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By Root 1110 0

Hudson, New York, and father of two, left his home and family without a word to anyone. From Hudson he traveled to Albany, where he bought a revolver. He then traveled to Chicago to await the arrival of the Bryan train. Upon the Bryans’ departure from Chicago, Broderick boarded the same train and traveled with his revolver all the way to New York. His motive remained unclear. If he had any intention to harm Bryan, he had ample opportunity during the several days’ trip from Chicago to New York. In the age before the massive protection afforded presidential candidates, and only five years before McKinley himself would be felled by a man carrying a revolver under a handkerchief, Bryan constituted an easy target for even an unskilled assassin. One paper identified Broderick as a “Bryan man,” perhaps indicating that he hoped to protect the candidate from injury.

Whatever his motive, Broderick disembarked from the train with Bryan and made his way to the New York home of his brother James on Ninety-Eighth Street. Martin told his brother his story, exhibiting the revolver. Much alarmed, James Broderick finally convinced his disturbed brother to retire and get some rest. The following morning James secured a promise from Martin to remain inside the house while he went to work. Feeling anxious for his brother, at home alone with a revolver, James soon returned from work to find a large and excited crowd surrounding his home. In his absence his brother Martin had shot himself in the breast, inflicting a critical wound. As Martin was being taken from the house, James told a reporter that he believed his brother’s mind “was affected by the heat.”

This strange episode of the 1896 campaign has been entirely forgotten, perhaps because of its enigmatic nature. Was Broderick’s story true or just the fantasy of a disturbed mind? Did he really travel on the same train as the Bryans, and if so, how close did he come to the candidate? Was this an assassination attempt? Bryan may very well have been lucky to avoid an assassin’s bullet, part of the charmed existence he had been leading since his nomination. Madison Square Garden would bring his lucky streak to an end.

IN 1932, Franklin Roosevelt became the first candidate of a major party to accept the presidential nomination in person at the national convention. With politicians still worried about appearing too ambitious or power-hungry, tradition held that they exhibit some restraint when notified of the nomination.

By 1896 there was little precedent for a candidate to accept the nomination at a huge rally like the one planned for Madison Square Garden that night. Abraham Lincoln had been notified of the 1860 Republican nomination at his home in Springfield and took a couple days to write a letter of acceptance. In 1868 the Democratic nominee, Horatio Seymour, had addressed a room full of people at Tammany headquarters in New York. For the next twenty-four years candidates accepted the nomination of their parties at their homes, in the clubrooms of hotels, or in the legislatures and governors’ mansions where they served. There was only one clear precedent for the Bryan notification ceremony at Madison Square Garden in 1896. It occurred four years before, when Grover Cleveland accepted the nomination on a dangerously hot night in Madison Square Garden.

July 1892 had been so hot that those New Yorkers who were able to had fled the city for the cooler climes of the Long Island and New Jersey shores. Many believed that the seemingly empty city could not provide enough spectators to fill Madison Square Garden for a political rally. Yet on July 20, an estimated 15,000 enthusiastic Cleveland supporters filled the still-new auditorium to hear the ex-president accept the nomination.

It was the first rally of its kind, part of the slow erosion of the republican restraint and decorum dating back to George Washington that kept candidates from “running” for office or openly seeking the nomination. The 1892 meeting also offered a number of contrasts with Bryan’s notification ceremony four years