SOUL OF THE NINETIES

289

that he, being a Harvard man, and of inherited wealth, showed to others of his class ways to spend their lives with satisfaction to themselves and advantage to their country.

An epitome, in a way, of the America of the nineties, as the nineties were seen by one of the shrewdest Amer

in the life of the time than the practice of it. The classic American satire on it, the most widely read, heard, and quoted, was Edmund Vance Cooke's "Fin de Siècle":

That was printed and reprinted numberless times. Charles Hoyt had music written for it and introduced it in "A Night in New York." It was so popular Hoyt retained it in "A Day and a Night." Still later it was interpolated in "The Belle of New York."

Returning to "Harvard indifference," still other elements entered into it. One was an honest pose of restraint, calm, understatement, a distaste for exaggeration, expansiveness. Another was a kind of passive resistance to the cult of money.

ican humorists, is to be found in "Mr. Dooley." Mr. Dooley is writing in 1897, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. After reviewing what he conceives to have been her recollections about England, he turns to his own review of America:

While she was lookin' on in England, I was lookin' on in this counthry. I have seen America spread out from th' Atlantic to th' Pacific, with a branch office iv th' Standard Ile Comp'ny in ivry hamlet. I've seen th' shackles dropped fr'm th' slave, so's he cud be lynched in Ohio . . . an' Corbett beat Sullivan, an' Fitz beat Corbett. ... An' th' invintions An' th' invintions . . . th' cottongin an' th' gin sour an' th' bicycle an' th' flyin'-machine an' th' nickel-in-th'-slot machine an' th' Croker machine an' th' sody-fountain an' — crownin' wurruk iv our civilization - th' cash raygister.

NEW TIMES, NEW EVENTS, NEW ISSUES

Radical Issues Associated with Currency Are Overcome,
and Bryan with Them, by Two Metallurgists. The Spanish
War Turns the Thoughts of Americans to a New Interest,
and Provides a New Political Issue. Debate on Expansion.

IN American political history, 1896 was a dividing point. It marked the climax and the ending of radicalism arising out of issues associated with currency. For a few years after 1896 there was no political discontent to speak of. It largely evaporated under the warming influence of generous emotions aroused by watching Cuba's struggle for freedom, the still warmer feelings that attended our taking part in that struggle, and the exaltation that accompanied our brief adventure in territorial annexation. It was assuaged by larger supplies of gold from the mines of the world, rising wages and prices, and the accelerated activity of business that came with the war. The political discontent that arose again about 1902 was from different causes, had different issues, and was led by a new spokesman.

Eighteen ninety-six was the zenith of Bryan's career. The day of his emergence, his "Cross of Gold" speech, was also to be the day of his highest reach. This is easy to see now; it was not seen at the time. During that 1896 campaign in which Bryan, after grasping the nomination with his "Cross of Gold" speech, threw his immense vitality into the effort to win the presidency, it was said that "probably no man in civil life had succeeded in inspiring so much terror, without taking life, as Bryan."1 A New 1 The Nation, New York.

York clergyman, Reverend Thomas Dixon,' spoke of Bryan as 'a mouthing, slobbering demagogue, whose patriotism is all in his jaw-bone," at which, according to the New York World, the audience howled." Reverend Charles Parkhurst, of New York, spoke of the silver movement as inimical to credit and an attempt, "deliberate and hot-blooded," to destroy what little of it remained, and declared: "I dare, in God's pulpit, to brand such attempts as accursed and treasonable." Roosevelt, then comparatively unknown, said of Bryan and his associates, that they were, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty sympathy with their remote skinclad ancestors who lived in caves and fought one another with stone-headed axes and ate the mammoth woolly rhinoceros." "the

The New York Tribune referred to Bryan as wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness . . . apt. . . at lies and forgeries and blasphemies and all the nameless iniquities of that campaign against the Ten Commandments.' The New York Sun shrewdly tempered violence with wit:

He was born eloquent and attracted much attention by repeating "Casabianca" when he was only eleven months old. He is not very much older now, but much more eloquent; and his eloquence is of the inspired sort, like that of a phonograph or telephone or speaking-tube. Whenever he opens his lips words of fire fly out, roman candles, cannon crackers, rockets, pin-wheels. A very beautiful show, but as the Honorable Tobias Castor says: "What it's all about, the Lord only knows." Henry Watterson's Louisville Courier-Journal trumpeted:

He is a boy orator. He is a dishonest dodger. He is a daring adventurer. He is a political faker. He is not of the material

1 Later Mr. Dixon left the ministry and became an author of rather lurid novels and motion-pictures. "The Clansman" is the one best known, and is typical.

BRYAN AND HIS PARTY

293

of which the people of the United States have ever made a President, nor is he even of the material of which any party has ever before made a candidate.1

Epithets devised by friends, and used by enemies in sarcasm, were: The Boy Orator of the Platte,2 Bryan the Brave, the Great Commoner, The Peerless One, the Magnet of the Platte.

Bryan used to repeat what his enemies said with a smile and manner that was subtly designed as half-way between Christ forgiving his persecutors and John L. Sullivan showing himself a good sport.

The gold section of Bryan's own party deserted. Some went openly and organized a Gold Democratic party with a separate ticket. Others, aiming to keep their party regularity, merely knifed Bryan. David B. Hill, the Democratic leader of New York State, returning from the convention, on being asked: "Are you still a Democrat?" replied: "Yes, I am a Democrat still, very still."

While Bryan was "whirlwinding" 18,000 miles up and down the country McKinley stuck, though with occasional fits of trepidation, to his "front-porch" campaign; but in September he decided, if matters became more threatening, to take the stump in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, and Kansas. Hanna, who had planned a vacation after bringing to success, in June, 1896, his eighteen months' work to get the Republican nomination for McKinley, wrote to a friend that "the Chicago

1 "It was fortunate that nearly all of the large daily papers, whether Democratic or Republican, were ardent advocates of the cause of sound money; copies of these were industriously circulated [by the Republican campaign managers]. Hanna had a high opinion of the influence of the Fourth Estate, and knew the hold the weekly country journals had on their readers. He sent them specially prepared matter, plates, and ready-prints."-James Ford Rhodes, "The McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations."

'About this designation of Bryan, Senator Foraker had a brutal but witty comment on the Platte River: "Six inches deep and six miles wide at the mouth."