page_title: William Jennings Bryan 1896 presidential campaign
section_title: Appraisal and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: William Jennings Bryan 1896 presidential campaign / Appraisal and legacy
caption_attribution_description: Mr. Bryan in 1899-I Stand Just Where I Stood Three Years Ago." Caricature of unsuccessful U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan standing outside the White House gates looking in.
context_page_description: In 1896, William Jennings Bryan ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States. Bryan, a former Democratic congressman from Nebraska, gained his party's presidential nomination in July of that year after electrifying the Democratic National Convention with his Cross of Gold speech. He was defeated in the general election by the Republican candidate, former Ohio governor William McKinley.
  Born in 1860, Bryan grew up in rural Illinois and in 1887 moved to Nebraska, where he practiced law and entered politics. He won election to the House of Representatives in 1890, and was re-elected in 1892, before mounting an unsuccessful US Senate run. He set his sights on higher office, believing he could be elected president in 1896 even though he remained a relatively minor figure in the Democratic Party. In anticipation of a presidential campaign, he spent much of 1895 and early 1896 making speeches across the United States; his compelling oratory increased his popularity in his party.
  Bryan often spoke on the issue of the currency. The economic Panic of 1893 had left the nation in a deep recession, which still persisted in early 1896.
context_section_description: Michael Kazin, Bryan's biographer, notes the many handicaps he faced in his 1896 campaign: "A severe economic downturn that occurred with Democrats in power, a party deserted by its men of wealth and national prominence, the vehement opposition of most prominent publishers and academics and ministers, and hostility from the nation's largest employers".  According to Kazin, "what is remarkable is not that Bryan lost but that he came as close as he did to winning."  Williams believes that Bryan did better than any other Democrat would have, and comments, "The nominee of a divided and discredited party, he had come remarkably close to winning."  Bryan's own explanation was brief: "I have borne the sins of Grover Cleveland."
  The consequences of defeat, however, were severe for the Democratic Party.  The 1896 presidential race is generally considered a realigning election, when there is a major shift in voting patterns, upsetting the political balance.  McKinley was supported by middle-class and wealthy voters, urban laborers, and prosperous farmers; this coalition would keep the Republicans mostly in power until the 1930s. The election of 1896 marked a transition as the concerns of the rural population became secondary to those of the urban; according to Stanley Jones, "the Democratic Party reacted with less sensitivity than the Republicans to the hopes and fears of the new voters which the new age was producing".  This was evidenced in the tariff question: Bryan spent little time addressing it, stating that it was subsumed in the financial issue; Republican arguments that the protective tariff would benefit manufacturers appealed to urban workers and went unrebutted by the Democrats.
  One legacy of the campaign was the career of William Jennings Bryan. He ran for president a second time in 1900 and a third time in 1908, each time losing.  Through the almost three decades before his death in 1925, he was ever present on political platform and speaking circuit, fighting first for silver, and then for other causes. Bryan served as Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1915, resigning as Wilson moved the nation closer to intervention in World War I.  His final years were marked with controversy, such as his involvement in the Scopes Monkey Trial in the final weeks of his life, but according to Kazin, "Bryan's sincerity, warmth, and passion for a better world won the hearts of people who cared for no other public figure in his day".
  Despite his defeat, Bryan's campaign inspired many of his contemporaries.  Writers such as Edgar Lee Masters, Hamlin Garland and his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, like Bryan came from the prairies; they wrote of their admiration for him and his first battle. The poet Vachel Lindsay, 16 years old in 1896, passionately followed Bryan's first campaign, and wrote of him many years later:
  Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,
  That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
  Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
  Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
caption: Cartoon of Bryan gazing through the White House fence
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