Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [56]
It may have been in Chicago that Bryan first developed the ideas that would one day make him the Great Commoner. “History,” he told one of the many discussion and literary societies he belonged to in Chicago, “teaches us that as a general rule, truth is found among the masses, emanates from them; a fact so patent that it has given rise to the old saying, ‘vox populi vox Dei’” (the voice of the people is the voice of God).
But if those masses were exploited economically by the great robber barons, so too were they exploited politically by the great machine politicians. In Chicago, Mayor Carter Henry Harrison ruled absolutely over the Cook County Democratic machine. Harrison believed that Chicagoans had only two desires, to make money and to spend money, and he had special maps printed allowing tourists to find their way from brothel to brothel. In the face of manipulation of the masses by a corrupt elite, the “better classes” of Americans, Bryan believed, had a special duty “to assume the burdens of citizenship . . . To shirk that duty is treason.”
Returning from church on Sunday, the Bryans received many callers at Clifton House, including George W. Peck, former governor of Wisconsin, and General A. J. Warner of Ohio, president of the American Bimetallic League. Mr. Bryan sat for a short time to allow an artist to put the finishing touches on his oil portrait.
Mrs. Bryan, in a summer dress of unbleached linen with black dots, also received guests. When asked about the upcoming campaign and her husband’s speech in New York, Mrs. Bryan spoke frankly. “I tremble sometimes at the thought of Mr. Bryan’s succeeding,” she said. Of the speech: “This speech will have to be entirely different from anything Mr. Bryan has said since the convention began. It will, of course, be more closely criticized and it must be a speech that will require no subsequent explanation.”
Just before midnight, with the temperature still at 85 degrees, the Bryans boarded the slow train to Pittsburgh, due to stop at every town of any size. They would spend Monday night at Pittsburgh before arriving in New York on Tuesday, August 11, a day that would see the heat wave and the death toll reach their heights.
OUT ON OYSTER Bay Theodore Roosevelt enjoyed a Sunday with his family, yet these days he was giving a great deal of thought to the upcoming presidential race and Bryan’s pending arrival. Just days before, Roosevelt had written to his British friend Cecil Spring-Rice: “If Bryan wins we have before us some years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American Republic. The movement behind him is most formidable, and it may well be that he will win. Still, I cannot help believing that the sound common sense of our people will assert itself prior to the election, and that he will lose. One thing that would shock our good friends who do not really study history is the fact Bryan closely resembles Thomas Jefferson; whose accession to the Presidency was a terrible blow to this nation.”
In comparing Bryan to Jefferson, Roosevelt meant that both men saw the American yeoman farmer as the foundation of both the spirit and the economy of the United States. In the same letter Roosevelt observed that the “semianarchistic” free silver movement had the Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian farmer as its backbone, not the wage-earning immigrants of the cities. In other words, the current revolutionary threat to American democracy came, ironically, from property-owning, native-born Americans, not from the property-less immigrant workers of American cities.
By 1896 Roosevelt had become something of a student of American cities. In 1891 he had published New York, a book that traced the history of his native city from its discovery by Henry Hudson in 1609 to the present. For Roosevelt, the