658 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad
endorsed Bryan’s candidacy. Bryan broke with tradition and embarked on a
nationwide speaking tour, seeking to rally farmers and workers to his cause.
The Campaign of 1896
Republicans met the silverite challenge head on, insisting that gold was the
only “honest” currency. Abandoning the gold standard, they insisted, would
destroy business confidence and prevent recovery from the depression by mak-
ing creditors unwilling to extend loans, since they could not be certain of the
value of the money in which they would be repaid. The party nominated for
president Ohio governor William McKinley, who as a congressman in 1890 had
shepherded to passage the strongly protectionist McKinley Tariff.
The election of 1896 is sometimes called the first modern presidential
campaign because of the amount of money spent by the Republicans and the
efficiency of their national organization. Eastern bankers and industrialists,
thoroughly alarmed by Bryan’s call for monetary inflation and his fiery speeches
denouncing corporate arrogance, poured millions of dollars into Republi-
can coffers. (McKinley’s campaign raised some $10 million; Bryan’s around
$300,000.) While McKinley remained at his Ohio home, where he addressed
crowds of supporters from his front porch, his political manager Mark Hanna
created a powerful national machine that flooded the country with pamphlets,
posters, and campaign buttons.
The results revealed a nation as divided along regional lines as in 1860.
Bryan carried the South and West and received 6.5 million votes. McKinley
swept the more populous industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest,
attracting 7.1 million. The Republican candidate’s electoral margin was even
greater: 271 to 176. The era’s bitter labor strife did not carry over into the elec-
toral arena; indeed, party politics seemed to mute class conflict rather than to
reinforce it. Industrial America, from financiers and managers to workers, now
voted solidly Republican, a loyalty reinforced when prosperity returned after
1897.
According to some later critics, the popular children’s classic The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, published by L. Frank Baum in 1900, offered a commentary on
the election of 1896 and its aftermath. In this interpretation, the Emerald City
(where everything is colored green, for money) represents Washington, D.C.,
and the Wizard of Oz, who remains invisible in his palace and rules by illusion,
is President McKinley. The only way to get to the city is via a Yellow Brick Road
(the color of gold). The Wicked Witches of the East and West represent oppres-
sive industrialists and mine owners. In the much- beloved film version made in
the 1930s, Dorothy, the all- American girl from the heartland state of Kansas,
wears ruby slippers. But in the book her shoes are silver, supposedly represent-
ing the money preferred by ordinary people.