William Jennings Bryan: “Cross of Gold” Speech

Impact

Once Bryan finished speaking, some enthusiastic Democrats wanted to have the convention start voting right away for its candidate. Bryan's opponents resisted and said that the balloting should occur on schedule. Bryan agreed; he told friends that if the support for him did not last overnight, it would not endure until November. Bryan and his aides needed time to gather the delegates' votes and to plot their strategy.

The voting for the nominee came on July 9, the evening of the day after Bryan's now-famous speech. It took five ballots for Bryan to emerge as the choice of the Democrats. Bryan took the lead on the fourth ballot and then, midway through the fifth ballot, passed the two-thirds needed for victory. Bryan was nominated unanimously. He selected a Maine Democrat named Arthur Sewall as his running mate in an effort to balance the ticket and appeal to the Northeast, where Bryan was weakest. Sewall was also a businessman for free silver, a rare combination in 1896. The Democrats achieved a ticket but at the cost of defections among the gold-supporting Democrats who resisted Bryan and the allure of free silver.

The campaign that followed saw Bryan make intense efforts to win the White House. He gained the support of the People's Party for his candidacy, although the Populists nominated a different vice president to run with him. Bryan went out on the stump to take his case to the American people. The Democrats lacked the money of the well-funded Republicans. The major newspapers were opposed to Bryan and denied him full coverage in their columns. To get his message out to the electorate, Bryan crisscrossed the country, making hundreds of speeches during the fall campaign season. In the aftermath of the “Cross of Gold” Speech (as it was quickly named), Bryan even seemed to have taken the lead from McKinley and the Republicans.

As the campaign entered the fall, however, the Republicans rebounded. They had raised more than $3 million for their war chest, money that they used to pour out pamphlets and other literature attacking Bryan's reliance on free silver. McKinley stayed at his home in Canton, Ohio, but Republicans brought an estimated 750,000 people there to hear the candidate's daily remarks. The McKinley campaign argued that inflation, which was at the heart of Bryan's appeal, would hurt workers on a fixed income. Tariff protection, they said, was a more effective answer to hard times. By October, Bryan's momentum had stalled, and the election had turned toward McKinley.

The results on election day confirmed that judgment. McKinley won 271 electoral votes to 176 for Bryan. In the popular vote, the Republican gained a 600,000-vote majority over Bryan, the largest such margin in a quarter of a century. Bryan carried the South and West; McKinley won significantly in the Northeast and Midwest. Bryan conceded that the “first battle,” as he called it, had not gone for the Democrats. He promised to make a renewed effort in 1900, and there was already talk among Democrats of another Bryan nomination.

The “Cross of Gold” Speech had propelled Bryan to the Democratic nomination, though it did not take him to the White House. The oration established Bryan as a major force in American politics, a position he occupied for the next thirty years until his death in 1925. His dramatic speech was soon recognized as one of the classic events of American political oratory. More than a century after it was delivered, it remains one of the rare speeches given at the right moment to make the speaker a national figure.