Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [29]
Economic cycles, bad weather, and the changing character of America from an agrarian to an industrial and urban country all held little interest for Bryan. When looking for someone to blame for the plight of his Nebraska constituents, the foe always resided in the big eastern cities. This was a fine strategy for a local or state politician from west of the Mississippi. Yet it seemed doomed to failure as a national campaign theme in the United States of 1896.
Bryan’s ideas appeared out of step with his contemporaries. America was now a country that lauded its industrial, not agricultural, output as a measuring stick against the great European powers. Entire states now defined themselves by their manufacturing industries, from Massachusetts paper mills to New Jersey chemicals and Pennsylvania steel. America’s largest city—the nation’s commercial capital—had provided the margin of victory in the last several presidential contests. And that city now prepared to defeat Bryan on two fronts: Both hostile gold Democrats and the heat threatened to make New York a living hell.
Many New York Democrats, rather than preparing for their nominee’s visit, prepared instead for the Sound-Money Democratic Convention due to meet in Indianapolis in September. They worked, as one member of the Sound-Money Democrats’ executive committee told the papers on August 4, “to hold the party true to its traditions and defeat the un-Democratic ticket nominated in Chicago upon a platform that is anything but Democratic.”
IF THE SOUND-MONEY Democrats represented a small but threatening front in the fight against Bryan, a far more serious threat on August 4 came from a single Republican. Mark Hanna was the political dynamo that would defeat Bryan not by matching the Great Commoner’s charisma or oratory, but by building a fund-raising and campaigning apparatus the likes of which the country had never seen. In Canton McKinley continued to receive visitors, including Reuben Herman of Baltimore, who told the Major about the revolt of Sound-Money Democrats in Maryland. Perhaps more importantly, McKinley received some of the advance sheets of the “campaign text book,” the book that would serve as the manual for all Republican writers and speakers for the next two and a half months until the November election. With profiles on the various candidates, the manual also contained sections on platform issues such as the gold standard, the tariff, foreign policy, taxation, labor, and the civil service. At four hundred pages, the manual reflected the sophisticated campaigning technique of “staying on message,” begun only eight years before, in the 1888 election. The textbook clearly spelled out for potential candidates the party’s position on all topics. A stump speaker like Roosevelt may have had no trouble discussing civil service or foreign policy, but he would need to take a close look at the money supply section before going forth to speak for McKinley.
On August 4 Hanna met with representatives of the city’s black Republicans who impressed on the Republican campaign chief the strength of their numbers in the city. According to the Times, “Reference was made to other times when they had been promised large rewards for their support, which they claimed had not been forthcoming after election. They wanted a business understanding at the outset.”
Addressing the needs of black Republicans was a standard promise among city politicians, and even a young Roosevelt had campaigned for the black Republican vote in his failed bid for mayor in 1886. Disenfranchised in the South after Reconstruction ended in 1877, the 60,000 blacks in New York in 1896 usually voted Republican, the party of Lincoln. What the black men demanded from Hanna that day was a headquarters “where all the colored men of the city might