Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [93]
He was not sanguine and already, in a letter to Roosevelt before the Convention met, talked of retiring to the private practice of law. “In a word, my dear boy, I am tired of this thing and want to be sure that my debts won’t have to be paid by a syndicate [a reference to McKinley’s].… Moreover the receding grapes seem to ooze with acid and the whole thing is a farce.”
At St. Louis in June, Lodge made his nominating speech. Reed received 84 votes on the first ballot in comparison to 661 for McKinley and the grapes receded beyond reach.
President Cleveland likewise was rejected by the Democratic Convention in favor of an ambitious thirty-six-year-old Congressman from Nebraska, known for his crowd-catching oratory, who treated the Convention to the most memorable rhetoric since Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. “Clad in the armor of a righteous cause … a cause as holy as the cause of liberty.… You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” When the hysteria was over, Governor Altgeld turned a “weary face and quizzical smile” to Clarence Darrow and said, “I have been thinking over Bryan’s speech. What did he say, anyhow?”
The campaign roused the country to extremes of emotion and reciprocal hate. It was Silver against Gold, the People against the Interests, the farmer against the railroad operator who siphoned off his profits in high freight charges, the little man against the banker, the speculator and the mortgage holder. Among the Republicans there was real fear that a Democratic victory, coming after the violence of Homestead and Pullman, would mean overturn of the capitalist system. Factory owners told then men that if Bryan were elected “the whistle would not blow on Wednesday morning.” Even the Nation supported McKinley. When he won, business settled back in its seat, reinforced in its rejection of social protest. “Mark Hanna’s era,” wrote a contemporary looking back, “marked a climax of this easy defiance by the strong. I well remember the charming bulldog manner in which Hanna took up defense of unlimited private monopoly.… It was a note that can never be sounded quite so fearlessly again.”
The arena was now cleared for a different battle, in which Reed’s fate and his country’s were to be decided. Cleveland had refused to be budged when Congress passed a resolution which by recognizing the Cuban rebels as belligerents would have permitted the sale to them of arms. The resolution was “only an expression of opinion by the eminent gentlemen who voted for it,” he said, and since the power to recognize rested exclusively with the Executive he would regard it “only as advice,” which left “unaltered the attitude of this Government.” Now he was replaced by McKinley, who, though personally opposed to war with Spain, was unpracticed in the art of living up to his convictions. In Spain Premier Canovas was dead, leaving weaker hands in control. In New York William Randolph Hearst, having bought the Journal, was adapting himself to the dictum of the editor of England’s first halfpenny paper, the Daily Mail, who on being asked what sells a newspaper, replied, “War.” Hearst was helping to manufacture a war by horrendous stories of Spanish cruelties, Cuban heroism, American destiny and duty, empurpled by the demands of a circulation battle with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
A new factor in the world was the victory of Japan over China in their local war of 1895, which caused a sudden recognition of Japan as a rising power in the East and startled Kaiser Wilhelm II into coining a phrase,