The most important result of the off-year elections of 1890 was the appearance of a number of new congressmen representing farm interests independent of either one of the major parties. This revolt against "the politics of dead center" took the form of agrarian insurgency in the West and South that had been building up after the Civil War and reached its culmination in the 1890s. There were several reasons why the farmer was discontented. The conversion of American agriculture to a commercial basis during and after the war had made the farmer a specialist and integrated him into a capitalistic system of mass production for a world market. He had the special role of producing a surplus by which the United States could adjust any unfavorable balance of trade created by a large volume of imports. But whereas the industrialist had some control over his market and prices, the farmer had none. He worked in an unorganized individualistic manner and competed in both the American and the world farm markets. Instead of benefiting from the new order of things, he was a victim of it. Leonidas L. Polk, a North Carolina farm editor, expressed the view of almost every farmer in the country when he wrote in 1887:

There is something radically wrong in our industrial system. There is a screw loose. The wheels have dropped out of balance. The railroads have never been so prosperous, and yet agriculture languishes. The banks have never done a better or more profitable business, and yet agriculture languishes. Manufacturing enterprises have never made more money or were in a more flourishing condition, and yet agriculture languishes. Towns and cities flourish and "boom,".. and yet agriculture languishes. Salaries and fees were never so temptingly high and desirable, and yet agriculture languishes.

Another hardship for the farmer was the decline in the prices that he received for his crops. Between 1870 and 1897 wheat prices dropped from $1.06 to 63.3 cents a bushel, corn from 43.1 to 29.7 cents a bushel, and cotton from 15.1 to 5.8 cents a pound. These figures were market prices, after warehouse and transportation charges had been paid, not the lower prices that the farmer received. In Kansas in 1889 corn sold for 10 cents a bushel and was commonly used in place of coal as a fuel; in 1890, a farmer in Nebraska stated that he had shot his hogs since he could neither sell nor give them away.

Another grievance of the farmer was the increased debtor and tenancy status under which he lived. By 1900 nearly one-third of the country's farms had mortgages, with the highest percentage in the Middle West-45 percent in Wisconsin, 48 percent in Michigan, and 53 percent in Iowa. Southern farmers had fewer mortgages, because they could not easily secure them. The number of tenant farmers increased from 25.8 percent of all the farms in 1880, to 29.4 percent in 1890, and to 35.3 percent in 1900. The basic cause of the farmers' misfortune was an overexpansion in agricultural production that caused supply to outrun demand from the 1870s down to about 1900. Not understanding the complicated reasons for his plight, the farmer naturally blamed others. He regarded the railroads as the chief villain. He resented discrimination and rate differentials and felt that he was a helpless victim of the rail monopoly. On through routes and long hauls the rates were comparatively low, because there was competition for this freight; but on local and short hauls, where competition was either scanty or nonexistent, the rates were disproportionately high. Sometimes the western local rate was four times that charged for the same distance and commodity in the East. It cost Minnesota farmers more to ship their grain to St. Paul or Minneapolis than to New York. The railroads also favored the big shipper over the small shipper; they dominated politics and bought up legislatures. The middleman was also the farmer's foe. The farmer found himself at the mercy of local merchants, grain dealers, brokers, and speculators in his crops. He also attacked the national banks because they refused to lend money on real estate and farm property and because they seemed indifferent to his seasonal needs for money.

The farmer complained, too, that he bore the brunt of the tax burden. Tax dodging, especially on the part of corporations, was notorious. The merchant could underestimate the value of his stock; the householder might exclude some of his property; and the owner of securities could conceal them. However, the farmer could not hide his land. Finally, the farmer opposed the high tariffs, because he had to purchase his consumer goods in a highly protected market while he sold his own crops in an unprotected market. He shared none of the benefits of protection, but instead contributed heavily to the subsidization of business. This injustice was all the more difficult to bear in view of his belief that the tariff was "the mother of trusts."

The farmers not only felt they were ignored; they suspected the government of indifference and even hostility. They decided to organize and protest against their condition. In 1867 Oliver Hudson Kelley, a government clerk, founded the Patrons of Husbandry, which became better known as the Grange, for the purpose of promoting agricultural education and creating social fellowship among farmers. The Grange, as the local unit was called, was a club where farmers met with their families to enjoy games and a picnic supper. Or they might listen to a lecture on scientific agriculture or discuss the cooperative purchase of a new reaper for general use.

At first the Grangers took no part in politics. They welcomed the new railroads, which increased the value of their land and furnished transportation for their products. By 1875 there were some 30,000 Granges in all parts of the country. In the upper Mississippi Valley-in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa-where more than one-third of the wheat was grown, they boasted a membership of over half a million. They were equally strong in the South, and South Carolina ranked second only to Iowa in the number of Granges.

The Grangers, in their campaign for self-improvement, soon began to aim at higher goals than education and fellowship. They also tried to increase farmers' income by establishing cooperative stores, banks, factories, and insurance companies. But these ventures were often unsoundly financed and operated and could not weather the competition of businessmen and the Panic of 1873. They left a burden of discredit and indebtedness and were the prime cause of the disintegration of the Grange movement in the mid-1870s.

It was impossible for so many farmers, with their long background of participation in politics, to get together without eventually going into the political arena. They had too many grievances, as we have noted, which they thought they could remedy by political action. Consequently, new protest parties were formed under various names in about a dozen Midwestern and southern states in the 1870s. They were never powerful enough to control a national party or to directly dictate national legislation. But they were an influential pressure group within both major parties, and they were able indirectly to affect important national legislation.

Beginning with Illinois in 1870, moreover, the Grangers won control of the legislatures of several Midwestern and southern states. They worked in state capitals mainly for the regulation of railroads and grain elevators. The Midwestern Granger legislatures tried to impose reasonable rates by direct legislation, by simply decreeing what rates should be charged. The railroads quite generally refused to obey these laws and either persuaded the legislatures to repeal them or won cases in the state courts. On the other hand, the beginning of railroad regulation was more promising in the South. Georgia, for example, established a railroad commission in 1879 that pioneered in the field of scientific regulation of rates and services.

The farmers, for a while, then turned to the Greenback movement, which grew out of demands to increase the amount of currency in circulation or to halt the withdrawal of greenbacks and to prevent government bonds from being redeemed in gold. The movement fell into two periods. The first lasted from 1867 to 1872 and was known as the social reform or wage earners' period. Eastern labor dominated it in these years, when its primary objects were to lower the interest rates on money and to reduce taxation by changing the war debt into inter-convertible war bonds. After 1873 the movement entered the inflationists' or farmers' period. The farmers were interested in the expansion of the currency in the hope that inflation would result in higher prices for their products. It was not until the Panic of 1873 had intensified the agricultural depression and the Granger movement had failed to relieve the situation that the farmers took over the Greenback movement. Then it developed into the Greenback Labor party, which reached its high-water mark in the election of 1878, when its candidates polled about one million votes and it elected fifteen congressmen. The party's main strength was in the Middle West, but even in the East the movement was largely agrarian. But with the failure in 1879 to prevent resumption of specie payment and with the price of corn further reduced in 1880, the farmers lost interest in greenbackism, and its support rapidly declined. In the presidential election of 1880 the Greenback candidate, James B. Weaver of Iowa, received only 300,000 votes, about 4 percent of the total; by 1888 the party was dead.

With the decline of the Grange and the disappearance of greenbackism, a new crop of farm associations appeared. By far the most important was the Farmers' Alliance, which was really two organizations of different origins. In the old Granger states of the Midwest the organization was known as the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance, and in the South, as the Southern Farmers' Alliance. The Southern Alliance originated in 1875 in a frontier county of Texas for protection against horse thieves and land sharks. It remained small until 1886, when it began to expand throughout the South under the vigorous leadership of C. W. Macune and absorbed rival farmers' organizations. The Northwestern Alliance was organized by Milton George in Chicago in 1880. There was also the National Colored Farmers' Alliance and Cooperative Union.

The Alliances, especially the Southern, experimented more extensively with cooperatives than the Grange, but with no greater success. An attempted merger of the two Alliances in a meeting at St. Louis in 1889 also failed. The Southern Alliance insisted upon the retention of its secret rituals and the exclusion of blacks, at least from the national body. The Northwestern Alliance wanted a federation in which each organization would keep its identity. Then, the Southern Alliance changed its name to the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union and induced the three strongest state alliances of the Northwestern Alliance-those of Kansas and of North and South Dakota-to join it. In the same year it gained the endorsement of the Knights of Labor.

Alliance leaders, realizing that most of the farmer's needs were beyond the power of the state governments to solve, developed a national program between 1890 and 1892. Its chief plank was inflation, mainly through the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1. This, farm leaders reasoned, would raise farm prices and relieve farmers of an intolerable debt burden. The leaders also wanted to repeal the National Banking Act and abolish national bank notes tied to United States bonds. They believed that the federal government alone should control the money supply and issue currency according to the needs of the country, not according to the bonded indebtedness or the supply of gold.

The farmers also demanded more stringent regulation of railroad rates. In fact, the Northwestern Alliance leaders generally favored governmental ownership and operation of railroads.

Another agrarian demand was for greater democratization of politics through the direct primary, secret ballot, and popular election of United States senators. Finally, the Alliancemen, hoping to attract large labor support, advocated the eight-hour day for workers, governmental support of labor unions in their struggle for collective bargaining, and an end to the employment of contract labor.

These developments gave the appearance that a new party was underway. Most of the Alliance leaders in the West believed so. Between 1890 and 1892, therefore, they made vigorous efforts to persuade the southern agrarians to join them in forming a new national party. It would unite all forces of discontent-farmers, workers, and various reform groups.

In May 1891 the Northwestern Alliance held a convention of over 1,400 delegates in Cincinnati. It included representatives from the Knights of Labor, Free-Silverites, and Greenbackers, as well as leaders of both the Southern and Northwestern Alliances. This gathering issued a call for a national convention of a new People's (soon to be called Populist) party. It would meet the following year in Omaha to write a platform and nominate a presidential ticket.

Populism originated within and grew out of the Alliance. The constitution of the Alliance proclaimed it to be a nonpolitical organization, as was the Grange. Yet there was a certain ambiguity about this. Each year the Alliance put forth a series of demands that could only be realized by political means. For example, the Ocala, Florida, platform of 1890 called for the abolition of national banks, establishment of a subtreasury system, a graduated income tax, the direct election of United States senators, and government control of communication and transportation facilities. By 1890 the Northwestern Alliance concluded that nonpartisan activities were a failure and decided to enter politics. Kansas led the way by organizing a People's (Populist) party in June 1890, and Alliancemen in other western states set up independent parties under other names. The West was in the throes of a mighty upheaval; a later commentator called it "a pentecost of politics in which a tongue of flame sat upon every man and each spoke as the spirit gave him utterance."

"Sockless" Jerry Simpson, Ignatius Donnelly, Mary Elizabeth Lease, Anna L. Diggs, and General Weaver were among the leaders of western populism. The party, though hastily constructed, was successful in Kansas where it elected five congressmen and one senator in the 1890 elections; in Nebraska, where it gained control of both houses of the legislature and elected two congressmen; and in South Dakota where it elected a senator.

In the South the Alliance, fearing that the establishment of a third party might bring the blacks into power, first tried to gain control of the Democratic party machine. It attacked the industrial and urban leadership of the Democratic party and endorsed candidates who pledged themselves to the Ocala platform. The Alliance appeared to have captured the Democratic party in the elections of 1890 when four governors, eight state legislatures, forty-four congressmen, and three senators promised to support Alliance demands, but nearly all these elected officials reverted to Democratic orthodoxy once in office. This disillusioning experience, plus the prospect of Cleveland's renomination by the Democratic party, stimulated Southern Alliancemen to become Populists. In July 1892, the national People's party was formally organized in Omaha, Nebraska.

When the Populists met in national convention at Omaha in 1892 they adopted a far-reaching progressive platform, which is one of the most important documents in American political history. In a long preamble the Omaha platform condemned national conditions and the major parties.

We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the very verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislature, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench... Business prostrated, homes are covered with mortgages, labor is impoverished, and the land is concentrating in the hands of capitalists ... The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few ... We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great parties for power and plunder ... Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform ... They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives and children on the altar of mammon.

More important were the specific planks of the Populist platform. They demanded: (1) free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, (2) the subtreasury system, (3) abolition of national bank notes and the issuance by the federal Treasury of abundant legal tender currency, (4) a graduated income tax, (5) governmental ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, (6) return to the government of unused lands granted to the railroads, (7) restriction of immigration, (8) an eight hour day for labor, (9) postal savings banks, and (10) election of United States senators by popular vote. General James B. Weaver of Iowa, the candidate of the Greenback-Labor party of 1880, was nominated for the presidency. Thus a new third party entered the national political arena.

The two major parties had already held their conventions in June. The Republicans renominated Harrison, in spite of a feeble attempt to stampede the convention to Blaine. The Democrats named Cleveland for the third successive time. Machine politicians, under the leadership of Governor David B. Hill of New York, tried to prevent Cleveland's nomination, but he was so strong with the rank and file of the party that he easily won on the first ballot.

The campaign of 1892 would have been a totally dull affair had it not been for the effort by the Populists to build their party and to make a good showing. Still, as Henry Adams observed, "the two candidates were singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other only enemies." Cleveland came out for sound money but made his fight mainly against the McKinley Tariff Act. Harrison straddled the money question and defended protection as a boon to labor. His claims that workers were prosperous and happy were undercut by a violent and bloody strike against Carnegie's Homestead plant in the middle of the campaign. However, the main issue seems to have been the personalities of the candidates. Cleveland was not glamorous, but he was more appealing than Harrison. Voters eager for a change not only elected Cleveland by a large plurality but also returned Democratic majorities to both houses of Congress.

Weaver polled slightly more than a million popular votes and carried Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, and Idaho, with twenty-two electoral 'votes. But the Populist showing was an exaggeration of the party's actual strength. In several western states the Democrats either had put no ticket in the field or else had supported Populist nominees. Furthermore, three states were carried by the silver interests rather than by the Alliance itself. No state east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio rivers gave Weaver as much as 5 percent of its vote. Cleveland would have won the election by a large margin even if all the Weaver states had gone for Harrison.

Yet the campaign showed how much populism had spread throughout the West. The new party elected three United States senators and eleven members of the House. Moreover, it more than held its own in the mid-term elections of 1894, when the Republicans once more regained control of the House.

Like Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover, Grover Cleveland had the bad luck to be in the White House when a major depression struck the country. The storm broke in the summer of 1893, causing more than five hundred banks to close and sixteen thousand business firms and railway systems to go into bankruptcy by the end of the year. With the closing of factories and mines, thousands of workers were unemployed. And within a year there were four million unemployed out of a population of about sixty-five million Americans. In the West the suffering was increased by the failure of the corn crop and by the continued decline in the price of agricultural products. But worst still were the hard times of the next four years, marked by acute personal hardships and a deterioration in the government's financial position.

Like all earlier presidents,, Cleveland did not believe it was his duty to use the arm of the federal government to combat a depression, and he complacently stated in his second inaugural address that "while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government, its functions do not include the support of the people." Cleveland believed that the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the McKinley Tariff had caused the panic and subsequent depression. Whatever else was wrong in the national economy resulted from the folly or misfortune of individuals, and thus was not the concern of the federal government.

In the face of the all pervading social unrest, Cleveland concentrated his first efforts on repealing the Silver Purchase Act so as to maintain the gold standard and to prevent the Treasury's gold reserve from falling below the established minimum of $100 million. On the other hand the silverites believed that the law of 1873 demonetizing silver had caused the economic disaster. They thought that the cure lay in the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to I of gold, and that the Sherman Act had provided them with inadequate relief. Many debtor agrarians agreed with them.

But Cleveland was convinced that the silver certificates issued under the Sherman Act and redeemed in gold were responsible for the drain on the gold reserve that was reducing it to the $100 million minimum, which had been used since 1882 as a metallic basis for the $350 million in greenbacks still in circulation. Thus he summoned Congress into special session in August 1893, and asked for the immediate repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The House voted for the repeal a few weeks later by a large majority, but the contest in the Senate was long and bitter. Cleveland withheld patronage from some senators and purchased the support of others such as Senator Daniel Vorhees of Indiana, a lifelong inflationist, by giving him control of all the patronage in his state. The silver senators, supported by the Populists and Southerners, fought against the repeal of the Sherman Act until the end of October when the Senate finally approved repeal by a close vote. Most Republicans voted for it; most western and southern Democrats voted against it, widening the split within the Democratic party on the currency issue.

Cleveland's leadership, however, fell short of the accomplishment of positive legislation to meet the Treasury crisis. Though he had said that "the administration must be ready with some excellent substitute for the Sherman Law," he failed to offer any constructive alternative. Many business leaders, as well as Democrats who favored repeal, had advocated the enactment of a substitute measure to provide for currency expansion and flexibility. Most of the Democrats, being practical politicians, feared that unconditional repeal might destroy their party, which was already sharply divided on the currency matter. But Cleveland insisted on unconditional repeal. At a cabinet meeting on the matter, he smote the table with his fist and asserted he would not yield an inch, and the compromise movement collapsed.

Unfortunately, the repeal of the Sherman Act did not restore prosperity or have any noticeable effect on the depression. The Treasury's gold reserve continued to fall, and, to maintain an amount sufficient to remain on the gold standard, Cleveland had the Treasury sell United States government bonds for gold. A group of bankers headed by J. P. Morgan absorbed three bond issues in 1894 and 1895, but it was not until 1897, when the depression had run its course, that the Treasury crisis ended. The gold purchases had enabled the Treasury to meet its obligations, but the decision to sell bonds to New York bankers was one of the most unpopular ones Cleveland ever made. The silverites grew more resentful of the president, and many Americans became alarmed over the dependence of the government upon a syndicate of Wall Street bankers.

Cleveland also failed to bring about any substantial reduction of the tariff. The Democrats, fulfilling their campaign promises, had passed a tariff bill in the House drawn up by William L. Wilson of West Virginia, which provided for a reduction in rates. But when the measure reached the Senate a group of protectionists from both parties, led by Senator Arthur Gorman, an influential Democrat from Maryland, attacked the bill with more than 600 amendments and restored most of the cuts that had been made in the House. The bill, now known as the Wilson-Gorman Tariff, was a far cry from genuine reform. Disappointed by this result, Cleveland allowed the measure to become law without his signature.

But Cleveland had contributed to this failure. He had played no effective part in framing the tariff. Then, too, the bitterness within the Democratic party that had been aroused during the fight over repeal of the silver act made agreement nearly impossible. Discipline and party loyalty no longer existed, and Cleveland had already used his political ace-patronage-in getting the Senate to repeal the Sherman Act. It was only when the Senate had mutilated the Wilson Tariff that Cleveland took some kind of action. Through a letter read on the floor of the House, he declared, "Every true Democrat knows that this bill in its present form... falls far short of the consummation for which we have long labored... Our abandonment of the cause or the principle upon which it rests means party perfidy and party dishonor."

While the blast relieved the president of his anger, it further antagonized the Senate and failed to accomplish the ends sought. Democratic senators savagely attacked Cleveland and defied him. While he refused to sign the Wilson-Gorman bill, he also declined to veto it. Cleveland's crusade for a lower tariff, which he had launched in 1881, had come to a sad conclusion. The reform phase of his public career had also ended. For the remainder of his presidency, Cleveland reduced his role to that of a protector of the status quo. In this he was more successful than he had been as a crusader for change, for he could play his usual, and many times more effective, role of righteous chief executive. He vetoed a bill that would have increased the supply of the currency. Through subordinate officials, he rudely rejected the petitions of angry wage earners, such as those who marched with Coxey's Army in 1894, to support a measure in Congress providing for the issuance of $500 million in legal tender notes to be spent on road construction by the unemployed. And in 1894 he sent federal troops to crush the Pullman strike.

As a result of the Panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company laid off a large number of its workers and in 1894 reduced wages as much as 25 percent without lowering the rents in the town of Pullman, Illinois, completely owned by the company. When their requests for lower rents or higher wages were refused and their spokesmen discharged, the Pullman employees went on strike in May 1894. In June the American Railway Union, founded by Eugene V. Debs in 1893, came to the assistance of the Pullman workers by voting to boycott all Pullman cars. The General Managers' Association, made up of officials from twenty-four railroads, joined forces with the Pullman Company. The strike spread rapidly and resulted in delaying the mail and tying up railroad traffic in the Chicago area. The president received numerous appeals to intervene from railroad officials, shippers, and business leaders.

Under pressure from the business community and urgings from Attorney General Richard Olney, a former railroad lawyer who was a foe of labor unions, Cleveland decided to end the boycott. Olney had the federal circuit court in Chicago serve an injunction, under the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Law, on officers of the American Railway Union against obstructing the railroads or interfering with the mails. When the union ignored the injunction, Cleveland exploded. "If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postcard in Chicago, that card will be delivered," he vowed. He dispatched some 2,000 troops from nearby Fort Sheridan to Chicago to "restore law and order," and soon the strike collapsed. At the same time Debs and other union leaders were arrested for violating the injunction and were sent to jail.

Cleveland was severely criticized for his actions in the Pullman strike. He sent the troops to Chicago over the strong protests of John P. Altgeld, the Democratic governor of Illinois, and there was an angry exchange between the two men. Altgeld challenged the right of the president to order soldiers to the scene, and he gave detailed information to show that local and state officials had the situation completely under control. "To absolutely ignore a local government," the governor charged, "not only insults the people ... but is in violation of a basic principle of our institutions." Cleveland answered that the troops had been sent "in strict accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States" and that there was no intention on the part of the federal government of "interfering with the plain duty of the local authorities to preserve the peace of the city."

Cleveland's solution of this labor dispute was costly. The imprisonment of Debs by a court order, without jury trial or conviction, and the use of a blanket injunction in the strike gave serious concern to many Americans, even to the conservatives. All over the country advocates of organized labor and of states' rights as well launched a heavy attack on Cleveland, whose popularity was now definitely on the wane. Yet Cleveland's unpopularity was temporarily offset by his actions in the Venezuelan boundary dispute. This arose out of a controversy between Venezuela and Great Britain over the boundary line of British Guiana. At stake were some 23,000 square miles of rich mineral country in an area claimed by both Venezuela and British Guiana. The British in 1887 turned down the good offices of the United States in settling the dispute. Then Cleveland in his annual message to Congress in 1894 offered to renew his attempt to have the matter arbitrated, but Britain refused to arbitrate. In February 1895 Congress passed a joint resolution urging arbitration. When no conciliatory word came from Britain, Richard Olney, now Secretary of State, with Cleveland's approval, in July 1895 sent a strong note to London which said, "Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interpretation... Its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers." Under the Monroe Doctrine, the United States could not permit a European power to seize the territory of an American republic. Thus the United States wanted a definite answer as to whether Great Britain would submit the dispute to arbitration. Cleveland called the note "Olney's twenty-inch gun." After a four-month delay, Lord Salisbury, British prime minister and foreign secretary, replied politely but firmly on 26 November to the effect that the Monroe Doctrine could not be applied to the dispute and was not part of international law and that Great Britain and Venezuela alone were concerned with the matter.

Cleveland then sent a special message to Congress in December, making public the correspondence between Olney and Salisbury and recommending that the United States take the decision of the boundary line between British Guiana and Venezuela into its own hands. "In making these recommendations," Cleveland said, "I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow." While a few prominent Americans such as Carl Schurz and President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard criticized the president's words, his message was widely approved in the country. Congress responded at once by unanimously authorizing the president to appoint a boundary commission and appropriating $100,000 for its expenses.

This action caused influential citizens in both the United States and Great Britain to work to maintain the peace. Also by this time the British government had become involved in difficulties with the Boers in South Africa and was concerned about its international position in general. Thus Great Britain agreed to submit its entire claim to arbitration. The tribunal, meeting in Paris in 1899, made a series of decisions that largely supported the original British position. The Venezuelan controversy came to an amicable conclusion and in the end led to closer relations between the United States and Great Britain.

Although the nation had supported Cleveland in the Venezuelan affair, the continuance of the depression and the president's failure to do much about it caused a steady decline of his popularity with many voters and politicians in his own party. Cleveland had many opponents. Silver Democrats, Populists, and other agrarians were alienated by the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and by Cleveland's defense of the gold standard. He had lost the support of organized labor by the use of troops to break the Pullman strike. Businessmen blamed him for the Panic of 1893, and industrialists were irritated by his attack on the protective tariff. Democratic party leaders charged him with splitting his party in the tariff and currency fights and of allowing the Republicans to win the midterm election of 1894. And his negotiation of bond issues with Wall Street financiers to maintain the gold reserve laid him open to the charge that he was "a tool of Wall Street."

Three Supreme Court decisions in 1895 added to the general discontent on the part of farmers, workers, and the lower middle class. The Court in a five to four decision in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company invalidated the income tax clause of the Wilson Gorman Tariff on the ground it was a direct tax. Therefore, according to the Constitution, it had to be apportioned among the states on the basis of population. Moreover, the Court, through Justice Stephen J. Field, had earlier called the income tax "an assault upon capital" and a "stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests ... became a war of the poor and against the rich." About a week after this decision the Court, in the case of in re Debs, unanimously upheld the injunction under which Debs had been imprisoned at the time of the Pullman strike. And at the same time the Court, in United States v. E. C. Knight Company, distinguished manufacturing from commerce and held that the Sherman Antitrust Act did not apply to manufacturing combinations within states, thus sanctioning the use of the holding company device and for some time hampering the prosecution of monopolies.

There was a widespread feeling in the country in the mid-1890s that there was a war on between the rich and the poor, and that Cleveland, the Supreme Court, and Congress were on the side of the rich. The agrarians looked upon Cleveland as an enemy, and he became the personification of the northeastern conservatism against which they were in revolt. Within the Democratic party, insurgent Democrats prepared to denounce Cleveland and advocate free silver. They hoped both to win the Populists and take over the Democratic party. Their work was so effective that by the summer of 1896, after the state conventions had met, they had gained control of every Democratic state organization south of the Potomac and west of the Alleghenies, except in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

The Republicans met in St. Louis in June and nominated William McKinley of Ohio for president and Garret A. Hobart, a corporation lawyer from New Jersey, for vice-president. Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a wealthy Ohio industrialist, had been largely responsible for McKinley's nomination. On the monetary question, McKinley's record was not consistent. He had voted for both the Bland-Allison Act and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act; and yet in 1891 in running for governor he had condemned the free coinage of silver and had advocated international bimetallism. McKinley hoped that the tariff would be the chief issue of the campaign. Hanna had already decided upon a gold standard plank, but at the convention he gave the impression that he had to be "persuaded." Upon the adoption of the gold plank a small group of silver advocates led by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado dramatically left the hall and organized the National Silver Republican party.

The Democrats were torn by bitter strife when they met in Chicago in July. The convention was dominated by the silverites who denounced Cleveland in resolutions and speeches. The platform repudiated the Cleveland program and attached the protective tariff, the national banks, trusts, and the Supreme Court. It called for an income tax and the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1. The leading contender for the nomination was Congressman Richard P. ("Silver-Dick") Bland of Missouri, who since the seventies had fought for free silver. But he was passed over, and on the fifth ballot the convention nominated William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who had captivated the silver delegates with a speech that rose to a stirring peroration: "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Bryan's nomination has the appearance of being won by the accident of a spontaneous speech. Yet Bryan, only thirty-six at the time, had been rounding up support for several years before 1896 and had already presented his ideas many times to other audiences. His convention speech was simply the last step, a step that became inevitable when the silverites gained control of the convention. Bryan's running mate was Arthur Sewall of Maine, a wealthy shipbuilder, banker, and protectionist, and an advocate of free silver.

The silver issue split the Democratic party as well as the Republican. The Democratic platform and the repudiation of Cleveland at the convention caused conservative Democrats to organize a gold, or National Democratic party, which put candidates in the campaign. This party had the support of President Cleveland and all members of his cabinet but one. But probably more conservative Democrats supported the Republican party than the gold Democratic ticket.

The Populists were in a dilemma. They had anticipated that both old parties would adopt conservative platforms and nominate conservative candidates. The Populists would then have a clear field to win the support of all the advocates of reform. But the capture of the Democratic party by the silverites and reform elements posed a problem for the Populists. If they nominated a Populist candidate, they feared that they would split the reform vote and permit McKinley to win. Yet if they sought to unite the reform vote by endorsing Bryan, they would surrender their identity to the Democrats and sacrifice their broad program of reform for a Democratic program that placed a disproportionate emphasis on the silver question.

When the Populists met at St. Louis in July, the fusionist faction (urging fusion with the Democrats) was organized with the aim of nominating Bryan. Southern Populists, who regarded fusion with the Democrats as anathema, agreed to support Bryan only after Senator William V. Allen of Nebraska, chairman of the convention, told the Southerners that the Democrats had promised to withdraw Sewall and accept Thomas E. Watson of Georgia as their vice-presidential nominee. This arrangement would have created a true Democratic-Populist partnership, but these promises were later broken. The Populists nominated Bryan for president and the Georgia Populist, Watson, for vice-president. But the Democrats persisted in running their original choices, Bryan and Sewall. Henry Demarest Lloyd watched the convention with profound disgust and concluded, "The People's party has been betrayed ... but after all it is its own fault."

The campaign was highly emotional and dramatic. Campaigning in an unprecedented fashion, Bryan spoke in 21 states, traveled 18,000 miles, made more than 600 speeches, and reached an audience of some 5,000,000 persons. McKinley remained at his home in Canton and read well-prepared speeches from his front porch to carefully coached delegations that visited him. The real work of McKinley's campaign was done by Hanna. The powerful response to Bryan's appeal frightened eastern conservatives, and Hanna took advantage of their panic to collect campaign funds. From trusts, banks, railroads, and tycoons he raised an estimated $3.5 million as against a bare $300,000 raised by Bryan. Hanna used the money lavishly but wisely, and he received great assistance from the press, which heaped all kinds of abuse upon Bryan. The Louisville Courier Journal called Bryan "a dishonest dodger ... a daring adventurer ... a political faker," and the New York Tribune referred to him as a "wretched, rattle-pated boy." The Philadelphia Press described the "Jacobins" of the Democratic convention as "hideous and repulsive vipers," and Theodore Roosevelt was reported as saying that the silver men should "be stood up against the wall and shot." Writing to Henry Adams in London, John Hay said of Bryan, "The Boy Orator makes only one speech-but he makes it twice a day. There is no fun in it. He simply reiterates the unquestionable truths that every man who has a clean shirt is a thief and should be hanged, and there is no goodness or wisdom except among the illiterates and criminal classes." Added to these tactics were those of threats. The idea was spread that Bryan's victory would bring disaster. Farmers were told that mortgages would not be renewed. Workmen were informed that factories would be closed or wages cut if Bryan won.

In the election the popular vote was unusually large, with each of the candidates receiving a larger total than any previous candidate of his party. Out of almost 14 million popular votes, McKinley won with a margin of just over a half million and with 271 electoral votes to 176 for Bryan. The Republicans also gained a majority in both houses of Congress. Bryan failed to carry a single industrial and urban state; nor could he carry a single state north of the Potomac and east of the Mississippi. In spite of the widespread unrest among labor, Bryan did not win labor's support and this failure was one of the principal reasons for his defeat. But he had nowhere the resources that backed McKinley, and he represented the party blamed for the depression.

The new work by Kleppner, Jensen, McSeveney, and others threw fresh light on the conventional narratives of the "crisis of the nineties" and the origins of the Progressive era. These writers contended that the ethno-cultural issues and responses previously mentioned were important well after the depression began in 1893, evidenced by shifts away from the Democratic party in areas little affected by the economic downturn. The Republicans' success in 1894 resulted in part from their ability to play down the cultural issues dividing them earlier, in part from their advocacy of plausible solutions to the depression (particularly the protective tariff), and in part from the deep divisions within the Democratic party. In spite of some Democratic regrouping in 1895, the Bryan campaign confirmed the Republican strengths and Democratic weaknesses of 1894. Meanwhile Republican party professionals refused to commit their party to a single issue, like prohibition, strongly advocated at the local level by the party's pietistic rural wing. Instead McKinley in 1896 led a new coalition of business-backed pragmatists who favored a pluralistic approach to interest groups and national issues.

Bryan, on the other hand, turned his campaign into a moral crusade aimed at rural, pietistic, old stock voters in the Midwest. This shift in appeal, along with the continuing depression, confirmed the voter realignment that began in 1894, insuring Republican dominance in the Midwest for nearly a third of a century. In the urban Northeast, Bryan failed not so much because he did not address himself to ethnic and religious differences among the voters "as because northeastern workers regardless of background, rejected the economic arguments he did advance-just as they had those of the Cleveland Democrats earlier in the depression" and instead "favored Republican arguments" on the tariff, currency, and the return of prosperity.

Thus the new literature, while emphasizing ethno-cultural forces, also recognized the importance of economic pressures on voters during a depression. The political realignment taking place during the depression of the 1890's therefore did not rest solely on ethno-cultural matters. In fact they subsided as issues, to be replaced by the economic ones of depression and the Republicans' positive responses to it. Consequently, "its depression victories enabled the Republican party to resolve a number of [ethno-cultural] disputes to the satisfaction of groups that supported the G.O.P." wrote McSevency. This view of the political realignment of the 1890s is consistent with that in some of the most recent studies of the two major parties.

In establishing its position as the majority party after 1894, the Republican party obviously benefited from the depression and Democratic mistakes. "But the Republicans prevailed because they more nearly met the needs and desires of the mass of American voters than any other party," and they provided "plausible solutions to the dilemmas of economic expansion." The Democrats, awarded national power in 1892, failed to meet this challenge satisfactorily, or to strengthen their party organization and thereby insure continued Democratic election victories. If the voters turned after 1894 to "the party of progress, prosperity, and national authority" (the Republican), wrote historian Lewis L. Gould, they "also turned against the party and principles of Grover Cleveland. This was Cleveland's main legacy to his party and the nation."

The election of 1896 was the most important since 1860, and it marked a decisive triumph for conservative Republicanism. In a negative sense the election represented the last bid of the farmers for leadership of a national reform movement. In a positive sense it ushered in a new era of political leadership and a new set of issues.

The McKinley Administration came in under highly favorable circumstances. Businessmen knew that their interests would be safeguarded for four years. There was a return to prosperity which was to continue for several years. Farmers largely dropped politics and were busy raising crops. Politicians were happy and looked forward to a long period of abundance. McKinley, well aware of the economic distress that had affected Americans, promised in his first inaugural that this would be his chief concern. To maintain recovery he advocated two principal measures-a higher tariff and a gold standard act. Congress responded with the Dingley Tariff of 1897, which raised duties to an average of 52 percent, the highest in American history, and with the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which declared the gold dollar from that time on would be the sole standard of currency.

With these two laws the McKinley administration made good its campaign promises. Beyond this neither the president nor Congress intended to interfere with the country. They planned to let it alone and to allow business to create prosperity. McKinley's inauguration marked the beginning of one of the great consolidation movements in American industry (1897-1904). This, coupled with the Spanish-American War, probably produced the golden years of prosperity under McKinley and Hanna.

McKinley's presidency also marked the beginning of a new era not only in national politics but in the running of the national government; as Professor Wilfred Binkley, a leading authority on the president and the Congress, wrote: "Not since the presidency of Thomas Jefferson had there been achieved such an integration of the political branches of the federal government and such consequent coherence and sense of direction in its functioning." The equilibrium and stalemate of the preceding two decades had given way to Republican supremacy.

Source: Vincent P. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America: 1877-1920 (Wheeling, IL: Forum Press, 1989), 60-79.