 CHAPTER 10 PART 1 OF TWENTY YEARS OF THE REPUBLIC, 1885-1905 by Harry Thurston Peck. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. THE RISING IN THE WEST, PART 1 The universal chorus of applause which in the United States greeted President Cleveland's Venezuela message continued for precisely three days. At the end of that brief period discordant notes were heard, so harsh and so insistent as to put an end to what had seemed to be a perfect political harmony. It was indeed Mr. Cleveland's fate never to taste in public office the sweets of popularity for any length of time, and he was now to enter upon the most trying year of all. The praise which he had lately won alarmed the Republican leaders. They had perforce commended the bold French which he had shown to England, yet this sudden popularity seemed likely to upset their plans. Was the President thinking of a third term? Mr. Chauncey M. de Pugh in a published interview suggested this hypothesis, and it created something like a panic among the gentlemen who were asserting that they could elect even a yellow dog in 1896. Therefore almost immediately the Republican press began to qualify its praise of Mr. Cleveland and to forget its enthusiasm of a day or two before. The New York Sun, which once again had drifted into the anti-Cleveland ranks, disclosed a new line of criticism in an editorial remark. If the eccentric statesman and instinctive antagonist of the more vital American sentiments who now occupies the White House had dealt with the Venezuelan affair from the beginning and the creditable spirit shown in his message, it is a question whether the situation would not now be satisfactory and without danger of war. Note 1, page 438 The Sun's lead was quickly followed by the Tribune which had at first spoken of the President's straightforward manly words but which now called his diplomacy that of a self-opinionated Tyro. But it was not the political so much as the financial aspect of the situation that raised a storm of disapproval and this curiously enough in those quarters where the President had hitherto found strong support as well as in a section where he was already hated. The possibility of war with England had frightened Wall Street. On the day after the message stocks dropped several points and the market was decidedly weaker at the close. On the 19th, when the full gravity of the situation had become known, there was something very like a panic. The soundest securities declined in value. It was said that European holders of American stocks and bonds were preparing to sell them in large blocks. According to an estimate generally accepted at the time, the depreciation in values consequent upon the prospect of war amounted to at least $400 million. It was then that Wall Street turned on Mr. Cleveland. Hitherto the bankers and brokers and other financiers had lauded him for having, as they said, preserved the national credit and saved the country from repudiation. But now that stocks were down, these same men cursed his very name. Whether his policy was brave and honorable or the reverse was nothing to them. Margins had been wiped out, money had been lost, that was all they cared about, and so it came to pass that the President was wounded in the house of his friends. It was then that he lost for a while the support of one who had been among the most devoted, the most consistent and the most able of all his advocates in the press, Mr. Edwin Lawrence Gottkin, the editor of the New York Evening Post. Mr. Gottkin at that time divided with Mr. Dana the honor of preeminence in American journalism. No two men could have been more utterly unlike in temperament in training or in character. Mr. Gottkin was an Anglo-Irishman by birth and as a young man he had been the correspondent of the London Daily News during the Crimean War. In the East he had made the acquaintance of men of great distinction in many fields of effort from whom no less than from his reading he acquired an invaluable fund of knowledge relating to politics, diplomacy, economics, history, and incidentally human nature. During the American Civil War he acted in the dual capacity of correspondent for the Daily News and for the New York Times thus establishing a definite connection with American journalism. In 1865 he was made editor of The Nation and in 1881 he became one of the two editors of the Evening Post, his colleague being Mr. Horace White. Mr. Gottkin's comprehensive knowledge of the great world, his cosmopolitanism, and his personal associations gave him a distinct advantage over those American editors who became famous in spite of their early disadvantages. Such men as Weed and Raymond and Greeley were possessed of natural force, but they lacked breadth of view and liberality of thought. They were infinitely keen at detecting the drift of each cross current of popular opinion, but they were deficient in the qualities which would have enabled them to guide that drift and to mold and shape opinion for wise and worthy ends. Mr. Gottkin's editorial ideals were entirely at variance with those of every other great American editor. He did not set himself directly to appeal to the masses of his adopted countrymen. He never wrote down to the intellectual level of the man in the street. His appeal was rather to men of intelligence and cultivation, men who were really representative of the best elements in American life, professional men, scholars, authors, lawyers, clergymen, great merchants, experts in their own subjects, and for these he wrote in a style that was wonderfully effective. His leading articles presupposed in their readers not merely a natural intelligence but education. They were full of illusions of the kind that are heard in the familiar intercourse of men of culture. Yet nothing could have been further removed from pedantry or pose. The manner was ease and simplicity itself. The sentences were shortened to the point. The phrasing was crisp and neat and oftentimes colloquial. The whole tone was that of an accomplished gentleman conversing with a set of intimates at his club. And Mr. Gottkin had also a delightful wit at his command. An appreciation of the comic which made his persiflage delicious and which also tipped his delicate irony with destructiveness. Note 2, page 440. This last quality, his irony, was a weapon that he used with consummate skill. Its touch was light. Yet it could make the apparently invulnerable argument of an adversary shrivel like a leaf. Anything more intensely exasperating than some of his ironic strokes cannot well be imagined. And he was the only one of Dana's editorial contemporaries who could rouse that seasoned veteran to serious wrath. Mr. Gottkin, unlike Dana, had a high regard for principle and his championship of any cause was as conscientious as it was courageous. Many indeed were the causes for which he seemed at times to fight almost alone, yet of which at last he lived to see the triumph. To that triumph his steady hammering in season and out of season very powerfully contributed. It is not too much to say that nearly all the most important questions of American political history from 1881 to 1896 got their first public hearing largely through the influence of Mr. Gottkin. They were, of course, bound to arise and to clamor for solution. But it was Mr. Gottkin's clear provision which perceived their imminence as it was his vigorous pen that won for them attention. The reform of the civil service, the introduction of the Australian ballot, the enactment of rigorous election laws, the revision of the tariff, the divorce of municipal government from partisan politics, and the establishment of a stable monetary system. All these issues were fairly forced upon the public mind through Mr. Gottkin's influence. And as the whole spirit of his work was different from Dana's, so was his reward a different one. Dana must still perhaps remain in popular remembrance the greatest of all American editors. He was read by more people, his personality was the best known, he amused and entertained and furnished an infinite number of quotable bits and passages for comment. But he exercised no lasting influence for he was utterly devoid of any real beliefs. His admirations were sham admirations. His enthousiasms were sham enthousiasms. He was sincere only in his hatreds, and the spectacle of an old man shrieking forth an expression of his hatreds was in the end more repellent than edifying. Mr. Gottkin, on the other hand, was never very widely known. Yet through his selected clientele of readers he exercised a power of persuasion beyond that of any other publicist in the United States. Each of those whom he convinced became a propagandist and an intellectual leavener of the community where he lived. And so if Mr. Gottkin himself was never famous with the sort of fame that Greeley and that Dana one, it may be said of him as Mr. W. D. Howells once most aptly wrote of a greater man than Mr. Gottkin. What he had taught had become part of the life of his generation and was thus far alienated from any consciousness of him in those whose conduct he had largely shaped. As might have been expected a personality so marked as that of Mr. Gottkin possessed the defects inseparable from its qualities. In declaring his opinions he was want to adopt the tone and manner of the superior person and to assume an air of absolute infallibility such as few are quite prepared to recognize as attainable in this imperfect world. A lack of fairness was another mental characteristic of the man. Editorially he would seldom or never admit that he had aired even when the proof of error was incontestable. Again his censure was at times so bitter and so unsparing as to create a certain sympathy with those who suffered from it. Indeed among his victims were many who had once been Mr. Gottkin's friends and fellow workers but who had had the reprehensible temerity to differ with him as to public questions. On such as these he always poured the choicest vials of his wrath and showed himself intolerant beyond belief. They had in his eyes committed the unpardonable sin. Having once seen the light of the pure Gottkinian revelation they had sinned against it. Hence it was that the most persistent readers of the evening post were the very men who spoke of it with jibes. They read it and were influenced by it yet at the same time they felt themselves continually irritated by its tone. One of these gentlemen, a very eminent New Yorker who had sometimes felt the touch of Mr. Gottkin's chastening rod is said to have spoken of the post as that pessimistic malignant and malevolent sheet which no good citizen ever goes to bed without reading and to the same gentleman was ascribed another and very widely coded epigram uttered in answer to a friend who was deploring the general demoralization of New York. But what can you expect broke in his hearer of a city with two such leading newspapers, the sun in the morning making vice attractive and the post in the evening making virtue odious. Perhaps the most marked of Mr. Gottkin's mental attributes was his inability to appreciate the power of sentiment and the force of human passion. For these things like one of his favorite philosophers J.S. Mill he seemed unable to make any allowance whatsoever but he took a cold blooded commercial view of almost every public question. Had he remained in England he would have been a little englander of the straightest sect improving even upon Mill and Cobdon and the profits of the Manchester School. As an American editor he applied the same standards to American affairs. In his eyes no work could be justifiable because it cost money. No threat of war was ever to be made because it depreciated the value of stocks and bonds. National Honor was a thing to be written of in derisive quotation marks and to be regarded as a word belonging only to the vocabulary of the political swashbuckler. With such beliefs it may be readily conceived that Mr. Gottkin read the President's Venezuela message with a mixture of horror and disgust. Horror because it might mean actual fighting and disgust because it seemed to evince so much ingratitude to Mr. Gottkin. Ever since the name of Cleveland had been heard in national politics the evening post had been his thick and thin supporter. It had defended him against the scandal mongers in 1884. It had praised the achievements of his first administration. It had urged persistently his second candidacy. It had made his financial policy its own. And now he had dared to break away from all the Cobdenite Gottkinian traditions and to show himself as pugnacious in an international dispute as though he had been a casse, a marseille, or a blame. Small wonder then that the evening post declared as soon as the message had reached its office that the President's fulmination has no moral support whatever. On the 19th it pronounced his action criminally rash and insensate. The national finances already in a perilous condition will be shaken as they have not been since the Civil War. Mr. Cleveland has frustrated his own wise attempts to adjust them on a sound basis. The President's message is a standing and very insulting threat to a first class power. The post quoted against the President his own dictum that patriotism is no substitute for a sound currency. It spoke of his jingo insanity. It declared his policy to be marked by insolence, abusiveness, and brutality. Everyone who favored it came in for a share of Mr. Gottkin's wrath. And he even accused a well-known administration senator of appearing at a public banquet in a state of intoxication and of delivering a speech including hooting and insulting audience. Though what this had to do with the Venezuelan question it would have been hard for even Mr. Gottkin to explain. The evening post a special following took up the same parable. clergymen preached against the righteousness of war. Some college professors gave their verdict to the effect that the President's view of the Monroe Doctrine was all wrong. Note 3, page 445. A convocation of Baptist missionaries and resolutions declaring that the United States might better go to war with Turkey on behalf of the Armenians than with Great Britain on behalf of the Venezuelans. There was in fact in the United States something of the same divergence of opinion as existed in Great Britain. But the country as a whole soon ceased to think of this particular issue because of the immediate revival of an older one. The uneasiness of Wall Street was speedily reflected in a new drain upon the gold fund in the Treasury. The Morgan-Bellmont Syndicate had carried out its promise and for nine months the reserve had been efficiently protected. But in November there was felt a slow but steady outflow which brought the fund to less than 80 million dollars and in December the hoarding of gold once more began. The menace of war led bankers to ship gold to Europe. Only three days after his Venezuela message and on the eve of the usual adjournment for the Christmas holidays the President sent a brief communication to Congress urging it to take some action for the betterment of financial conditions. As this advice was utterly ignored Secretary Carlisle was directed to issue January 6, 1896 a circular asking for subscriptions to a new loan of 100 million dollars. Note 4, page 445. This was the fourth and last of the bond issues made by Mr. Cleveland in order to protect the gold reserve as it was also the largest. Unlike the two preceding ones the loan was offered for popular subscription. Bonds of a denomination as low as 50 dollars were engraved so that the most modest investor might have an opportunity to bid and an entire month was to elapse before the sealed proposals were opened. In deciding to offer the loan in this public way rather than once more make a bargain with a syndicate the President was undoubtedly influenced by this scathing criticism which had been visited upon him. He would never admit this either then or afterwards yet one cannot well think otherwise. Moreover Congress had taken the matter up with serious intention. A house bill provided that no bond sale should be made thereafter saved by popular subscription. Senator Elkins had offered a resolution declaring that bonds should not be sold at all by private contract. On the whole the President must have felt the sting of an almost universal censure. Therefore he now arranged a loan for the Treasury was actually in distress. Note 5, page 446. And he went directly to the people rather than to Wall Street. As it turned out there were 4,635 bidders for the bonds and the loan was oversubscribed by 400 million dollars. It was a triumph for the advocates of the open sales. To be sure of the bids received only 828 were accepted and in the allotment of the bonds Messers J.P. Morgan and company were offered to take the entire issue received some 62 million dollars while the other bidders received 38 million dollars. But it is to be noted that the lowest bid which the Treasury now considered was at the rate of 110 and 7 tenths as against the 104 and a half paid by the Morgan Belmont syndicate in the preceding February. This fact alone would seem to be a sufficient condemnation of the syndicate transaction though Mr. Cleveland never would admit the justice of this criticism. Note 6, page 447 Reviewing the whole series of bond issues after the lapse of many years and regarding all the circumstances connected with them, there appears not to be the slightest reason for impugning the good faith, the integrity or the patriotism of President Cleveland. All through those trying times he acted as he believed the highest interest of his country bad him act. But in the matter of the bond contract with the Morgan Belmont syndicate there can be little doubt that he was guilty of a serious mistake not in the arrangement which necessity drove him into making but because he delayed so long as to create the unfortunate necessity that he learned the lesson of his error was shown by his management of the fourth and last bond issue. During his final year of office the Treasury suffered no more from speculative rates upon it. Wall Street had found that the siphon process could be no longer made a source but the fact that the President had again sold bonds to keep the gold reserve intact found the already fierce resentment of the silver party into a more furious flame. The western silver men cared nothing for the effect of the Venezuela message upon Wall Street if it caused a panic there so much the better if stock gamblers had been ruined by it well and good if securities had dropped four hundred millions in value this was a cause for grim rejoicing. The fact of a war with England was very popular all through the west not upon patriotic grounds alone but is likely to bring an era of easy money and good times. A writer in the Oregonian published in Portland, Oregon undoubtedly expressed a widely prevalent feeling when he declared that the people of his state and many other Americans wished a war because they all know that the wealth of the world has gotten to the hands of a few and that there is no relief for the masses business is at a standstill and will remain so until something happens. We are at the mercy of England as far as our finances go and this war is our only way out. Such was the prevailing sentiment in the western state so far as the Venezuelan incident was immediately concerned but the new gold loan with its great addition to the public debt made for the sole purpose of insulting silver was the last straw upon the back of the far from patient populists. By this time men had formed the habit of speaking of gold and silver as though the two metals were possessed of human attributes. They were not only anemophied but personified and both vices and virtues were ascribed to them. A thousand horse-throated orators depicted the infamy of gold and the rectitude of silver. Gold was the coward metal which basically sneaked out of the country when times were troublesome. It was the accomplice of money sharks and usurers, the enemy of labor the traitorous propagator of poverty and want. Silver on the other hand was brave and honorable too noble to desert the people in their hour of need. It was the debtor's ally the benefactor of the poor. To it were addressed words of as passionate adoration as ever lover lavished upon mistress or devotee upon divinity. In truth at this period a large portion of the American people was touched by something very like emotional madness over one of the most prosaic questions of pure economics. The tide of populism which had begun to rise in 1889 which had swallowed into a flood in 1890 and which in 1892 had temporarily been diverted into democratic channels was now roaring through the west with a fury that swept everything before it. In all the silver producing states it seemed to be wrecking the older parties while in Kansas and Nebraska men and women and even children turned away from the ordinary vocations of life and gave themselves up body and soul to the politics of unrestrained emotion. The fact that women had the ballot in these states may account in part for the extraordinary scenes that were enacted there. Certain it is that during the year 1896 entire communities seemed to be afflicted with a strange obsession resembling the hysteria which swept over Europe at the time of the first crusade. This comparison did in fact suggest itself to a very keen though unsympathetic observer who has left a vivid picture of the time. It was a fanaticism like the crusades 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 school house windows circled back vain hope to the stars. For the thousands who assembled under the school house lamps believed that when their legislature met and their governor was elected the millennium would come by proclamation. 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 voices, children's voices, the voices of old men, 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. It was a season of chivalrous and fetishes and slogans. Reason slept. And the passions, jealousy, covetous hatred ran amuck and whoever would check them was crucified in public contumally. Note 7, page 450. These people honestly believed that their happiness and prosperity were being sacrificed unpityingly to the greed and moneylust of the rich men in the East, that the President of the United States was the pliant tool of a plutocracy without bowels of compassion and that in obedience to his masters he was barring out the blessings of free silver which meant independence and wealth and ease to every taller in the land. No wonder that for a time there was madness in the very air. As is the case in all great popular convulsions the human scum and driftwood first came hurtling to the surface. There was a wild cry for a leader and in response a thousand leaders self-appointed leaped into sudden though ephemeral prominence. Strange figures these for the widespread distrust and hatred of all professional politicians became at last a hatred and distrust of every man who possessed ability and training which make leadership effective. And so there came forth from the obscurity of incompetence and failure a crop of demagogues in whom were fearfully combined the irrational and the grotesque. Itinerant preachers broken down country editors farmers who had failed to make a living on their farms, eccentrics whose peculiarities at any other time would have classed them with the insane and leather-lunged fanatics with a gift for raving hour after hour these were the guides and prophets who for a while exercised an absolute control over one of the most intelligent and most purely American communities. A leading article which appeared in a western newspaper at about this time was widely quoted all over the United States because of its pungent diagnosis of conditions in the state of Kansas. One paragraph may be quoted here since its nervous slangy phrases are like flashlights in their brief intensity. What's the matter with Kansas? We all know yet here we are at it again. We have an old Mossback Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the state house. We are running that old J for governor. We have another shabby, wild-eyed rattled-brained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that their rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner. We are running him for chief justice so that capital will come tumbling over itself to get into the state. We have raked the ash heap of failure in the state and found an old human hoopskirt who has failed as a businessman who has failed as an editor who has failed as a preacher and we are going to run him for congressman at large. He will help the looks of the Kansas delegation at Washington. Then we have discovered a kid without a law practice and have decided to run him for attorney general. Then for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation. We have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weeds. Note 8, page 451. End of chapter 10, part 1. Chapter 10, part 2 of Twenty Years of the Republic 1885-1905 by Harry Thurston Peck. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Rising in the West, part 2. Some of the early protagonists of populism and of the silver school of democracy won a temporary notoriety beyond the limits of their respective states. Very few were destined to play a part in national politics. Among the former were Governor Pennoyer of Oregon and Governor Waite of Colorado who may be cited as types of the erratic leaders in the new movement. Pennoyer had been elected as a Democrat in the reaction following upon the passage of the McKinley bill. He first became known by his boorishness in refusing to meet President Harrison on the borders of Oregon at the time of the President's journey through the West. During the coxie demonstration a part of Kelly's army came into conflict with the officers of the law and Governor Pennoyer was besought to send military assistance to the latter. To this appeal he replied by telegram, let them fight it out. I don't care a hoop which side wins. Governor Waite of Colorado gained demagogic honors by the violence of his public speeches in one of which he spoke of the impending war between the capitalists and the downtrodden people. I am prepared, said he, to ride in blood up to my bridles. As Mr. Waite had never been noted as a fighting man this sanguinary intimation served rather to amuse than to alarm but it won for the Governor the sober key of bloody bridle's Waite. Another erratic though much cleverer personage was Jerry Simpson a convert from republicanism whom the Kansas populist had sent to Congress. In Washington and at last all over the country he became known as Sockless Jerry from a popular legend to the effect that he cultivated simplicity by wearing nothing besides shoes upon his feet. Among the women who shared with men the prestige of political leadership the most interesting figure was Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Lease who maybe styled the Anna Dickinson of populism for she had all the vehemence and much of the wild eloquence of the once famous abolitionist. Mrs. Lease was a native of Pennsylvania who in 1885 was admitted to practice at the Kansas Bar. She was drawn into the Union labor movement became a member of the Farmer's Alliance discovered a gift for extemporaneous speaking and in 1890 was one of the most important political leaders in the state. She headed the forces that were opposed to the re-election of Senator Ingalls and the World Wind Campaign which she conducted against him was a notable event of the year 1890. The vitriolic oratory of Ingalls was fairly outdone by the amazing vocabulary of vituporation which Mrs. Lease had at her command and which poured forth with a fury and an intensity of passion that thrilled her listeners and fired them with her own emotions. The scans in Python has defeated Ingalls and in 1893 came measurably near procuring for herself a seat in the Senate of the United States. To her was described the admonition already referred to. Kansas had better stop raising corn and begin raising hell. The doctrine of free silver had not only its profits and its orators but also its literary propagandists. The history of political pamphleteering contains few more curious incidents than the vogue enjoyed by one of the pro-silver tracks which in 1895 became to the west what the drapery letters of Dean Swift were to the people in 1724. A young man named William Howard Harvey, a native of West Virginia began the publication in 1893 of an illustrated paper called Coin, devoted to the cause of free silver coinage. Mr. Harvey was fairly educated and had dipped into a large number of treatises on bimetalism from which he had gleaned a variety of arguments in support of the silver party's chief tenant. At last he wrote and published a little volume with the title Financial School, presenting his arguments partly in the form of a dialogue. Note 9, page 454. Accompanied by some explanatory narrative. The book opened with a brief account of the existing financial stringency and of the business depression noticeable throughout the country. It then went on to tell how. Coin, a young financier in Chicago established a school of finance to instruct the use of the nation. The school opened on the seventh day of 1894. One of the largest halls in the Art Institute was comfortably filled. Coin stepped out on the platform looking like the smooth little financier he is. Coin's lectures and demonstrations were supposed to have been continued for six days. On the first day there were present a number of well-known young men, sons of Chicago editors and other leading citizens. On subsequent days the audience increased and finally included senators, university professors, bank presidents and economic experts, all of whom were specifically named and most of whom interrupted Coin's lucid exposition and endeavored to refute his arguments. Of course, Coin easily disposed of them, silencing them by apt illustrations, pertinent facts or pointed wit. On the last day of his lectures he had convinced the majority of his hearers and had become a popular idol so that the book ends with an account of a brilliant reception given him at the Palmer House by a large and distinguished company. The voracious chronicle with its interspersed dialogue and easy repartee was cheaply printed while its text was illustrated by a series of rude woodcuts appealing partly to popular prejudice and partly to the almost universal love of false analogy. Analogy, says Charles Reid somewhere, is not argument which is the reason why so many persons use it as such. Both the text and the woodcuts in Coin's financial school admirably exemplified the truth of this remark. One of his hearers asked Coin whether the government by putting its stamp on silver could make 53 cents worth of that metal equal to a dollar in gold. Certainly, says Coin in substance, if the government were to buy 100,000 horses wouldn't the price of horses go up? And to persuade the reader that a double metallic standard is preferable to a single standard a picture is given of a one-legged man moving painfully along on crutches. Two legs are better than one, hence two meadows are better than one. Another cut illustrates Jeven's famous metaphor of the two reservoirs connected by a pipe. In fact, the creator of Coin had got together every sort of argument ranging from scientific induction to the most obvious fallacy in the cheapest clap trap, all tending to show that national prosperity could never return until the government mince were reopened of silver at the old ratio of 16 to 1. The success of this little book was extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies were sold and circulated. It was the silver party's Bible and every word in it was accepted as literally true. The farmers studied it by his fireside. The shopman in the intervals between serving customers took hasty glasses at it. It was read aloud at country gatherings. The arguments were cited as unanswerable. Those who studied it were able to chatter voluably about primary money, medium of exchange, circulation per capita and other topics which they came to imagine that they understood. Most of its readers believed that Coin was a real person, that everything narrated in the book had taken place precisely as narrated there and that the distinguished senators, economists and publicists had actually been silenced and put to confusion as a real financier. So widespread an influence did the book exert that even serious periodicals like the nation felt it worthwhile to expose the inaccuracy of Coin's facts and the fallacy of his deductions. Not without significance were such of Coin's woodcuts as appealed to prejudice and passion. No doubt to thousands these were as effective as the arguments. Silver was depicted as a beautiful woman whose head was stricken off by the malignant Senator Sherman. The assassination of Silver was the legend under another woodcut. In another the nation is represented as a cow which the farmers are busily engaged in feeding while a fat capitalist comfortably milks it. In still another Mr. Sherman and President Cleveland are shown in the guise of burglars secretly digging out the foundation, Silver, of a well-built house. For whoever else was now held up to odium the President was certain to be made a sharer in it. In the guise which had bound him to a majority of his party were practically sundered. In Congress he had few supporters and many bitter enemies. There were senators who personally hated him so much that they opposed and hampered legislation which they themselves approved if only they believed that he was favorable to it. In the house, now that the Democrats were in a small minority and were not steadied by responsibility many cast off all pretense of decorum and ceased to speak and with ordinary respect. A group of these refractory Democrats won for themselves the nickname of the Wild Horses because they could not be kept within the party traces. Chief among them were Mr. Sibley of Pennsylvania, Mr. Johnson of Ohio and Mr. Bland of Missouri. Mr. Sibley had in fact never pretended to follow the avowed policy of his own party. He had voted against a revision of the tariff. He had opposed the administration's financial measures and he was in general more hostile to the president than was the bitterest Republican. On January 8, 1896 he made in the house a course and violent speech which was remarkable as being the utterance of a Democrat regarding his party's chief. In it he accused the president of giving offices in return for votes. He repudiated all party responsibility for the administration's policy. He wound up by declaring that what the country needed was an agreement which was something more than a combination of brains, belly and brass. The administration moreover could no longer count upon the solid support of the southern members of Congress who had long been a bulwark of conservatism and party loyalty. In many of the southern states the Democratic Party had suffered a transformation. Hacened by the influence of populism the change had nevertheless been different in character from that of a revolt of the so-called poor whites or non-slave holding persons against the aristocratic leaders who had for generations been supreme. The Civil War had not at once broken the power of that semi-futile system which had flourished in the time of slavery and which produced and perpetuated an oligarchic governing class. But now the masses began to demand control. Note 10, page 457. They set up leaders of their own and gradually the older type of southern statesmen gave way to a far less admirable substitute. The most striking exemplification of the new order at the south was found in the person of Benjamin Ryan Tillman of South Carolina. Tillman did not, strictly speaking, belong to the class of poor whites. He was a man of some position and education. But he was not of the governing cast and he placed himself at the head of the poor whites in a political movement which resulted in the partial elimination of the governing cast from a position of local and national importance. Tillman was a very extraordinary figure both as a man and as a politician. His personality was more than forceful. Lurking in his nature and easy to be roused was something of the savage, something even which suggested the ferocity of the wild beast. When stirred he was violent almost beyond belief. He put absolutely no restraint upon his tongue, but hurled abuse at all who differed from him denouncing them as hellhounds, traitors, and fall-mouthed lawyers. He had lost one eye and this mutilation gave to his face a peculiarly truculent aspect even in repose. An aspect which became indescribably sinister and terrifying when the man was convulsed by one of his furious elkbursts of fashion. In 1890 by the aid of the Farmers' Alliance he was elected governor of South Carolina under the control of the state from that gallant soldier and gentleman Wade Hampton. As governor, Mr. Tillman established the so-called state dispensary system, a semi-socialistic plan under which the manufacture and distribution of intoxicating liquors were monopolized by the state. Note 11, page 458. Tillman's supremacy was not easily or peacefully acquired. He had to face the opposition of an extremely influential section of the state. In the cities his name was executed. Attempts were made to disperse the meetings of his followers. He was vilified in every possible fashion. Riots broke out in several towns. His life was often threatened. Yet in spite of everything by his fearlessness, his energy, and his strong appeal to the passions and prejudices of the ignorant, he became the general affairs. In 1892 he was again elected governor and in 1895 a senator of the United States. It was during his canvas for the latter office that he blazed out into relentless antagonism to President Cleveland, whom he attacked in speeches, the very outrageousness of which won him a wide hearing. Send me to Washington! He would yell to the frantic mobs that cheered him, and I'll stick his old ribs. Even when speaking in his official capacity at the Atlanta exposition and before a dignified assemblage he could not refrain from course and insulting language. There are some so infatuated that they think that all the financial wisdom of the country is monopolized by the East, and they say, me too, every time Cleveland grunts. I should not have said anything about the President as I expect to get a better chance at him in Washington, but it did my heart good to hear the Governor of Georgia say that the two crank reformers from South Carolina had evoked more applause than the President of the United States. Note 12, page 459. It was not, however, merely the Tillmans and Sibleys, nor even the Gormans and Bryces in Congress who were ranged in opposition to Mr. Cleveland. During the last year of his administration he seemed to live under a cloud of poverty, blacker and more nearly unrelieved than that which any other elected President had ever known. The Republicans were never weary of pointing out what they described as the disastrous failure of his policies. The majority of his own party believed him not only to have wrecked it but to have betrayed it. The free silver men held him responsible for the financial depression. The capitalists called him rash and utterly unsafe because of his Venezuela message. The Republicans were breaking the Great Chicago Strike by the use of troops. Only here and there was a voice raised in his defense and the defense was nearly always worded like a half-apology describing to him only what was called success and defeat. One would have said in view of all this bitter opposition and unrestrained contumally that Mr. Cleveland was destined to live in history only as that President who beginning with the most splendid opportunities had most completely wrecked and ruined his own regime. Two very diverse opinions regarding President Cleveland's public career have been held by students of American politics. According to his eulogists he was a no respect to blame for the partial failure of his policies. It is said that the whole responsibility of this failure must ultimately rest upon the Congress which deliberately thwarted and rejected his wise counsels. In the face of such corruption, incompetence, ignorance and malice exist in both houses of the national legislature, how could any president have done more than Mr. Cleveland did? In the very opposition which he encountered, many find but one more tribute to his political purity and uncompromising integrity of character. On the other hand, his critics have asserted that the very terms in which he is most often praised constitute an impeachment of his statesmanship. A great party leader they say must do his work with such instruments as he has at hand. A statesman who is worthy of the name will master difficulties, overcome obstacles, adapt his methods to his instruments prevailed by management, by tact and by judicious compromise until in the end he attains a lasting and complete success. He will make no unnecessary enemies. He will allow for prejudice for human frailty of every kind and he will not expect the walls of Jericho to fall at a single blast of his trumpet. Mr. Cleveland of Lincoln is often cited as embodying the true art of statecraft and his patience and genial wisdom are contrasted with Mr. Cleveland's blunt and robust tactlessness. Success, it is said, is the measure of a statesman's fame and Mr. Cleveland did not achieve success. It is probable that the truth is to be found somewhere between these two opposing views. The manner in which President Cleveland forced the repeal of the Sherman Act to alienate a powerful faction in the Senate as to make that body permanently hostile to him for the rest of his term of office. He treated senators of the United States precisely as he had when Governor of New York treated the petty politicians at Albany. He gave orders where a more tactful politician would have made requests. He displayed arrogance instead of conciliation. He cracked the whip and shouted instead of using the milder influences of persuasion. The patronage which he dispensed were secretly as hostile to him as those who angrily refused it and far more humiliated. To say no gracefully is a difficult accomplishment, but even Mr. Cleveland's yes was often irritating. And so as he possessed Lincoln's tolerance and worldly wisdom he might, like Lincoln, have avoided personal hostility. But the conditions of the time were so unusual that he must still have met with political opposition within his own party as Lincoln did. For in 1864 Lincoln was of all men the least commended by the Republicans in Congress. On one occasion an editor visiting Washington asked Ladea Stevens to introduce him to some members of Congress who were favorable to Lincoln's re-election. Stevens led him to the desk of Mr. Arnold of Illinois. There, said he, is the only Lincoln member of Congress that I know. Stevens regarded Lincoln as incompetent weak. Henry Wilson, afterwards Vice President, spoke of him as politically a failure. Greeley had a low opinion of his ability. His personal friends such as Washburn, Raymond and Thurlow Weed believed his re-election an impossibility. Even Lincoln himself at one time doubted it. Note 13, page 462 And therefore the example of Lincoln is not convincing when cited as embodying a rebuke to Mr. Cleveland. For what would it have profited the latter to retain the personal goodwill of senators and representatives if they were still politically hostile to him driven on by forces of disorder and disunion too strong for them to master? In 1864 it was not Lincoln's tact and statesmanship that brought him a final triumph, but rather the brilliant victories won in the field by Sherman, Sheridan and Grant. And the mention of Mr. Lincoln brings to mind another circumstance which makes any parallel between him and Mr. Cleveland most unfair to the Democratic president. Lincoln embodied to the mind of the people two great issues that were really only one the preservation of the American Union and the abolition of slavery. At the root of both there lay a moral principle and both appealed with overwhelming force to sentiment. They were so plain so vividly defined that no sophistry could obscure them no shrewd debater reasoned them away and so back of the supercilious politicians at the capital were the masses of the people their eyes fixed with pathetic faith and loyalty upon that tall gaunt, stooping, homely man who to their minds meant everything that makes a cause worth dying for. But to President Cleveland it was given to deal with issues that made no such simple and direct appeal. The questions that were his to solve were economic questions replete with technicalities which only a comparatively few could rightly understand and as to which even these comparatively few were not agreed. Catch words and clever phrases and garbled facts when rolled forth glibly by a smooth tongue speaker suffice to make the worse appear the better reason and confuse the wits of half the nation. Hence the task which Cleveland took upon himself was harder in its way than Lincoln's and one which in its very nature could have been completed only after the weariness of many years and the bitterness of many failures. So far as his own hand could perform what he attempted he was splendidly successful. He was like a giant facing a terrific tempest. If he could not advance he would at least not yield nor take a backward step. His old time foes assailed him without ceasing and his one-time friends betrayed him. He encountered such malignity of hatred as would have terrified and sickened a weaker soul than his. There are signs that within his heart even he often wins that the cruel falsehoods which assailed him. Yet nonetheless he stood unmoved and magnificently unafraid a superbly verile figure holding fast to what he felt to be the right and looking at all opponents squarely in the eye. In the end he came to know that it was his not to achieve what he had hoped but to save that which had been entrusted to him. And he did it bravely, grimly, powerfully. Opinions may differ as to his conception of his duty but the memory of his devotion to high principle, his strength of will and his dauntless courage must remain to all Americans a source of patriotic pride and an enduring inspiration. End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Part 1 of 20 years of the Republic 1885 to 1905 by Harry Thurston Peck This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Election of 1896 Part 1 As the time for holding the National Conventions drew near, both the Republican and the Democratic Parties were in a state of feverish anxiety. The free silver agitation had divided both and no one could with confidence predict the effect of this division upon either of them. Yet the Republicans were seemingly in a far better position than the Democrats. The latter, now that President Cleveland's guidance and practically repudiated, were without any leadership whatsoever. There had, as yet, arisen no strong dominant personality such as could compel obedience to his will. The Penoirs and Wates and Tillmans had often a numerous local following but they were not of the stuff which goes into the making of national leaders. On the other hand, whatever differences of opinion might divide the Republicans on questions of policy there was among them no lack of experienced and able party chiefs among popular enthusiasm. Of these the two who received the most earnest supporters candidates for the presidential nomination were Mr. Thomas B. Reed of Maine and Mr. William McKinley of Ohio. Mr. Reed's energetic and almost revolutionary course as Speaker of the House, Note 1, page 465 had made him a very conspicuous and striking figure. His forceful personality, his intellectual acumen, his iron will and his effectiveness as a debater gave him a definite title to the highest political preferment. He was known to be fairly conservative in his financial views and he was therefore acceptable to the Republicans of New England and the middle states. But this very fact militated against his candidacy with the party as a whole and especially with the party managers. In view of the intense sectional feeling which was then influencing the West the nomination of a New and Expedient. Furthermore, precisely in proportion to the definiteness of Mr. Reed's financial views was his availability as a harmonizer generally questioned. What was sought by the shrewdest politicians in the party was a candidate who should come from a western state who was identified with some other issue than the money question whose record would neither alarm the gold men nor exasperate the friends of Silver and who was personally liked by representatives of every faction. Such an individual was Mr. McKinley who seemed to be an almost ideal leader from the standpoint of availability. In his behalf moreover there were enlisted forces the extent and power of which were not generally recognized in the early months of 1896 but which were soon to prove quite irresistible. Mr. McKinley was a kindly personage of winning manners and unblemished character. He had served in the army during the Civil War and had afterwards acquired a wide experience of practical politics and of politicians as a member of Congress. During that time he had been a strong protectionist and the High Tariff Act which bore his name and which became law in 1890 had made him known all over the civilized world. This measure had in fact led to his own defeat for re-election to the house in the same year and had caused the Republican disaster of 1890. Note 2, page 466 Yet in view of democratic incompetence and the failure of President Cleveland's tariff policy there had now come about a strong reaction which was favorable to high protective duties. But it was Mr. McKinley's past and present attitude toward the financial question which made him especially well fitted to succeed in 1896. In the early part of his congressional career he had been emphatically numbered among the Friends of Silver. He had voted for the Bland Allison Bill on its first passage through the house and he had again voted to enact that measure in disregard of the veto of President Hayes. Later in many public speeches he had defended the free or use of silver. At the same time his utterances were far from radical and he had recently appeared rather to advocate by metalism through an international agreement than to approve the policy of letting the United States attempt the dangerous experiment alone. Note 3, page 467 Therefore Mr. McKinley while not organizing the silver wing of his own party was regarded as a safe man by the gold monometallists. His own desire if nominated was to relegate the financial question to an inconspicuous place in the campaign and to fight the battle once more upon the issue of the tariff. During four of the years of his absence from Congress Mr. McKinley had been governor of Ohio to which office he was elected in 1891. As governor he had in some respects exposed himself to serious criticism. In the second year of his term he had become deeply involved in debt through endorsing the notes of a personal and political friend. Owing sums which amounted in the aggregate to more than $100,000 and having only the modest salary of his office with which to meet the obligation his position was one of great embarrassment. In these traits he accepted gifts and loans from several wealthy friends whose names are variously given but who rescued the governor from bankruptcy and secured his lasting friendship. A little later Min began to censure Governor McKinley for his very marked unwillingness to favor any legislative action that interfered with the great corporate interests in the towns and cities. The state of Ohio was in financial difficulties from insufficiency of revenue. That the street railways had never paid inadequate tax upon their earnings was a notorious fact. Yet all legislative attempts to make them yield a reasonable sum were viewed so coldly by the governor as to prevent their passage. On the other hand, a bill to extend the franchises of these companies from 25 to 99 years received his countenance. And the persons engaged in the promotion of the measure were permitted to use Governor McKinley's executive offices as their headquarters. Special favors were granted to railway corporations, one of which secured from the state a piece of public property for a sum amounting only to one half of the official valuation. Very grave scandals were exposed in connection with the penal and charitable institutions of Ohio. Governor McKinley's opponents cited these and other circumstances of a like character as the basis for a charge of neglect of duty if not of actual collusion with persons whose interests were in serious conflict with the interests of the state. The financial favors which he had received from wealthy men were significantly mentioned in connection with his alleged unwillingness to interfere with these other friends as corporation officers. Note 4, page 469. The implications involved in the recital of these facts so far as they concerned Mr. McKinley were in the main unjust. The governor of Ohio has no veto power and therefore can exercise no direct control over proposed legislation. Many of the abuses brought to light during the years from 1891 to 1895 were of earlier origin or in no way directly connected with the functions of the state executive. Moreover, Governor McKinley's personal character was known to be above reproach. At the same time his official attitude was undoubtedly marked by a certain passivity with regard to the occurrences already mentioned and it afforded at least a negative support to the measures upon which hostile criticism was so freely lavished. Mr. McKinley entertained a respect amounting almost to reverence for the opinions of a majority. The political course was always directed by an anxious desire to be in harmony with the leaders of his party. He was not at all the type of statesman who was to be found at the head of a forlorn hope. He shaped his conduct and to a great extent his opinions by what he thought to be the wishes and the welfare of his immediate supporters. Being under great personal obligations to a number of men who were rapidly acquiring political power in his state a sense of gratitude no less than a shrewd perception of expediency to accept their aid and to find in them his closest friends and chosen monitors. Among them was a comparatively recent figure in the field of politics whose fame such as it was still remained holy, local though within a few months it was to be almost as widely trumpeted as Governor McKinley's own. The personality and character of this man deserve a somewhat careful study. He is rightly to be regarded less as an individual than as a very accurate exemplification of new and powerful forces which for many years had been acquiring strength but which now for the first time emerged from a half obscurity and revealed themselves to the nation as laying claim to an almost despotic dominance. Marcus Alonzo Hanna or Mark Hanna as men usually spoke of him was a native of Ohio the son of a prosperous wholesale grocer. From his father he inherited keen business instincts and a guiding motive which some have called ambition and others greed. His early training successfully directed all his exceptional energies towards one definite end to get and to keep. He was soon known as a bold and active trader who fought his commercial rivals without giving or asking quarter and without caring whether the means he used were fair or foul so long as he came forth a winner in the struggle. His activities were multifarious his energy inexhaustible he dealt in coal and oil and iron and stone, he charged ships, he manufactured stoves he bought mining shares and he established banks. He even added a newspaper and a theater to his possessions. There was in short no conceivable enterprise or speculation upon which Hanna would refuse to enter if only he saw in it the prospect of sufficient gain. Business with him was warfare and it was warfare à outrance. In his commercial strife he presented an analog not to the dualist or even to the champion of the prize ring both of whom are governed by a rigorous code but rather to the savage rough-and-tumble fighter who bites and gouges when body blows are found to be of no avail. Moral considerations did not enter into his scheme of life. He was a pure materialist respecting nothing but superior force and his sole gospel was the gospel of success. Having no purely intellectual diversions he long regarded the fierce pursuit of an occupation and a thrilling game. Only by chance did he discover that there was an even keener pleasure to be found in a still greater game where of the winner might lay his grasp upon political power. This knowledge came to Mr. Hanna after he had tried to add a system of street railways to his already complicated interests and had found that the grant of franchises depended upon the favor of the politicians. And so Mr. Hanna purely in the way of business shared alderman and local legislatures just as he had previously secured clerks and managers and agents for his other enterprises. He felt no scruples as to the means which he employed. Here again his one criterion was success. He was at least no hypocrite. He professed no greed save that which he was daily practicing. He was often brutal but he was wholly frank in his brutality. A striking instance of this in a letter which he wrote in 1890. In that year the Attorney General of Ohio Mr. David K. Watson had brought suit against the Standard Oil Company for the dissolution of its trust agreement. Note 5, page 471. Hanna had relations with the Rockefellers which induced him to interfere with the progress of the suit. Accordingly he wrote to the Attorney General a personal note in which occurred this memorable sentence. You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public life owes the public anything. Note 6, page 472. Such was the cynical view which Mr. Hanna always took of politics both national and local and in practice he lived up to the full measure of its implications. He got control of the political machine in the city of Cleveland. The majority of the councilman were his agents. The mayor was his creature. The other officials of the city were his men to his friends. It was not long before the legislature of the state had felt the power of the peculiar influences which Hanna exercised and in 1891 it was Hanna more than any other individual who having espoused the cause of Mr. McKinley in the hour of his congressional defeat had made him governor of Ohio. But here one must in fairness take into consideration the more personal side of this interesting character since otherwise the man as a whole certainly understood. Hanna though utterly devoid of even the most rudimentary morality where business was concerned had still a nature that was able to attract and win the liking of his associates. He was intensely human though his humanity was that of a primeval man. Big and strong and course he had the primitive instincts developed almost in excess. He was frankly appetitive, robustly insuriant, a mass of mighty longings and concealed desires. It was said of him that every want of his became at once a lust to be sated greedily and in the very moment of its birth. Not all the lust of the flesh however mastered him. In his family relations and as a husband and a father his life was irreproachable yet in the wider sense of the word one may apply to him the striking phrase of a recent English novelist and say that he was essential as a mutton chop. He lusted after power and he got that also. And all through his life his minor appetites were forever making themselves felt and seen. But he was so wholly natural with regard to them his desires were so openly avowed and his enjoyment in their gratification was so hearty and spontaneous as to induce in those who knew him a genuine cordiality. The simplicity and even homeliness of his taste while they often amused were on the whole attractive. When he was at the height of his career and had at his command every luxury that wealth could give he used to boast of but one thing and that was of a superior kind of corned beef hash of which he said his cook alone possessed the recipe and whenever he wished to pay the highest possible compliment to a friend he sent him an invitation to a breakfast at which this corned beef hash was served. Such things as this tickled the fancy of his associates and most men found it hard to think much ill of one who could talk with boyish glee of a treat so innocently plebeian. His younger acquaintances used to speak of him as Uncle Mark and this familiar title affords a clue to the sort of affectionate familiarity which he inspired. Hannah was in fact of the earth earthy but there was something of the wholesomeness of the earth about him and a stock of manliness as well. He spoke out the thing he really thought if he was displeased he grunted and swore. But he could be generous and he was afraid of no man. Mr. Lincoln Stephens tells the story of how Hannah once undertook to make a political speech to a crowd of Welshmen who had no mind to listen to him. Every sentence that he spoke was interrupted by their jeers until Hannah's blood grew hot. There's a lot of American in me he shouted. There's some scotch. Somewhere's way back there's Irish blood. But by gee, blank, there's no Welsh. If there was I'd go down there and lick the whole lot of you. This, said Mr. Stephens, won the Welshmen and they cheered Mark Hannah and listened to him willingly while he finished what he had to say. Note 7, page 473. One of the most marked of Hannah's attractively human qualities was the warmth of his personal friendships. When he hated, he hated with masculinity, but he also set no bounds to the ardour of his likings. This course fibred man had something of the gentleness of a woman where friendship was concerned and also something of the unrestraint of a child. When his confidence had been fully won, his cynicism and the hardness of his character seemed to disappear. Singularly lacking in complexity, his emotions in private life were as little controlled as were his appetites in public matters. He had a friend he would caper clumsily. Over the bereavement of a friend he would blubber like a schoolboy. He had no reverence for anyone, but he did possess an unusual capacity for affection and there can be no doubt that for Mr. McKinley his affection was sincere and that it did him honour. Between the two there existed what it is no exaggeration to call a genuine fondness. Psychologically, this is to be explained as based upon the standards for no two men could have been more unlike. Curiously contrasted indeed were McKinley's suavity and Hannah's bluntness, McKinley's caution and Hannah's courage, McKinley's vacillation and Hannah's almost insolent tenacity of purpose. McKinley respected all of life's conventions, Hannah hooted at them. McKinley believed that the will of the majority was the will of God. Hannah was sure that majorities could be manufactured until was only the reflection of the far stronger will of the few able men who played upon the motives of human passion and self-interest. It is probable that McKinley never really understood Mark Hannah, but there can be no question that Hannah rightly understood McKinley and that he admired in him those qualities of which he was himself completely destitute. At the close of the St. Louis Convention speaking to a newspaper correspondent, Hannah burst out with the enthusiastic I love McKinley, he is the best man I ever knew. Note 8, page 475 We may be sure that these words and the feeling back of them were entirely sincere. The close and intimate friendship between the two men had most important political results. Their personal liking for each other was strengthened by the consonance of their ambitions. Mr. McKinley desired to be President of the United States. Mr. Hannah had set his heart upon becoming one of the two Senators from Ohio. In fighting the battle for his friend, Hannah was opening up a path to the fulfillment of his own long cherished hope. So successful had he shown himself in making Mr. McKinley twice Governor, so keenly practical had been his management of men and of affairs, so vast were the resources which he had at his command, and so undoubted was his loyalty, that to him Mr. McKinley's political fortunes were unreservedly interested in the crucial year of 1896. Whatever the Chief Republican aspirant for the presidency did or said or wrote was done or said or written only after the approval of Mark Hannah had been given to it. Few knew this at the time, but it began to be understood as the months wore on, though even then, and for a long while afterwards the full significance of the fact was only half appreciated. What it really meant was that behind the candidacy of a very amiable, and upright gentleman there was advancing into a place of almost unlimited power and opportunity, a dominant influence which was seriously to modify the character of American public life. Here in fact one sees the initial appearance of what became to be known as the businessman in the highest sphere of national politics. For it was as a businessman that Hannah always described himself. Politics with him were an adjunct to his business, and the esoteric interests of business, such as his were for a while to direct the course of American history. Before this time, in the United States as in all other nations of the first rank, men of wealth had often gained political power, and it was frequently their wealth which had enabled them to do so. But in general, and with most of them, wealth was the means and political office was the end. Again, as has already been shown in the course of this narrative, wealth has been often wrongly and unscrupulously used for the furtherance of political ambition. But in 1896 a novel phenomenon was exhibited, the result of many causes all of which however had tended towards one result. Now for the first time, a party if such it can be called, had a risen which was not devoted to any definite political principles at all, but rather to the furtherance of private interests that were commercial and financial. This party though not recognized as a party was neither Democratic nor Republican, but was the party of wealth, consolidated highly organized, directed by men of rare ability, and using political power no longer as an end but as a means, its real object being the private advantage of moneyed men, the safeguarding of corporations from legal interference and control, and the exploitation of official influence for the benefit of individuals who are unknown to public life. All this was implied in the mention of the businessman in politics. The businessman in politics was the capitalist who needed political favors or protection in his business, and whether he were nominally a Republican or a Democrat, his allegiance to either party counted as nothing when compared with the sympathetic solidarity of interest which bound him to all other men of the same class. The representatives of wealth, manufacturers, bankers, mine owners, railway managers, and heads of great financial institutions had, by this time, come to constitute what was in reality another party which did not, indeed, appear to be such which had no name and which did not hold conventions and openly nominate candidates of its own but which loomed large behind the two older parties, endeavoring to play off one against the other and to use indifferently the machinery of each for the esoteric welfare of consolidated wealth. The most far-sighted of the men who gave, as it were, the Maud d'Autre to this association had perceived with dread a growing tendency among the American people to expect from the federal government rather than from the states that redress for many a wrong which only far-reaching centralized power could give. The particularism of early years was disappearing. The old-time doctrine of states' rights was fast losing its hold upon the American people. Republican rule and the arguments of the protectionists had gradually fostered a belief that if the government at Washington was to be the source of prosperity, so must it also be the fountainhead of justice. Many events of the preceding decade had stimulated and enhanced the intensity of this feeling but perhaps the most significant of all was the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act, the debates over which had revealed the immense powers conferred by the clause in the Constitution permitting the government to regulate commerce between the states. The particular act in question had as yet imposed no serious check upon the operations of the various trusts but the principle which it had established was pregnant with possibilities of disaster to those corporations which had successfully defied the common law and it found it easy to control the legislative action of individual states. A shiver must have passed through many a directorate when Congress actually set upon the statute books even an imperfect law invoking so great a power against the lawlessness of wealth. President Cleveland's vigorous assault upon the over-protection of commercial industries must likewise have made a deep impression that one attack had practically failed yet another might succeed. On the whole the temper of the times and a steady drift towards something like state socialism were becoming plain to many and to none more so than to those persons who now came to the surface of affairs bearing the euphemistic name of businessmen in politics. It was because Mr. Hanna was a perfect type of the class which has been described in his personality and his character assumes so much importance. It was an unerring instinct which led the cartoonists and caricaturists in the press to draw his likeness and let it symbolize predacious capital. And just as Mr. Hanna had formally got control of the city government of Cleveland in order to secure franchises for his street railways so now both he and his associates began a vigorous campaign for the control of the national administration because it too had become essential for the future safety of their business. The very audacity of their scheme almost excites one's admiration, nor did it necessarily imply the presence of corruption in its grosser forms. Theirs was a far more scientific game as it was also a far bolder one than that of the old time purchases of legislation, those who played it kept for the most part within the letter of the law. The persons with whom they had to do were no longer the cheaply venal to be safely offered. Men of reputation and honor must be influenced and used through what were apparently legitimate rewards but the effect upon American life both public and private of the entrance of this new caste or party was deplorable in that it meant the innervation of civic morality and the exaltation of social ideals that were debasing. During the early months of 1896 Mr. Hanna as the chief McKinley manager undertook a very adult role. The Republicans in the eastern states were almost solidly in favor of maintaining the gold standard and of establishing it by law. In most of the western states on the other hand the party was honeycombed by what was styled the silver heresy. The money question was forcing its way insistently to the front and demanding a solution. Neither element of the party must be repelled. A majority of the delegates from both sections of the McKinley in order to secure his nomination and make his election possible. Mr. Hanna's management was masterly and revealed a rare genius for political strategy. Above and beyond his already well-known shrewdness, courage and resourcefulness he now exhibited a rare discretion and a diplomatic taciturnity which few had ever thought this rough impulsive person to possess. The story of how Mr. Hanna brought about the nomination of McKinley has never yet fully told. His course at the time was utterly misunderstood. A reading of the contemporary newspapers will serve to show that even the surface facts were ludicrously misrepresented. The narrative that is now to be set forth is that which Mr. Hanna himself was afterwards want to tell in private conversation and it is in complete accord with all the circumstances which are matters of both personal and public record. Mr. Hanna himself was a thorough believer in the gold standard. Furthermore he intended that the Republican convention should make an unequivocal declaration in favor of such a standard. But for the time he kept his purpose to himself and bent his energies to the single task of securing delegates favorable to McKinley. The western states were his chief concern. New England was practically a negligible quantity and was in any case committed to the support of Mr. Speaker Reid. The greatest of the middle states, New York and Pennsylvania had candidates of their own who stood no chance of nomination but whose appearance in the field would at the outset neutralize the influence of those states in the convention. The west and the south were therefore the object of Mr. Hanna's immediate solicitude. Both sections had a leaning towards the doctrine of free silver and hence Mr. McKinley must be represented for a while as a genuine friend of silver. Yet this point must not be too strongly pressed and the currency question must be treated as one of subsidiary interest and importance. Such is a brief outline of the situation as it appeared to Mr. Hanna and his able campaign was conducted in accordance with its exigencies. As early as January of 1896 the Republican newspapers throughout the country began to display a remarkable enthusiasm for Mr. McKinley's nomination. Not however because of his past or present attitude towards the money question but because he was the exponent of high tariff duties and easy times. The lean years of the Cleveland administration were explained as wholly due to the repeal of the McKinley Act of 1890. Voters have short memories and they had long since forgotten that the treasury deficits, the lowered wages and the shutting down of mills and factories had begun during Mr. Harrison's presidency. All that they were permitted to remember was the fact that at least three million men were now out of work and that a quadratic president had been in office for three years. The days of Harrison were lauded as an era of abundance and the election of McKinley on the tariff issue was declared to be the only way of bringing back that glorious period. The old cry of Bill McKinley and the McKinley Bill was supplemented by the new and taking catch word McKinley and the full dinner pail. Someone described the Ohio statesman as the advance agent of prosperity and this phrase went from mouth to mouth and was caught up by the newspapers. Never was a press campaign more skillfully conducted. It seemed to reflect in the great Republican strongholds a spontaneous demand for the nomination of Mr. McKinley. Yet the silver question would not down but everywhere distracted men's attention from the tariff cry. The gold men in the east and the silver men in the west were equally clamorous to know just where the party himself stood. When the Ohio state convention met on March 11 its pronouncement on the financial issue was eagerly awaited for surely Mr. McKinley's own state might be expected to give the watchword to his party throughout the land but Mr. Hanna was too shrewd to show his hand just yet and so the convention adopted that sort of delphic utterance which the vocabulary of American politics expressively denominates a straddle. The state platform said we contend for honest money for a currency of gold, silver and paper that shall be as sound as the government and as untarnished as its honor. To that end the Ohio Republicans favored by metalism and demanded the use of both gold and silver as standard money. End of Chapter 11 Part 1 Chapter 11 Part 2 of 20 years of the Republic 1885 to 1905 by Harry Thurston Peck this LibriVox recording is in the public domain the election of 1896 Part 2 of course this declaration under all its sounding phrases was ambiguous to a degree everybody Democrats Republicans and populist desired honest money. They were all agreed that gold, silver and paper ought to constitute the currency of the United States but as to what was honest money to what were to be the relative values of the gold, silver and paper opinions were everywhere as widely divergent as those of President Cleveland and Coyne Harvey. The effect of this Ohio declaration was on the whole however just what Mr. Hanna had intended. It left things in the west precisely where they were and enabled the McKinley agents to explain their candidates' opinions in whatever way was most likely to please their auditors in each section. As for Mr. McKinley himself he remained at his home in Canton refusing with much dignity to be interviewed but making from time to time a brief address on the subject of the terror. In New England and above all in New York his reticence excited both alarm and indignation. Was Mr. McKinley still a silver man at heart as he had been in 1878 when he voted for the bland Allison bill and as he had seemed to be when later he reproached President Cleveland for having struck down silver. His argument were the demands that he come out frankly and say just what he thought about the most vital issue of the day. Mr. Hanna and his associates treated this demand as though it were impertinent and almost insulting. Mr. Grovner of Ohio said with a show of solemn indignation no man's friends have a right to call upon him to foreshadow the party's platform. Major McKinley will respond to the platform but he will not dictate what the platform shall be. Perhaps through the minds of some of the anxious Republicans who read these words there may have flitted a recollection of Mr. Cleveland's blunt letter to the reform club in 1892. Note 10, page 483. When he spoke out just what he thought even though he felt that in doing so he was forfeiting the presidency. Their fears at any rate led them to work hard for delegations favorable to the gold standard. Early in June it was evident that Mr. Hanna had in all probabilities secured a majority in support of McKinley's nomination while it was also probable that the silver men would be outvoted. 22 Republican state conventions had in fact pronounced openly against the free coinage of silver. Yet it still seemed possible that the national convention in St. Louis would repeat the Ohio's straddle and thus continue the traditional policy of evasion and equivocation. The convention met on June 16th with little show of genuine enthusiasm among the delegates. Note 11, page 484. Even before the formal opening the money question had dwarfed all other topics of discussion. There were rumors of dissension and threats of actual bolting. Senator Platt of New York openly attacked Mr. McKinley for his secretiveness and duplicity and spoke of withdrawing from the convention if it failed to make a specific declaration for the gold standard. The New York delegation of which Senator Platt was chairman passed resolutions condemning the free coinage of silver. On the other hand, Senator Henry M. Teller, who headed the Colorado delegation, made it plain that if a gold plank were adopted he and his followers would secede. The delegations from the other western mining states were equally emphatic. Mr. Hanna had secured most of the southern delegates for his candidate, but some were still in doubt. One of the Texan delegates received by every mail postcards on which large and vivid characters in red admonished him. If you vote for Mr. McKinley, you need not come back to Dallas. Note 12, page 484. The New England representative still warmly urged the claims of Mr. Reed, whose foremost champion was Senator Lodge of Massachusetts. The New York delegates were favorable to the candidacy of Mr. Levi P. Morton, who had been vice president during the Harrison administration. Mr. Key of Pennsylvania showed how completely he was master of his own state by the fact that the Pennsylvania delegates were pledged to give him at least a complimentary vote. The Iowa delegation had been directed to put Senator Allison in nomination. Thus, when the first session of the convention began under the temporary chairmanship of Mr. Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana, all was confusion and rumors of every sort were rife. Meanwhile, Mr. Hanna was solidifying the strength of the McKinley forces and hourly adding to their numbers. In his pocket he had a draft of the money plank which he meant to have the convention finally adopt and it was explicitly and unequivocally in favor of the gold standard. He had shown it to Mr. McKinley who had approved it and who had himself prepared the draft of a tariff plank. But not even yet was Mr. Hanna ready to declare himself. He meant to maneuver in such a way as to make his final move appear to be a concession in return for which he could ask a substantial equivalent. In other words, he was to receive a reward for doing the very thing that he had all along intended to accomplish. The committee on resolutions found difficult to reach an agreement as to the financial declaration to be made. Senator Teller, who was a member of that committee, held out for a free silver plank and his colleagues were slow to antagonize him. Mr. Hanna let them discuss the convention for nearly two days during which time the business of the convention was at a standstill, the members listening to speech making to the arguments of women suffragists and to patriotic music. On the first day, the session lasted for a little more than an hour. The wildest stories were circulated regarding the coming action of the platform committee. This delay and the resulting rumors seriously alarmed the advocates of gold. They feared less in the end some sort of compromise might be made. Finally, several of the most influential of their number decided to take the bull by the horns. They went to Mr. Hanna's rooms in the hotel where he was staying and delivered a sort of ultimatum. They demanded that he accept a gold standard plank for the platform or else they would carry the fight to the floor of the convention and thus precipitate an open conflict between themselves and the supporters of Mr. McKinley. They gave Mr. Hanna just one hour in which to exceed the amount. Note 13, page 486. That wily leader must have smiled grimly as they left him to reflect upon the threat which they had made. They had quite unconsciously played his game and victory was now assured. Needless to say, in less than the prescribed hour Mr. Hanna pronounced himself to be a gold man and the plank which he had brought with him to St. Louis was incorporated in the platform to be reported. Apparently he had yielded under strong compulsion and the gentleman who had seemingly forced their will upon him now thought of him with that kindness which generous victors feel towards a vanquished foe. Note 14, pages 486 and 87. And so it came to pass that on June 18th the platform was read to the convention by Senator Foraker. It described the Cleveland Administration as responsible for a record of unparalleled dishonor and disaster. It renewed Republican allegiance to the policy of protection as the bulwark of American industrial independence and the foundation of American development and prosperity. Protection and reciprocity are twin measures of the Republican policy and go hand in hand. Democratic rule has recklessly struck down both and both must be re-established. It declared for a firm, vigorous and dignified foreign policy for American control of the Hawaiian islands, for the purchase of the Danish West Indies, and for the construction, operation and ownership of the Nicaraguan canal by the United States. The Monroe Doctrine was reaffirmed and American intervention in Cuba was mentioned with approval. We favor the continued enlargement of the Navy and a complete system of harbor and sea coast defenses. Amid breathless silence the part of the platform relating to the Nicaraguan canal was read out. The Republican Party is unreservedly for sound money. We are unalterably opposed to every measure calculated to debase our currency or impair the credit of our country. We are therefore opposed to the free coinage of silver except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the world which we pledge ourselves to promote and until such agreement can be obtained the existing gold standard must be preserved. Our silver and paper money must be maintained at parity with gold and we favor all measures designed to maintain inviolably the obligations of the United States and all our money whether coin or paper at the present standard the standard of the most enlightened nations of the earth. No sooner had the platform been reported to the convention than Senator Teller of Colorado rose and offered a substitute for its gold standard declaration. Mr. Teller's substitute was one she had tried in vain to induce the committee to adopt. It declared that the Republican Party favors the use of both gold and silver as equal standard money and it pledged the party to secure the free, unrestricted and independent coinage of gold and silver in the mints of the United States at a ratio of 16 parts of silver to one of gold. This embodied the extreme demand of the free silver men and it was certain to be rejected. Many delegates might have favored the device of a straddle as a measure of expediency, but Senator Teller had forced the monetary issue in a way which admitted of no compromise. In support of his substitute he spoke with intense feeling, his voice often faltering in tears of unaffected emotion in his eyes. For him it was a solemn moment. He had been a Republican all his life and to part with his old associates was unspeakably bitter. The Republican Party was organized, I was there. It has never had a national candidate since it was organized that my voice has not been raised in his support. It has never had a great principle enunciated in its platform that has not had my approbation until now. With its distinguished leaders I have been in close communion and close friendship. I have shared in its honors and in its few defeats and disasters. Do you think that we can sever our connection with a party like this unless it be a matter of duty? A duty not to our respective states only, but a duty to all the people of this great land. The convention respected Mr. Teller's emotion and listened to his address in sympathetic silence. But when the role was called his substitute was rejected by a vote of 818 to 105 and the platform as reported from the committee was adopted by a vote of 812 to 110. Those delegates who were in full accord with Mr. Teller then rose and left the convention hall. They were only 34 in number yet among them were four senators of the United States and two members of the House of Representatives. Note 15, page 489. The convention then proceeded to the nomination of a candidate for the presidency. The nominating speeches were beneath the level even of convention oratory and neither Senator Foraker's aeration in behalf of Mr. McKinley nor Senator Lodges in support of Mr. Reed nor Mr. DePuse for Mr. Morton showed any great rhetorical ability. The result was already known to all even before the delegates had been polled. Mr. Reed's following melted away even the delegates from his own state wavering. Joe, God Almighty, hates a quitter! Roared Mr. Fessenden of Connecticut to Mr. Manley of Maine. But expostulation was useless. A test of Mr. McKinley's strength as against the united opposition had previously been made upon a question of sustaining the committee on credentials and the vote showed the Ohio candidate to have a large majority 545 to 359. This was vastly increased when the convention voted directly on the nomination. Mr. McKinley received 661 votes. Mr. Reed, 84. Senator Key 61. Mr. Morton, 58. And Senator Allison, 35. The choice of Mr. McKinley was then made unanimous amid the first genuine enthusiasm that had been shown. The cheering was vociferous and prolonged. And it reached a climax when a delegate raised upon the point of a flagstaff a cocked hat such as one associates with the portraits of Napoleon. It was a harmless whim on the part of Mr. McKinley to fancy that he bore certain physical resemblance to the victor of Marengo. And a knowledge of this fact lent vigor to the cheering which greeted the Napoleonic emblem. Unsympathetic Democrats noted that the nomination had been made on June 18, the date of the Battle of Waterloo, and they professed to see in the coincidence an omen of disaster to the Republican Napoleon. For the vice presidency, the convention nominated on the first ballot Mr. Garrett A. Hobart, a wealthy entrepreneur and man of affairs whose home was in New Jersey. Mr. McKinley's nomination was well received by Republicans throughout the country. And the convention's explicit utterance in favor of the gold standard satisfied those capitalists and businessmen who had previously opposed him as a trimmer. But his selection on a gold platform had also the effect of consolidating the advocates of silver and of making the election turn inevitably upon the financial question. Before this the Democratic Party in the west and south had become practically a free silver party. The conventions of 30 states had passed resolutions approving the free coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1. Only 10 states had declared for the maintenance of the gold standard. The convention of one state alone, Florida, had ignored the money issue altogether. It was so plain that the approaching national convention of the Democratic party would be controlled by the free coinage of the gold standard. It was so plain that many conservative Democrats, or Cleveland Democrats as they were called, were at first inclined to take no part in the convention's councils but to break openly with their party in advance of its assemblage. From this course however they were dissuaded by President Cleveland himself who on June 16th caused a letter to be published which may be considered his last official utterance as the head of the Democratic Party. In it his faith in the ultimate good stone was still both confident and courageous. A national convention wrote he is a gathering for conference and reflection. No Democrat should refuse to take part in it from sheer faint hardiness or with the belief that its conclusions are predetermined. On the contrary everyone should do all within his power to guide its deliberations to wise and salutary ends. The cause worth fighting for is worth fighting for to the end. This spirited summons rallied the conservative leaders of the party and when the convention met at Chicago on July 7th both factions were fully represented there. But as soon as the delegates began to arrive it was plain that only a miracle of management could stem the tide that had set in for free silver. As Mr. Richard P. Bland expressed it in a published interview the democracy of the west were convinced that the gold standard meant bankruptcy and that the convention would declare for the coinage of silver at 16-1 and D. Blank the consequences. Note 16, page 492 A correspondent of the New World which was the organ of the Cleveland Democrats described the situation in Chicago very accurately in these words. The silver rights will be invincible if united and harmonious but they have neither machine nor boss. The opportunity is here the man is lacking. Such was indeed the case. There were present men who in former years had exercised almost dictatorial power in democratic conventions but they were now swept aside unheeded or made to feel that they were distrusted and disliked. Senator Hill, Mr. Whitney and Ex-Governor Flower of New York were there and so were Ex-Governor W. E. Russell of Massachusetts and General Bragg of Wisconsin. Yet they were lost in the swirling mob that marched and shouted and sang about leadership or any definite purpose save a desire to smash things and to shake off the domination of the East. Fanatics like Alt-Geld and Tillman rode the crest of this human deluge and their wild talk harmonized with the reckless mood of those who listened to them eagerly. One finds it interesting to speculate upon the feelings with which Senator Gorman of Maryland must have watched the strange scenes that were taking place on the eve of this convention of his party. At the convention of 1892 he had been an honored leader the cause for which he then contented at triumph at the polls. A Democratic president and a Democratic Congress had sought to keep their pledges to the nation by wise and moderate councils, by the remission of unjust taxation, and by shaking off the grasp of the money-power. But Mr. Gorman and those who acted with him had turned that great victory to naught. They had humiliated their chosen leader and the professions of their party seemed dishonest and ridiculous. Yet in doing this they had sown the wind, and they were now blasted by the whirlwind of political retribution. Who in all this vociferous multitude cared for what Mr. Gorman and his associates wished or thought? The most uncouth delegate from a mining camp was here of more importance than the smooth senator from Maryland, who by his machinations sapped the strength of the conservative democracy, had thus the blood gates of a furious torrent which was already far beyond control. How completely the great majority of the delegates had cast away their old allegiances was made evident when the convention first assembled on July 7th in a vast structure styled a coliseum under whose spreading roof of glass and iron 15,000 human beings were crowded together in the heat of a summer sun. The National Committee was still controlled by the conservative element of the party, and this committee now presented to the convention the name of Senator Hill of New York as its selection for the temporary chairmanship. Both usage and etiquette required that their choice should be ratified by the delegates as a matter of ordinary courtesy. But not even for a temporary office with the majority except an eastern man who was also an opponent of free silver. A debate remarkable for its bitterness at once began. And in opposition to Mr. Hill after John W. Daniel of Virginia, an ardent silver advocate was put in nomination and was elected to the temporary chairmanship by the decisive vote of 556 to 349. A preliminary test of strength had now been made, and from this moment the silver men were exultantly aware of their supremacy. An eyewitness of the scene thus noted its significance. The scepter of political power has passed from the strong, certain hands east to the feverish headstrong mob of the west and south. Note 17, page 494. During the debate a delegate had casually spoken the name of President Cleveland. Many of the spectators at once rose to their feet and cheered. But it was a nominal circumstance that not a single delegate joined in the cheering even those from New York remaining silent in their places. Mr. Altgeld on the other hand was greeted with yells of unrestrained anger. Having won this victory and having listened to an address by Senator Daniel, the convention adjourned until the following day. When it reassembled on the morning of July 8, it was plain that the silver faction meant to use its power to the full. By a sweeping majority the representation of each territory was augmented from two members to six. The delegation from Nebraska which was pledged to support the silver men with Mr. William J. Bryan at its head was admitted to the convention. Four gold delegates from Michigan were rejected and four silver delegates were substituted in their place thus giving to the silver faction under the unit rule the solid vote of Michigan. Having affected these changes, all of which greatly increased the strength of the majority Senator S. M. White of California was made permanent president of the convention. On July 9, the Committee on Resolutions reported a platform devoted almost wholly to the money question which was declared to be paramount to all others at this time. The platform after denouncing the demonetization of silver as being the cause of the prevalent financial distress went on to say we are unalterably opposed to monometallism which has locked fast the prosperity of an industrial people in the paralysis of hard times. Gold monometallism is a British policy and its adoption has brought other nations into financial servitude to London. We demand the free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold at the present legal ratio of 16 to 1 without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation. We demand that the standard silver dollar shall be a full legal tender equally with gold for all debts public and private. And we favor such legislation as will prevent for the future the demonetization of any kind of legal tender money and private contract. The resolutions were made to condemn the issuing of interest bearing bonds of the United States in time of peace and the trafficking with banking syndicates and to denounce arbitrary interference by federal authorities and local affairs and especially government by injunction which was described as a new and highly dangerous form of oppression by which federal judges become at once legislators, judges and executioners. Life tenure in the public service was also disapproved in favor of appointments for fixed terms of office. The Monroe Doctrine was reaffirmed, sympathy was expressed for the people of Cuba in their struggle for independence and an enlargement of the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission was demanded together with such control of railroads as will protect the people from robbery and oppression. It will be noted that contrary to all usage the platform as reported by the majority contained no word of approbation for President Cleveland. More than that it condemned every important policy with which he had been identified. It was indeed precisely what those who wrote it meant that it should be, a repudiation of him and of his administration. A minority of the committee however presented a protest to the convention signed by sixteen members representing sixteen different states. Note 18, page 496. These gentlemen pronounced some of the declarations in the platform as reported by the majority of the committee to be wholly unnecessary. Others were called ill-considered and ambiguously phrased while still others were extreme and revolutionary. The minority therefore offered in place of the Free Silver Declaration a substitute to the effect that any attempt on the part of the United States alone to establish Free Silver Coinage would both control the national finances and retard or prevent the success of international bimetalism. It would place this country at once upon a silver basis, impair contracts, disturb business, diminish the purchasing power of the wages of labor and inflict irreparable evil upon our nation's commerce and industry. Finally, the minority offered the following resolution as an amendment to the majority's report. We commend the honesty, economy, and the present Democratic National Administration. Both reports were now before the convention and the climax of the struggle had been reached. At once Senator Tillman leaped upon the platform. To him the minority report with its praise of President Cleveland was like a red rag to a bull. He fronted the multitude dark and savage featured, his face flushed, his hair unkempt, the incarnation of the mob, vengeful and defiant. There was a strange gleam in his one eye. When he began to speak, his fury rose to a fierce crescendo. He paced the platform like a madman clenching his fists, hissing out his words, tossing his hands high above his head and snapping his jaws together. Note 19, page 497. So completely had passion mastered him that much of what he said was unintelligible. But those who heard him gathered that he was denouncing Mr. Cleveland as a tool of Wall Street, a tyrant and one who richly deserved to be impeached and driven from his high office. Oddly enough, the vehemence of Mr. Tillman defeated its own object. Intenses was the feeling of the multitude to which he spoke. Such raving did not touch its sympathies. Though applause was given to him by many in his violence he had overshot the mark. Senator Hill, who spoke in behalf of the minority report, failed in another way to meet the mood of the vast audience. His face was ashen white as his manner glacial. Mr. Hill entirely lacked the oratorical temperament. Holy, unimpassioned at all times the emotions of those about him seemed to make him colder and still more unbending. I am a Democrat, he began, but I am not a revolutionist. Then he proceeded with a discourse that was wholly argumentative an appeal to reason which, if pronounced before a purely deliberative body might well have carried conviction in its words. It was, however, no deliberative body that he now addressed, but a surging mass of men frantic with excitement upon whom mere argument was thrown away. He might as well have spoken to a cyclone, and when he took his seat he knew that he had failed. Mr. Velas of Wisconsin and Mr. Russell of Massachusetts who followed and supported Mr. Hill were no less ineffectual. Weakness of voice and evident consciousness of coming defeat and an unpopular cause were their efforts unavailing. Until now there had spoken no man to whom that riotous assembly would listen with respect. But at this moment there appeared upon the platform Mr. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska who came forward to reply to the three preceding speakers. As he confronted the 20,000 yelling cursing shouting men before him they felt at once that indescribable magnetic thrill which beast and men alike experience in the presence of a master. Serene and self-possessed and with a smile upon his lips he faced the roaring multitude with a splendid consciousness of power. Before a single word had been uttered by him the pandemonium sank to an inarticulate murmur and when he began to speak even this was hushed to the profoundest silence. A mellow penetrating voice that reached apparently without the slightest effort to the far the most recesses of that enormous gave utterance to a brief exhortium. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the convention I should be presumptuous indeed to present myself against the distinguished gentleman to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty the cause of humanity. Mr. Bryan had in these three sentences already won his auditors. The repose and graceful dignity of his manner the courteous reference to his opponents and the perfect clearness and simplicity of his language riveted the attention of every man and woman in the convention hall. As he continued it was with increasing earnestness and power. He spoke briefly of the issue which was there to be determined. He held it to be an issue based upon a vital principle the right of the majority to rule and to have its firm convictions embodied in the declaration of the party. It is not a question of persons. It is a question of principle. And it is not with gladness that we find ourselves brought into conflict with those who are now arrayed upon the other side. 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. We say to you that you have made the definition of a businessman too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation council in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a businessman as the merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning in toils all day, who begins in the spring in toils all summer and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much businessmen as the few financial magnates who in a back room corner the money of the world. We come to speak for this broader class of businessmen. Mr. Bryan's delivery of this passage was remarkable for its effectiveness. He spoke with the utmost deliberation so that every word was driven home to each hearer's consciousness and yet with an ever increasing force which found fit expression in the wonderful harmony and power of his voice. His sentences rang out with an accent of superb disdain and now with a stirring challenge of a bugle call. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families and posterity. We have petitioned and our petitions have been scorned. We have been treated 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. As Mr. Bryan pronounced these spirited words, the Great Hall seemed to rock and sway with the fierce energy of the shout that ascended from twenty thousand throats. When he flung out the sentence we defy them, the leaderless democracy of the West was leaderless no more. In that very moment and in that burst of wild applause was the chief. You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. We reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. We go forth confident that we shall win. Why? Because upon the paramount of this campaign there is not a spot of ground upon which the enemy will dare to challenge battle. If they tell us that the gold standard is a good thing, we shall point to their platform and tell them that their platform pledges the party to get rid of the gold standard into substitute by metalism. If the gold standard is a good thing, why try to get rid of it? I call your attention to the fact that some of the very people who are in this convention today in favor of international by-metalism, thereby declaring that the gold standard is wrong and that the principle of by-metalism is better, these very people four months ago were open and avowed advocates of the gold standard and were then telling us that we could not legislate two metals together even with the aid of all the world. If the gold standard is a good thing, we ought to declare in favor of its retention and not in favor of abandoning it If the gold standard is a bad thing, why should we wait until other nations are willing to help us let go? Here is the line of battle and we care not upon which issue they force the fight. We are prepared to meet them on either issue or on both. It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but three millions in number had the courage to declare their political independence and their nation. Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to 70 millions declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends, that will never be the verdict of our people. Therefore we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they say by-metalism is good, but that we cannot have it until other nations help us, we reply, instead of having a gold standard that England has, we will restore by-metalism and then let England have by-metalism because the United States has it. If they dare to come out into the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them, the brow of labour this ground of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. End of chapter 11 part 2