… But I should like to examine him as a degenerate.”
MARK HANNA—LIKE A VIRGIN In describing the canny, ahead-of-his-time political operator Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt once remarked, “He has advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine!” Hanna was an Ohio political broker who spotted the young McKinley as early as 1884, when he was an Ohio congressman, and proceeded to groom him to become president.
At the time, many observers thought that Hanna called the shots and could “shuffle [McKinley] and deal him like a deck of cards.” But friends who knew both men disagreed. One contemporary said that Hanna, the hardened politician, felt about the pure-as-the-driven-snow McKinley as “a bashful boy [feels] towards the girl he loves.” And McKinley’s biographer, Margaret Leech, wrote: “Hanna was drawn to McKinley’s idealistic standards like a hardened man of the world who becomes infatuated with virgin innocence.”
BIG MONEY AND POOR WEDNESDAY Eastern tycoons didn’t particularly like the independent-minded McKinley, but they disliked Bryan and his silver standard even more. They began spending big money to keep the Boy Orator out of the White House. Led by James G. Hill, the powerful New York railway mogul, Wall Street pushed Republican businesses into line. In those days, political contributions were not left to chance. Banks were assessed one quarter of one percent of their capital. Most big businesses, especially life insurance companies, contributed in a similar fashion. Standard Oil—becoming very big business indeed in an increasingly machine-dependent age—put $250,000 into the Republican war chest. All told, the party collected some three million dollars, although some estimates range even higher.
Republicans warned that William Jennings Bryan was literally insane.
WILLIAM MCKINLEY
VS. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
The year 1900 announced a new American century in which things were looking far rosier than they had four years earlier. McKinley had gotten lucky. The Depression ended soon after he took office, with the advent of good harvests, rising prices, and new gold discoveries in Alaska, Australia, and South Africa (these doubled the world’s supply of gold and allowed the Treasury Department to issue more banknotes). Arguments for a new silver currency standard were suddenly a lot less persuasive. McKinley could also take credit for the blossoming of American imperialism. In 1898, the United States fought the Spanish-American War, ostensibly to liberate Cuba. The U.S. victory resulted in the acquisition of the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
THE CAMPAIGN It was a foregone conclusion that McKinley was the Republican candidate for 1900—the only suspense was identifying his running mate. The main contender appeared to be Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, the “Rough Rider” hero of Cuba and governor of New York, but party arch
itect Mark Hanna hated Roosevelt’s manic energy and impulsiveness. During the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, Hanna screamed to delegates, “Don’t any of you realize that there is only one life between that madman [Roosevelt] and the presidency?”
Roosevelt, for his part, pretended that he wasn’t interested in the veep nod but showed up at the convention wearing a hat that looked suspiciously like his old broad-brimmed Rough Rider hat (leading one observer to smile and say, “Gentleman, that’s an acceptance hat”). The prediction turned out to be true: McKinley and Roosevelt stood together on the podium when the convention was done.
The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan again, dooming their candidate to another hopeless fight. The silver issue was dead, yet Bryan would not give it up, leading Republican Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed to quip that Bryan would “rather be wrong than be president.” Bryan went after McKinley on imperialism and the stranglehold of trusts and monopolies on American business, but people just didn’t care. “Let well enough alone” was the Republican slogan, and that about summed it up. McKinley didn’t even bother to make his front-porch appearances; instead, the fiery Roosevelt traveled 21,000 miles and rivaled Bryan in passionate speech-making (although Roosevelt chagrined Mark Hanna and the Republican faithful by referring to Bryan as “my opponent,” as if Roosevelt himself were running for president).
THE WINNER: WILLIAM MCKINLEY McKinley smashed Bryan 7,218,039 votes to 6,358,345, this time winning many of the agricultural states in the West. Bryan’s career in politics wasn’t over—he still had one more presidential campaign left in him—but his popularity was clearly trending downward.
Interesting footnote: In the summer of 1899, William McKinley posed for a photo with his first-term vice president, rich New Jersey businessman Garret A. Hobart, who died in office later that year. The photograph was so admired that another one was issued in the summer of 1900, with McKinley sitting in an identical pose with VP candidate Theodore Roosevelt.
Strangely, no one can remember McKinley and Roosevelt posing for the photograph together. Even stranger, the photo shows McKinley wearing the exact same clothes and sitting in the exact same chair as the McKinley/Hobart photo from a year before. Additionally, there is a faint, barely discernable line running down the middle of the McKinley/Roosevelt photograph, which has led some historians to speculate that the photograph was a composite assembled by the McKinley campaign—no doubt for the innocent reason that McKinley and Roosevelt didn’t have time to sit down together. If so, it’s most likely the first-ever doctored photograph employed in a presidential campaign.
There would be plenty more.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
VS. ALTON PARKER
On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley attended Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, afterward shaking hands with the public at a reception on a very hot day in which men and women alike pulled out huge handkerchiefs to wipe their brows.
One of these handkerchiefs concealed a .32 caliber Iver-Johnson revolver belonging to Leon Czolgosz, a young man who had been stalking McKinley all day. Czolgosz, who believed himself to be an anarchist, went by the name Fred Nieman, which means Fred Nobody. He is easily the most pathetic of all presidential assassins and so lamebrained that real anarchists refused to hang out with him, thinking he was either insane or a police spy. When Czolgosz reached McKinley in the reception line, he shot the president twice. In a week, McKinley was dead—the third president killed by an assassin in thirty-five years.
Czolgosz would fry in the electric chair, only the fiftieth person to be so afforded the honor; the new American century had begun with a bang and a sizzle. When forty-two-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president, he remarked: “It’s a dreadful thing to come into the presidency this way, but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it.”
Morbid Roosevelt certainly was not. With his high-pitched, braying voice, his obsession with exercise, and an abundance of natural energy, he was, in the words of historian Henry Adams, “pure act.” The writer Henry James, who didn’t like Roosevelt at all, called him “a monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.”
THE CAMPAIGN In his first term as McKinley’s successor, Roosevelt showed a political subtlety that many people thought he did not possess (this is, after all, the man who called the president of Venezuela a “villainous little monkey”). Understanding the deepening voter dissatisfaction with big business, Roosevelt very publicly went after “the malefactors of great wealth” in antitrust suits while at the same time maintaining generally cordial relations with the Wall Street capitalists who would fund his 1904 campaign. He was nominated to great acclaim on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago.
Roosevelt’s Democratic opponent was the extremely colorless Alton B. Parker, chief justice of the New York Court of Appeals and probably one of the most obscure presidential candidates of all time. Parker—whom Roosevelt referred to as “the neutral-tinted individual”—was chosen to appeal not only to Democrats but also to crossover Republicans sick of Roosevelt’s progressive labor policies. Unfortunately, Parker had very little skill when it came to campaigning and speaking, so he spent much of his time alone on his Hudson Valley farm. The best the Democrats could claim for their man was that, if elected, Parker would “set his face sternly against Executive usurpation of legislative and judicial functions.”
Not exactly stirring stuff. There was a brief flurry of activity in the fall when Roosevelt thought he might actually lose in New York; he made a personal appeal to his Wall Street connections, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars being bestowed upon him practically overnight. These enormous sums amassed so quickly embarrassed Roosevelt, who worried that tycoons like J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick thought they were buying him. (In fact, after the election, Frick claimed, “We bought the son of a bitch and then he did not stay bought.”)
Roosevelt could, and did, win without owing anybody anything. The election of 1904 was a Republican landslide, with the president garnering 7,626,593 votes to Parker’s 5,082,898. The electoral vote margin was even more lopsided at 336 to 140.
WILLIAM TAFT
VS.
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
“What does Taft stand for, by the way?
Why, T.A.F.T. means ‘Take Advice from Theodore!’ ”
—Democratic joke
In his great exuberance upon winning the 1904 election by such a gratifying margin, Theodore Roosevelt did something he would always regret. Accepting his country’s nod for another term on election night, he stated: “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination” for a second elective term.
In other words, the forty-six-year-old president had declared himself a lame duck at the moment of his greatest victory. It was perhaps one of the most foolish statements in president-elect history. Roosevelt’s second term certainly had major successes—he won a Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the Russo-Japanese War, watched work on the Panama Canal begin, helped pass a Pure Food and Drug Act, and further curbed big business excess—but he was less effective than he might have been if he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a second full term.
At least he had the satisfaction of handpicking his successor—his good friend and secretary of war, William Howard Taft. At first, Taft was reluctant, but Roosevelt convinced him and Taft was quite touched: “I must go over and thank Theodore,” he said. To which the convivial president replied, patting Taft on the back: “Yes, Will, it’s the thing to do.”
Republicans were sorry to see Roosevelt go. When the party faithful met at their convention in Chicago, the mere mention of Roosevelt’s name by the convention chairman led to a forty-nine-minute chanting demonstration of “Four, four, four more years!” But as per Roosevelt’s wishes, Taft was nominated on the first ballot. His opponent would be the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, a little older and a great deal balder, running for the third
time on a very tired Democratic ticket.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT Taft was a well-liked, jovial politico who had risen high in the ranks of the party, in large part due to his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had used the affable Taft as a sort of ambassador-at-large to smooth out difficulties all over the world—from the Vatican’s claim to properties in the newly acquired Philippines to troubles getting the Panama Canal under way. Taft weighed 330 pounds, and his vice-presidential running mate—a conservative New York congressman named James “Sunny Jim” Sherman—tipped the scales at more than 200 pounds. Pound for pound, they offered the most political tonnage of any presidential ticket in history.
DEMOCRAT: WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN There was something both glorious and sad about seeing the old warrior running again for a third try. Even though the odds weighed heavily against him, Bryan hit the stump swinging, along with his running mate, an Indiana state senator named John Kern.
THE CAMPAIGN
In retrospect, it is difficult to see how Bryan could have beaten any candidate backed by Roosevelt, but the Republicans weren’t taking any chances. They immediately launched a vicious personal attack, with Teddy himself describing Bryan as “a kindly man and well-meaning in a weak way … but he is the cheapest faker we have ever proposed for president.” Even First Lady Edith Roosevelt opined that Bryan was “a trifle too fat and oily for the fastidious.”
Bryan struck back. His main campaign theme was “Shall the people rule?” and he hammered an argument that many Americans were beginning to support: that far too many politicians were still in the pockets of big business. Bryan was aided by publisher William Randolph Hearst, founder of the new Independent Party and Roosevelt’s enemy. In September, Hearst published secret letters from Standard Oil Company files proving that prominent Republican Senator Joseph Benson Foraker had received sums as high as fifty thousand dollars for what were vaguely labeled as legal fees. (Ironically, these same secret letters implicated the treasurer of the Democratic campaign, Charles Haskell, who was forced to resign.)
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