From: nyt%nyxfer%igc.apc.org@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (NY Transfer News)
Subject: HIST:How Capitalists Rule/Pt.18
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The NY Transfer News Service
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 20:23:27 GMT


Via The NY Transfer News Service ^ All the News that Doesn't Fit

                    The Republocrats, Part 18:

                Imperialism abroad, reform at home

                        By Vince Copeland

In 1898 William Jennings Bryan had supported the Spanish-American
War, like so many others who saw it as helping the Cuban revolution
against Spain. But by 1900, when he ran for president for the
second time, he began to take a more militant pacifist position. In
this he was somewhat in opposition to the Democratic Party, but so
great was his popularity that this was taken as part of his
political personality and was, by and large, accepted.

Said Bryan about the war in the Philippines: "It is our duty to
avoid killing a human being no matter where the human being lives
or to what race or class he belongs." ("Bryan" by Louis Koenig, p.
326)

Considering all that has been said about Bryan as a demagogue and
a superficial thinker, these sentiments of his are worth thinking
about. However, the times were very different then and he
represented different social forces than now hold the political
arena.

No doubt it was not easy for him to take this position. But there
was a tremendous anti-imperialist sentiment among the middle class,
if not such a noticeable pacifist feeling. And the United States
was truly at a crossroads in its history. Bryan must have felt it
his duty to raise these issues in the starkest and most
ultimatistic way he knew how.

We should add that the Democratic Party did get a few large
campaign contributions from William Randolph Hearst and the silver
mining interests.

Hearst owned silver mines as well as his newspaper empire. But he
was a long-time Democrat and made a veritable profession of baiting
Wall Street in his papers, identifying himself with the Democratic
left for quite a period in spite of his wild chauvinism in the
Spanish-American War.  When he started the Chicago American
newspaper about 1900, he made it a Bryan organ. He also started a
national network of Democratic clubs that worked for Bryan.

So while the Democrats got funds from Hearst, any direct Wall
Street contributions were always refused by Bryan. The total
election fund of the Democrats was still less than half a million
dollars in 1900.

INDEPENDENCE FOR THE PHILIPPINES

Bryan pledged that if elected he would call Congress into special
session to declare immediate independence for the Philippines.
Revolutionary promises like that are unknown to the big parties
today. Even in those days, that promise was a guarantee that the
party would be defeated by big business.

It should be clear that the Bryan phenomenon was indeed a preview
to some extent of the later development of the Democratic Party.
This was even somewhat true in respect to Black freedom. Like all
politicians, Bryan wanted to get the African American vote,
although he probably was very cautious about upsetting the
Democratic status quo in the South, which did not include many
votes for Black people. This contradiction generated opportunism
among the Democrats on many occasions. And Bryan was not immune.

But he spoke at the 1900 convention of the Negro National
Democratic League, which had branches in 28 states. The convention
was the "largest of its kind ever assembled" up to that time.

"One of Bryan's happier days was a meeting with a delegation headed
by Bishop J. Milton Turner, minister to Liberia in the Grant
administration. Turner and his followers stressed their
dissatisfaction with McKinley's policies and predicted an upsurge
of Negro votes for Bryan, as did W. R. McAllister, president of the
Afro-American Protective League, who confidently predicted the
support of `free-thinking Negroes.'" (Koenig, p. 335)

A POLITICIAN FROM THE PAST

Although William McKinley again definitively won the presidency in
1900, and with the same old political line, he really presided over
a different United States than the one he had known in the Senate.
Even the pictures of him are redolent of the 19th century. But the
sense of incongruity went deeper than that.

With nearly half the electorate voting for a program of social
reform, it should have been obvious that different conditions were
making themselves felt. Even if a new age had not already begun,
certainly it was time for the government to make some adaptation to
the crying needs of the people.

The social situation was tense. Wages had risen little since 1896,
when the yearly average pay was $406--even less than in 1892. The
work week was from 54 to 63 hours. The number of strikes was
increasing. The newly formed labor unions had doubled their
membership in the previous four years to 868,000 members. Although
the Populist vote was low, it was largely because it had virtually
been taken over by the Democrats (leaving the Populists with just
50,000 votes in 1900).

The Democrats seemed to be the main sponsors of reform and the
Republicans the stand-patters. The Republicans and Democrats seemed
to be polar opposites on social questions, especially judging from
the extreme intensity of the 1896 election and the
not-much-less-confrontational 1900 fight. But such was not really
the case, as was to become clear in 1904.

McKinley was assassinated in 1901. His replacement, Theodore
Roosevelt, made a number of concessions to the broad masses.
Roosevelt was such a different kind of a person that his
personality alone seemed to be the stimulus for a wholly different
path in government. But this was an illusion.

To understand this proposition, let us look at another party, the
new Social Democratic (Socialist) Party, and its reception among
the people. It alone was by no means the spur that prodded
Roosevelt to make concessions to the workers and farmers. But
looking at the socialists' electoral achievements in comparison
with our own age, we can see and feel the very different political
atmosphere that must have prevailed.

DEBS AND THE SOCIALISTS

Eugene Debs, who had led the Pullman strike and then served six
months in jail because of it in 1895, used his time in prison to
good effect. He studied various socialist writers, including Karl
Kautsky (who had not yet become a renegade). Debs came out of
prison a convinced socialist at the age of 43. By 1900 he was
running for President of the United States on the ticket of the
Social Democratic Party, which had been formed in 1898. He got
about 87,000 votes.

He ran again in 1904, getting 402,000 votes, and in 1908 with
420,000. The 1912 election netted him nearly a million votes out of
15 million cast, or 6 percent. And at that time every candidate
took a position that seemed friendly to labor.

The Democrats, on the other hand, ran a very conservative candidate
in 1904 and made their peace with Wall Street, although Bryan
himself was still very much in the picture and still exposing the
big money interests.

The Republicans, under Theodore Roosevelt, had made what appeared
to be a 180-degree turn on domestic issues. They led an
anti-corporation drive, especially from 1901 to 1909. How real and
how effective this drive was, we shall see in the discussion of
Theodore Roosevelt's politics.

(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@mcimail.com".)

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