Bye, Old Grover

DESCRIPTION: "William Jennings Bryan, Sitting on the fence, Trying to make a dollar Our of fifty cents, Bye, old Grover, bye, oh, Bye, old Grover, bye. I saw the train go 'round the curve, Goodbye, old Grover, goodbye, All loaded down with Harrison's men, Goodbye..."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1949 (McIntosh-FolkSongsAndSingingGamesofIllinoisOzarks)
KEYWORDS: political nonballad money
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1884 - Grover Cleveland elected president the first time, beating James G. Blaine
1888 - Benjamin Harrison elected President by the Electoral College even though Grover Cleveland won the popular vote
1892 - Cleveland wins the rematch with Harrison
1896 - William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan (the first time)
FOUND IN: US(MW)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
McIntosh-FolkSongsAndSingingGamesofIllinoisOzarks, p. 20, "Bye, Old Grover" (1 text)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Free Silver" (subject of William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 election) and references there
NOTES [415 words]: McIntosh-FolkSongsAndSingingGamesofIllinoisOzarks's informant says that this song was from the election of 1888, when Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland 233 to 168 in the electoral college although Cleveland won the popular vote 49% to 48%. The story is that it was sung in 1889, at the time of the actual transition. There are two problems with this. First, who would bother with an anti-Cleveland song AFTER the election? And second, why the mention of William Jennings Bryan, who in 1889 was not yet thirty and unknown?
This leaves two possibilities. First, the Bryan verse was not part of the proper song. This seems not unreasonable. Second, the song is from the election of 1896, when Grover Cleveland was on his way out of the White House, to be replaced by either Bryan or William McKinley. The latter explanation strikes me as more likely, although I'd hate to be dogmatic; Cleveland was very unpopular after the Panic of 1893 (even though economists generally believe that the Panic was caused by the sorts of policies espoused by Bryan and opposed by Cleveland), so Republicans would be happy to say, "Let's get rid of Cleveland, and not replace him by Bryan."
For more on this, see "Free SIlver."
I doubt the statement "Trying to make a dollar Our of fifty cents" is intended literally -- but, in fact, there were times when it was precisely true. The 16:1 gold-to-silver equation went back to the Coinage Act of 1837, when that was almost exactly the ratio of market values (see Stanley L. Jones, The Presidential Election of 1896, University of Wisconsin Press, 1964, p. 6). That had gone entirely out the window with the Coinage Act of 1873 (Jones, p. 7), but the ratio was remembered and was a basis for the 16:1 ratio. But by the 1890s, "Those opposed to the free coinage of silver protested that since 1837 the market value of silver had declined by almost half [partly because more silver had come on the market and partly because other countries had stopped buying it up] and that in reality the market value between the two metals was about 32 to 1" (Jones, p. 12). In other words, instead of 16 ounces of silver being worth an ounce of gold, 16 ounces of silver was worth half an ounce of gold. Or, put another way, sixteen silver dollars' worth of silver was worth only half a gold dollars' worth of gold. So if Bryan had had his way and silver been coined at 16:1, he would have been trying to make gold dollars out of fifty gold cents worth of silver. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: McIn020

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography