The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  Thanks to William Jennings Bryan and “his new Red Circus,” something miraculous had happened, the Sun proclaimed: “the business interests of the country are all arrayed on one side.” The prospect of elite unanimity impressed many. E. L. Godkin, then the conscience of American journalism, clucked in the Nation that “no man has ever yet been elected President whom the business interests of the country … distrusted and opposed as unsafe; these interests in the controlling states are substantially unanimous against Bryan.” Godkin was pleased even more by the harmony with which the nation’s press came together against the Democratic challenger. 4

  It wasn’t just business interests and respectable journalism that spoke as one: every species of orthodoxy joined hands that year. Eminent clergymen stood tall against the threat, joining the Methodist bishop who declared from the pulpit that “Populists were no better than Anarchists.” A society preacher in New York denounced “Populist orators” as “the enemies of mankind.” Another is said to have called Bryan “a mouthing, slobbering demagogue, whose patriotism was all in his jaw-bone.” 5

  Scholarly elites hastened to join the consensus. Of fifteen university presidents polled by the Nation , not one supported Bryan. Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, possibly the most famous intellectual in America, bitterly assailed the free-silver movement in a series of articles for Leslie’s Weekly . Cornell historian Andrew Dickson White, a founder of that university, intervened with a pamphlet claiming that “for the first time in the history of the United States we have an Anarchist and Socialist platform” adopted by one of the two main parties. 6 Bryan himself was heckled by a crowd of Yale students as he spoke in New Haven—not because of his views on offensive Halloween costumes but because of his insolence toward the rich. As his speech was interrupted again and again, Bryan lashed out, saying, “I have been so used to talking to young men who earn their own living that I hardly know what language to use to address myself to those who desire to be known, not as creators of wealth, but as the distributers [sic ] of wealth which somebody else created.” It did not go over well. *

  * * *

  OF COURSE, THE Democratic Party was not really made up of anarchists, nor had it been captured by the Populists. Still, its shift to the Left was real enough, with huge potential consequences for the country’s financiers and investors. Their fear was a tangible thing.

  Republican leaders pulled out all the stops. Their candidate, the famed protectionist William McKinley, waged an avuncular “front porch campaign” from his home in Ohio. But behind the scenes, McKinley’s friend Mark Hanna, the Cleveland tycoon, organized a bare-knuckle offensive in the great showdown between the classes. If Bryan represented the producing masses of the country, as the Democrat claimed, Hanna would counter his appeal with Trump-like promises of prosperity-through-tariffs. He would enlist American business and the whole votes-for-hire political system of the nineteenth century to suppress the eloquent challenger.

  In this war, Hanna was “a political generalissimo of genius,” the historian Matthew Josephson has written, “risen suddenly from the councils of the leading capitalists, to meet and checkmate the drive of the masses by summoning up the berserk fighting power latent in his class.” 7

  The dynamic Hanna set about raising and spending enormous sums for the GOP effort, even going door-to-door to the headquarters of the great American corporations soliciting funds to put down the Nebraska upstart. There were few campaign finance rules back then, and what Hanna levied was what Josephson calls a “political assessment”—which is to say, a private Republican tax—“upon corporate wealth.” 8

  Armed with an unprecedented treasury, Hanna proceeded to crush Bryan under a mountain of money. He summoned up a blizzard of alarmist anti-Populist pamphlets—120 million of them, according to Josephson, distributed wherever Bryan’s message seemed to have traction. A squad of paid Republican orators followed Bryan as he moved around the country. There were parades, mind-numbingly long and noisy and expensive. Every shady Election Day practice of the era was deployed; every last possible hireling was provided with generous outlays. Toward the end of the contest, business rolled out its ultimate weapon: coercion, allegedly threatening to shut down factories or cancel deals if Bryan won. Matthew Josephson’s summary is chilly but exact: “Moral enthusiasm was to be beaten at every point in the line by a machinelike domination of the actual polling.” 9 And so it was.

  * * *

  WHA T THE REPUBLICAN campaign defended was a culture of hierarchy and domination. “Some men must rule; the great mass of men must be ruled,” Mark Hanna once said, and by and large America’s elite agreed with him. People who thought like Hanna did taught at American colleges, preached from American pulpits, wrote for highbrow American magazines, and funded American politicians.

  From the heights of this unanimity the men of quality denounced the rabble. Bryan’s campaign aroused “the basest passions of the least worthy members of the community,” announced an editorial in the New-York Tribune that ran on the day after the election. “It has been defeated and destroyed because right is right and God is God.” 10

  Populism was the world turned upside down. It came from a dark place where society’s guardrails were gone, where wealth and learning and status counted for nothing. “Populism” was a word used to express the horror of seeing hierarchies collapse and the lowly clamber to places where they do not belong.

  Anti-populism’s Magna Carta was The Platform of Anarchy , a pamphlet by the statesman John Hay that was distributed around the country as part of the Republican propaganda effort in the fall of 1896. 11 Hay’s indignation was monumental. Populists, he wrote, valued nothing, throwing “their frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization.” They longed to bind the hands of government “where it is inclined to protect order and property.” They appealed “to the openly lawless.” They waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” Their plans for funding the government were “the merest babble of the loafers around a rural livery stable.” For the plumèd knights of the Republican Party, “it is as if a champion at a tourney, awaiting the onset of a chivalrous antagonist, should suddenly find himself attacked by a lunatic in rags.” *

  The future president Theodore Roosevelt echoed this view in Review of Reviews , where he descended into straightforward prole-bashing, performed in the key of aristocracy offended:

  That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress [the Populists] as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust, and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves at least they hope to make matters uncomfortable for those that are. 12

  The respectable faced off against the contemptible. Quality and good taste were menaced by the riffraff for no reason greater than the supposed resentment of lower animals for higher ones.

  I use the word “animals” deliberately. In 1894, Rudyard Kipling, then a resident of Vermont, published an allegorical story in which a group of horses on an East Coast farm trade stories about the hard work they have done for their human masters. In a weird foreshadowing of Orwell’s Animal Farm , a radical horse from Kansas shows up in their pasture and neighs about “degradin’ servitood” and “inalienable rights” and the need to rise up against “Man the Oppressor.” Readers at the time would have recognized his views as a parody of Populism; they are meant to sound ridiculous. The horse talks big, but in truth he is merely lazy. “I say we are the same flesh an’ blood,” the creature whinnies, insisting on equine equality regardless of how little work he does. The other horses are disgusted by his rebellion against their human masters and even more so by his democratic patter, which they correctly understand to be an excuse for shirking the life of labor that is every farm animal’s lot in this world. The radical, Kipling teaches, is an anim
al who does not know his place in the hierarchy; the other horses gang up and give him a terrible kicking. 13

  The visual theme cartoonists favored as they went about illustrating Populism’s upstart challenge was the eternal war of police and the poor. In an 1896 cartoon from Puck , another elegant humor magazine, William Jennings Bryan and his legion of disorder can be seen waving their red flag and marching down a city street behind three wild-eyed figures labeled “Riot,” “Repudiation,” and “Populism.” The street is lined with stately banks and insurance companies, and—thank goodness—two lines of police representing the “sound money vote” are closing in to defend these honorable institutions from the “noisy mob.” 14

  Cops vs. Pops was a recurring fantasy of those feverish days. Another Puck cartoon from the same period showed the Republican candidate, William McKinley, depicted as a prosperous gentleman with a noble lady on his arm, making his way through “The Slums of Popocracy.” All around the glamorous couple lurk dark and shabby figures representing Democratic and Populist leaders. But fear not! Two beefy policemen are escorting the wealthy couple through this vale of proletarian menace. *

  That cops exist in order to protect respectability from the dissolute was taken for granted by the editors of Puck . The humor, if you can call it that, was the way these cartoons fit political insurgency into this same template: a challenge to financial orthodoxy was equivalent to slum lawlessness; Populists were, essentially, lower-class criminals who obviously needed to be policed.

  * * *

  THE IDE NTIFICATION OF Populism with demagoguery, a core doctrine of modern-day punditry, is descended directly from this original Democracy Scare. To prosperous Americans of the Gilded Age it was inconceivable that intelligent human beings would wish to crack down on banks or ditch the gold standard. Populist grievances were irrational by definition; indeed, as the renowned sociologist William Graham Sumner explained to readers of Leslie’s Weekly in 1896, there really was no such thing as “hard times.” Yes, people’s lives were being ruined, but stuff like that happened all the time. Stuff like that was unremarkable. What deserved the reader’s outrage and contempt, Sumner insisted, was when some “wily orator” showed up and told the losers “that this is somebody’s fault.” Somebody other than they themselves, that is. 15

  As we have seen, William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination by virtue of his extraordinary skills as an orator; he campaigned by traveling the country and speaking to live audiences, which was something of an innovation in American politics. To his foes, what these things indicated was not that Bryan was a capable leader but that he was a demagogue, a man who made his way in the world by means of empty talk. By extension, the whole troublesome Populist insurgency was maybe just a matter of hypnotizing rhetoric.

  It began on the very day of Bryan’s surprise nomination. An editorial in the New York Evening Post declared the Nebraskan to be the Democrats’ “chief demagogue,” a man “who took the mob of repudiators off their feet by a speech of forty-blatherskite power.” It wasn’t so much Bryan’s arguments that won the Democrats over, the editor continued, as it was “his wind power, which is immense.” 16

  Another Evening Post editorial got all technical about the matter, attributing Bryan’s victory to the enormous size of the building in which the Democratic convention was held, which permitted “a shouting, shrieking mob” to influence the proceedings. How has modern science overlooked this direct statistical relationship between architecture and mob psychology? It is the clear mathematical answer to the mystery of populism. 17

  A favorite image of the anti-Populists of the 1890s was the masquerade, the trick, the puppet show. Bryan and his followers were not real Democrats, everyone agreed; they were “masquerading in the Democratic garb,” as Professor White of Cornell put it. Life magazine imagined Bryan as the leader of a pirate gang that had hijacked the Democratic vessel; as Mephistopheles, luring the farmer astray. 18 In a more gothic vein, Leslie’s Weekly depicted Bryan’s face as a mask, behind which lurked a hideous howling “Anarchy” in a boar’s hide and a bat’s wings. This was, as the caption put it, “The New (Not the True) Democracy”; one of the monster’s hands held its name tag; a second gripped the throat of a working man; a third used a knife to cut the dollar in half. *

  Who was really in control of the uprising? Was Bryan some kind of mastermind, or was he merely the tool of others? According to the New-York Tribune , Bryan was “not the real leader of that league of hell,” a verdict they handed down after the Democrat lost the election. “He was,” the paper declared, “only a puppet in the blood-imbrued hands of Altgeld the Anarchist and Debs the revolutionist and other desperadoes of that stripe.” †

  And if he wasn’t a puppet or a demagogue—if Bryan wasn’t fooling when he denounced plutocracy—oh my God, don’t even ask. “He is a dangerous man,” editorialized the New York Sun : “if he is sincere, dangerous even as a fool is dangerous when he raises a false alarm of fire in a crowded theatre; and if a demagogue, as he seems to be, doubly dangerous.” 19

  The most extreme note was sounded by Judge magazine in a striking centerfold cartoon depicting Bryan as a bright-red Satan, complete with horns, bat wings, and a pointy tail. As in the Bible story, the demonic Nebraskan tempts the farmer with a vision of glittering cities, rivers, and hills, all made entirely of silver. The implication was not that free-silver’s promise was false but that it was evil, a pact with the enemy of all that is rightful and holy. But the farmer, thank heaven, rejects the sinister offer.

  None of this is to say that demagogues and evildoers and political puppets don’t exist in American life; clearly they do. Nor is it to say that every politician who claims to love “the people” is sincere; many are not.

  What that original Democracy Scare insisted upon is that any politician who uses the language of class-based grievance is probably either insincere or demonic; that any scheme for reforming capitalism by enlisting the votes of working people is most likely a fraud, a con game, a rebellion against God Himself.

  * * *

  THIS WAS NOT a hopeful way of thinking about democracy and its possibilities. On the contrary, to men of orthodox views, the people were the problem; they were the unpredictable oceanic force that had brought on the Populist threat. Dwelling on the people’s mutability and menace, Gilded Age anti-Populists reached for the most frightening images available to understand how democracy had gone so very wrong.

  The fight over the 1894 income tax law was an early example. Before the Supreme Court, eminent Republican lawyer Joseph H. Choate described the tax as an instrument of mob rule, repeatedly mentioning its Populist origins as he made his case. “I have thought that one of the fundamental objects of all civilized government was the preservation of the rights of private property,” he declared. “I have thought that it was the very keystone of the arch upon which all civilized government rests, and that this once abandoned, everything was at stake and in danger.” Noting that the public supported the income tax and might be angry if it were deleted, Choate announced that this was even more reason for the Supreme Court to strike it down and remind the beast of its place, “no matter what the threatened consequences of popular or populistic wrath may be.” 20

  John Hay, the author of The Platform of Anarchy , had served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary during the Civil War, but in later years, as he contemplated what universal suffrage made possible, he began to doubt democracy itself. The people were suckers for demagogues; they were enlisting in strikes and riots; they were becoming the Mob. 21 “Most of my friends think Bryan will be elected and we shall all be hanged to the lampions of Euclid Avenue,” he wrote to Henry Adams. In his pamphlet he compared the 1896 Democratic convention to the Reign of Terror, describing it as the sort of thing humans had not seen “since the half-demented clubs of Paris [which is to say, the Jacobins], when the old French civilization was rocking to its fall, delivered their daily defiances to all existing institutions.”


  Comparisons with the French Revolution were something of a cliché during those days of hate and trembling. Cartoonists loved to depict Populists as marching peasants wearing liberty caps, and on the morning after Bryan’s nomination the New York Sun chose to dub the candidate “William Jacobin Bryan.” 22

  The same publications were appalled at the notion that the people should have a greater say in running the place and settling questions that were the province of their betters. Then as now, faith in the people’s wisdom was thought to be populism’s original sin. Bryan was mocked in the Nation for supposedly starting his speeches with empty salutes to the genius of the common people: “Your wisdom is inexhaustible and infallible,” he was parodied as saying. “I tell you that you are so great that you can ignore the rest of the world.” A cartoon in Puck imagined Bryan on his whistle-stop tour, blowing the same sort of buncombe out of a bellows at a crowd of happy farmers, snaggletooth idiots wearing long agrarian whiskers. Bryan was driving them to ecstasy by saluting the wisdom of the hayseed:

  Our people are capable of ruling! / They do not need the lessons of history! / They have nothing to learn! / They do not care for the experience of other nations! / They know it all! … Study and science are of no account, / the popular intuition is better than / reasoning and what the people say goes! 23

  The imagined message—that the people had no need of experts—sent fear and outrage reverberating through the establishment. To the suggestion that the economic system be reorganized to benefit ordinary people, the financial elites replied: That’s not how it works. We direct things the way we do not because we are greedy but because we know how they are to be directed. “A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods,” recalled Henry Adams years later; “for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by southern and western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers.” 24