William Jennings Bryan and the Populist Revolt

In the eighteen eighties and nineties, Nebraska was a state in crisis. Farmers had come west with everything they owned, borrowed money to buy land and equipment, planted wheat and corn, and then watched the prices fall year after year while the cost of credit, the cost of shipping, and the cost of everything they bought from the East stayed high or went higher. The railroads set freight rates that seemed designed to extract the last dollar from the last bushel. Banks foreclosed on farms that had been worked for years.

Out of this crisis grew the Populist movement, formally the People's Party, which was something genuinely new in American politics. It was a farmer-driven third party that called for government ownership of the railroads, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, and a reformed money supply. The money question was the heart of it. Farmers carried debt denominated in dollars, and they needed more dollars in circulation to ease that debt. The banking establishment wanted the gold standard, which kept dollars scarce and creditors comfortable.

William Jennings Bryan came out of Lincoln. He had served in Congress, lost a Senate race, and was thirty-six years old when he stood up at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July of eighteen ninety-six and delivered a speech that became one of the most famous in American political history. He ended it with a single image: you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. The convention did not nominate him that day. Balloting began the next morning, and on the fifth ballot the delegates swung behind him and secured his nomination.

Bryan lost the eighteen ninety-six election to William McKinley, and he lost again in nineteen hundred, and again in nineteen oh-eight. But the platform he ran on was not a failure. The graduated income tax became the Sixteenth Amendment in nineteen thirteen. Direct election of senators became the Seventeenth Amendment in the same year. The Federal Reserve Act, which addressed the money supply question, passed in nineteen thirteen as well. Three of the four central Populist demands became law within twenty years of Bryan's first campaign.

He never won. But his side, eventually, did.