Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [957]
Wealthy New Yorkers too saw 1896 as an electoral Armageddon. From their perspective, the inflationary proposals of agrarian primitives, antimodern provincials, crackpot economists, and hayseed cranks were dangerous, immoral, little short of theft. Currency panaceas took no account of the realities of life in a gold-standard world—only Latin Americans and other backward peoples used silver—and thus imperiled international trade. Worse, by striking at the heart of the credit superstructure, they threatened to abort modern capitalism—and with it, modern civilization.
Hatred of Bryan and silver reached acrid levels. The Rev. Parkhurst called on the “solid intelligent integrity of the country” to “grind its heel relentlessly and unpityingly into the viperous head that is lifting itself up in venomous antagonism not only to this Government, but in venomous antagonism to all government.”
Horrified by the silver hordes sweeping in out of the West, Wall Street erected golden barricades. Abandoning the Democrats, they piled into the Republican Party and met candidate William McKinley’s campaign manager with open wallets. Morgan dined with him on board the Corsair and pledged a quarter-million dollars. Standard Oil matched this, and contributions from New York-based corporations and insurance companies helped swell the GOP’s war chest to an unprecedented and astronomical three-million-plus dollars (Bryan managed a mere three hundred thousand).
The Republican millions bankrolled a political advertising campaign that sent hundreds of speakers into the field, coordinated the work of metropolitan papers and churches, and printed and distributed millions of pamphlets, broadsides, and booklets. Employers formed sound-money clubs and pressured workers into attending “educational” meetings. Republicans wrapped themselves in the flag too. On the Saturday before the November election, New York was swathed in patriotic bunting and festooned with Old Glories. While 750,000 looked on, a huge column of a hundred thousand professionals, businessmen, and their employees (volunteered or dragooned), each holding aloft a flag, marched in a monster parade organized by the Sound Money Association. Children, their chests covered with badges attesting allegiance to the gold standard, sang derisive songs about greenbacks.
Bryan carried the fight to the temple of the moneychangers. Though he was reviled from press and pulpit with unprecedented ferocity, working people packed Madison Square Garden hoping to hear the great orator give a stem-winding speech. Bryan disappointed them, reading a prepared, “statesmanlike,” two-hour address to the packed and sweltering house; many in the audience melted away.
Bryan’s problems went beyond the heat. The populist vision of a republic of small freeholders had little to offer the mass of metropolitan wage-laborers in the mid-1890s. German and Jewish socialists and anarchists were put off by the populists’ evangelical convictions and prohibitionist culture. Unionists like Gompers reasoned that the farmers were themselves employers of wage-labor and so unworthy of support. Tammany did endorse the national ticket and turned out such (largely Irish working-class) support as Bryan got. Gold Democrats of course bolted the party; even Pulitzer’s World refused to back the Nebraskan.
Bryan lost both New York and Brooklyn, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since 1848. So thorough was McKinley’s triumph that the greenback critique