The 1896 presidential election is generally considered one of the “watershed” or “realignment” elections in American history – the kind that sets the tone and establishes the new party system (in this case, the “Fourth Party System”) for the coming decades. What if it had gone the other way? What if William Jennings Bryan’s Democratic-Populist coalition had beaten McKinley’s Republicans? What kind of president would “the Great Commoner” have made? Would he have forced through an inflationary “free silver” monetary policy? How would that have affected the development of the American economy? And how would this political triumph of the farmers have affected the subsequent development of agrarian life in America? Would we still have a lot of family farms, or would economic-efficiency pressure have turned them all into agribiz plantations in spite of politics?
Here’s the Democratic 1896 platform:
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/seminar/unit8/demplat.htm
It calls for the following:
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Bimetallism
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No government bonds to be issued in peacetime
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An end to banknotes
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No protective tariff
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The income tax
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Ending immigration of unskilled labor
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Greater regulation of railroads and expansion of the powers of the ICC
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Reduction in the size of the US government
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Limitations on the use of judicial contempt
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Oppposition to the Pacific Railroad Funding Bill
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Full pensions for all US Civil War veterans
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Statehood for Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico
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The Monroe Doctrine
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Sympathy for the Cubans
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Limiting the civil service to fixed terms
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Opposition to a third presidential term
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Waterway improvements
The only thing I’m willing to wager on is that if Bryan had been elected in 1896, there would’ve been no Spanish-American War in 1898.
Couldn’t have, I’m not American.
I don’t know that that’s true. Bryan was a supporter of the war…a stronger supporter of the war than McKinley, actually. Bryan supported it both for moral reasons (freeing the Cubans) and practical ones (the war would put pressure on the economy and lead to bimetallism.)
Well, for one, evolution would not be tought in American schools.
Maybe it would be. Part of Bryan’s opposition to evolution was that he thought it gave scientific respectability to Nietzschean philosophy, which he saw manifested in the German militarism of WWI. If Bryan’s 1896 Presidency had altered history so as to have averted WWi, perhaps his opposition to evolution may not have been so stringent.
My kids’ elementary school would’ve been named something else.
I’m not sure if this is meant in jest, but a hypothetical Bryan presidency would have ended long before the controversy over teaching evolution arose during the 1920’s.
Indeed, Bryan volunteered for and served as an officer during the Spanish-American War. He disagreed with McKinley over annexing the Philippines as an American colony. It’s conceivable that without the Philippines we would have been less involved in Pacific affairs and even more isolationist during the 1930’s, and have avoided war with Japan. I doubt it, though.
Regarding currency, Bryan was completely correct to identify deflation as a huge problem in the 1890’s–especially for farmers, who were net borrowers–and to identify the demonetization of silver earlier in the Nineteenth Century as a cause. Economic growth outran gold mining during the late Nineteenth Century, and bankers prospered and farmers suffered as a result.
He was less correct in proposing remonetization of silver, after the fact, at a 16:1 ratio as a solution. (The market ratio was about 40:1 at the time.) That would have created a huge one-time inflationary spike.
Furthermore, we were on a “fractional reserve” gold standard in the 1890’s, in which bank notes circulated as legal tender only fractionally backed by gold. The mere fact of Bryan’s election may well have caused a “gold run” on the Treasury, with uncertain consequences none of which were good, which is why Wall Street was apoplectic over the possibility of Bryan winning.
The more painless cure for deflation occurred by accident later in the 1890’s, with cyanide gold mining and gold rushes in the Klondike and Australia.
Not only that, but at the turn of the century the president had essentially nil influence over education policy. Even if Bryan took it into his head to use his office to crusade against evolution, all he could have done would be to appoint a fundamentalist postmaster to censor evolution-related mail as “obscene,” a la Comstock.
I doubt it too. America would want a piece of the China trade with or without the Philippines. Bryan would surely have sent troops to Beijing when the Boxer Rebellion broke out, just as McKinley did.
I wonder, though, if Bryan would have willingly given up Chinese reparations afterward in return for the Chinese sending over “treaty scholars.” I think the idea of Christianizing and “civilizing” the Chinese would have appealed to Bryan, but there also would have been a lot of populist projects he could have funded with that money.
Anyway, America is not going to sit by quietly while the Japanese take over the Pacific. But would Japan still have adopted an aggressive policy in the decades after Bryan? That depends on whether there is still a Great Depression. Bryan was against tariffs, and if he (somehow) managed to popularize low tariffs enough to get later presidents to follow the same policy, the rest of the world might have been better able to absorb America’s surplus production in the 1920s.
For some reason I take a “macro” approach to the question:
If Bryan is elected, McKinley is not assassinated and Theodore Roosevelt does not become president. TR does not try to stage a comeback in 1912, so the Republican vote is not split and Woodrow Wilson is not elected. That’s three different administrations in two decades. I know better than to guess how policy would have differed, but it certainly would have.
I think it was a jest hinging on the fact that an aging William Jennings Bryan was counsel for the prosecution in the Scopes “monkey trial.” 
And he appeared as “Matthew Harrison Brady” in Inherit the Wind. (I once played the Judge in a community-theater production.)
One thing to consider is that after the 1896 elections, Republicans outnumbered the combined forces of the Democrats, Populists, Silver Party and Silver Republicans in the House by 206-150. And this was after the GOP having lost 48 seats in the election. The Senate was a closer run thing, with the GOP holding only a plurality. For Bryan to be able to get much of his agenda through Congress, you’d have to posit an even more massive landslide away from the Republicans, who were strongly wedded to the gold standard and the tariff.
Hey, I played the Reuters reporter in my high school’s production!
Bryan was no great shakes as Secretary of State under Wilson. I think he could talk a good game (and talk, and talk, and talk) but he had limited administrative skills, and was strongly distrusted by the extremely powerful business tycoons of the day. Marcus Hanna would have done all he could to stymie Bryan’s legislative agenda and to see McKinley defeat Bryan in 1900. President Bryan might just not have been able to get much done in the White House, both due to his own shortcomings and the political calculus which flurb notes.
One unusual aspect of Bryan’s 1896 campaign was that he ran with two different vice-presidential candidates. Bryan was nominated as the Presidential candidate of both the Democrat and Populist parties. But the Democrats nominated Arthur Sewall as their Vice-Presidential candidate while the Populists nominated Thomas Watson as their choice for VP. While most likely Sewall would have been actually elected as Vice-President if McKinley had won, it’s not impossible that some kind of electoral battle might have been resolved with Watson being named Vice-President.
And it might not have been a minor issue. McKinley was re-elected to a second term and assassinated. If the same thing had happened to Bryan then Thomas Watson could have become President.
And Watson would have been a really bad President. Most people who remember the Populists nowadays tend to ignore the bad parts of their legacy. One of the main platforms of the Populist Party was a call for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to take back America. And Watson was square in the middle of this. He hated black people, he hated Jews, he hated Catholics, and he hated foreigners. He openly supported the Ku Klux Klan and said that it should be more active in American politics.
Or it’s possible that both Democratic and Populist electors would have stuck to their guns, throwing the VP election into the Republican-majority Senate, which would have elected the Republican Hobart, giving us a President and VP of opposite parties in an amusing flashback to Adams and Jefferson.
Watson had a fascinating and depressing career which mirrorred the changes taking place in the South at the time. In the early stages, at least through the 1890’s, he supported black civil rights and worked for a political alliance between poor white and poor black farmers. (Enough black people were still voting at the time, in at least some Southern states, to make this a realistic prospect, although the authorities often suppressed their votes when they might make a difference.)
The biracial alliance strategy generally didn’t work (except in North Carolina, until it was savagely crushed in the election of 1898), because poor whites could always be won back to the Democratic Party through race-baiting appeals not to join forces with N-words.
Some time around 1898 Watson had an epiphany, and decided that if that was the way the game was going to be played, he would play it best. (Rather like George Wallace vowing in 1962 that he would never be out-N-worded again.) He became a truly vile individual, one of the worst race-baiters and Jew-baiters in the South.
It’s hard to generalize about the Populists. In North Carolina, as noted, they fused with Republicans and promoted black civil rights more effectively than any government between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. In South Carolina, on the other hand, Pitchfork Ben Tillman allied Populism with racism as early as 1890. It varied from state to state.
Then Bryan would have been the one to get assassinated.
Leon Czolgosz didn’t base his desire to kill the President on anything McKinley did or did not do. Czolgosz was insane.
Whoever was elected President would have been shot.
Agreed. He was nuts, and an anarchist. He shot McKinley because McKinley was the President, not because of McKinley’s views on imperialism or free silver. Bryan would have suffered the same fate in some alternate universe.