William Jennings Bryan: “Cross of Gold” Speech

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the first paragraph, Bryan begins humbly with a disclaimer about his ability to measure up to “the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened” and notes that “this is not a contest between persons.” He then asserts that “the humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.”

By the third paragraph, Bryan moves into the heart of his oration. He alludes to the fervor with which the followers of Peter the Hermit (1050–1115) joined in the First Crusade. This was a common image in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to convey a sense of determination and fervor. Bryan says that the debate over free silver has been divisive and intense but argues that the advocates of silver have prevailed. In the fourth paragraph, Bryan assures the former Massachusetts governor William Russell and the gold delegates that they have disturbed the business interests of the West as much as the silver men have caused dismay in the East.

In the sixth paragraph, Bryan reaches a key point in his speech. He says that the workers, farmers, and miners of the West are businessmen in the same sense that corporate officers, lawyers, and merchants in the East bear that title. Bryan's comments address sectional divisions and demonstrate that he is speaking for those who did as much labor as traditional business figures did in the East.

Bryan then advances the claims of those westerners who deserve better treatment from the rest of the country. He galvanizes the crowd when he says at the end of these comments in paragraph 7: “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.”

Critics of Bryan likened his appeal to that of Maximilien Robespierre, the radical Jacobin of the French Revolution who was likewise preaching social revolution. In answering this charge from the former Wisconsin senator William F. Vilas, a major figure among Cleveland Democrats, Bryan associates himself with the aspirations of President Andrew Jackson, who, Bryan notes, resisted “the encroachments of organized wealth” in his fight against the Second Bank of the United States during the 1830s.

In paragraph 9, Bryan answers some of his critics within the Democratic Party. The Democratic platform endorsed an income tax that the Supreme Court the year before had ruled unconstitutional. The major source of government revenue in 1896 came from a tariff that assessed taxes on imports. Bryan wanted to overturn the tariff policy and shift the burden of taxes to those with higher incomes.

When Bryan in the tenth paragraph talks about “national bank currency,” he is referring to the form of money that then existed—namely, notes, based on gold deposits, which were issued by national banks and circulated as legal tender. Bryan, along with many other party members in 1896, was not satisfied with this system, believing that the national government should issue the currency based on both gold and silver. In his remarks, Bryan refers to Senator Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) of Missouri, a Jacksonian politician of the mid-nineteenth century. Bryan includes another allusion to Jackson's conflict with the Second Bank of the United States. Bryan looks back to the history of Rome with a reference to the Cataline conspiracy of 62 BCE that the famous orator Cicero helped to thwart.

The Democrats had come out against life tenure in the civil service. Since the judiciary stayed in office until retirement or death, the idea had come under attack on that ground. Bryan's tenth paragraph responds to these allegations.

In discussing paragraph 12, Bryan reassures his opponents that the adoption of free silver would not undermine existing contracts that specified payment in gold. At the same time, he includes a reminder about the “Crime of 1873” and what that measure did to affect debtors.

Paragraph 13 brings Bryan into the substance of his argument for free silver. The gold supporters argued that the silver policy could not bring the white metal into a financial parity with gold within a year. The market price of silver was low at this time, and raising it to a ratio of sixteen to one (which was what Bryan favored) would have required large subsidies from the treasury. Bryan brushes that argument aside. One of the devices that moderate thinkers on both sides of the issue advanced was the concept of an international agreement to use silver more widely. This was dubbed “international bimetallism.” The large flaw in that proposal was the opposition of Great Britain, the leading champion of gold, to any such endeavor.

The Republicans and the gold-supporting Democrats wanted to base the campaign on the tariff issue. Bryan would have none of that, and in paragraph 14 he utters one of the phrases most identified with this speech: “If protection has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands.” (Bryan here makes a biblical reference to the first book of Samuel, which says that “Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.”)

Bryan mocks William McKinley and the Republicans for their stand on the gold standard in his fifteenth paragraph. He contends that the political position has deteriorated since the Republican convention nominated McKinley on the gold standard and a promise to seek an international agreement on silver. The Republicans inserted that language at the behest of McKinley to placate silver supporters in the West. Since Republicans often compared McKinley, who was not a tall man, to the small-sized French dictator Napoléon I, Bryan has fun with the topic. McKinley faces his electoral Waterloo and will, like the French leader, end up in exile in the political equivalent of the remote Atlantic Ocean island of Saint Helena.

This alleged plunge in Republican fortunes, Bryan argues in his sixteenth paragraph, has occurred because McKinley and his party have become associated with the gold standard and the readiness to place American monetary affairs in the hands of other countries through an international bimetallic agreement.

In paragraph 17, Bryan further ridicules the idea of international bimetallism and accuses his opponents of being willing to abandon the gold standard even as they say that he is doing the same thing. He cites American history for his contention that the nation had never adopted an out-and-out gold standard. He adds that “the common people” had not come out for gold—only “the holders of the fixed investments.”

John G. Carlisle, who is mentioned in the eighteenth paragraph, was Grover Cleveland's secretary of the treasury in 1896. When he was a member of the House of Representatives in 1878, Carlisle had made a pro-silver speech. Bryan uses Carlisle's words about “the idle holders of capital” and “the struggling masses” to ask where the Democrats would stand. He maintains that the party's sympathies “are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party.” (Note how, in Bryan's last two sentences, he alludes to what has been called the “trickle down” theory often associated with the Republican Party and the contrasting approach identified with the Democrats.)

The nineteenth paragraph is brief, but it contains the core of Bryan's argument in the speech:

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

Those sentences are some of the best expressions of the agrarian values that underlay the Democratic Party in 1896.

Bryan is now moving toward his conclusion. In paragraph 20, he reiterates the point that free silver could be implemented “without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation on earth.” He predicts victory across the country, and then he evokes the spirit of the American Revolution: “It is the issue of 1776 all over again.” In 1896, as during the time of the battle against the British, the voters would display their political independence. The Democrats would institute bimetallism on their own without asking permission of England or other countries. If the fight was to be made over the gold standard itself, however, Bryan would welcome that as well.

As he prepared to utter his final words, Bryan turned to gestures he had practiced before. “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world,” he says, “we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” When he referred to “this crown of thorns,” Bryan pressed his hands down on his forehead. When he ended with the words “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” he spread his arms to make a cross of his own.

Additional Commentary by Charles Orson Cook, The Honors College, University of Houston

The “cross of gold” speech is legendary in American politics and is often cited as the most famous piece of political oratory in U.S. history. Bryan first delivered these remarks at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896 but gave several versions of it later; there even exists a commercially recorded copy made more than twenty years after the fact. By 1896 Bryan had been a supporter of free silver for several years. In Nebraska he had a close working alliance with the Populist Party and even supported their 1892 presidential nominee and silverite James B. Weaver. Bryan had several major speeches on the House floor—one of over three hours’ duration—on free silver to his credit, so that by the time of the convention he had honed his text to a fine point, and he had succeeded in making the complexities of an inflated currency seem understandable. As he saw it, basing the national currency on silver as well as gold would have the effect of cheapening an expensive and inflexible money supply, which would, among other things, make debts easier to repay. Free silver would also, he thought, provide the kind of managed inflation that would stimulate economic growth. The widespread economic depression of 1893 doubtless added a sense of urgency to his case and clearly made free silver more popular. By the time of the Democratic Convention, in fact, the arcane details of free silver were less important to most than its symbolic promise of assisting the downtrodden.

Although this speech is mostly about free silver, Bryan also touches on two other issues that were central to his political career. One of those was the graduated income tax, which would fall heaviest on those with high incomes and lightest on those with low incomes. In his view, the income tax would help redistribute wealth by demanding that the rich pay their fair share and help reverse the effects of the protective tariff on the struggling masses. Congress had actually enacted a version of the income tax, but the Supreme Court had struck it down in a recent decision, a fact to which he refers here. The other issue to which Bryan gives lip service in this speech is tariff reform, an issue that had served him well in Congress and would continue to be part of his political agenda during this campaign and even those of 1900 and 1908. But, as he makes clear, free silver had now surpassed both these issues for primacy in his struggle for economic opportunity. It is also significant that Bryan was speaking as a member of the platform committee of the Democratic Party in an effort to convince the assembled delegates that free silver ought to be the centerpiece of the party’s platform. At this moment Bryan was as conscious of defeating the opponents of free silver in his own party as he was of campaigning against Republicans in the general election.

Barely of constitutional age (thirty-five) to be a presidential candidate, Bryan was not at this point in the convention an announced candidate for the nomination, although he was working hard behind the scenes to promote his career. He understood clearly that this speech at this particular moment had the potential to propel him to national attention. He begins by reviewing the history of the free silver movement in the party, which he asserts had its origin only a year earlier. In fact, however, the silver Democrats had been agitating for years against the more conservative, pro-gold, and largely eastern urban and mercantile branch of the party. Bryan’s statement that “old leaders have been cast aside” is a clear allusion to the fact that the Democrats were sharply divided on the money question and that in part the struggle was over which faction would control the party’s future. In vintage rhetoric, Bryan casts the issue as a moral struggle of the common citizen against wealthy interests. Free silver, as Bryan pictured it, was more than an economic issue. It was a way of life under siege. In the second-most-quoted passage of the speech, he returns to his agrarian theme that family farms were at the heart of American culture: “But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” The concluding words of the speech, cloaked in Christian symbolism and rhythmic intonation, are among the most quoted in modern history: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Bryan’s speech was twenty minutes long, short by his standards. But the convention exploded in response. Both shouts of joy and tears were everywhere, and the demonstration that followed was unprecedented. Contrary to myth, however, the “cross of gold” speech did not deliver the nomination to Bryan immediately. His followers were ecstatic; no one had ever articulated their case for free silver as eloquently, and no one would do so ever again. Nevertheless, on the first nominating ballot the next day, Bryan was fully a hundred votes behind the leader, Richard Bland of Missouri. But as favorite sons began to drop out of the race on the second ballot, Bryan closed in on Bland’s lead. By the fifth canvass, Bryan had not only overtaken the Missourian but also had secured enough delegates to clinch the nomination. He was, at thirty-six, the youngest nominee of a major party in the country’s history.