This Day in Convention History (Bryan Electrifies Dems With ‘Cross of Gold’ Speech)

July 8, 1896—With a barn-burner of an address to Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago for their Presidential convention, William Jennings Bryan did more than just switch the direction of his party in a more liberal direction, toward an acceptance of silver that incumbent Grover Cleveland would not support.

The former two-term, 36-year-old Congressman from Nebraska and advocate for the Populist movement also served notice that he would launch a campaign in which personal intensity would only be matched by physical mobility, as he became the most important Democratic figure for the next generation—its Presidential nominee three times, and a political force to be reckoned with in two others.

You can listen to Bryan’s recording of his “Cross of Gold” speech on the American Rhetoric Web site, but I’m afraid it would be like hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played on a single note. He read the speech in a recording studio, on equipment far more primitive than today’s, requiring careful pronunciation above all else. It lacked an audience that “The Boy Orator of the Plains” could cajole, convince, exhort, and—at one memorable point, to one lukewarm group—defy.

Most of all, it lacked the suspense—and unexpected drama—of the real-time event. “When I finished my speech," Bryan recalled, “I went to my seat in a silence that was really painful. When I neared my seat, somebody near me raised a shout, and the next thing I was picked up—-and bedlam broke loose.”

At least since the Republican Convention of 1976, when Gerald Ford narrowly beat down the insurgent candidacy of Ronald Reagan, nothing of consequence remains to be decided at the two parties’ quadrennial gatherings. If, as historian Michael Beschloss noted in this past Sunday’s New York Times, modern conventions resemble heavily scripted “infomercials,” the style of their predecessors was political theater. It may have been best exemplified in 1896, when, upon the conclusion of Bryan’s speech, the transported delegates marched around the hall for an hour.

The next day, the delegates nominated Bryan for the Presidency. No prior candidate had been present for his own nomination.  Moreover, although well-received convention speeches have thrust other up-and-rising politicians to national prominence (e.g., Hubert H. Humphrey, Barack Obama), no other has become his party’s nominee the week of his speech.

The fiery finale of the speech (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) ensured its permanent place in political annals. It also manifested the religious intensity that Bryan would display on public occasions throughout the rest of his life.

As Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, for instance, he and the President placed in State Department posts a high number of former missionaries and their children—part of their plan to ensure that post-imperial China would not only be a democratic nation, but also a Christian one. The concluding, perhaps most controversial, chapter of his life—his participation in the Scopes “monkey trial”—resulted from his fear that the theory of evolution was becoming increasingly accepted by churches.

This unfortunate end to Bryan’s life ensured that he would not be remembered as he should have been—as the most radical contender for the Presidency until another religious-minded candidate, Jesse Jackson, came along in the 1980s. Furthermore, it undoubtedly encouraged historians such as Richard Hofstadter to view perhaps more darkly than they should have the roots of the Populist movement he came to spearhead.

Populism took shape in the Gilded Age, as farmers found themselves increasingly marginalized in an America turning away from agriculture and toward industry. Farmers especially felt themselves at the mercy of railroad magnates and East Coast financiers.

In certain ways, farmers’ sense of loss and rhetoric that blamed Wall Street and foreigners for their plight (Britain had withdrawn money from American banks in the Panic of 1893) has led some media observers (notably, Forbes and U.S. World Report) to liken Bryan and the Populist wing that took over the Democratic Party in 1896 to Donald Trump’s and his supporters that upended the GOP establishment this year.

Historian H.W. Brands anticipated these critics in a 1996 appearance on C-Span’s Booknotes to promote his history of the 1890s, The Reckless Decade:

“A populist is someone who appeals to the masses, who generally employs a rhetoric of distrust of groups that they identify as elite. And in a democracy like the United States, to be branded ‘elitist’ is a serious charge. Populists portray themselves as the defenders of received values, of traditional virtues. They often tend toward demagoguery. In . . . the I890s, they were quite taken by conspiracy theories. This was in line with their thinking that elites controlled the American political systems, the American economy. And there was a notion that if somehow the United States could simply get back to its populist roots, if the common people could once again take control of the political and economic system, then we would return to some golden era of American history.”

 

Certainly, a powerful sense of grievance and a feeling that too many remained stranded in hard times (the Panic of 1893, the Great Recession of 2007-09) are common threads running through these different points in time. Bryan gave voice to this when he directly addressed gold-standard adherents who followed the lead of the incumbent President, Grover Cleveland:

"When you [turning to the gold delegates] come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course." He went on to redefine "business man" in a broader sense than the proprietor of a large urban concern, as it was already becoming known.

But Bryan, unlike Trump, was a party loyalist, ready to differ sharply with opponents on issues but without resort to name-calling; he was not a billionaire, but a man who had to recoup his finances after the 1900 Presidential race; and, far from espousing vague, often contradictory positions, he proposed specific reforms way in advance of their eventual enactment (e.g., the federal income tax, railroad regulation, women's suffrage, a Department of Labor, state initiative and referendum, and two issues with sharp resonance today: the abolition of capital punishment and campaign fund disclosure). 

The youngest major party Presidential nominee in American history, with little opportunity to make a name for himself during his four years in Congress, Bryan made a virtue of necessity by launching something unprecedented in national politics: a barnstorming campaign by train, in which he made at least 250 speeches, seen by at least 5 million people. This drew an implicit generational contrast with the 54-year-old Republican nominee, William McKinley, who conducted a “front-porch campaign” from his Ohio home.

But McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, countered with an all-media promotional blitz based unapologetically on funds derived from the commercial interests that Bryan castigated. 

In his fine new book The Fight to Vote, Michael Waldman not only itemized the multiple ways that the GOP got its message out (e.g., 120 million pieces of literature, brochures in nine languages, and a short film of McKinley that was, in effect, the first campaign commercial), but also its systematic, even shameless form of fundraising (for instance, “Banks were dunned to donate one quarter of 1 percent of their capital to McKinley’s campaign”).

 

Predictably, Bryan was swamped in November 1896. He would go on to be nominated again by the Democrats in 1900 and, after skipping the 1904 race against overwhelmingly popular Theodore Roosevelt, for a third time against William Howard Taft in 1908. He lost each election. But, as leader of the party’s liberals, he lent critical support to Wilson at the 1912 Democratic Convention.  That alliance proved ill-fated for Bryan. Wilson appointed him Secretary of State but sought his advice little, and Bryan resigned in protest over the President’s handling of the Lusitania controversy.

Quote of the Day (Rev. Samuel Dickinson Burchard, Losing an Election for the GOP With a Gaffe)

“We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”—Rev. Samuel Dickinson Burchard (1812-1891), October 29, 1884, coining an alliterative phrase that lost the election for his Presidential candidate, James G. Blaine (pictured left), quoted in the New York World, Oct. 30, 1884

In keeping with the spirit of Burchard, pastor of the Murray Hill Presbyterian Church, I have come up with my own alliteration to describe October 29, 1884: DDD—i.e., the Day of Double Disaster. Well, disaster for Blaine, anyway.

The day would have been bad enough for its evening event: a “prosperity dinner” at Delmonico’s restaurant, featuring 200 of the nation’s robber barons gathered for the Republican Blaine. 

As Henry Graff noted in his biography of Blaine’s opponent, Grover Cleveland, the sight of so many tycoons pulling up on the street in their carriages was “simply out of place” amid an economic downturn. But then, as now, the GOP were unfazed by plutocratic pornography.

(Before I get buzzed by those of a more conservative persuasion, I hasten to add that today, Democrats have their own fat cats—including this one.)

In some ways, this second disaster, in my opinion, was worse than the one earlier in the day, as Blaine seemed untroubled by the specter before him and the event’s masterminds, having planned this well in advance, seemed not to have a clue about the potential P.R. fallout—especially the New York World cartoon called “The Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the Money Kings.”

But the controversy that really made the difference in the election was one that the “Plumed Knight,” who had been angling patiently for the nomination for the last eight years, was utterly unprepared for, probably because of utter exhaustion. 

Both Democrats and Republicans were convinced that the election would turn on New York, just as in 2004 both parties’ major consultants correctly concluded that the Presidential sweepstakes would ride on Ohio.

In an attempt to win this swing state, Blaine had crisscrossed it nonstop in these closing weeks of the campaign, so that on the morning of the 29th, as he sat down for a meeting with a group of Protestant ministers at New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel, he was catching his breath—and collecting his gray matter—when Burchard dropped his bombshell.

I believe it was columnist Michael Kinsley who coined the phrase, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” If that’s the operative (if unofficial) definition, then there ought to be another term for a politician undone (or at least put in hot water) by a supporter’s big mouth, as Blaine was. 

(Maybe we can call this “The Wright Stuff,” after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who placed his longtime congregant, Barack Obama, in his own political cauldron in 2008.)

Each of the three ‘r’s identified by Burchard was problematic for the Republicans. The least difficult was the third ‘r’, “Rebellion,” a reference to the divisions still left, a generation later, by the Civil War.

Since the war, the GOP had adopted the so-called “waving the bloody flag” strategy—reminding voters that, while they had supported the Union cause unreservedly, Southern Democrats had been instrumental in the secession movement and many Northern Democrats opposed fighting the war to its conclusion. But now, with Reconstruction having ended, the efficacy of such appeals had worn off—and, in the South, could be counterproductive.

“Rum” was a phrase close to Burchard’s heart, as an advocate of Prohibition. With the establishment of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874, the movement was gathering momentum, though not enough yet to pass a constitutional amendment, as it did in 1918.

But the Republicans, like the Democrats, regarded the movement at this point with extreme caution, if not distaste. Much of the reason stemmed from the source of votes. Of the approximately 1,000 voting booths in the city during this single election, some 60% were located in saloons. The appeal of this “reform” movement was lost on New Yorkers and other city residents.

But it was the “Romanism” part of Burchard’s introduction of Blaine that caused the biggest ruckus. Afterward, the minister claimed that he hadn’t intended to insert the word—it simply sprang to mind as he was hunting spontaneously for a third item to complete his ringing phrase.

Maybe age had something to do with it, too—when he retired a year later, The New York Times reported that he was “the oldest member of the Presbyterian Church in this country.” Age eliminates the self-censorship button that many people maintain.

Whatever the cause might be, Burchard probably didn’t have to rummage far in his subconscious to dredge up his bit of anti-Catholic bigotry.

“Romanism” proved so toxic because it was adjacent to “Rum.” At the time, immigrant Catholics were being blamed for all kinds of urban unrest, including poverty, violence and corruption—all associated by much of the public with alcohol.

Here’s why Burchard’s remarks held so much peril for Blaine: He believed that he could finally swing the Empire State into the Republican column.

Despite his association with the so-called “Blaine Amendment” that sought to eliminate government funding for parochial schools, the leader of the “Half-Breeds” (the moderate conservative wing of the GOP) thought he stood a decent chance to win Catholic votes this time. He had, for starters, gotten under the skin of the British government during his brief service as Secretary of State under President James Garfield.

More important was his background: Not only was his mother Irish Catholic, but his sister was a mother superior in a convent. How could anyone be anti-Catholic with those kinds of associations?

Someone with associates like the Rev. Burchard, that’s who, according to Democrats. Blaine didn’t do or say anything immediately after Burchard’s outburst to signal disapproval. The only explanation I have for his curious inaction was exhaustion; the last six weeks of the campaign would see him make approximately 400 speeches, addresses so Dickensian in their flamboyance that he would be indisposed afterward.

The RRR speech was an answer from heaven from Democrats on the defensive over Cleveland’s possible fatherhood of a child out of wedlock. Senator Arthur Pue Gorman, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, gave the order to his underlings as soon as he heard Burchard’s phrase: “See to it that the statement is in every newspaper in the country by tomorrow.”

By the next day, when Blaine had his wits about him, he had denounced the minister’s statement, but it was too late by then. We’ll never know exactly how many votes the incident cost, but consider this: Blaine lost the election by less than three tenths of 1% of the total vote. He lost New York, too.

Of course Tammany Hall had the discipline and resources needed to mount a major offensive against Blaine, but for once the organization didn’t have to do much to convince people to turn out. Catholic priests were so incensed by the whole affair, in sermons the week before the election, they urged parishioners to vote against Blaine.

Thirty-five years later, when Carrie Phillips, a former lover of Warren Harding, was threatening to tell the press nasty things about the Republican nominee, GOP bosses found enough funds to pay for a trip to Asia that would take her and her husband outside the country until after the 1920 election. I’m sure Blaine wished he could have done the same thing for the minister that got him into so much trouble.

This Day in Electoral History (GOP Farmer Commits Fraud; British Envoy, a Gaffe)

October 21, 1888—With the Presidential election only a few weeks ago, The Los Angeles Times – unlike its present incarnation, a mouthpiece of its Republican owner, Col. Harrison Otis—printed a letter that tilted the balance of the contest.

In an unguarded moment, Lionel Sackville-West, Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States, confided to a correspondent he had never met, an English-born American citizen named Charles F. Murchison, that the incumbent administration of President Grover Cleveland was “desirous of maintaining friendly relations with Great Britain.”

A few small problems with all of this:

* “Murchison” was fiction—the letter had been created by a Republican farmer named George Osgoodby.

* Sackville-West had fallen for a diplomatic version of a trick that pugilist Muhammad Ali later tried out on George Foreman in a boxing ring—i.e., “Rope a Dope.”

* The Cleveland administration not only didn’t invite the errant envoy’s endorsement, but would have been thrilled if he could have been dropped into a deep, deep well—for at one stroke, Sackville-West had alienated a constituency that had put the President over the top in the key state of New York four years before—Irish Catholics.

In the end, the fury of this voting bloc led to the loss of New York for the Democrats in 1888. While narrowly winning the popular vote, Cleveland lost the all-important Electoral College vote to his Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison.

I could go on and on about this event, but I’ve found someone who can relate it a hundred times better than I ever can. I’m talking about Robert B. Mitchell, an assistant editor with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

The longtime journalist has indulged his fascination with history in Skirmisher: The Life and Times of James B. Weaver, the Populist Party candidate of 1892.

Now he displays his smooth writing style and considerable erudition on a blog called “The Greased Pig.” (If that term sounds slightly unsavory, well, it is—it comes from Ambrose Bierce’s description of the Presidency as “the greased pig in the field game of American politics.” The more things change, etc….) Here is Mitchell’s post about this imbroglio.

Mitchell only started his blog a fortnight ago, but I’m impressed enough that I’ve already bookmarked it. I hope you will, too, faithful reader.

This Day in Presidential History (Cleveland’s Covert Cancer Operation)

July 1, 1893—Taking care that skittish financial markets not be further unnerved, Grover Cleveland had a cancerous lesion removed from his left upper jaw, in an operation performed not only a hospital or a doctor’s house but aboard a private yacht floating in New York’s East River, away from the prying eyes of reporters.

The details of the President’s surgery, as recounted in a fine short biography by my old Columbia University professor of history, Henry Graff, are excruciating to read. The President, terrified of cancer, did not bring the lesion to the attention of his doctors for several weeks, by which time the condition had spread. A 1975 reexamination of the tissue showed that it was a verrucous carcinoma of the hard palate and gingival, often caused by alcohol (Cleveland enjoyed beer and had the protruding abdomen to prove it) and tobacco (he relished a good cigar, too).

The yacht’s salon was converted into an operating room. Cleveland sat in a chair lashed to the interior mast during the operation while his doctors used far more anesthesia than they’d expected. Not only was the public not informed of the procedure (in fact, when one paper leaked the news, the administration vigorously denied it), but even his Vice-President, Adlai Stevenson (grandfather of the future Democratic Presidential nominee), does not appear to have been informed. In fact, the full story was not publicly revealed only nearly a decade after the President’s death, almost a quarter century after the operation.

There was a reason for this secrecy. Wall Street feared what would happen if Cleveland, a “sound money man” who backed the gold standard, were succeeded by Stevenson, who backed the use of silver in currency.

Cleveland’s secret surgery, while one of the first instances of concealment of Presidential medical conditions, still does not rank as the worst. Take your pick among John F. Kennedy, whose doctors conspired with him to hide from the public the fact that he had Addison’s Disease, an adrenal insufficiency that required daily dosages of steroids and other medications for the last 16 years of his life; Franklin Roosevelt, whose ghastly physical appearance in his third term contrasted with denials that anything was amiss; and Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a devastating stroke in 1919 while campaigning for the League of Nations—and could not perform his normal Presidential duties for the remaining year and a half of his term.

My pick for the biggest coverup was the one stage-managed by Edith Wilson and her husband’s physician-friend, Cary Grayson. The latter refused to say that the President had even suffered a stroke, let alone that he was disabled by it. As for Mrs. Wilson: Though Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign as the first female candidate with a serious chance to win the Presidency was rightly considered precedent-shattering, in a number of ways Woodrow Wilson’s wife might be considered the first to fill the office.

Though Mrs. Wilson insisted that she did nothing without informing the President, and it is certainly true that she was his most trusted confidante before his stroke, it is an open question whether she spoke to him all the time in great detail about issues after he was incapacitated. She would not allow him to be seen, allowing all kinds of rumors to circulate. She also downplayed the true nature of his condition, claiming that he had only suffered a nervous breakdown.

Most startling, she did not inform the Vice-President, Thomas Marshall, of Wilson’s condition. Marshall had to hear about the true nature of his boss’s medical state from a friendly intermediary. Witty but insecure, Marshall was not prepared to insist upon assuming power because of the President’s incapacity—and Wilson, with the help of his wife, would not yield it.

Had Wilson died in office or stepped down voluntarily, Marshall might have been able to effect a compromise that would have saved the President’s cherished League of Nations. The President’s stubbornness, exacerbated by his stroke, assured that his dream ended in disaster.

This year, as Americans go to the polls, they will, of course, consider the candidates’ stances on issues. But they should also, to the extent they are able, consider each candidate’s physical and emotional readiness for the toughest office in the world.

This Day in Economic History (The Stock Market and the Panic of 1893)

May 5, 1893—Almost two months to the day after returning to the White House, Grover Cleveland experienced the second-worst (the worst being a catastrophic attack on the nation’s citizens) nightmare of an American President: an economy that goes south on his watch. In this case, the major signal of precipitous economic decline was a panic on the New York Stock Exchange, the first tremor of a far worse convulsion some months later that produced the Panic of 1893, a downtown surpassed in severity only by the Great Depression that began in October 1929.

A President exerts much less influence over the economy than over foreign affairs. That relative impotence was even greater in the nineteenth century, before a consensus formed during the New Deal that the executive branch of the federal government, if only as a last resort, must staunch the worst bleeding in the economy. Without a national bank or other central financial authority that could control markets (the charter of the Second Bank of the United States had not been renewed during the Jackson Administration, and the Federal Reserve would not be created until 1913), mostly all a President could do was wring his hands and pray.

While in office, Bill Clinton looked backward to the turn of the century to see how Americans had managed the convulsions of a new economy. If he read closely about the plight of his Democratic predecessor Cleveland, he must have felt as if he were reading a horror novel rather than an academic history. A kind of perfect storm produced the May 1893 frenzy:

* Then, as now, foreign investors bought heavily into U.S. companies. The 1891 failure of British banking house Baring Brothers made them especially timorous, with call rates on loans in New York rising to over 180 percent.
* While the subprime mess precipitated much of our current economic distress, the wild ride given investors by the American railroad industry lay behind the 1893 disruption. The February 1893 collapse of the Philadelphia and Reading, with debts up to $125 million, underscored the risks. By year’s end, 74 American railroads would collapse. (A fascinating phenomenon developed as railroads hit the financial wall; they needed well-connected attorneys at the helm of their companies to steer them through their legal morasses, including Frederick Billings of the Northern Pacific and Robert Todd Lincoln – yes, the President’s son – of the Pullman Palace Car Co.
* A Republican Congress frittered away a $100 million Treasury surplus.
* The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 pushed gold reserves below the $100 million mark and sent inflation through the roof.
* The National Cordage Co., a major rope trust and employer as well as big stock-market favorite, went belly up on May 4, immediately precipitating the stock market plunge.

Cleveland felt strongly that the Silver Purchase Act needed to be repealed, but Congress was oddly dilatory about the matter. Then, as now, the Constitution’s system of checks and balances ensured that the government wouldn’t move until a crisis came. It did so on June 27, when the stock market really crashed—the start of a four-year depression in which as much as a fifth of the nation’s factory workers lost their jobs.

By the time Congress could be persuaded to move, Cleveland couldn’t, for medical reasons. Also in May, it became apparent that a cancerous lesion in his mouth required surgery. The trouble was this: If anything should happen to the President, the next in line would be Vice-President Adlai Stevenson (grandfather of the later Illinois governor and Presidential candidate), whose pro-silver stance made him anathema to Wall Street.

Not a word could get out, then, about his medical condition, and to ensure that it didn’t the President had to have the surgery performed on a yacht in New York’s East River. Only after he was recovered, over a month later, was he prepared to call Congress into special session on August 7. Finally, they agreed to rescind the Silver Purchase Act. While investors were reassured, the damage continued to be long-lasting, ensuring that a Democrat would not hold onto the White House during the election of 1896.