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The last time the Democratic Party held its national convention in Denver was exactly a century ago, in 1908. That was also the first time the Democrats convened west of Kansas City.
The presidential nominee that year was no novelty,
though; for the third time, William Jennings Bryan, once
known as the boy orator of the Platte,
was selected.
Bryan is sort of a historical footnote today, perhaps best
known as the inspiration for the character of Matthew
Harrison Brady in the play and movie Inherit the Wind -- a
prominent lawyer who prosecutes a teacher for teaching
evolution, much as Bryan did in the famous Scopes trial of
1925.
But Bryan was once a power in the land. He served as secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, resigning in 1915 because he was a pacifist and could not support Wilson's belligerent attitudes. Bryan was also the Democratic candidate in 1896, and was nominated again four years later.
Bryan, then only 36 years old and an obscure two-term
congressman from Nebraska, electrified the 1896 convention
with his Cross of Gold
speech, which got its name
from its biblical conclusion: Having behind us the
producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by
the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the
toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold
standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon
the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not
crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
It was a speech that enabled him to carry most of the
West in 1896, along with what was then the Democratic
Solid South
of the old Confederacy.
The issue that brought those delegates to their feet was something that, today, is seen as an arcane matter best left to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: monetary policy. Back then, it was the hottest of election issues, discussed in pool halls and barbershops throughout the country.
For farmers, then 43 percent of the American labor force and 47 percent of the population, the problem was deflation: The dollar was gaining in value every year. That meant it bought more, which tended to work against farmers. In 1881, for example, corn fetched 63 cents a bushel. In 1890, it was down to 28 cents. In 1881, a farmer with a mortgage payment of $1,000 a year would have needed to raise 1,587 bushels to make that payment. But nine years later, he would have needed 3,571 bushels -- more than twice as large a harvest. If he could not raise that much corn, foreclosure loomed.
Little wonder, then, that the nation teemed with
millions of angry farmers who wanted to see the nation's
money supply increased to reverse the deflation. But how to
do that, when the dollar was then tied to gold?
Greenbackers
suggested that the government just
print more dollar bills, or greenbacks.
Another idea
was to make silver, which was then being mined in abundance
in the West, a legal currency, thereby expanding the money
supply. The resulting inflation would drive up crop prices;
farmers could pay their bills while silver miners in the
Rockies kept their jobs.
Thus arose the uneasy alliance that became the Populist Party of the early 1890s. It elected a governor in Colorado, Davis H. Waite, in 1892. That year, the Populist presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, carried Colorado, Kansas, Idaho and Nevada. Six Populists served in the U.S. Senate of that era. Seven states, mostly in the West, elected Populist governors, sometimes as fusion candidates with the Democrats -- that is, they were nominated by both parties.
And that's what Bryan was in 1896 -- a fusion candidate nominated by both the Democrats and the Populists.
Some of the Populist platform eventually became law:
direct election of U.S. senators (they were previously
selected by state legislatures) and a graduated income tax.
The party fizzled away for a variety of reasons, but it was
certainly as influential as any third party
in
American history.
Bryan fizzled, too, from the nation's leading progressive advocate for farmers and laborers, to a standard-issue Democrat in 1900 and 1908 (carrying only Nevada, Colorado and Nebraska in the West), to the puritan reactionary of the Scopes trial in 1925.
Political alliances were different then. Today, Prohibition is seen as an extremely conservative position, but back then most progressives supported closing the saloons and breweries -- a goal shared by much of the women's suffrage movement. Populists opposed immigration because it would lower wages, and many, like Tom Watson, became vile race-baiters even if they didn't start out that way.
Bryan's opposition to the teaching of evolution in
public schools was more progressive than it might seem
today. It was motivated by more than his adherence to a
rather literal interpretation of the Bible. Bryan had a
humanitarian objection to social Darwinism
-- the
theory that the strong are supposed to oppress the weak in
human society.
As for Populism, the party that dominated the West at the end of the 19th century, consider the preamble to the 1892 platform, and how much of it might remain relevant today:
... we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the
verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption
dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress,
and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are
demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to
isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent
universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are
largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced,
business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor
impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of
capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to
organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor
beats down their wages. ... The fruits of the toil of
millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes
for a few, unprecedented in the history of the world. ...
From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we
breed the two great classes -- tramps and
millionaires.
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