The campaign of 1896, the liveliest since the Civil War, centered oil the money question. "Night and day," reported a correspondent for the London Daily Mail, "in every newspaper, in every cafe, in every street car, it is the dollar and the dollar alone, whose fate is discussed." In the "Battle of the Standards," as it was called, the Republicans upheld the gold standard while the Democrats went partly Populist and came out for the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold.

But the monetary agitation was symptomatic not systemic. It was the terrible depression following the Panic of 1893 that produced the great debate over money. While protectionists continued to insist that high tariffs created jobs and opened the way to recovery, currency inflationists saw no solution to the crisis so long as there was a shortage of money in circulation. The monetary debate involved a sectional clash: the agrarian West and South vs. the urban East. It also involved economic strife: debtors vs. creditors, hard-pressed farmers vs. prosperous industrialists, the underprivileged many vs. the privileged few. "In form," said reformer Henry George, "the struggle is on the currency question. But these are only symbols, and behind them are gathered the world-opposing forces of aristocratic privilege and democratic freedom."

The monetary question dominated the conventions of both major parties. When the Republicans met in St. Louis on June 16, some of the delegates wanted to emphasize the tariff again and soft-pedal the currency issue. But the Easterners insisted on a strong fiscal plank and the party ended by opposing the free coinage of silver "except by international agreement" and declaring that "the existing gold standard must be preserved." Some twenty silver Republicans from the West, led by Colorado's Senator Henry M. Teller, walked out of the convention (while the band played "Silver Threads among the Gold"), founded the National Silver party, and later gave their support to the Democrats. Once the silverites were gone, it was easy to agree on candidates. On the first ballot William McKinley, Governor of Ohio, long backed for the Presidency by Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna as "the advance agent of prosperity," won the nomination and was teamed up with Garret A. Hobart, a New Jersey corporation lawyer.

McKinley, fifty-three, had once been a "straddlebug"; he had even supported silver measures when he was in Congress. But he was a devout "Goldbug" by now, and, as sponsor of the high-tariff act of 1890, was identified with Republican protectionism as well. "The money question is the vital thing," a friend told him after the convention. "I am a Tariff man, standing on a Tariff platform," responded McKinley. "This money matter is unduly prominent. In thirty days you won't hear anything about it." But judge William R. Day of Canton, Ohio, disagreed. "In my opinion," he said, "in thirty days you won't hear of anything else."

Judge Day was right. When the Democrats, meeting in St. Louis on July 16, rudely snubbed President Cleveland and the Gold Democrats and enthusiastically adopted a free-silver plank, it was clear that money, not tariffs, was to dominate the campaign. The candidate, William Jennings Bryan, former Congressman from Nebraska and a passionate silverite, was determined to give the monetary issue primacy. In a debate on the party's currency plank, he delivered one of the most impassioned speeches ever made in a party convention and brought the delegates to their feet howling in ecstasy with his cry toward the end: "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...! 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!"

Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech touched off a demonstration lasting close to an hour, during which delegates shouted, cheered, and wept, carried Bryan around on their shoulders in triumph, and waved banners on which were scribbled the words, "NO CROWN OF THORNS! NO CROSS OF GOLD!" Gold Democrats were appalled. "For the first time," exclaimed an Eastern delegate, "I can understand the scenes of the French Revolution."' The convention chose Bryan (at thirty-six, the youngest man ever nominated for President) on the fifth ballot and, to balance the ticket, picked Arthur Sewall, a rich Maine shipbuilder, for second place. With the silverites in the saddle, the Goldbugs, determined not to be crucified on a cross of silver, angrily walked out of the convention, organized the National Democratic party to fight Bryan, and ran John M. Palmer for President. After it was all over someone asked New York's conservative David B. Hill whether he was still a Democrat. "Yes," he sighed, "I am a Democrat still-very still." Observed the New York World: "The sceptre of political power has passed from the strong certain hands of the East to the feverish, headstrong mob of the West and South."

The Populists were in a quandary. Should they maintain their independence in 1896, thus splitting the silver forces, or should they endorse Bryan, thus jeopardizing their broader objectives? They finally decided to support Bryan. The Democratic platform, after all, contained a number of Populist planks in addition to free silver: supporting tariff reduction, a graduated income tax, and stricter railroad and trust regulations; condemning the use of court injunctions against strikers; and disapproving of the bond issues which Cleveland arranged with J. P. Morgan in 1895 to maintain the nation's gold reserves. As a compromise, the Populists substituted Georgia's Thomas E. Watson for the Democrat's Arthur Sewall as Vice-President, under the impression that the Democrats would accept Watson too. Only after fusion had become official did they learn that the Democrats had no intention of dropping Sewall from the ticket. By then it was too late to back out. Populist faithfuls, who saw their party go down the drain after fusion with the Democrats in 1896, deplored the obsession with silver. "Free silver," said Henry Demarest Lloyd, "is the cow-bird of the Reform movement. It waited until the nest had been built by the sacrifices and labors of others, and then it laid its eggs in it, pushing out the others which lie smashed on the ground. It is now flying around while we are expected to do the incubating."

Mainly because of Bryan, the handsome young Nebraskan with the magnetic voice, the campaign of 1896 was almost continuously exciting. Bryan-"the Silver Knight of the West," "the Great Commoner," "the Peerless One"-took unashamedly to the stump in a quest for votes and when he was charged with lacking dignity he exclaimed: "...I would rather have it said that I lacked dignity than ... that I lack backbone to meet the enemies of the Government who work against its welfare in Wall Street." In Philadelphia he asked: "What other Presidential candidates did they ever charge with lack of dignity?" "Lincoln," said someone in the crowd. "Yes, my friends," said Bryan, "they said it of Lincoln." "Jackson," suggested someone else. "Yes, they said it of Jackson." "And Jefferson," volunteered another Bryanite. "Yes," said Bryan, "and of Jefferson; he was lacking in dignity, too." While bands played "El Capitan," the Democratic marching-song, Bryan went around the country, speaking in little towns as well as big cities and from train platforms as well as in large auditoriums, preaching the gospel of free silver. "Where there is more money in circulation," he said time and again, "there is a better chance for each man to get money than there is when money is scarce." Gold, he insisted, helped only the classes, while free silver helped both the masses and the classes: "There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them."

Before the campaign was over Bryan had traveled 18,000 miles by train, made more than 600 speeches (sometimes ten or twenty a day), addressed five million people, and talked of many things: farm prices, mortgage rates, the need for credit, and railroad regulation. But he subsumed all of these issues under the super-issue of free silver, made the white metal synonymous with democracy and the people, and identified gold with Wall Street, the special interests, privilege, and plutocracy. Like the "Cross of Gold" speech at the convention, Bryan's campaign speeches were filled with religious imagery and evangelical fervor and aroused many of his listeners to a pitch of passion that dumbfounded when it did not alarm respectable people in the East. "It was a fanaticism like the Crusades," observed Kansas Republican journalist William Allen White, who was both fascinated and repelled. "Indeed, the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy, Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold and all its symbols--capital, wealth, plutocracy--diabolical. At night from ten thousand little white schoolhouse windows, lights twinkled back vain hope to the stars... They sang their barbaric songs in unrhythmic jargon, with something of the same mad faith that inspired the martyrs going to the stake. Far into the night the voices rose-women's voice, children's voices, the voices of old men, of youths and of maidens, rose on the ebbing prairie breezes, as the crusaders of the revolution rode home, praising the people's will as though it were God's will, and cursing wealth for its inequity."

The Republicans were savage in their assaults on Bryan. No epithet was too strong to hurl at the Democratic standard-bearer: socialist, anarchist, communist, revolutionary, lunatic, madman, rabble-rouser, thief, traitor, murderer. The New York Times called him "an irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathetically honest and enthusiastic crank." The New York Tribune referred to him as a "wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness," and the Philadelphia Press dismissed his followers as "hideous and repulsive vipers." A Chicago clergyman even announced that the "Chicago platform was made in Hell," and Theodore Roosevelt contemplated appearing "on the field of battle, sword in hand," in the event of a Bryan victory. But the Republicans did more than mouth maledictions. Under the adroit direction of Mark Hanna, chairman of the Republican national committee, they amassed ample funds from banks, insurance companies, and industrial corporations, distributed tons of pamphlets, leaflets, banners, posters, and McKinley buttons and sent out hundreds of able speakers to explain to the voters why gold meant stability and prosperity while silver threatened anarchy and economic collapse. Some bankers told farmers their mortgages would be foreclosed if they voted Democratic, and some employers put warning slips in their workers' pay envelopes: "if Bryan is elected, do not come back to work. The plant will be closed." Bryan's grasp of the money question was undoubtedly simplistic; but it is clear that the views of his opponents were equally lacking in sophistication. Their hysteria at the thought of silver matched the Bryanite frenzy at the idea of gold. "The whole currency question," Finley Peter Dunne's comic character Mr. Dooley finally decided, "is a matter of lungs."

McKinley's campaign was quieter than Bryan's but no less energetic. Like Benjamin Harrison in 1888, but on a much larger scale, McKinley carried on a "front-porch" campaign at his home in Canton, Ohio. His manager Mark Hanna arranged for hundreds of delegations-representing farmers, workers, businessmen, veterans, college students, clergymen, lawyers, doctors-to take the train to Canton, deliver complimentary little addresses, which had been carefully cleared beforehand, at McKinley's place, and then listen to brief responses by the Republican candidate, also carefully prepared ahead of time. McKinley's brief speeches were widely reported in the press and some of' his remarks became popular campaign material: "Good money never made times hard"; "Our currency today is good-all of it is as good as gold," "We want good prices and good wages, and when we have them we want them to be paid in good money." In all the Republican campaign literature he sent out Hanna tried to get across the idea that McKinley and gold mono-metallism meant a return to prosperity after the searing depression of the Cleveland years and a boost in employment and wages for the workers. The most popular Republican slogan was "McKinley and the Full Dinner Pail."

Hanna and his associates were alarmed in August; Bryan and the gospel of silver seemed to be sweeping the country. By October they were reassured; a revival of business, followed by rising prices, seemed to be taking the wind out of Bryan's sails. On November 5, almost fourteen million citizens went to the polls, more than ever before, and gave McKinley over 600,000 more popular votes than Bryan (7,111,607 or 50.88 percent to 6,509,052 or 46.77 percent) and 95 more electoral votes (271 to 176). The Republicans also had majorities in both houses of Congress. The sectional cleavage was clear: McKinley carried the industrial North and Middle West as well as several states in the Far West, while Bryan took the Solid South and the Plains and Mountain states. There was also an economic cleavage: McKinley not only captured the votes of the urban middle and upper middle classes; he also did better than Bryan with urban laborers and the most prosperous farmer, neither of whom saw anything to gain from currency inflation. Bryan's strongest supporters were poverty-stricken farmers in the West and the South; but he also attracted many citizens everywhere who were bothered by plutocratic rule in a democratic country and by the social ills that accompanied the industrialization of the economy after the Civil War: sweatshops, slums, child labor, widespread poverty.

By the time of McKinley's inauguration the long depression touched, off by the Panic of 1893 was ending and the Republicans could claim to be the party of prosperity. The opening of gold mines in South Africa and elsewhere increased the world's gold supply and ironically brought about the currency inflation for which the silverites had been clamoring. Still, Bryan's message had not been merely monetary; he had dramatized many issues in 1896 that continued to be pressing. Even his opponents--some of them at least--couldn't help being impressed by the gallant fight he had waged against great odds. "The great fight is over," Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's wife wrote Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British Ambassador, afterwards, "and a fight conducted by trained and experienced and organized forces, with both hands full of money, with the full power of the press--and of prestige--on the one side; on the other, a disorganized mob at first, out of which there burst into sight, hearing, and force-one man, but such a man! Alone, penniless, without backing, without money, with scarce a paper, without speakers, that man fought such a fight that even those in the East can call him a Crusader, an inspired fanatical prophet! It has been marvelous. Hampered by such a following, such a platform ...he almost won. We acknowledge to 7 millions campaign fund, as against his 300,000. We had during the last week of the campaign 18,000 speakers on the stump. He alone spoke for his party, but speeches which spoke to the intelligence and hearts of the people, and with a capital P. It is over now, but the vote is 7 millions to 6 millions and a half!"

Source: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Campaigns (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 167-69.