Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [23]
But Bryan’s nomination, although not a complete surprise, had immediately shifted the very language of the national contest. McKinley was no gold Republican and had even supported the backing of the dollar with silver earlier in his career. Instead, he was solely the author of the McKinley Tariff, and this was his only campaign theme. Bryan’s nomination now made silver, not the tariff, the burning issue of the campaign. McKinley was not Bryan’s natural foil. Indeed the Republican Party would have been hard pressed to find a pure “gold Republican” to counter either a silver Democrat or a Populist. In Bryan, McKinley faced both, and his candidacy now appeared, the Nation observed, as illogical “as a Methodist preacher would be in an election for Pope of Rome.”
McKinley was no longer a sure thing. Whole swaths of the country that Republicans had counted on seemed in doubt. After Bryan’s nomination, Republicans had to scramble to catch up. Hanna cut short his vacation and worked tirelessly to establish headquarters in Chicago and New York.
Now Hanna did his most important work of the campaign: raising money from the great New York financiers. The amount he raised was unprecedented. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Morgan’s banking firm each gave the Republicans a contribution of $250,000. This $500,000 was larger than the entire Democratic Party’s campaign war chest for 1896. In the end corporate America would provide the bulk of the $3.5 million that Hanna would send out from the Republican National Committee, twice as much as the party raised for the 1892 election.
Money was not the only difference between the Bryan and McKinley campaigns. Bryan’s Madison Square Garden speech scheduled for the following week would touch off an unprecedented speaking campaign by a presidential candidate. By election day the nominee would travel some 18,000 miles, giving six hundred speeches in twenty-seven states to an estimated 5 million people.
McKinley, himself no great orator, stayed at home. Clearly he could not match the younger Bryan in energy or speaking skill, and trying would only damage his dignity. Except for a week’s vacation in August and three days given to nonpolitical speaking engagements scheduled before the nomination, from the day of his June nomination until the November election McKinley never left his home in Canton. Instead, the mountain came to McKinley.
McKinley’s visitors to Canton reflected a cross section of every American commercial, working, ethnic, and religious group. Hungarian-Americans came from Cleveland. Western railroad men made the two-thousand-mile pilgrimage. Hardware men, commercial travelers, and farmers’ associations crowded onto the McKinley front lawn. Laborers from Carnegie’s furnaces in Pittsburgh donned their best Sunday suits to make the trip. Where Confederate veterans of the Civil War had stood one day, black Republicans stood the next. On some Saturdays the trains arrived from morning until night, bringing as many as 30,000 people to Canton. McKinley spoke to them all.
Despite the seeming spontaneity of the various groups’ excursions to Canton, and the unaffected nature of McKinley’s reception, in reality the front-porch campaign was rigorously planned. In addition to raising