Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [24]
Once the delegations stepped off the train at the Canton railroad station, a well-oiled reception machinery kicked in. Committees of greeters met the visitors, who were escorted to the McKinley home by uniformed squads of the mounted Canton troop. Bands played music as the parade passed through a town bedecked with American flags and red, white, and blue bunting. Townspeople cheered from the sidewalks. It was as if all of Canton had been transformed into some kind of political amusement park, a Republican Disneyland for 1896.
When the faithful finally reached their destination, the candidate came out of his house, mounted a chair, and addressed the crowd on his front lawn. Just as Hanna and other supporters had once been drawn to McKinley by his warmth and sincerity, now the mass of dusty and tired travelers forgot for a moment their weariness as they basked in the presence of the Republican presidential candidate. The addresses of the delegations and McKinley’s response seemed extemporaneous and from the heart, but in fact, just as everything else, they had been well planned. Spokesmen for the various groups were required to send advance copies of their remarks to be approved and even edited by McKinley. In turn, McKinley’s replies were carefully crafted, both to take account of the individual interests of the delegations and to speak to the larger nation beyond Canton. After all, newspapermen were now permanent fixtures around the McKinley home. A speech of welcome crafted specifically for, say, the St. Louis Methodists for McKinley, would be taken down and printed in hundreds of papers the following day.
As McKinley spoke from the porch, his elderly mother and his invalid wife often sat alongside. The front-porch campaign, then, had the added feature of framing McKinley not just as a politician but as a devoted family man. This sat particularly well with the women who visited Canton that summer and early fall. Although still without suffrage nationally, women had become a moral force in politics through groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. And the National American Woman Suffrage Association had had some success at the state level by the 1896 election: Wyoming entered the Union with women’s suffrage in the state constitution in 1890, and Utah followed in 1896. The issue, however, would not find a prominent place in the 1896 campaign.
Camped around the McKinley front porch, the newspapermen kept their ears pricked for the magic words “silver” and “gold.” By August 3, though, they had been largely disappointed, as had many of the sound-money advocates around the country. When asked about the silver question, McKinley would quickly change the subject to the tariff. This made Hanna’s New York fund-raising efforts more difficult, as the big financiers waited for McKinley to come out strongly in favor of the gold standard.
About a week before, when McKinley had made a rare trip off his front porch and out of Canton to address supporters in Pennsylvania, the candidate had made a passing reference to the issue. “Our currency today is good,” McKinley stated. “All of it is good as gold, and it is the unfaltering determination of the Republican Party to so keep and maintain it forever.” It was only a small mention of that magic word, but this, McKinley’s first public use of the word “gold” after his nomination, reverberated throughout the country and cheered the sound-money advocates. According to the Nation McKinley had uttered the word “in a somewhat furtive way . . . hastening to take a good pull at the tariff to steady his nerves.”
Yet a passing reference to gold was not enough. What people were really