Meanwhile the irrepressible Bryan was wheedling a speaking slot on the convention’s key evening program, positioned behind four speeches that turned out to be either lackluster or discordant. First came South Carolina’s unkempt “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, looking like a “train robber,” as one journalist put it. He stirred waves of hisses with a rabid appeal to sectionalism. Then there was New York senator David B. Hill, whose competent but staid speech wailed against the platform and implored delegates to respect the party’s “old Democrats . . . who have grown gray in its service.” After that the delegates suffered through two speeches notable for their hollowness.
Then came Bryan. Having fortified his vocal cords by sucking on a lemon and calculated with perfect pitch the tenor of the moment, he both captured and amplified the political crosscurrents roiling the consciousness of farmers, miners, merchants, laborers, and rural folk everywhere. His theme was equality of human value. Why should Eastern businessmen, he demanded, be placed on a higher plane of esteem than ordinary citizens?
The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer . . . 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 brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth . . . and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world.
The floor and galleries exploded in applause as the hall fluttered with white handkerchiefs waving furiously. It was time, said Bryan, for the great mass of Americans to take control of the nation’s politics. “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”
From the gallery, a man shouted, “Go after them, Willie!” Another yelled, “Give it to them, Bill!”
He went after Republicans in declaring, “If protection has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands.” He set up his audience perfectly for the final defiant demand: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Then Bryan fluttered his fingers down the sides of his head, as if to suggest the trickle of blood, and stretched out his arms into the image of a cross.
The convention went wild with cheers and applause that lasted half an hour. The next night, the Nebraskan captured the Democratic nomination on the fifth ballot, after Bland’s standing dissipated steadily through the first four votes. Dawes had seen it coming.
But McKinley had missed the populist wave’s full force. On June 20, he greeted well-wishers in Canton with a stout defense of protection but didn’t mention the currency issue. He later spoke of the necessity of a sound dollar but without much elaboration or apparent conviction. Godkin’s Nation, ever vigilant for signs of weakness on currency matters, wondered about McKinley’s backbone should he be elected: “McKinley’s character is so vague, and so little forecast of what he is likely to do can be got either from his career or from his language, that a good deal of uncertainty must mark the first year or two of his administration.”
This concern wasn’t entirely misplaced. Meeting with friends at his Canton home shortly after the St. Louis convention, the governor pushed aside a suggestion that the money issue would dominate the campaign. “I am a Tariff man, standing on a Tariff platform,” he said. “This money matter is unduly prominent. In thirty days you won’t hear anything about it.” The Major’s friend William Day replied, “In my opinion, in thirty days you won’t hear of anything else.”
William Jennings Bryan would ensure that Judge Day was right. Further, it wasn’t clear McKinley and his men were prepared to fight on that unfamiliar battlefield. Hanna, who would manage McKinley’s canvass as the newly installed chairman of the Republican National Committee, had fashioned a traditional campaign relying on surrogate speakers to tout the GOP candidate throughout the summer, then building up to big torchlight parades and rallies as the November election approached. McKinley too had looked forward to a light campaign schedule during the summer.
Now that wouldn’t suffice, as Hanna quickly perceived. He canceled a scheduled August cruise along the New England coast and wrote to McKinley, “The Chicago convention has changed everything.” He foresaw “work and hard work from the start” and viewed the situation in the West as “quite alarming. . . . With this communistic spirit abroad the cry of ‘free silver’ will be catching.” Early Midwest soundings indicated free-silver sentiment was welling up in Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, even Ohio. Traditional Republican farmers appeared poised to abandon the party in favor of what one Iowa political manager called “the free silver craze [which] has taken the form of an epidemic.”
It boiled down to the calculus of presidential map and math. Republicans had dominated presidential politics through most of the decades since 1860 by capturing New England, the Northeast, most of the Midwest, and much of the West. Democrats dominated the Solid South and border states. But Democrats had won the presidency under Cleveland in 1884 and 1892 by capturing traditionally Republican states in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West: California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. Now Bryan seemed poised to seize traditional Republican strongholds in the West, including Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and the new states of Washington, Idaho, and Utah. Thus it was imperative that McKinley rebuff Bryan’s Midwest onslaught and prevent any electoral erosion in that crucial region.
That in turn would require an entirely new kind of campaign. It wouldn’t be enough simply to stir the faithful with military bands, torchlight parades, and massive rallies—the traditional approach to a presidential campaign. The currency issue had scrambled the nation’s political fault lines to such an extent that it wasn’t clear who the faithful were. That created an imperative to educate voters on the fundamentals of currency policy and persuade them that the only sound course was sound money. Hanna had to get the message out that the Democrats’ inflationist silver embrace would erode the savings of ordinary Americans, disturb delicate financial markets, upend the nation’s economy, and undercut prosperity everywhere.
Hanna quickly created a new organizational structure, with him “in the saddle,” as he put it. Rather than leading the state party organizations loosely, as in the past, he would be the field marshal, directing state parties closely on strategy and execution. He set up a dual headquarters structure, in New York and Chicago, to address key geographic challenges quickly and efficiently. When he saw he must devote most of his time to New York fundraising, he installed Dawes as head of the Chicago operation.
Dawes introduced modern accounting methods and chose business professionals as his associates over political hacks. “No contract is made by this Committee without my approval,” he assured McKinley on August 1, “and no contract is let without . . . competitive bids.” Dawes helped create a Traveling Men’s Bureau, a Speakers’ Bureau, and a Literary Bureau, all charged with pursuing the campaign’s educational mission. He reported to McKinley that the operation was running smoothly and morale was high. “There has not been the slightest trace of any friction among the members of the Committee,” he wrote.
With the New York office handling fundraising, Chicago took on the educational role, pursued primarily through the distribution of pamphlets, brochures, posters, buttons, and favorable newspaper articles, sent out in more than a dozen languages. Eventually Dawes oversaw the distribution of some 100 million pieces of literature into a country of about 15 million voters. The New York office sent out 20 million more into the Northeast. One particu
larly popular pamphlet turned out to be a forty-page piece explaining the silver question in easily digestible, conversational prose.
The Chicago operation hired 100 employees to produce these materials and ship them out every day in railroad cars. Some 275 separate messages were tailored to specific regions and audiences—farmers, military veterans, first-time voters, ranchers, store owners, laborers—reached through a distribution chain that began with state GOP committees and extended through county and precinct offices. When Hanna discovered that some state and local committees weren’t always snappy in distributing materials, he got the Chicago operation to devise ways of sending materials directly to voters. Staffers also sent masses of materials to newspapers for reprinting or distribution inside the paper. Some of these were sent out in the form of plates that allowed small papers to save money by eliminating stages of the printing process. Eventually the newspaper-distribution program reached nearly 3 million people every week.
All this was new. And it required more money than any presidential campaign had ever raised or spent. The printing budget for the Literary Department turned out to be close to half a million dollars. Some $900,000 was distributed through the state GOP committees, while the Chicago organizational budget was $274,000. The New York operation consumed nearly $1.6 million, while Chicago spent more than $1.9 million. Altogether the campaign expended $3,562,325.59, more than double Harrison’s 1892 spending.
But Hanna’s early efforts at fundraising proved disappointing as Northeastern industrialists held back, “scared . . . so blue” by the threat of Bryan, as John Hay wrote his friend Henry Adams, “that they think they had better keep what they have got left in their pockets against the evil day.” Besides, the industrialists weren’t sure what to make of the seemingly parochial and often laconic McKinley, whose political base had been small Midwestern towns. In August, Dawes reported to McKinley his concern “that we are mistaken in assuming that we are going to have more funds than in 1892.” While interest was high among businessmen, he explained, “it is more difficult for them to spare the money” in economic hard times.
The relentless Hanna set out to convince industrial money men that both he and his candidate were serious and bent on stemming Bryan’s populist tide. He warned the titans of banking, insurance, railroads, oil, and other industries that it wouldn’t be sufficient now for him to go hat in hand to various small industries protected by Republican tariff policies and get the usual modest contributions. Turning back the ominous free-silver threat required big money. Ultimately he proved persuasive. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company gave $250,000, while Rockefeller himself contributed another $2,500. Banker J. P. Morgan also gave $250,000, and $174,000 came in from a number of railroad companies. Chicago meatpacking enterprises gave $40,000, and the New York Life Insurance Company, traditionally favorable to Democrats, donated $50,000.
By crafting his educational campaign and building his fundraising juggernaut, Hanna transformed American politics. Now the parties would move beyond efforts merely to stir party stalwarts with dramatic late-campaign rallies and parades. The aim would be to build the base by expanding the ranks of the faithful through political education. At a time when significant immigration was bringing new voters into the political process, the Hanna innovations would become crucial to maintaining party leverage in an increasingly dynamic political environment.
Bryan meanwhile developed his own plan to maximize his limited campaign budget (about a tenth of McKinley’s) by crisscrossing the nation via railroad and casting his eloquence over countryside and cityscape from the platforms of trains. He set out from Lincoln on August 7 on his way to New York City, where he planned to kick off his campaign at Madison Square Garden, and immediately his dynamism and stamina could be seen. His journal entries captured the program’s grueling nature: Lincoln to Chicago, 555 miles; Chicago to New York, 913 miles; New York to Buffalo, 440 miles; Buffalo to Erie and return, 176 miles; Buffalo to Toledo, 84 miles; short trips around Upper Red Hook, New York, 100 miles. The Lincoln–New York trip included speeches at Omaha; Des Moines; the Iowa towns of Grinnell, Iowa City, and West Liberty; Chicago; the Ohio towns of Mansfield, Lima, Alliance, and Orrville; and Pittsburgh. He even stopped at Canton to deliver a speech in which he acknowledged his opponent’s “high character and personal worth,” while also slyly urging Cantonites to keep “your distinguished citizen among you as a townsman still.”
Bryan set for himself a campaign regimen that ultimately would encompass, he later calculated, 570 speeches and 18,000 miles of travel in twenty-nine states. He spoke an average of 80,000 words a day, and on one mid-October day made twenty-three speeches, the first at Muskegon, Michigan, at seven in the morning and the last at midnight in Lansing. He later booked thirty Chicago addresses in three days with the aim, one newspaper speculated, of placing “himself practically in personal contact to the extent of sight and hearing of the entire population of . . . Chicago.”
This campaign frenzy, coupled with the populist surge unleashed by Bryan’s charismatic persona, generated serious nervousness among McKinley men.
“You’ve got to stump or we’ll be defeated,” Hanna told McKinley at one strategy session.
“You know I have the greatest respect for your wishes,” the governor replied, “but I cannot take the stump against that man.” He knew Ida couldn’t hold up under the strain; he didn’t want to leave her; and his instincts warned against competing with Bryan on his own turf.
But Hanna wouldn’t give up. Myron Herrick, visiting the industrialist in Cleveland, found him “scared to death” over Bryan’s kinetic campaign. “We have got to get McKinley out on the road to meet this thing,” Hanna told him. Herrick dutifully traveled to Canton to press the case for a stump tour.
“Don’t you remember that I announced I would not under any circumstances go on a speech-making tour?” replied McKinley, insisting that a course alteration now would give an appearance of weakness. “I might just as well put up a trapeze on my front lawn and compete with some professional athlete as go out speaking against Bryan.”
Evincing a degree of self-awareness while gigging at Bryan, he added, “I have to think when I speak.” He didn’t consider himself well suited to Bryan’s kind of political showmanship, which would simply escalate if he sought to compete with it. “If I took a whole train, Bryan would take a sleeper,” said the Major. “If I took a sleeper, Bryan would take a chair car. If I took a chair car, he would ride a freight train. I can’t outdo him, and I am not going to try.”
Instead he developed a different concept for connecting with the electorate and conveying his message. Rather than going to the voters, he would invite the voters to come to him. This wasn’t altogether novel. Benjamin Harrison had welcomed a number of delegations to his Indianapolis home during his 1888 campaign, and McKinley himself had received numerous well-wishers after getting the Republican nomination in June. Word went out that he would welcome Americans from anywhere in the country who wished to see him at Canton and hear his plans for the nation.
The response was greater than anyone had anticipated. Streams of visitors made their way to Canton’s North Market Avenue to show support and see the candidate in his own environment. It turned out that the “Front Porch” campaign, as it was called, also allowed McKinley to control his message by managing the exchanges with delegation leaders.
When a letter arrived at Canton or campaign headquarters announcing that a delegation of farmers, cigar makers, merchants, or churchmen wanted to visit on a particular day, the campaign sent a letter back asking the delegation spokesman to visit Canton beforehand to discuss the matter. At these meetings, McKinley asked what the spokesman intended to say. If the answer was vague, McKinley said something like, “That will hardly do.” He requested a letter ten days or so before the event with the proposed remarks written out. Sometimes, if they weren’t quite right, the governor edited them before sending them back.
On one occasion, a
delegation spokesman arrived with his proposed address already written. “Just read it to me,” said McKinley. After hearing it, the governor sought a complete rewrite—but with his characteristic diplomatic sensitivity. “My friend,” he said, “that is a splendid speech, a magnificent speech; no one could have gotten up a better one. But this is not quite the occasion for such a speech. There are occasions when that would be just the right thing. It is sound and sober from your standpoint, but I have to look at it from the party’s standpoint.” He counseled the man on how to make his speech just right for a Front Porch exchange.
Employing such techniques, McKinley manipulated his image and message as delegations of every civic stripe arrived at the Canton train station, marched down Main Street to an elaborate plaster arch constructed for the occasion, then waited until summoned to the McKinley Front Porch. Brass bands and cheering locals escorted them along their way, and the town was festooned with patriotic bunting. At a nearby tent, visitors were offered two glasses of beer and a sandwich (for “wets”) or a cup of coffee and two sandwiches (for “drys”).
As each delegation approached his house, McKinley remained inside, then emerged with dramatic flair to cheers from the assembled. Often Ida would come onto the porch or wave her greeting from behind a window. As the spokesman uttered his remarks, McKinley listened intently, “like a child looking at Santa Claus,” his Canton friend Harry Frease later recalled. Then the candidate climbed upon a chair to deliver his own well-tailored remarks, often memorized, always including an expression of delight in welcoming such valued guests to his home. Afterward he invited them up to shake hands and enjoy a glass of lemonade.
President McKinley Page 16
