Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [44]
III.
ENEMY’S COUNTRY
ON JULY 16, the day after Bryan won the Democratic nomination in Chicago, he received a long letter from Pennsylvania congressman Joseph Sibley. At the American Bimetallic League convention in Memphis that June, Sibley, a fervent silver advocate, had urged the creation of an independent silver party to challenge both the Democrats and the Republicans in 1896. At the time, Bryan had sided with outraged Democratic leaders and defeated Sibley’s motion, but not without offering the disappointed Pennsylvanian an olive branch: “We say to all parties, go on with silver at your front and we shall not envy you one laurel on your brow.” With the Democratic National Convention meeting the next month, such a statement appeared a savvy piece of diplomacy on Bryan’s part, since he hoped to muster behind him the party’s silver forces, Sibley included. Indeed, after Bryan won the nomination, Sibley emerged as one of several serious contenders for the vice presidential slot on the ticket.
Having failed to secure the presidential nomination on July 15, Sibley had written a frank letter to Bryan about his candidacy and the upcoming campaign. Sibley opened by saying that he would have preferred to see the nomination go to Colorado senator Henry Teller, another dedicated silver man. If not Teller, Sibley would have preferred himself because, he said, “I felt confident that I had strength that you did not.”
Sibley advised Bryan that in the current campaign, Pennsylvania would be a battleground state, and he urged the nominee to give speeches in Pittsburgh, Altoona, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia. “But do not waste your time in New England and New York,” Sibley warned. Perhaps Sibley was addled by his defeat at the hands of Bryan, for he went on to offer the candidate completely contradictory advice. “The battleground is not in the South or the West; the battle must be fought in the enemy’s territory, and it will be won in the enemy’s territory.” Bryan’s reaction to Sibley’s candid missive is unknown. Clearly he ignored the contradictory advice from a one-time rival who questioned Bryan’s strength as the party nominee. Yet something about that phrase “enemy’s territory” must have struck a chord with Bryan.
At two o’clock Friday afternoon, August 7, the Bryans boarded the train in Lincoln, beginning their slow journey east to New York. Although the Madison Square Garden speech set for August 12 would mark the official start of the Democratic candidate’s campaign, by the time Bryan reached the city, he had already addressed thousands of people in half a dozen states. A genius at extemporaneous speaking, with the physical strength to stand for hours and the lung capacity to project his voice to the back of even the largest crowds, Bryan was never at a loss for words.
Before departing, accompanied by a pack of newspaper reporters, Bryan addressed the hometown crowd that had gathered at the depot. “In ordinary times I would have desired to have the notification take place at my home,” Bryan said. “But this is not an ordinary campaign, and, feeling that the principles in which we are interested should rise above any personal preferences which we may have, I expressed the desire to be notified in New York, in order that our cause might be presented first in the heart of what now seems to be the enemy’s country, but which we hope to be our country before this campaign is over.”
Almost immediately that single phrase—“enemy’s country”—went out over the wires and soon appeared in newspapers throughout the nation. Bryan would later complain that the phrase “was picked out for