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Subject: HIST:How Capitalists Rule/Pt.14
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Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 21:45:04 GMT


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How Capitalists Rule:

                         The Republocrats
                        By Vince Copeland

                             Part 14:
                 Rebellion of the Bryan Democrats


There was much more to the rebellion at the Chicago Democratic
convention in 1896 than we have described. The anger of the
majority of the Democratic Party knew no bounds; there was enough
energy for a complete revolution. What then prevented them from
permanently changing the face of the party and breaking the hold of
the Wall Street financiers?

One could say it was partly their own illusions. For instance, many
thought that pure majority rule would have its way and the revolt
would continue until the big rich got tired and threw in the towel.
But no such thing happened. As we shall see, in later elections the
status quo ante was restored. The Democrats swung to the right
again for some time before they sponsored the left-leaning New
Deal--which also gave way to a rightward trend later on.

McKinley slush was too deep

Another reason was the large amount of money that was by then
necessary to take any presidential candidacy to the whole country.
According to the New York World, while the forces of William
McKinley raised $16 million, those for William Jennings Bryan could
only muster less than half a million.

Nevertheless, there were 6,502,925 votes for Bryan, the most ever
polled by a Democrat up to that time. McKinley edged him out with
just 7,104,779.

Money alone played a tremendous role. But previous tradition and
indoctrination of not just the masses but particularly their
leadership had done its work, too.

The failure of the rebels proved that it is at the very least an
extremely difficult task to take over one of the two big capitalist
parties for the people themselves. If this kind of rebellion was
insufficient to do the job, then any mere publicity campaign or
change in voting procedure can hardly be expected to change the
basic rules of the game.

"I vote for the man"

Around this time you began to hear the refrain, "I vote for the man
[the individual], not the party." This came about partly because of
corruption and the desire to get honest individuals in office to
reform the government. But it was becoming more evident that the
parties no longer stood for the same principles they had started
out with and were better at "throwing the rascals out" than at
having a consistent program of their own.

A vote for an individual without regard to party implies that the
individual has some independent power in the legislative or
executive body. And it implies that this individual's principles
are so clear and his or her understanding and command of the
political process so complete that any cooperation or teamwork is
unnecessary.

How can a single person take on the 535 elected members of
Congress, plus the executive branch and the Supreme Court? Even an
organized party firmly united to accomplish some goal will find
great difficulty doing so. And in order to keep its unity and
strength, it must have the power to discipline or expel a member
who refuses to vote with the party. But such is the power of the
ruling class press that the average voter believes such party power
is dictatorial and hurtful to the individual, merely by definition.

Suppose the party pledges in its platform to demand a certain
minimum wage, but some of its representatives in Congress refuse to
vote for this, or vote for a much smaller amount without party
agreement. Obviously, these representatives would have let down
those who put them in office. They should not be in the party and
should not get the votes of the party supporters.

This system is followed to a degree in some other countries, but
nowhere very consistently, except perhaps by the communist parties.

Some mistakes and a double-cross

Although the Democratic attempt in 1896 was indeed a genuine
rebellion, it was not a revolutionary one and it did not open the
door for a new and independent party representing the workers and
oppressed people.

Had that happened, the party would not necessarily have won more
votes. In fact, it might have totalled many fewer votes. And the
tradition in U.S. politics is to sacrifice everything for victory
at the given moment, rather than to build a party of opposition.
This of course leads to many opportunist mistakes and minor and
major betrayals of friends and allies.

In the case of the Democrats of 1896, it was the Black South that
was most betrayed, while Northern labor, although not betrayed, was
neglected more or less unconsciously. That is, the party activists
thought they were the next best thing to a labor party, but this
was not really so.

In Bryan's great speech to the convention, in which he told the
assembled outcasts exactly what they wanted to hear, he called upon
the delegates to stand up against the capitalist East with the
knowledge that they too were "businessmen." The farmer was a
"businessman."

"The man who is employed for wages," he cried, "is as much a
businessman as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as
much a businessman as the corporation counsel in the great
metropolis.... The merchant at the crossroads store ... the farmer
who goes forth in the morning and toils all day ... who by the
application of his brain and muscle to the natural resources of the
country creates wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who
goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain...."

The euphoria among the assembled Democrats is described vividly by
Louis Koenig: "As Bryan advanced to each step of his definition,
the crowd went berserk with approval and delight. Farmers, when
they heard themselves classed as businessmen, sailed their hats
through the air. One enraptured farmer thrashed a vacant seat with
his coat, exclaiming, `Oh my God! My God!' When Bryan added to his
definition, `The miners who go down a thousand feet,' he touched
off a new uproar." ("Bryan" by Louis Koenig, G. P. Putnam Sons,
1971, p. 196)

It wasn't a labor party

The idea that everybody was a business person might be interpreted
as merely a piece of rhetoric not to be pinned down for exact
quotation or rule-of-thumb tactics. But the truth is that the basic
drive of the convention was indeed in the direction of tiny,
oppressed businesses, which were trying to become bigger and more
prosperous businesses.

What's wrong with that? Only that to become big, the small business
must eventually hire large numbers of laborers at the lowest
possible rate of pay. Otherwise it goes into bankruptcy as a result
of other businesses elbowing it out.

This concept also contains an implicit rationalization for the Wall
Street tycoons themselves. But that was brushed out of the
consciousness of the Democrats at the time and there was much
genuine support for labor because labor was oppressed by Wall
Street just as very small capital was.

Nearly all the leaders of organized labor did support Bryan, except
for the head of the American Federation of Labor itself, the
conservative Samuel Gompers, who waffled on the election although
he supported "free silver." This was in spite of Bryan having
offered Gompers the post of secretary of labor if elected. (There
has been no such offer to a labor leader by a major candidate in
the century since!)

Later in the campaign, Bryan spoke in Madison Square Garden and
made an appeal to labor that seemed to fall flat. The contradiction
about business people and perhaps Bryan's own ambivalence about the
right to get rich lay at the bottom of this relatively poor
performance. A more immediate reason was Bryan's failure at the
time to push his party's proposal for an income tax on the rich or
to lash out at the anti-labor injunctions that were already looming
so large against union organizing.

It would be wrong, however, to say this is what caused his lower
vote among the industrial working class. That was caused by the
all-out takeover of the electoral process by big business and the
multimillion-dollar brainwashing of the industrial workers along
with the rest of the population in favor of the Republican
McKinley. And there was a distinct economic upturn in that election
year, which generated quite a few more Republican votes.

The Black South is strangled again

The election of 1896 also marked another double-cross for African
American voting rights. The Black people, who voted Republican when
they could vote, had been slowly emerging from the political vise
clamped on them by the white supremacist southern Democrats after
1876. The compromises of Booker T. Washington and the apparent
growth of a sort of modus vivendi that moderated the terror seemed
to offer the hope of a political revival for the Black people.

But that is not the way it happened.

When the Democrats rebelled and Bryan ran for President, the
Peoples Party decided to run Bryan, too. This seemed logical
enough, since Bryan had taken up many of the positions of the
Populists, although definitely not all, and not so clearly.

But this had a different effect in the South than in the West. The
establishment party in the West was the Republican Party. The
Democrats were the "outs" like the Populists, even though not as
radical. But in the South, the establishment party--of a much more
dictatorial establishment!--was the Democratic Party.

There were about a million Black farm people in the Southern
Alliance who were loyal to the Peoples Party. By supporting the
Democratic candidate for president, regardless of how good or how
rebellious he might have been, the Peoples Party began to liquidate
itself and leave the Black Populists helpless against their old
enemy, the Democrats.

Bryan never apologized for this or made any real attempt to correct
the situation. In fact, he moved from the West to take up residence
in the South not long after the election, apparently thinking he
had a bigger base in the South than in the West.

Oppression of the voteless

With all the whips and scorns of fortune that have been the hard
lot of the African American people, the elections of 1876 and 1896
may not be fundamental--except possibly as turning points--but they
are extremely illustrative of a political relation of forces.

The landless lot of the new Black proletariat and the semi-feudal
system of sharecropping were the basic instruments of oppression.
But the denial of the vote was the political _form_ of the
oppression, even though the vote became less important as the
Republican Party, which the Black voters still favored, moved to
the right.

With the great number of segregated villages and towns, the African
American freedom to vote could have meant a large number of Black
sheriffs, Black judges and even Black mayors.

So the Southern dictators, even though hamstrung by their Wall
Street masters, kept the lid firmly closed on this particular
political cauldron. The lid was kept on by the terror, but the lid
itself was the Democratic Party. And the Peoples Party now provided
a facelift for the still super-racist Democrats by supporting them
in the crucial 1896 vote.

Had the Democrats won the presidential election in 1896, there is
absolutely nothing to indicate that they would have changed the
racist rule in the South. The counter-revolutionary deal of 1876-77
between the Northern bankers and the Southern landowners was still
very much in effect.

The whole rebellion in the Democratic Party, in other words, helped
to snuff out a more fundamental rebellion of the Black masses that
had been taking place more slowly and was now ending for a whole
historical period.

A modern party takes shape

In some ways, however, the 1896 revolt did foreshadow the
beginnings of the modern Democratic Party. Bryan was the first
Democratic presidential candidate to blast the "trickle-down"
theory and expose its weaknesses. And in spite of the fact that the
party moved to the right during the years of Woodrow Wilson, giving
wild support to the First World War, its general social and
economic aims remained relatively liberal and foreshadowed the much
more liberal New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941.

                               -30-

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St.,
New York, NY 10010; "workers@igc.apc.org".)

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