Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [39]
Hard times devastated farmers, too, who often sank into debt with heavy mortgages, just like the Estby family. Even when farmers produced abundant crops, high interest rates charged by banks and exorbitant shipping costs charged by the railroads ate their profits. This fueled their growing distrust of concentrated wealth, corporate greed, and big business monopolies and trusts. In an increasingly urbanized and industrialized America, ailing farmers felt forgotten, and many joined the Populist party to fight for reform of the injustices they experienced. In rousing language, Bryan built his campaign to tap into the needs of those he called the “struggling masses” and “humbler members of society.” He reaffirmed their worth to the country, citing them as the Americans who produced the crops and goods that allowed the nation to live.
He also excoriated the “capitalistic class” that “owns money, trades in money and grows rich as the people grow poor.”11 Bryan named and identified their fears of abuse from the powerful corporate elite, from Wall Street, and from the railroad and mining magnates. Captains of industry such as John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), J.P. Morgan (banking financier), and James J. Hill (Union Pacific) passionately supported William McKinley and the Republican agenda, and they wielded enormous political clout. Bryan fought openly against “the heads of these great trusts” that he believed put corporate profit above people.12 Poor farmers and workers, especially in the West and South, flocked to hear him speak as he stumped as the “champion of the people.” Some supporters even infused him with religious symbolism, calling him the “new Christ of Humanity” who had “come to loose the chains of plutocracy from the people.” Whether voters saw him as a “mouthing slobbering demagogue” or the savior of the common man, his campaign galvanized interest in the election.13
Helga read newspaper accounts of the mesmerizing young orator and saw the hope he ignited in ordinary folk like herself, even while arousing enormous disdain of many powerful business, clergy, and political leaders. One conservative Republican called him “the blatant wild ass of the prairie,” and others feared his demagogic, divisive appeal.14 Helga began to form her own opinion of Bryan. She knew intimately the fear of financial ruin and the callous power of the financial elite who threatened to foreclose and take their family’s home away. Both in Spokane, and now across America, she saw firsthand the growing gap between the extremely wealthy families and the desperately destitute families. Visual reminders existed in almost every town and city within the elegant mansions and enormous ranches of the rich, and the squalid shacks and hovels of the dirt-poor. Walking the rails, she knew “on the other side of the tracks” often meant a literal dividing line in a town, keeping people of different social and economic classes apart as effectively as a moat around a medieval castle. She began to notice another division in America, the racial and ethnic separations, which she had paid scant attention to when surrounded by the Scandinavian community.
Each step she took across America represented her own defiant and last-ditch effort to prevent this destitution to befall her family. The enormity of her risk was linked in direct proportion to the enormity of her fear. It was also a highly personal act. But in Bryan’s vision, and some of the populists he represented, Helga heard a collective effort to reform America. He urged the farmers, laborers, and small businessmen of the country to unite in opposition to the concentrated and arrogant wealth of giant corporations and monopolists. Bryan’s was a fervent crusade for the unlimited coinage of “free silver” and a bimetallic money system to restore the country’s economic health. After Congress closed down the coinage of silver in 1873, the nation used only the gold standard.