Free Silver

DESCRIPTION: "Laboring men please all attend While I relate my history, Money it is very scarce...." "The farmer is the cornerstone, though he is cruelly treated. Bryan is the poor man's friend...." "We'll arise, defend free silver's cause...."
AUTHOR: James W. Day ("Jilson Setters") ?
EARLIEST DATE: 1939 (Thomas)
KEYWORDS: money political nonballad
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
July 7, 1896 - William Jennings Bryan gives his "Cross of Gold" speech calling for a silver currency
1896, 1900, 1908 - Bryan's three runs for the presidency
FOUND IN: US(Ap)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Thomas-BalladMakingInMountainsOfKentucky, pp. 191-192, (no title) (1 text) (OakEd, pp. 194-195)
Foner-AmericanLaborSongsOfTheNineteenthCentury, p. 283, "Free Silver" (1 text, plus a 1939 WPA transcription on p. 284)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Wait for the Wagon (Free Silver version)" (subject of Free Silver and the 1896 election)
cf. "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight (Bryan Version)" (subject of the 1896 election)
cf. "Bryan Campaign Song" (subject of the 1896 election)
cf. "Don't You Know (Way Over in Williamson)" (subject of the 1896 election)
cf. "We Want None of Thee" (subject of the 1896 election)
cf. "The Patchs on My Pants" (subject of the 1896 election)
cf. "Bye, Old Grover" (subject of the 1896 election?)
NOTES [4016 words]: William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was a curious mix of genius and fool. A genuine peacemaker and friend of the poor, and a brilliant speaker, he had neither economic nor scientific sense (as he demonstrated by serving as prosecutor in the Scopes trial as well as by his support of "free silver").
It should be noted that silver had been legal tender from 1792 (Jameson, p. 600). But the original goal had not been to fix a price ratio; the coinage act of 1837 had intended the ratio to float. The imbalance, at times, was substantial. Phillips, p. 50, demonstrates how fast the "exchange rate" fluctuated in the 1870s after western silver mines made the metal much more abundant: In 1873, the amount of silver in a silver dollar was worth one dollar in gold, but only 99 cents in 1874, 96 cents in 1875, and 89 cents in 1876! Thus there was more than a 10% premium on gold over silver.
But the ratio at the time of the 1837 Act was 16:1 (Jones, p. 6), so that was what was remembered. However, in 1873, with little silver actually being used by the treasury, the coinage act of 1873 had demonetized silver -- though it did so so quietly that many people at the time did not realize it! (Jones, pp. 10-11. It was claimed that even President Grant was unaware of it).
The 16:1 ratio had not been maintained over time. 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 and that in reality the market value between the two metals was about 32 to 1" (Jones, p. 12). But the 16:1 ratio was remembered -- and remembered in particular by those who found themselves in a credit squeeze. Farmers had seen commodity prices fall below break-even levels (for a typical discussion of the heartbreak of western farmers, see the notes to "Marching for Freedom"), while they still had to pay off their loans. It was this which resulted in the rise of the Populist party in the midwest in the 1890s. Like most populists, they were radical in their desire for change, their reforms were such as to strike genuine liberals as reactionary (Jones, p. 75); certainly they were economically naive.
By the 1890s, farmers oppressed by debt were begging for a loosening of the money supply. Several proposals were floated in populist circles, such as a plan to bring back "greenbacks" (paper money not backed by gold) or a plan for specialized local banks called "sub-treasuries" (Jones, p. 79; the latter, if they had lent appropriately, sounds like it might have worked). But the most common proposed solution was free coinage of silver.
That debtors needed relief is beyond question; the deflation problem was genuine. That free silver was the answer is unlikely. Even Jameson, p. 480, writing *during* the Panic of 1893, recorded that "The crisis of 1893 seems to have been rather due to financial legislation than to an unsound condition of the business of the country." More recent experts have generally agreed: The imbalance caused by silver and gold being arbitrarily linked at an unnatural exchange rate led to an unstable monetary supply and led to disaster. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 had called for purchase of a limited amount of silver for use as currency -- at a 16:1 ratio to gold by weight (Graff, pp. 101, 103).
The problem with free silver was not silver-as-currency, it was with the notion of an irrational, non-floating exchange rate between silver and gold. But that was the situation in 1890-1893. Little wonder that the economy suffered -- in effect, people used silver to buy gold, and then hoarded the gold. Capital dried up -- and so, separately, did government finances, resulting not only in the Panic of 1893 but also in a near-government bankruptcy in that year that forced President Cleveland to borrow gold at high rates of interest (Graff, pp. 114-115). So the government attempted to free itself of the silver requirement.
Entry Bryan. A lawyer by training, he had never been particularly good at law (Jones, p. 65; Glad, p. 26, notes that the cow college that he went to "did not mold him into a scholar nor greatly challenge his intellect"; it merely gave him the chance to figure out what to do with his life). But he was a brilliant campaigner (not *politician*, note; campaigner). "His major asset undoubtedly was an unusually beautiful voice, which he could project with ease to the furthest corner of a large and crowded public hall" (Jones, p. 64). With his wife's help, he wrote brilliant speeches (Mary Baird Bryan eventually managed to join the bar in her own right -- Glad, p. 28 -- and must have been truly brilliant to manage to overcome the prejudices of the time). He was also good at speaking off the cuff. It earned him a Nebraska congressional seat in 1892 -- as a Democrat in a year when Populists were sweeping the Farm Belt. He did not seek a third term in 1894 (Glad, p. 30, thinks he gave up in the face of conservative opposition), probably hoping to gain a senate seat that year (he had already been passed over in 1892/1893), but the Nebraska legislature was not in Democratic hands (Jones, p. 69), so he wrote newspaper editorials and gave speeches. Were he alive today, he would doubtless have made a very successful Baptist televangelist.
It was his suggestion that the Populist Party hold its convention after the two regular parties so that it could "take advantage of the errors of the old parties" (Jones, p. 71). In hindsight, this proposal was probably good for Bryan -- but certainly not for the Populists; had they taken up a silver plank first, they might have brought a lot of Democrats to their side, and perhaps even have caused the Democrats to nominate a "gold bug" and let the Populists win with a plurality, but with Bryan already the Democratic nominee, there was no place for them.
Had he had brains to go with his gifts, Bryan might have accomplished great things. But he had all the worst traits of a populist: He might see a real problem, but he would go for the simplest possible answer and never think about it again. We often think of him being the Surprise of the 1896 Democratic Convention. But experts knew about his views for years before that. Bryan had adopted the cause of free silver, and backed it with all his intensity -- people were calling him the "Nebraska Cyclone," the "Knight of the West," and, of course, "Silver-tongued" (Jones, p. 67). Writers such as Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and Vachel Lindsay were deeply drawn to him (Jones, pp. 65-66), and Edgar Lee Masters would say of him, "The period of American political history between 1896 and 1900 belonged distinctively to Mr. Bryan" (Jones, p. 66).
So he already had an audience before the 1896 Democratic convention. Probably few thought of him as presidential material. But he had been quietly campaigning -- very quietly; his campaign consisted of himself, his wife, and some clerks; he was deliberately setting himself up as an underdog (Jones, p. 185). Most campaigns on that scale go nowhere. But 1896 was different: The Free Silver forces dominated the Democratic convention -- but they didn't have a candidate: "At this point the silver Democrats themselves lacked a hero, a Democratic leader with sufficient personal magnetism and stature, to be accepted by everyone as a symbolic representative of the cause for which they were battling. Above all now they needed a positive leader" (Jones, p. 217).
They didn't even really have a plan, except to control the convention (several states had sent two delegations, pro- and anti-silver. The convention seated the silver delegates -- including a Nebraska delegation that was in Bryan's pocket. One wonders what would have happened had they seated the other delegation. Silver would still have dominated the convention -- but Bryan wouldn't have had any position. He still didn't have any campaign staff. The first days of the convention passed in paralysis and utter boredom as committees dominated by Silver supporters tried to figure things out (Jones, pp. 219-224). All the other delegates could do was listen to boring speeches.
Then it was Bryan's turn. His speech wasn't even entirely about silver. A lot of it was about labor and the relationship between labor and business: "The man who is employed for wages is just as much a business man as his employer." "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them" (Jones, p. 228).
But it got to silver in the end: "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."
That wasn't Bryan's only grand rhetorical flourish. There were plenty of others, e.g. the pro-farmer line, "Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country" (Glad, p. 138 -- a quote which shows just how enamored of the Jeffersonian nation of farmers Bryan was). Or "If they ask us why it is that we say more on the money question than we say upon the tariff question, I reply that, if protection has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands" (Glad, p. 137. an invocation of 1 Samuel 18:7=21:11, "Saul has slain his thousands And David his tens of thousands." Ironically, Bryan, like King Saul, misinterpreted the phrase -- like most Hebrew poetry, it is a parallelism, with both Saul and David inflicting many deaths, praising both in the same way. But Bryan treated it as if it were an antithesis.). But it was the Cross of Gold that really got people's attention; it was a truly powerful line.
Ironically, the "Cross of Gold" speech wasn't even a campaign speech. It was a speech to support the Platform Committee's draft of a pro-silver platform (Jones, p. 229). But it swept the convention. The platform passed -- and then it was time for the nominations. The silver forces, which had come united in ideas but with no standard-bearer, had found their voice.
The silver platform caused at least one major candidate to withhold his name from nomination, but there were still many names placed before the convention. Bryan did not lead after the first ballot -- but he was second, and he gained steadily, and with the anti-silver forces mostly abstaining, he was nominated on the fifth ballot (Jones, pp. 233-236). Bryan became the youngest serious presidential candidate in history.
Glad, p. 130, says, "With the advantage of historical perspective it is easy to see that of all possible choices in or out of the Democratic party William Jennings Bryan had the best chance for the nomination. No one had been more active in the silver movement; yet no one had more deftly avoided tying himself to any particular organization." I'm not sure I agree. It's true that Bryan had no enemies -- but he had no particular constituency, either. His problem was to get the foot in the door. Once he had done that, then yes, he was an obvious consensus choice.
Which still didn't solve all the silverites' problems: They no more had an obvious vice presidential candidate than they had had a presidential, and Bryan didn't care who was chosen. So it took them another five ballots to nominate Arthur Sewall (Jones, pp. 237-238).
A few conservative Democrats were so upset that they scheduled another convention and nominated a pair of Civil War generals, Unionist John M. Palmer and Confederate Simon Bolivar Buckner, for President and Vice President (Jones, pp. 269-272). They received the informal endorsement of President Clevelend (Jones, p. 274), but they never got organized and don't seem to have affected the outcome in any way.
Much more significant was the fact that a genuine third party had been coalescing over the previous decade -- the Populists had had good success in several areas, and in 1892, their candidate James B. Weaver had won 22 electoral votes and four states plus one vote each in two others. (It helped that the Democrats had not had an official candidate in a few states! -- Jones, p. 342.) And they were genuinely the party with the most ideas (not all good ideas, but at least new ideas). With both parties fracturing over Free Silver, they had a real chance to clean up if they could unite those defectors. But that meant they had to be a Free Silver party (Jones, pp. 206-207) -- and so, when the Democrats nominated Bryan, they had to either support him or split the Silver vote. It put them in a dilemma, and they knew it; many Populists said that they had to find a way to set themselves apart (Jones, p. 255). So they sort of split the difference, nominating Thomas E. Watson (for whom see "Thomas E. Watson") as their vice presidential candidate but making Bryan their presidential choice (Jones, pp. 258-259), meaning that Bryan was in the unique situation of running with two vice presidential nominees. So they had roped their wagon to a horse that someone else was controlling. Despite their attempts to distinguish themselves from the Democrats, it would destroy the party. Indeed, it resulted in an internal party war (Jones, pp. 260-262); one wonders how the election would have turned out had the Populists held together.
To be fair, if the Democrats were a one-issue party at this time, so was William McKinley. He "had devoted his career to tariff protection with a singular concentration. It was literally true that he knew nothing else, that the issues of money and banking, foreign policy, and so on, were largely mysteries to him" (Jones, pp. 105-106). Philipps, p. 42, is less harsh but calls the tariff "McKinley's focal point" and allows that "McKinley's enthusiasm for protection was part of what led foes to call him a front man for corporations, trusts, and plutocrats" and on p. 48 points to a link between the tariffs McKinley supported and high rates of inequality and the formation of monopolies.
Glad, p. 16, notes a peculiar irony: McKinley, "whose financial affairs revealed no great business insight," nonetheless supported the policies that were thought to be pro-business and "accepted completely the outlook of the captain of industry." Bryan, whose business dealings were more successful, supported the perspective and hopes of the farmer and laborer. McKinley did at least have more experience of government: Like Bryan a lawyer, he had spent enough time in congress to have vied for Speaker of the House (and was made chair of the Ways and Means Committee when he failed to achieve that) as well as governor of Ohio (Glad, pp. 19-20). Glad, p. 21, concludes, "Endowed with modest talents, he made his way with diligent application and hard work" -- plus, I would say, the unusual combination of patience with soaring ambition.
High tariffs weren't the direct economic suicide that free silver was, but America by this time was a fairly advanced economy; the high tariffs probably did more harm than good. It says something about the choices in 1896 that both parties were devoted to bad economic policies. Glad, p. 50: "Both McKinley and Bryan were men of good will.... Yet neither was prepared to look squarely at the realities of American economic development; neither could resist ordering facts to fit a mythological frame of reference."
Glad, p. 31, reminds us, "Perhaps the fundamental point to be emphasized in any comparison of Bryan and McKinley is that both men were essentially conservative. In every personal quality the two reflected their respective portions of the American experience. In every expression of opinion, in every decision, and in every commitment, one could appeal to a tradition as characteristically American as could the other. It is true that in the dramatic campaign of 1896 Bryan became associated with agrarian radicalism. But that radicalism was by no means Marxist.... He idealized the sturdy yeoman farmer of the Jeffersonian heritage." Which wasn't exactly a good starting point for assembling a top-down political movement! P. 48 reminds us, "Although he knew he could not restore the Jeffersonian world, he yearned for the ethical purity which he associated with that world. And he was prepared to act in the interest of economic justice as agrarians conceived it." Whereas McKinley believed in the competitive power of business, and considered the farmers economic failures (Glad, p. 49). Which they were, in a sense, except that they were necessary failures -- and there are only so many spots at the top of the economic ladder! Making it further ironic was McKinley's fondness for tariffs -- he believed in competition, but only between Americans, which is not the path to economic efficiency!
"Advocates of both gold and silver believed that free coinage of silver would have an inflationary effect" (Glad, p. 76) -- which is certainly true. It's just that the free silver people welcomed it -- without realizing that free coinage of silver would cause unsustainable inflation; this was a period when prices generally went down (due to mechanization and increased agricultural production), not up.
The one thing that McKinley was really, really good at was manipulating the nominating process; Jones devoted pp. 114-157 to his mind-numbingly dull process of nailing down convention delegates, which was so effective and inexorable -- and so lacking in actual campaigning -- that some suspected he was setting up the Democrats to nominate an unelectable candidate; Jones, p. 155. I don't think McKinley was smart enough to actually plan that, but the Democrats really did produce an unelectable candidate. Even apart from the man they nominated, the Democratic process seemed pure chaos next to the Republicans. Many attributed the GOP organization to McKinley's ally Mark Hanna, which Jones, pp. 176-177, believes dramatically overstates Hanna's abilities, but there is no question but that the McKinley campaign was as calculating as any in history, and the Republican convention the most rigidly stage-managed until well into the twentieth century. McKinley stayed away, as was the custom -- but Mark Hanna was there, and McKinley and the campaign had connections by both telegraph and telephone (Glad, p. 108), so McKinley had all the advantages of staying away and most of those of being present. Bryan, by contrast, was on the spot, and his campaign had little money and little organization -- in many states, even the Democratic establishment wouldn't support him (Jones, p. 297).
(Ironically, many Republicans were also pro-silver to some degree, and while the Republican platform explicitly called for retaining the gold standard, it also wanted to "promote" an "international agreement" about making silver currency; Jones, p.168).
The Cross of Gold speech was great oratory. As a fiscal policy, it was nonsense. As was much else Bryan spouted. As journalist Oswald Garrison Vilard said, "Of all the men I have seen at close range in thirty-one years of newspaper service, Mr. Bryan seemed to me the most ignorant" (Chace, p. 85).
Bryan did everything he could, holding rally after rally with adoring crowds while the stiff-spoken McKinley followed the traditional practice of not campaigning much (Jones, pp. 276-277). Jones, p. 309, thinks that the early period of this Tour was Bryan's peak -- if the election had been held right then, he might have had a chance.
Indeed, McKinley's own campaign computations implied Bryan could win. There were 447 electoral votes to be decided (HammondAtlas, p. U-60). Glad, p. 168, reports that the McKinley camp felt confident of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania -- 117 electoral votes. They held the advantage in the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin (88 electoral votes). So that was 205, short of the 224 needed. Bryan, they knew, would hold the Solid South (about 125 votes), and they expected him to take the agricultural west (58 votes excluding the states on the West Coast, for a total of 183 or so. Leaving about sixty electoral votes up in the air. So Bryan could win if he held all the open states or made a move on the Old Northwest. But then McKinley's relentless campaign organization began its slow, steady counter-attack -- backed by a huge war-chest; Glad, p. 169, estimates that a quarter of the contributions to the McKinley campaign were in the amount of $1,000 or more (on the order of $35,000 2023 dollars), and the total haul at more than three and a half million dollars (substantially more than a hundred million 2023 dollars). Whereas Bryan's contributions were mostly in small amounts, and not that may of those; bankrupt farmers didn't have much to give!
While Bryan inspired fervent devotion in certain circles, the country was basically conservative, and the Republicans exploited that, hosting big flag-waving rallies shortly before the election to mobilize mindless patriotism (Jones, pp. 291-292. Reading some of McKinley's statements frankly makes me feel diseased, it's such idolatrous flag-worship). Nor did they do anything to help quell the whispers that Bryan was a revolutionary (Jones, p. 293). Surprisingly many ministers preached against free silver on the grounds that inflation robbed those who had lent money (Jones, p. 337; this of course ignores the fact that deflation robbed those that borrowed and the Bible argued against usury anyway). Most of the newspapers also supported McKinley -- and, in many cases, just reprinted McKinley press releases as news: "Three and a half columns of specially prepared matter were sent out every week" (Glad, p. 170), and many of them were translated into the native languages of immigrants -- even such relatively obscure languages as Finnish and Hebrew.
The result was an extremely heavy turnout -- the largest vote total in history to that time, and not to be exceeded for another twelve years (Jones, p. 340). There was talk of vote manipulation, but no real evidence was ever suggested. But Bryan lost. (He would lose by wider margins in 1900 and 1908.) McKinley, as expected, won the Northeast and the Old Northwest; also West Virginia and most of Maryland's votes, plus most of California and Oregon. And he even picked up some of the agricultural west: Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota. McKinley, according to HammondAtlas, p. U-60, picked up only 51% of the popular vote, to 47% for Bryan and 2% minor -- but he won 271 electoral votes (61%); it was a clear if not overwhelming victory.
Bryan did change the course of the Democratic party, which for the first time became open to liberal ideas. And, because his positions caused the Populist party to join the Democrats in nominating him, he helped destroy the Populists (Jones, p. 83).
In another irony, Bryan's Free Silver campaign failed, but his secondary theme, that the Democratic Party was the party of working people, took hold: It would be a few more years before it became established, but for many decades the Democrats were the pro-workers party, and generally had their support. Until the Republican Party got taken over by Populists in the 2010s, just as Silver Populists had taken over the Democrats the century before. (The change in the Republican party was similar: Although progressivism had a brief vogue under Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley was largely responsible for turning the Republicans, until then the more liberal party, into the party of conservatism.)
Several other songs in the Index also refer to the election of 1896, although there is little evidence that any of them truly went into tradition; see "Don't You Know," "The Patches on My Pants," "That Prosperity Wave," and "We Want None of Thee." For the second Bryan/McKinley election, in 1900, see "Bryan Campaign Song." - RBW
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