page_title: Third Party System
section_title: Climax and collapse, 1890–1896
hierarchical_section_title: Third Party System / Climax and collapse, 1890–1896
caption_attribution_description: Cover of Puck magazine , from 1887, depicting Rep. John Sherman waving a 'bloody shirt'
context_page_description: The Third Party System is a term of periodization used by historians and political scientists to describe the history of political parties in the United States from 1854 until the mid-1890s, which featured profound developments in issues of American nationalism, modernization, and race. This period, the later part of which is often termed the Gilded Age, is defined by its contrast with the eras of the Second Party System and the Fourth Party System.
  It was dominated by the new Republican Party, which claimed success in saving the Union, abolishing slavery and enfranchising the freedmen, while adopting many Whig-Party-style modernization programs such as national banks, railroads, high tariffs, homesteads, social spending, and aid to land grant colleges. While most elections from 1876 through 1892 were extremely close, the opposition Democrats won only the 1884 and 1892 presidential elections, though from 1876 to 1892 the party often controlled the United States House of Representatives and from 1879 to 1887 frequently controlled the United States Senate.
context_section_description: New issues emerged in the late 1880s, as Grover Cleveland and the Bourbon Democrats made the low tariff "for revenue only" a rallying cry for Democrats in the 1888 election, and the Republican Congress in 1890 legislated high tariffs and high spending. At the state level moralistic pietists pushed hard for prohibition, and in some states for the elimination of foreign-language schools serving German immigrants. The Bennett Law in Wisconsin produced a bruising ethnocultural battle in that state in 1890, which the Democrats won. The millions of postwar immigrants divided politically along ethnic and religious lines, with enough Germans moving into the Democratic Party to give the Democrats a national majority in 1892. Party loyalties were starting to weaken, as evidenced by the movement back and forth of the German vote and the sudden rise of the Populists. Army-style campaigns of necessity had to be supplemented by "campaigns of education", which focused more on the swing voters.
  Cleveland's second term was ruined by a major depression, the Panic of 1893, which also undercut the appeal of the loosely organized Populist coalitions in the south and west. A stunning Republican triumph in 1894 nearly wiped out the Democratic Party north of the Mason–Dixon line. In the 1896 election William Jennings Bryan and the radical silverites seized control of the Democratic Party, denounced their own president, and called for a return to Jeffersonian agrarianism (see Jeffersonian democracy). Bryan, in his Cross of Gold speech, talked about workers and farmers crucified by big business, evil bankers and the gold standard. With Bryan giving from five to 35 speeches a day throughout the Midwest, straw polls showed his crusade forging a lead in the critical Midwest. Republicans William McKinley and Mark Hanna then seized control of the situation; their countercrusade was a campaign of education making lavish use of new advertising techniques. McKinley warned that Bryan's bimetallism would wreck the economy and achieve equality by making everyone poor. McKinley promised prosperity through strong economic growth based on sound money and business confidence, and an abundance of high-paying industrial jobs. Farmers would benefit by selling to a rich home market. Every racial, ethnic and religious group would prosper, and the government would never be used by one group to attack another. In particular McKinley reassured the German-Americans, alarmed on the one hand by Bryan's inflation and on the other by prohibition. McKinley's overwhelming victory combined city and farm, Northeast and Midwest, businessmen and factory workers. He carried nearly every city of 50,000 population, while Bryan swept the rural South (which was off-limits to the Republicans) and Mountain states. McKinley's victory, ratified by an even more decisive reelection in 1900, thus solidified one of the central ideologies of twentieth-century American politics, pluralism.
caption: Democratic magazine ridicules Republican use of "bloody shirt" memories of war
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