Presidential Election of 1896

The Issue

The chief campaign issue was the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16:1 with gold. The farmers and radicals of the day believed that the use of silver would inflate the currency and increase profits for their crops. It was far too simplistic a notion, but they championed the cause with great fervency. The tariff and other issues that had appeared with regularity since the end of the Civil War also received much debate, but the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 ounces of silver minted on par in price with one ounce of gold remained the overriding issue of the campaign. The election canvass of 1896 holds the title The Battle of the Standards.

The Conventions and Candidates

The Republicans, long the party of protection and traditional Protestant values, came to their convention in St. Louis anticipating great things. The eventual nominee was William McKinley, former congressman and governor of Ohio. McKinley, who was managed by Marcus Alonso Hanna of Cleveland, Ohio, a gentlemen of perceptive business acumen and, connected with the Standard Oil Corporation, bore the sobriquet of his opponents: Dollar Mark. Hanna was able to obtain the nomination for McKinley without a great deal of opposition.

McKinley ran on a platform of protection and the promise of Republican prosperity. Aging Union veterans supported McKinley overwhelmingly, and as a result the bloody shirt, waved in the Gilded Age breeze. McKinley was moral, upright, honest, conservative, and devoted to his invalid wife. The Republican Platform advocated bimetallism if other nations of the world adopted the same standard, but, in the meantime, endorsed the gold standard.

The Democrats gathered in Chicago and quickly repudiated their own president, the beleaguered Grover Cleveland. The platform committee was swayed by a former congressman from Nebraska and editor of the Omaha World, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the powerful orator from Platte River country. Bryan, a dynamic speaker, held the audience spellbound and gave one of the most remembered and powerful speeches in American political history entitled the Cross of Gold. Bryan, with populist rhetoric, class warfare, biblical imagery, historical allusions, and agrarian emphasis, made his case for the free and unlimited coinage of silver on par with gold at a ratio of 16:1. The climax of the speech held the audience in awe: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

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