Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [28]
With the temperature climbing, Wilson’s euphoria was sadly out of touch with the disaster about to befall the city. “The remarkable decrease in the death-rate for July and in the death-rate from diarrheal diseases for the same period indicate improved sanitary conditions in this city,” Wilson proudly proclaimed. Wilson penned his remarks in a month that would witness hundreds of “excess” infant deaths from just the sort of diseases against which the Health Department president claimed such progress. Wilson would not send such a letter to the mayor again.
IN LINCOLN, far from the heat, Bryan took a break from receiving callers at his home on Tuesday to work on his Madison Square Garden acceptance speech.
Already expectations ran high. The Chicago Tribune expected the speech to be, according to its headline, “the Oratorical Effort of His Life.” With Bryan and his wife due to board the train to New York in only three days, time was running short. The train was scheduled to stop in every town along the route, with a longer overnight stop in Chicago the coming weekend. Once aboard the train, he would have little time for thoughtful reflection.
While his acceptance of the Democratic nomination in New York would mark the official beginning of the campaign, in fact the minute his foot left the Lincoln train station platform, the candidate would be in full campaign mode, giving a dozen speeches a day that would then speed across the telegraph wires and appear in newspapers the next morning. And with a heat wave already settling over the Plains and Midwest, causing deaths from St. Louis to Chicago, the trip east was destined to be hot, dusty, and exhausting. It was best to sit quietly in the cool of his home and prepare for the tough journey ahead—and the tougher audience awaiting him in New York.
Although barely a town compared to Manhattan in 1896, Lincoln was one of the fastest-growing cities west of the Mississippi. Home to both the state capital and the state university, it was an important railroad center and metropolitan hub of an agricultural hinterland. More than just a sleepy prairie town with farmers in dusty overalls taking their produce to market, Lincoln had an industrial and commercial flavor as well, provided by banks, newspapers, factories, and paper mills. Bryan’s own occupation reflected this, although his law practice of Talbot and Bryan did not keep pace with the increasingly affluent city. In fact Bryan’s legal career seemed merely a platform from which to launch his political career.
In preparation for running for office, Bryan had joined every community and fraternal organization in Lincoln, from the Odd Fellows to the Masons, and from the bar association to the chamber of commerce. He was an Elk and a Moose, a Sunday School teacher at the Presbyterian Church, and a lecturer on moral themes at the YMCA. Through these organizations Bryan became a well-known figure among Lincoln’s political and economic elite, and in them he found like-minded compatriots in what would become his crusade against the moneyed interests of the East. Such groups reinforced Bryan’s ideals of fairness, universal brotherhood, and devotion to the common people.
It was perhaps through these organizations, and the Round Table discussion club founded by Bryan, that the young lawyer with political aspirations began to champion “free silver.” With an eye to winning the Democratic nomination for Congress in 1890, Bryan railed against the McKinley Tariff and echoed farmers’ concerns against falling land and crop prices. Faced with fixed payments for mortgages and railroad rates, the Nebraskan farmer had seen the price of his corn drop from 63 cents a bushel in 1881 to 26 cents in 1890. Wheat fell from