William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold: The Speech That Won 1896

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On July 9, 1896, inside a sweltering Chicago Coliseum, a 36-year-old former congressman from Nebraska sat eating a sandwich to settle his stomach. Minutes later William Jennings Bryan gave a speech that won him the Democratic nomination for president. This episode explains the anger behind it: the end of silver coinage in what critics called the Crime of 73, a deflation that crushed indebted farmers, the Panic of 1893, and a gold standard president, Grover Cleveland, whom his own party wanted to repudiate.

Bryan was no accident. He had spent years lecturing and mailing delegates his photograph and speeches, and he maneuvered for the closing slot in the platform debate, not the keynote. At the podium he redefined the businessman to include the farmer and the miner, argued that prosperity rises from the producing masses, and ended with arms outstretched like a man on a cross. Five seconds of silence gave way to a 25 minute uproar. He lost to William McKinley that fall, but the party he captured was changed for good.

• The Democratic National Committee first seated a rival pro-gold Nebraska delegation, and Bryan had to wait for the credentials committee to put him on the floor.
• Senator Benjamin Tillman opened the debate with a sectional speech that fell flat, and the gold speakers who followed were dry, long-winded, or too ill to be heard by 20,000 people.
• Bryan warned that if the farms were destroyed, grass would grow in the streets of every city in the country.
• Delegates tore state standards from the floor and carried Bryan on their shoulders, yet he refused an immediate vote, saying his momentum had to survive a night's sleep.
• McKinley ran a front porch campaign from Canton, Ohio, while Bryan traveled an estimated 18,000 miles by train and spoke to roughly five million people.