27 pages • 54 minutes read
William Jennings Bryan, Robert W. ChernyCross of Gold
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was born and raised in Salem, Illinois. He was the son of Silas Lillard Bryan, a judge and Democrat. Bryan showed a skill for oration at a young age and followed his father in both his career as a lawyer and his Democratic affiliation. He studied law at Union Law College—now known as Northwestern University School of Law—in Chicago and began his practice in Jacksonville, Illinois. This continued until he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. There he began his political career by running for congress, winning a seat in the House of Representatives where he served from 1891 to 1895.
During his political career, he served as a champion of progressive causes, which later included women’s suffrage, the minimum wage, and rights for union workers. He was somewhat responsible for the shift away from the prior conservative policies of the Democratic Party. His most well-known area of focus was the country’s economy. Bryan emphasized the economic interests of his native rural Midwest over the urban Northeast, and he ran in 1896 on a platform focusing on bimetallism. Bryan was an idealist whose religion and politics linked to one another, and this connection appeared both in the speech’s imagery and in the righteousness with which he approached his arguments. The speech earned him a presidential nomination from both the Democratic Party and the Populist Party. This would become the first of three unsuccessful attempts for the presidency. He lost twice to William McKinley, in 1896 and 1900, and once to William Howard Taft in 1908. While Bryan never won the presidency, President Woodrow Wilson chose Bryan as secretary of state. Bryan resigned in 1915 due to his view that Wilson’s response to Germany was too extreme.
After his resignation, Bryan shifted from politics to religious matters. He was a firm supporter of prohibition and opposed the theory of evolution due to his fundamentalist beliefs. Almost as famous as his “Cross of Gold” speech is his role in the 1925 Scopes trial. He served as the prosecution in the trial against the schoolteacher John T. Scopes who taught Darwinism. While the prosecution won and Scopes was fined, the stress of the trial proved too much for Bryan. He died only six days after its conclusion. While Bryan was and continues to be a divisive figure in US history, he is remembered for being a skilled orator and lawyer. His influence was responsible for the adoption of many progressive policies by the United States government at the beginning of the 20th century.
William McKinley
William McKinley (1843-1901) ran in opposition to Bryan during the 1896 presidential election as the candidate for the Republican Party. He was born to a family of ironworkers in Ohio, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and later attended New York’s Albany Law School. Afterward, he returned to Ohio, where he practiced law and was elected governor in 1892.
At the time of the “Cross of Gold” speech, McKinley was running for the Republican candidacy for the 1896 presidential election. His political career was backed by Mark Hanna, a wealthy businessman from Ohio who worked to support promising candidates from the Republican Party. Unlike Bryan, McKinley’s nomination by the Republican Party was all but assured before the Republican National Convention began. In opposition to Bryan’s appeal to farming and mining regions, he appealed to its urban and industrialized areas. He supported the gold standard and raising tariffs to help the economy, although he did promise some concessions for supporters of bimetallism. Bryan makes extended references to McKinley in his speech, criticizing him for turning his back on the people of the US in favor of the interests of other countries.
While Bryan traveled around the US to support his campaign, McKinley ran what is known as a “front porch campaign,” where he met delegations in or near his local area. He gave many speeches to his supporters from the actual porch of his home in Canton. Meanwhile, Hanna sought financial support from wealthy backers concerned by the anti-capitalist sentiments of Bryan’s campaign. Because of his work, the Republicans were better funded than the Democrats. Additionally, the press, which mostly came from the Republican-supporting urban areas of the country, supported him over Bryan. By the time of the election, national support for silver dropped, and McKinley made a push for the adoption of high tariffs. McKinley beat Bryan in the 1896 general election.
After the election, he became the 25th president of the United States. He again beat Bryan in the 1900 election, which lost Bryan favor within the Democratic Party. McKinley served as president until an anarchist assassinated him in 1901. After his death, he was succeeded by his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt.
The Gold Democrats
In the “Cross of Gold” speech, Bryan references three speakers who gave their speeches before his at the Democratic National Convention. They were all supporters of gold and spoke against bimetallism. None of the three proved popular at the convention.
The first of the speakers was David B. Hill, a senator and former governor of New York. In his speech, he defended President Cleveland and the gold standard while also emphasizing that he was seeking to unite the Democrats rather than divide them over monetary issues. While he sided with the idea of the gold standard in his speech, he was not as vocal about his discontent as many of the other gold-supporting Democrats after Bryan won the nomination. After Hill was William Vilas, a senator from Wisconsin and a Bourbon Democrat who served in President Cleveland’s cabinet. His speech, a long defense of Cleveland’s policies, caused the gold supporters to run over time during the debate. He withdrew after the Democratic Party decided to run on the platform of free silver following the convention and became one of the key members of the Gold Democrats. The last of the three was William E. Russell, the Governor of Massachusetts, a conservative Democrat and proponent of the gold standard. He did not want to run in the 1896 election if the Democrats chose to support bimetallism and only attended after much convincing. Russell gave the speech before Bryan’s during the convention, which the audience barely heard due to his hoarse voice. Despite the hopes of Eastern Democrats for his future within the party, he died from heart failure only a week after the convention.
The attendees expected a show from the speakers at the convention. Due to the gold-supporting side running over their allotted time, Bryan was given extra time to give his speech. These extra minutes proved crucial as the reaction from the delegates required him to stop several times.
