Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [96]
On their return trip, the Bryans listened to a fellow passenger “very bitterly denouncing me,” Bryan himself later remembered. “After he had exhausted language in expressing his contempt for me and my supporters, he was introduced. Mrs. Bryan and I tried to assure him that no harm had been done by his candid expression of opinion, but he was so deeply mortified he did not enjoy the remainder of the trip.” It is doubtful that William and Mary enjoyed the remainder of their trip either, as the passenger’s comments simply underscored the hostile reception New York had given them. With their departure set for the next morning, the violent denunciation of the man aboard the steamboat may well have been the last words the Bryans heard directly from an average New Yorker. Their boat, Perseus, was named for one of the heroes of Greek mythology, who was told to seek his destiny on the “island of golden apples to the west.”
CONCLUSION: A PHENOMENON
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, William Jennings Bryan, and the killer heat wave all departed New York City at around the same time. On Saturday, August 15, the Bryans took leave of their host’s home en route for upstate New York. “Saturday morning we brought to a close our very pleasant sojourn with Mr. St. John and his mother,” Bryan later wrote in his account of the 1896 campaign. These were his final words on the trip to New York. He made no further mention of the speech, the failed receptions, the criticism of the city press, or his frosty reception by New York Democrats.
There have been few instances in American history of a presidential candidate suffering such a reverse of fortune so quickly and so early in the campaign. On August 8 Bryan had started from his home in Lincoln, aboard a slow, eastbound train that allowed the candidate to stop and make dozens of speeches to thousands of people. He built anticipation for the most important speech of his career, more important even than the “Cross of Gold” speech that had won him the nomination in Chicago. With this single speech in Madison Square Garden, in the heart of “enemy’s country,” he had tried to win over skeptics and take the East by storm. No doubt he and his managers envisioned a repeat of the scene in the Chicago auditorium of only the month before: a spellbinding performance of the Boy Orator followed by a half-hour demonstration that would sweep aside all doubt surrounding the Great Commoner, the presidential nominee of both the Democrat and Populist parties. Only a week later, Bryan was slinking off to lick his wounds, forbidden by campaign managers even to continue his tour.
In their continuing autopsy of his New York visit, the newspapers noted one previous time when a politician had come to the city and shaped his own destiny and that of the country by way of a historic and well-received speech. On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln addressed an audience at Cooper Union. Although he had been defeated two years before by Stephen Douglas in the Illinois race for the U.S. Senate, their debates had given Lincoln a national profile.
Lincoln went to New York in 1860 with handicaps equal to Bryan’s in 1896. Both were seen as westerners with little to offer America’s greatest metropolis. In 1896 Bryan’s Nebraska had been a state for only thirty years, while in 1860, Lincoln’s Illinois had been a state for only forty years. Lincoln and Bryan were both perceived as political ingénues. Lincoln had served one term in the House of Representatives, Bryan only two. By the time of their New York speeches, neither man was seen as being especially “presidential.” Lincoln was a rough-hewn, gangly, small-town lawyer with a nasal twang New Yorkers found grating. Bryan was a self-righteous demagogue and small-town lawyer and editor, with a brash campaigning style that New Yorkers found off-putting. Both men came to the city with reputations as noted western orators (the New York Times called Lincoln “that noted political exhorter