1896. The Transformation of the American Party System. Orthodox economic historians attribute
the triumph of William Jennings Bryan in the Democratic Convention of 1896 and his later
renominations for president to a righteous rising up of the people demanding inflation
over the interests holding out for gold. Friedman and Schwartz attribute the rise of Bryanism
to a price contraction of the last three decades of the 19th century, and the triumph of gold
Gold and Disappearance of the quote money issue to the price rise after 1896.
This conventional analysis overlooks several problems.
First, if Brian represented the people versus the interests, why did Brian lose and lose
soundly not once but three times?
Why did gold triumph long before any price inflation became obvious, in fact at the depths
of price contraction in 1896?
But the main neglect of the conventional analysis is the disregard of the highly illuminating
insights provided in the past 15 years by the quote, new political history of 19th century
American politics and its political culture.
The new political history began by going beyond national political issues, largely economic,
and investigating state and local political contests.
It also dug into the actual voting records of individual parishes, wards and counties
and discovered how people voted and why they voted the way they did.
The work of the new political history is truly interdisciplinary, for its methods range from
sophisticated techniques for voting analysis to illuminating insights into American ethnic
religious history.
In the following pages, we shall present a summary of the findings of the new political
history on the American party structure of the late 19th century and after, and on the
transformation of 1896 in particular.
First, the history of American political parties is one of successive, quote, party systems.
Each party system lasts several decades, with each particular party having a certain central
character.
In many cases, the name of the party can remain the same, but its essential character can
drastically change in the so-called, quote, critical elections.
In the 19th century, the nation's second party system, the Whigs vs. Democrats, lasting
lasting from about 1832 to 1854, was succeeded by the third system, the Republicans vs. Democrats,
lasting from 1854 to 1896.
Characteristic of both party systems was that each party was committed to a distinctive
ideology clashing with the other, and these conflicting worldviews made for fierce and
close contests.
Elections were particularly hard fought.
Interest was high since the parties offered a quote choice, not an echo, and so the turnout
was remarkably high, often reaching 80% to 90% of eligible voters.
More remarkably, candidates did not, as we are used to in the 20th century,
fuzz their ideology during campaigns in order to appeal to a floating,
ideologically different, independent voter.
There were very few independent voters.
The way to win elections, therefore, was to bring out your vote,
and the way to do that was to intensify and strengthen your ideology during campaigns.
Any fuzzing over would lead the Republican or Democratic constituents to stay home in
disgust and the election would be lost.
Very rarely would there be a crossover to the other hated party.
One problem that strikes anyone interested in 19th century political history is, how
come the average person exhibited such great and intense interest in such arcane economic
topics as banking, gold and silver, and tariffs?
Thousands of half-literate people wrote embattled tracks on these topics and voters were intensely
interested, attributing the answer to inflation or depression to seemingly economic interests
as do Marxists and other economic determinists simply won't do.
The far greater depressions and inflations of the 20th century have not induced nearly
as much mass interest in economics as did the milder economic crises of the past century.
Only the findings of the new political historians have cleared up this puzzle.
It turns out that the mass of the public was not necessarily interested in what the elites
or national politicians were talking about.
The most intense and direct interest of the voters was applied to local and state issues,
and on these local levels the two parties waged an intense and furious political struggle
that lasted from the 1830s to the 1890s.
The beginning of the century-long struggle began with the profound transformation of
of American Protestantism in the 1830s.
This transformation swept like wildfire
across the Northern States,
particularly Yankee territory during the 1830s,
leaving the South virtually untouched.
The transformation found particular root
among Yankee culture with its aggressive
and domineering spirit.
This new Protestantism called pietism
was born in the fires of Charles Finney
and the great revival movement of the 1830s.
Its credo was roughly as follows.
Each individual is responsible for his own salvation,
and it must come in an emotional moment of being, quote,
born again.
Each person can achieve salvation.
Each person must do his best to save everyone else.
This compulsion to save others was more than simple missionary work.
It meant that one would go to hell unless he did his best to save others.
But since each person is alone and facing the temptation to sin,
This role can only be done by the use of the state.
The role of the state was to stamp out sin and create a new Jerusalem on earth.
The pietists defined sin very broadly.
In particular, the most important politically was, quote, demon rum, which clouded men's
minds and therefore robbed them of their theological free will.
In the 1830s, the evangelical pietists launched a determined and indefatigable prohibitionist
Second was any activity on Sunday except going to church, which led to a drive for sabbatarian
blue laws.
Drinking on Sunday was of course a double sin and hence was particularly heinous.
Another vital thrust of the new Yankee Pietism was to try to extirpate Roman Catholicism,
which robs communicants of their theological free will by subjecting them to the dictates
of priests who are agents of the Vatican.
If Roman Catholics could not be prohibited per se, their immigration could be slowed
down or stopped.
And since their adults were irrevocably steeped in sin, it became vital for crusading pietists
to try to establish public schools as compulsory forces for Protestantizing society or, as
the pietists like to put it, to quote, Christianize the Catholics.
If the adults are hopeless, the children must be saved by the public school and compulsory
attendance laws.
First was the political program of Yankee pietism.
Not all immigrants were scorned.
British, Norwegian, or other immigrants who belonged to pietist churches, whether nominally
Calvinist or Lutheran or not, were welcomed as, quote, true Americans.
The Northern pietists found their home almost to a man, first in the Whig Party and then
in the Republican Party.
And they did so, too, among the Greenback and Populist parties, as we shall see further
below.
There came to this country during the century an increasing number of Catholic and Lutheran
The Catholics and High Lutherans, who have been called, quote, ritualists or liturgicals,
had a very different kind of religious culture.
Each person is not responsible for his own salvation directly.
If he is to be saved, he joins the church and obeys its liturgy and sacraments.
In a profound sense, then, the church is responsible for one's salvation, and there was no need
for the state to stamp out temptation.
These churches then, especially the Lutheran, had a laissez-faire attitude toward the state
and morality. Furthermore, their definitions of sin were not nearly as broad as the pietists.
Liquor is fine in moderation, and drinking beer with the family in beer parlors on Sunday
after church was a cherished German tradition, Catholic and Lutheran. And parochial schools
were vital in transmitting religious values to their children in a country where they
They Were in a Minority
Virtually to a man, Catholics and high Lutherans found their home during the 19th century in
the Democratic Party.
It is no wonder that the Republicans gloried in calling themselves throughout the period
quote the party of great moral ideas, while the Democrats declared themselves to be quote
the party of personal liberty.
For nearly a century, the bemused liturgical Democrats fought a defensive struggle against
people whom they considered pietist fanatics, constantly swooping down trying to outlaw
How did all this relate to the economic issues of the day?
Simply that the leaders of each party went to their voting constituents and raised their
consciousness to get them vitally interested in national economic questions.
Thus, the Republican leaders would go to their rank and file and say, just as we need big
paternalistic government on the local and state level to stamp out sin and compelled
Morality, so we need big government on the national level to increase everyone's purchasing
power through inflation, keeping out cheap foreign goods through tariffs, or keeping
out cheap foreign labor through immigration restrictions.
And for their part, the Democratic leaders would go to their constituents and say, just
as the Republican fanatics are trying to take away your liquor, your beer parlors and your
parochial schools, so the same people are trying to keep out cheap foreign goods through
So, stateism and libertarianism were expanded to other issues and other levels.
Each side infused its economic issues with a moral fervor and passion stemming from deeply
held religious values.
The mystery of the passionate interest of Americans in economic issues in the epic is
solved.
Both in the second and third party systems, however, the Whigs and then the Republicans
had a grave problem.
Partly because of demographics, greater immigration, and higher birth rates, the Democratic liturgicals
were slowly but surely becoming the majority party in the country.
The Democrats were split asunder by the slavery question in the 1840s and 1850s.
But now, by 1890, the Republicans saw the handwriting on the wall.
The Democratic victory in the Congressional races in 1890, followed by the unprecedented
landslide victory of Grover Cleveland carrying both houses of Congress in 1892, indicated
to the Republicans that they were becoming doomed to be a permanent minority.
To remedy the problem, the Republicans, in the early 1890s, led by Ohio Republicans William
McKinley and Mark Hanna, launched a shrewd campaign of reconstruction.
In particular, in state after state, they ditched the prohibitionists, who were becoming
In an embarrassment and losing the Republicans large numbers of German Lutheran votes, also
they modified their hostility to immigration.
By the mid 1890s, the Republicans had moved rapidly toward the center, toward fuzzing
over their political pietism.
In the meanwhile, an upheaval was beginning to occur in the Democratic Party.
The South, by now a one-party Democratic region, was having its own pietism transformed by
the 1890s.
The quiet pietists were now becoming evangelical, and southern Protestant organizations began to call for prohibition.
Then the new, sparsely settled mountain states, many of them with silver mines, were largely pietists.
Moreover, a power vacuum, which would ordinarily have been temporary, had been created in the National Democratic Party.
For Grover Cleveland, a hard-money laissez-faire Democrat was blamed for the Panic of 1893,
and many leading Cleveland Democrats lost their gubernatorial and senatorial posts in the 1894 elections.
The Cleveland Democrats were temporarily weak and the Southern Mountain Coalition was ready to hand.
Seeing this opportunity, William Jennings Bryan and his pietist coalition seized control of the Democratic Party at the momentous convention of 1896.
The Democratic Party was never to be the same again.
The Catholics, Lutherans and laissez-faire Cleveland Democrats were in mortal shock.
The quote, party of our fathers was lost.
The Republicans who had been moderating their stance anyway, saw the
opportunity of a lifetime.
At the Republican convention, representative Henry Cabot Lodge, representing the
Morgans and the pro gold standard Boston financial interests, told McKinley and
Hannah, pledge yourself to the gold standard, the basic Cleveland economic
issue, and drop your silver right and greenback tendencies, and we will all
back you, refuse, and we will support Brian or a third party.
McKinley struck the deal, and from then on, the Republicans, in 19th century terms, were a centrist party.
Their principles were now high tariffs and the gold standard, and prohibition was quietly forgotten.
What would the poor liturgicals do?
Many of them stayed home in droves, and indeed the election of 1896 marks the beginning of the great slide downward in voter turnout rates that continues to the present day.
Some of them, in anguish at the pietist, inflationist, and prohibitionist brianites, actually conquered their anguish and voted Republican for the first time in their lives.
The Republicans, after all, had dropped the hated prohibitionists and adopted gold.
The election of 1896 inaugurated the fourth party system in America.
From the third party system of closely fought, seesawing races between a pious status Republican party versus a liturgical libertarian Democratic party,
A charming anecdote told to us by Richard Jensen sums up much of the 1896 election.
The heavily German city of Milwaukee had been mainly democratic for years.
The German Lutherans and Catholics in America were devoted, in particular, to the gold standard and were bitter enemies of inflation.
The Democratic nomination for Congress in Milwaukee had been obtained by a populist Democrat, Richard Schilling.
Sounding for all the world like modern monetarists or Keynesians,
Schilling tried to explain to the assembled Germans of Milwaukee in a campaign speech
that it didn't really matter what commodity was chosen as money, that gold, silver, copper,
paper, sauerkraut or sausages would do equally well as money.
At that point, the German masses of Milwaukee laughed Schilling off the stage and the shrewdly
opportunistic Republicans adopted as their campaign slogan Schilling and Sauerkraut and
swept Milwaukee.
The Greenbackers and later the pro-silver inflationist Brianite populist party were
not quote agrarian parties.
There were collections of pietists aiming to stamp out personal and political sin.
Thus, as Kleppner points out, quote, The Greenback Party was less an amalgamation of economic
pressure groups than an ad hoc coalition of true believers.
Ideologues who launched their party is a quasi-religious movement that bore the indelible hallmark
of a transfiguring faith, end quote.
The Greenbackers perceived their movement as the quote, religion of the master in motion
among men, end quote.
And the populists described their 1890 free silver contest in Kansas not as a political
campaign but as quote, a religious revival, a crusade, a pentecost of politics in which
a tongue of flame sat upon every man and each spake as the spirit gave him utterance, end
quote.
The people had quote, heard the word and could preach the gospel of populism.
It was no accident we see now that the Greenbackers almost invariably endorsed prohibition, compulsory
The Transformation of 1896 and the death of the third party system meant the end of America's
great laissez-faire, hard-money libertarian party.
The Democratic Party was no longer the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland.
With no further political embodiment for laissez-faire in existence and with both parties offering
quote an echo, not a choice, public interest in politics steadily declined.
A power vacuum was left in American politics for the new corporate statist ideology of
progressivism which swept both parties and created a short-lived progressive party in
America after 1900.
The progressive era of 1900 to 1918 fastened a welfare warfare state on America which has
to set the mold for the rest of the 20th century.
Statism arrived after 1900 not because of inflation or deflation, but because a unique
set of conditions had destroyed the Democrats as a laissez-faire party and left a power
vacuum for the triumph of the new ideology of compulsory cartelization through a partnership
of Big Government, Business, Unions, Technocrats and Intellectuals.