McKinley and Bryan in 1896 Compared as Two Ways to Run for President

Imagine you are running a presidential campaign and a consultant walks in with the following plan. Your candidate will not travel. He will not hold rallies in the big cities. He will sit on his own front porch in a small Ohio town, in a rocking chair, and wait for voters to come to him. The consultant also says the other side's candidate, a thirty-six-year-old with a voice like a church organ, will cover the country by rail and give hundreds of speeches. Which campaign do you bet on?

If you answered the traveler, you are in good company. Most of the newspapermen of 1896 would have, too. And you would have lost your money. William McKinley sat on that porch in Canton, Ohio, and beat William Jennings Bryan by a margin that settled the politics of a generation. This is the story of two ways to run for President, why one worked and the other did not, and what the difference tells a campaign today about money, message and map.

The country they were fighting over

To understand 1896 you need the Panic of 1893, which set off one of the worst depressions the country had known to that point. Banks failed, railroads went into receivership and work dried up. The Democratic President, Grover Cleveland, was blamed, and his party was tearing itself apart over the one question that mattered to the voters: what should money be?

For most of the century the United States had used both gold and silver as the base of its currency. In 1873 Congress passed a coinage law that stopped the free coinage of silver, which critics called the "Crime of 1873." Silver's price then fell as the big mines of the West poured out metal. Farmers in the South and the Plains, who owed money and sold crops at falling prices, wanted silver coined freely at a fixed ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one of gold. More money in circulation, they reasoned, would lift prices and make debts easier to repay. Bankers, merchants and most Eastern business people wanted a gold standard, with a dollar that would buy the same amount next year as it did this year. Congress had tried halfway measures, the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, and Cleveland had pushed the repeal of the second in 1893. That had split the Democrats from top to bottom.

Hold that in your mind: in 1896 the central economic question was, at bottom, about who controls the supply of money, a job the country would later hand to the Federal Reserve in 1913. If you want to know how that institution works, see The Federal Reserve in plain English and the levers it really holds.

Two conventions, two platforms

The Republicans met in St. Louis in June 1896 and nominated McKinley, the former Ohio congressman and governor whose name was on the tariff of 1890. The platform called for the gold standard until an international agreement could be made on silver. A handful of Western delegates, led by Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, walked out in protest. The party took the loss and moved on.

The Democrats met in Chicago in July, and Bryan, a former Nebraska congressman, gave a speech that changed everything. On July 9 he closed the platform debate with the Cross of Gold address, which ended with the warning that the party should not "crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." The hall went up in flames. He was nominated the next day. The Populists, the farmers' third party, also named Bryan, but gave him a different running mate than the Democrats did, which tells you how awkward the fusion was. The gold Democrats, Cleveland's friends, refused to follow and put up their own ticket. In effect, the Democratic Party lost a wing before the campaign began.

The comparison

Here is the whole thing in a table, so you can see the mirror.

Let me take the rows in turn.

The porch: how McKinley won by staying home

McKinley's decision to stay put was partly practical and partly brilliant. He was an experienced campaigner, but he understood that he could never out-orate Bryan. So he did not try. He invited the country to come to him.

Delegations of workers, farmers, veterans, shopkeepers and church groups rode the railroads to Canton in a steady procession through the summer and fall, often on excursion fares that the party arranged. They gathered on his lawn. A spokesman for the group would deliver a short address, and McKinley would reply from his porch with a few remarks, prepared in advance and tailored to the audience in front of him. Farmers heard about prices and markets. Workers heard about jobs and steady pay. Veterans heard about the Union. The newspapers carried the speeches, and the speeches always came back to the same point: sound money, and a tariff that protected the American worker.

That is message discipline in its purest form. Every sentence McKinley spoke, he had thought about. Nothing could be turned into a gaffe. Nobody could catch him tired at the end of a twenty-hour day. And the venue itself said something: here was a man at home, who invited you in, a steady hand in a time of panic.

I'd call it the cleverest piece of political staging of the century, with one condition. It works only if you have an organization that can bring the crowds and a press that will carry the words. McKinley had both, and the reason was named Mark Hanna.

The machine: Hanna and the money

Marcus Alonzo Hanna was a Cleveland businessman, a coal and iron man, who had become McKinley's closest political friend and manager. After the St. Louis convention he became chairman of the Republican National Committee, and he ran the campaign like a corporation. He opened headquarters in Chicago and New York. He built a speakers' bureau. He organized a printing operation that put out an enormous quantity of pamphlets and leaflets in many languages, aimed at specific groups of voters. And he raised money on a scale the country had never seen, by going to the business community, to banks, insurance companies, railroads and manufacturers, with a pitch that played on their fears of free silver.

The Republicans outspent the Democrats by a wide margin. Precise figures are disputed to this day, and I will not give you one I cannot stand behind. What is not disputed is that the gap was large and that it mattered.

I am a Republican writer and I will not pretend this was all pure. Some employers warned their workers that their factories would close if Bryan won, and in some cases the warnings came with the pay envelope. Critics at the time and historians since have called that pressure, and it was. Corporate giving of this kind also led to a backlash. After more scandals in the early 1900s, Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907, which banned corporations from contributing money to federal candidates. If you want to know why we have campaign finance laws, the 1896 campaign is part of the answer.

For a modern view of how campaign money works, see our pages on the fundraising call sheet, how a first-time candidate asks for money and the section on money and fundraising on this site.

The whistle-stop: how Bryan campaigned

Now Bryan's side, and it deserves more credit than it usually gets. He was the first major-party nominee to take the case directly to the voters on a national scale. Candidates then were supposed to look above the fray, with the party doing the work. Bryan broke the rule. He traveled by train through the Midwest, the Northeast and the border states, thousands of miles in total, and spoke again and again to crowds at depots, fairgrounds and halls. His voice was his instrument, and by every account he used it for hours a day until it nearly broke.

His campaign lacked what McKinley's had. It had little money, thin organization, and a party that had lost its eastern and business wings. A candidate who has to make the entire case himself, in public, hundreds of times, has to say something new each day, and that is a risk. It also spread his message across many subjects, while McKinley's stuck to one.

Bryan had a different problem too, and I find it the most instructive of all. His coalition was strong in the places where debtors and farmers lived and weak where wage earners lived. A factory worker in Pittsburgh or Chicago did not own a mortgaged farm. He bought food and clothing, and he had a job to lose. He heard that free silver meant "cheap money," and he suspected that meant higher prices and an uncertain pay envelope. Bryan never persuaded him otherwise. The Republican pitch to labor was: your wages come from a working factory, and a factory needs confidence.

The result: what the map looked like

On November 3, 1896, McKinley won 271 electoral votes to Bryan's 176. Add them: 271 plus 176 equals 447. A candidate needed a majority, which was 224. McKinley cleared it by 47. His share of the popular vote was a little over 51 percent.

The map told the tale. McKinley carried the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, much of the upper Plains and the Pacific coast states of California and Oregon. Bryan carried the South, the farm states of the central Plains and the silver states of the mountain West. McKinley took the cities, which had been the question mark going in.

What that meant is the real story. The election is usually called a realignment, and the word fits. It built a Republican coalition of business, industrial labor in the Northern cities and Midwestern farmers that held for most of the next thirty-six years, with the Republicans winning every presidential election from 1896 through 1928 except 1912 and 1916, when Woodrow Wilson won (the split behind the first of those is in Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912). The story of how that map shifted, and how it shifted back, is in How the Republican Electoral Map Moved Across Four Eras from 1896 to 2016.

What happened to the money question

The Republicans kept their word, in time. In March 1900 McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act, which fixed the dollar's value in gold. By then, though, the issue had already lost its steam, because gold itself was no longer scarce. New discoveries in South Africa, Alaska and the Yukon, and a better method of extracting gold from low-grade ore, added to the world's supply, and prices stopped falling and began to rise. In a sense the farmers got the gentle inflation they had wanted, without free silver.

The gold standard itself did not last forever. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. The government took the country off the gold standard for ordinary citizens in 1933, and the last link between the dollar and gold was cut in 1971. Money was never as simple as either side's speeches made it sound. That is why the inflation fights in Inflation is the one tax that never needs a vote in Congress belong in any conversation about 1896.

Who each model suits

Compare again, as a practical matter, for anyone who runs for office, from school board on up.

The porch suits a candidate with a disciplined message and an organization behind them. It rewards preparation and punishes improvisation. It is for the candidate who can say one thing, in a hundred ways, to a hundred audiences, and who has a team that can fill the lawn. If you have volunteers and a clear message, do this. The step-by-step version for a local race is in a campaign budget worksheet for the candidate with no money and no staff.

The whistle-stop suits an insurgent with a message that the establishment will not carry. It spends the candidate's energy to substitute for a missing organization. It can produce a movement. But a movement that cannot reach the city worker, or the party's own wing, will lose, and Bryan lost three presidential elections: 1896, 1900 and 1908.

The deeper lesson: voters who feel their pocketbook at risk will choose the steadier hand. Bryan had the better speech. McKinley had the better answer to the voter who wondered whether the factory would still be open next month.

The bottom line

• In 1896 Republicans won by pairing a single, steady message (sound money and jobs) with a well-funded national organization. A campaign that can say one thing clearly will usually beat one that says ten things well.
• Bryan's campaign shows both the power and the limit of a great speech. It raised a movement, but it could not hold a party together or reach the city wage earner.
• The money side of the story has a lesson of its own. Hanna's fundraising worked, and it also led to the Tillman Act of 1907. A campaign that wants to last should raise money in a way it would be glad to see on the front page.
• Before you vote on a candidate's money plan, ask the McKinley question: what does it do to prices, jobs and my paycheck? Check the numbers on the Federal Reserve's own pages, not the speech.
• If you are thinking of running for something, pick your porch or your train deliberately, and make sure you have the volunteers for the one you choose.