1896

____________________

 

“William Jennings Bryan had caused more fear without taking human life than any other man in history.”

 

(Not sure of the source: possibly Donald L. Murray, 1929)

____________________

 

 

July 9: William Jennings Bryan delivers his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

 

In a loose Chapter VIII, “William Jennings Bryan: The Democrat as Revivalist,” pp. 240-265 from The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter (I’m almost sure), an eyewitness remembers sitting in the gallery, near a gold Democrat who:

 

…had been sneering at every friendly reference to the silver cause. When Bryan finished his appeal the gold Democrat “lost control of himself and literally grabbed hold of me and pulled me up from a sitting to a standing position on my chair. He yelled at me, ‘Yell for God’s sake, yell,’ as Brian closed his speech.” (240)

 

I think this is Hofstatder, who describes Bryan as “knowing little literature but the Bible.”

 

Bryan was equally at home in religion and politics. In his lecture “The Prince of Peace,” which he gave many times and in almost every corner of the world, he declared:

 

I am interested in the science of government, but I am more interested in religion.  ... I enjoy making a political speech…but I would rather speak on religion than on politics. I commenced speaking on the stump when I was only 20, but I commenced speaking in the church six years earlier – and I shall be in the church even after I am out of politics.

 

Unfortunately Bryan’s political leadership and social philosophy were as crude as the theology of his evangelical brethren.

 

 

Bryan embodied popular feelings.

 

The author says that Roosevelt, Wilson and La Follete “sensed popular feelings: Bryan embodied them.” (241)

 

Bryan’s typical constituent was the long suffering staple farmer of the West and South. … For 30 years, since 1865, he had kept his eyes on the general price level, watching its sink downward almost without interruption until at last the dollar had trebled in value. This meant slow agony for the farmer; he was a debtor, and his long-term debts were appreciating intolerably. A debt that he could have paid in 1865 with 1,000 bushels of wheat now cost him 3,000 bushels. To one who owes money and finds it hard to come by, economic hardship appears in its simplest guise as a shortage of money. If money was scarce, the farmer concluded, then the logical thing was to increase the money supply. The silver campaign of 1896 was a struggle between those who wanted money cheap and those who wanted it dear.

 

But in 1896 free silver ranked among the heresies with free love. Except in the farm country, wherever men of education and substance gathered together it was held beneath serious discussion. Economists in the universities were against it; Preachers were against it; Writers of editorials were against it.

 

As late as 1933, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, one economist could grumble, “Well, this is the end of Western civilization.” (241-242)

 

 

Farmers – then a majority of Americans – were victimized.

 

Farmers had other serious concerns – victimized by tariffs – abused by the railroads – and hurt by middlemen, speculators, warehousers, and monopolistic producers of farm equipment. But now free silver became a crusade. Henry Demarest Lloyd, a reformer himself, bemoaned the focus. Free silver is the cow-bird of the reform movement,” he said. “It waited until the nest had been built by the sacrifices and labour of others, and then it laid its eggs in it, pushing out the others which lies smashed on the ground.” (244)

 

Western silver mine operators donated heavily (for that time) to the Bryan campaign. As early as 1892, while running for Congress, Bryan said, “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” Hostatder writes, “he saw nothing to be ashamed of in such a confession. The cause of the people was just.” Often called “The Commoner,” Bryant identified himself with the people, which proved costly, “for it gave them not so much leadership as expression. He spoke for them so perfectly that he never spoke to them. In his lifelong stream of impassioned rhetoric he communicated only what they already believed.” (245-246) He was, for example, friendly to labor “but never sponsored a positive program of labor legislation.”

 

As for his faith in the people, Bryan was clear:

 

I assert that the people of the United States…have sufficient patriotism and sufficient intelligence to sit in judgment on every question which has arisen or which will arise, no matter how long our government will endure. The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions, and it requires no extended experience in the handling of money to enable a man to tell right from wrong. (246-247)

 

The second principle for Bryan, can be summarized in the old Jacksonian motto: “Equal rights to all and special privileges to none.” (247)

 

Hofstadter describes the party platform:

 

Most of its demands, on the contrary, can be summed up in the expression: “Hands off.” The call for a return to bimetallism was a call for the removal of a restriction on silver coinage imposed as late as 1873, not for some thoroughly novel policy. The labor planks asked only that the federal government keep its hands off labor disputes and leave them to state authority – a victory for John P. Altgeld over Grover Cleveland. The income tax plank was not accounted a means of redistributing wealth on any considerable scale, but merely of forcing the plutocracy to pay for his own services. It was the great merchant, not the farmer, who needed a navy, cried Bryan, echoing the Jeffersonians of old; it was the capitalist, not the poor man, who wanted a standing army “to supplement the local government in protecting his property when he enters into a contest with his employees.” (248)

 

 

The man employed for wages, the farmer, are also business men.

 

Bryan wanted to persevere the individualism of the farmer, and called that the “first battle” to be fought. He insisted:

 

When you come before us and tell us that we are to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course. We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer. The attorney in a country bank is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; a merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day – who begins in the spring and toils all summer – and who by the application of brawn and muscle to the natural resources of the country, creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes up on the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. (249)

 

He added,

 

We believe, as asserted in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal; But that does not mean that all men all are or can be equal in possessions, inability, or in Merritt; It simply means that all shall stand equal before the law.

 

“After one hundred years of change in society the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian philosophy was intact,” Hofstadter writes. (250)

 

Bryan practiced law “without distinction” for five years, in Illinois, then “fled west” to Lincoln, Nebraska and began to “edge into politics.” He first won a seat in Congress in 1890, and two years later, after “arduous study” gave an “impressive anti-tariff speech” which focused national attention upon him. He hoped to be elected to the Senate in 1894, but the legislature spurned him.  Next, he turned to editing the Omaha World-Herald. Defeated in 1896, in 1900, he ran on an anti-imperialism, anti-trust platform, “but prosperity had returned,” and he lost again.

 

In 1902 Bryan took a trip abroad and observed state ownership of utilities as it was practiced in European countries. Thrown aside by his party in 1904 in favor of the conservative Alton B. Parker, he continued to press for a more radical program, including government ownership and operation of the railways. (255)

 

When Teddy Roosevelt was elected, Bryan visited him in the White House, saying, “Some people think I’m a terrible radical, but really I’m not dangerous at all.” He told the New York Tribune that socialism had “gone too far” in this country, but later said that government ownership of the railroads would blunt the socialist movement. Bryan explained:

 

The man who argues that there is an economic advantage in private monopoly is aiding socialism. The socialist, asserting the economic superiority of the monopoly, insists that its benefits shell accrue to the whole people, and his conclusion cannot be denied if his assertion is admitted. The Democratic party, as I understand its position, denies the economic as well as the political advantage of private monopoly and promises to oppose it wherever it manifests itself. It offers as an alternative competition where competition is possible, and public monopoly wherever circumstances are such as to prevent competition. (255-256)

 

By the time he ran again in 1908, he  was telling the Wall Street Journal that he was in “no hurry about government ownership.” But he did have this rule of thumb, according to the historian:

 

According to Bryan’s formula, when a Corporation engaged in interstate commerce came to control as much as 25 per cent of the business in its field of enterprise it must obtain a federal license; the provisions of this license would guarantee the public against watered stock and prevent the corporation from controlling more than 50 per cent of the traffic in its product or products. (256)

 

Teddy Roosevelt, in fact, had appropriated most of Bryan’s best issues, as Hofstadter sees it. After his death, his wife Mary listed her husband’s projects that had become law: the federal income tax, popular election of U.S. senators, publicity in campaign donations, the vote for women, a Department of Labor, railroad regulation, currency reform, and state initiative and referendum petitions. In later years, as Secretary of State under President Wilson, he was anti-war and proposed a series of arbitration treaties, so that nations on the verge of war could “cool off.” In Latin America, The Commoner believed that the U.S. “could prevent revolutions, promote education, and advance stable and just government.” He was, says Hofstadter, “genuinely neutral” in the lead-up to World War I, and “did not look at Britain with the soft eyes of the middle- and upper-class East.” He pushed for Germany to ease it submarine warfare – but expected the British to then ease their food blockade of Germany.

 

“Why be shocked,” he told Wilson, “at the drowning of a few people, if there is no objection to starving a nation?”

 

After the Lusitania was sunk, Wilson’s protests went too far, he felt, and Bryan resigned on June 8, 1915.

 

In 1924 the Democratic National Convention was held in New York City. The party was split on a resolution to condemn the Ku Klux Klan by name, but delegations from Bryan country “were filled with Klan supporters.”

 

It was a magnificent opportunity for a man who had read Jefferson on tolerance to give a great lecture on bigotry. Instead, fearing more than anything else a further decline in his influence, Bryan delivered a weak appeal not to rend the “Christian Church” nor destroy party unity. Of the Klan he said: we can exterminate Ku Kluxism better by recognizing their honesty and teaching them that they are wrong.” Fat, balding, in wrinkled clothes, taxed by the heat, bereft of the splendid voice that had made him famous, he was unequal to the merciless heckling from the galleries, and when he descended from the platform after a ludicrous effort to promote compromise candidates, he told Senator Heflin with tears in his eyes that he had never in his life been so humiliated. (262-263)

 

____________________

 

“No teacher should be allowed on the faculty of any American university unless he is a Christian.”

____________________

 

 

Increasingly, he turned to religious issues in his last years. He began lecturing on college campuses, arguing, “No teacher should be allowed on the faculty of any American university unless he is a Christian.” He defended the law under which John Scopes was prosecuted, saying the people were merely asserting their right “to have what they want in government, including the kind of education they want.” Hofstadter describes Bryan’s stance in the trial as a “childish conception of religion.” Bryan said of Scopes, “A man cannot command a salary for saying what his employers do not want said.” (264-265) From all corners of the country, Bryan received letters of congratulation for his fight against the teaching of evolution.

 

When a few weeks after the trial’s close Bryan’s heart gave out, there was profound grief among those who had followed him faithfully from the fight against gold to the fight against the ape. Fiery crosses were burned in his memory, and one of his constituents celebrated him as “the greatest Klansman of our time.” A cruel and inaccurate characterization, it underscored the fatal weakness of a man who at sixty-five had long outlived his time. (265)

 

Hofstadter sees Bryan as a man of simple ideas – whereas I wrote in my notes, years ago, that he was more realistic and forward-thinking than the historian believed.

 

*

 

Ford “put the nation on wheels.” 

Henry Ford builds his first car. He was so obsessed with his work he failed to notice his “quadricycle” was too big for the door of the shed where he was working and had to break up the wall to get it out when it was done. The first “Ford” was really an old buggy frame mounted on four bicycle tires, with a puny, two-cylinder gas engine. It had a 3-gallon fuel tank, a top speed of 20 miles per hour, and couldn’t go in reverse. The “horn” was an ordinary doorbell screwed to the front. Yet, everywhere Ford drove, crowds gathered to stare. 

Ford once worked 48 hours straight on his project. A great tinkerer and mechanic, his lack of education often showed. Born a few days after the Battle of Gettysburg ended, he believed he was a reincarnated soldier. He feared sugar and believed cigarette smoking would lead to a life of crime. He hated Jews and attacked them later when he had his own newspaper. His first two companies went broke; but if you invested in the third you became rich. Later he spied on union organizers in his plants and resorted to violence to try to keep workers from organizing.

 

Favorite expressions included:

 

“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice,” which appeared above his mantle.

 

“Life is work.”

 

“History is bunk.”

 

 

Ford shaped modern America. He popularized mass production methods (in the dystopian novel Brave New World they date years from before Ford, and after Ford.). He brought the assembly line and interchangeable parts into common usage. He was able to keep cutting the cost of his Model T, which meant more people could afford cars. He paid his workers better than most, $5 per day, and raised the standard of living for common workers. He later agreed to the eight-hour day and Saturday’s off. In many ways he was a fair employer – he hired handicapped workers and African Americans, for example – but paid women less. 

Later his company used violent methods to suppress unions.  

It was a different era – but people were the same. His son Edsel drove to school at age eight. That’s the difference. Henry had child by one of his secretaries when he was 59. That’s the same. 

The car industry grew – creating a boom in glass, steel, rubber, oil, leather and textiles and road building. 

The U.S. economy also boomed. Ford “put the nation on wheels.” Nearly half of all cars in the 1920s were Ford models.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My students were interested in the limited capabilities of his first car, the story of 999, and how investments would work in his companies. The idea that you could invest in a Ford company and lose your money was easy to understand. His third company was founded on $10,000 in capital in 1903.

 

A teacher who bought one share for $100 sold her share in 1919 for $262,036. 

If you use one popular inflation calculator, in 2019 terms, an investment of $1,486.75 would have grown to $3,895,824.02.

The first "Ford" had a tiller like a boat for steering.

 

*

 

The “safety” bicycle is now in wide use, two wheels of the same size, pneumatic tires, and the ability to “brake” by reversing pedals.

 

Jill Lepore writes,

 

The safety was the prototype of every modern bicycle. Most everything added to the bicycle since is just tinkering around the edges. During the bike craze of the eighteen-nineties, bicycles became an emblem of modernity; they were the epitome, as Paul Smethurst argued in “The Bicycle: Towards a Global History” (2015), of “the cult of speed, a lightness of being, a desire for existential freedom and a celebration of the future.” 

 

Bicycling, Susan B. Anthony said in 1896, “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” 

 

That same year, the preacher who coined the phrase, “What Would Jesus Do?”  came out in favor of bicycles. “I think Jesus might ride a wheel if He were in our place, in order to save His own strength and the beast of burden.”

 

Bicycle riders also wanted more paved roads. The League of American Wheelmen, founded in sixteen years earlier, pushed for state and local governments to do more.

* 

From a biography of Edmund Burke, Woodrow Wilson copied two phrases: “In studying the problems which confront us in matters of government we must have regard ‘not merely to forms of government and law’ but more especially to ‘whole groups of social facts which give to law and government the spirit that makes them workable.’” (10/19) 

He also insisted: “The true philosophy of government can be extracted only from the true history of government.” (10/49) 

During his years as a professor (he had given up the idea of a career in law, finding it not to his taste), he 

gave few A’s and one boy in thirteen flunked. Students thought his standards severe but knew him to be everlastingly fair. Year after year they voted him the most popular of professors. Almost everyone wanted to “take Wilson,” and promising students came to Princeton just for that purpose. Very soon he became an institution. (10/57)

 

In 1896 he gave an address at Princeton, where he had been teaching for six years, titled “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” 

It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible,” he said, “in this country for learning to seek a place apart and hold aloof from affairs.” The Presbyterian ministers who founded Princeton, he pointed out, acted as if under obligation to society rather than to the church. “Religion, conceive it but liberally enough, is the true salt wherewith to keep both duty and learning sweet against the taint of time and change; and it is a noble thing to have conceived it thus liberally, as Princeton’s founders did …  Duty with them was a practical thing, concerned with righteousness in this world, as well as with salvation in the next.”

 

Wilson also said (I garbled my notes, and these two quotes may be from a different speech): 

“There is nothing so conservative of life as growth; When that stops, decay sets in and the end comes on apace. Progress is life, for the body politic as for the body natural. To stand still is to court death.” 

“Not all change is progress, not all growth is the manifestation of life.”

His speech continued: 

Of course, when all is said, it is not learning but the spirit of service that will give a college place in the public annals the nation. … We dare not keep aloof and closet ourselves while a nation comes to its maturity. The days of glad expansion are gone, our life grows tense and difficult; our resource for the future lies in careful thought, providence, and a wise economy; and the school must be the nation.

 

He ended, “Who shall show us the way to this place?” (10/61)

 

Wilson was interrupted repeatedly by applause, “Princeton,” wrote Walworth (his first edition of the book came out in 1958), “in the person of Woodrow Wilson, had an hour of triumph before the nation and the world. At last the full power of the whole man had come forth in dazzling brilliance.” 

Princetonians wrung the speaker’s hand after he finished, “in a frenzy of pride,” to have had a professor so move a distinguished audience. “Editors quoted and commented, and a magazine published the address in full. Commanding the respect of both scholar and Philistine, the prophet had won eminence in his own land.” (10/62)