Presidential Election of 1900

AS THE NATION calmed after the electrifying election of 1896, known as the Battle of the Standards (over the currency issue), Americans began to enjoy prosperity again, and it seemed that William McKinley and the Republicans delivered on their promise of a “full dinner pail” for all. At first glance, it appeared that Democratic loser William Jennings Bryan's political career had ended at age 37. It only took two years to give Bryan another issue on which to run, and he made the most of it.

The United States suffered from economic downturns known as panics every 10 years. The panics did not occur due to shortages, but to overabundance. The American industrial machine and the nation's farmers produced more than the world had ever seen up to that time.

In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed, which caused a great deal of psychic trauma amid the body politic. Shortly after the revelation of the Census Bureau's report, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a monumental address at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago in 1893 entitled “The Significance of the Frontier Upon History,” in which he declared that the nation experienced economic downturns because the nation needed markets to sell its excess goods. Now that the safety valve of moving west and homesteading was over, the nation needed to look beyond its borders. The Far East, with its teeming millions and precious commodities, seemed an answer to the American economic problem of oversupply.

Turner was not the first individual to see the need for expanding markets. In 1890, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote The Influence of Seapower Upon History, in which he argued for a large navy to protect an equally large merchant fleet, both of which needed coaling stations en route to the Far East. Mahan also argued for a canal across Central America to decrease travel time by half to the Far East. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of [Page 606]Massachusetts and Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the Navy, agreed with Mahan's thesis that great nations needed powerful vessels that protected merchant fleets. The “large policy” would find its opportunity for implementation at the end of the Spanish-American War.

Cubans had long been in turmoil, struggling to free themselves from the Spanish yoke. Americans, thanks to the “yellow press,” sympathized with the Cubans. McKinley, having seen war firsthand as a youth in the Union Army, did not want to go to war to liberate Cuba, but two events resulted in a declaration of war against Spain. First was the discovery of a letter written by Spanish Ambassador Enrique Dupuy De Lome to a friend in Cuba, claiming that McKinley was:

The letter appeared in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal on February 9, 1898. The public outcry was deafening. The second event that helped trigger the war occurred on the evening of February 15, when the U.S.S. Maine imploded in Havana harbor. Many Americans believed after the insult of the De Lome letter that the Spaniards destroyed the ship and killed over 200 sailors. By April, the nation was at war with Spain. William Jennings Bryan served with a Nebraska regiment as colonel, but his unit never experienced hostile fire, and he spent the entire conflict in Florida. Bryan resigned his colonelcy immediately after the end of hostilities and returned to Nebraska.

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