Money Mischief_ Episodes in Monetary History - Milton Friedman [40]
The political situation was, however, very different. The incumbent president was a Democrat, Grover Cleveland, a Gold Democrat who had engineered the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act (Timberlake 1978). The party was split on the silver issue. The Gold Democrats organized a National Democratic party, which ran its own candidate, but this splinter party did not poll many votes. Rather, as James Barnes writes in an authoritative discussion of the Bryan campaign, "Bryan was defeated by that fear of something we know not of, for the bare bodkin of free silver on the tongues of the gold advocates conjured up evils more formidable even than those that existed.... Bryan ... in part defeated himself by permitting the gold men to draw him on to their own battlefield and slay him with a single sword. A brilliant offensive that had begun on a wide field in July with the cry 'We defy them' had by November turned into a defense on a narrow money front. There was sense in Mark Hanna's comment [Mark Hanna was McKinley's campaign manager], 'He's talking Silver all the time, and that's where we've got him,' for the army that girded itself in midsummer could not be held together on the single question of the standard of value" (1947, pp. 399, 402). In an attached footnote, Barnes adds: "In the beginning they were attacking with confidence privilege, monopoly, high prices, exactions by the money lenders, corruption in government, and a social and economic order that had neglected the mass of the people. By November they were fighting on the single question of a silver dollar versus a gold dollar, and many were both scared and bewildered" (pp. 399–400).*
Bryan was nominated for president again in 1900 and in 1908. On both occasions, he was defeated by a wider popular and electoral vote majority than in 1896. He remained influential in the Democratic party, serving as Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state from 1913 to 1915, when he resigned. As an avowed pacifist, he objected to what he took to be Wilson's departure from absolute neutrality—one of the all too rare instances when a cabinet member has resigned on grounds of principle. Nonetheless, 1896 had clearly been the peak of his political career. It was all downhill after that.
He died in 1925, a few days after his last great battle—the famous Scopes trial, which pitted Bryan, as a fundamentalist defending a Tennessee statute outlawing the teaching of evolution, against Clarence Darrow, as a modernist opposing the statute as a violation of free speech. Bryan won the battle (the defendant, John Scopes, was found guilty of violating the law and was fined) but lost the war (the decision was later overruled). And, the legal verdict aside, it was Darrow, not Bryan, who was undoubtedly the hero in the court of public opinion.
While conventional wisdom identifies both Bryan and the 1896 campaign almost exclusively with silver, free silver was not the only plank in the Democratic platform, as Barnes (1947) suggests, and many of the other planks ultimately fared much better. As Henry Commager wrote in 1942: "Few statesmen have ever been more fully vindicated by history. Item by item the program which Bryan had consistently espoused, from the early nineties on into the new century, was written onto the statute books—written into law by those who had denounced and ridiculed it. Call the list of reforms: government control of currency and banking, government regulation of railroads, telegraph and telephone, trust regulation, the eight-hour day, labor reforms, the prohibition of injunctions in labor disputes, the income tax, tariff reform, anti-imperialism, the initiative, the referendum, woman suffrage, temperance, international arbitration" (p. 99). Personally, I have considerably more sympathy for Bryan's support of bimetallism than conventional wisdom does and considerably less for many of the