The Great Quadrangular Debate of 1893
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Note: Janice M. Harbaugh, a devoted student of Iowa history, has performed a great service with the republication of The Great Quadrangular Debate through her Raspberry Ridge Publishing imprint. Originally published in 1893 by The Farmer’s Tribune in Des Moines, Iowa, the booklet consists of speeches given by Democrat Henry Watterson, Populist James B. Weaver, the Rev. Russell Conwell and Republican S.L. Woodford of Massachusetts. More of a lecture series than a debate, the event was held at the Philadelphia Baptist Temple under the auspices of the Chatham Literary Union from March 24-April 13. The Great Quadrangular Debate: Philadelphia 1893 is available at amazon.com.
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In the early spring of 1893, four speakers appeared in Philadelphia to weigh in on a big question: “Which offers the best practical political means for the benefit of the workingmen of this country – the Democratic party, the Republican party, the People’s party or the church?”
The speakers — Col. Henry Watterson, long-time Democrat and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal; James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892; Rev. Russell H. Conwell of Philadelphia, the founder of what became Temple University; and Republican S.L. Woodford of Massachusetts — did not disappoint.
Over the course of three weeks at the Baptist Temple of Philadelphia, Watterson, Weaver, Conwell and Woodford traded views on that question and in the process debated others in an event that vividly illuminated the politics of the era.
The occasion for this intellectual sparring contest was a so-called Quandrangular debate organized by the Chatham Literary Union. Such events were held in a number of the cities in the early 1890s, according to Janice M. Harbaugh, whose Raspberry Ridge Press has reprinted speech transcripts of the event published by the Farmer’s Tribune in Des Moines in 1893.
This was not at all like the debates we have come to know in the 21st century. Participants did not appear on the same night but individually over the course of three weeks. They delivered speeches rather than answered questions. They responded to points made by other speakers based on transcripts, but there were no in-person back-and-forth exchanges. There were applause lines but no pithy rejoinders. This was a contest of ideas rather than soundbites.
The debate came at a critical moment in the last decade of the 19th century. Voters returned Grover Cleveland to the White House in November, but his mandate was not overwhelming. Discontent on the nation’s farms and ranches drove voters to the Populists. Labor strife at the Homestead Steel plant in western Pennsylvania erupted in July 1892. The devastating Panic of 1893 was just picking up steam.
Watterson, for one, had little patience for the idea that these developments meant America was divided by class. “We are all working men, the banker, the merchant, the doctor, the toiler, toiling day after day,” he argued. “The poorest babe who steals timidly into the world by the back door has as much of a chance of becoming the president of the United States as the richest who takes his millionaire grandfather by the whiskers.”
[image error]Henry Watterson in 1891. Library of Congress.
The Kentuckian blamed discontent on a national obsession with money and wealth. ” ‘Put money in thy purse’ seems to have become a national motto,” he said. He dismissed the Agrarian radicalism personified by Weaver and equated it with anarchy. “There is at this time no one political issue separating the people on the right and left into party lines, which are a source of lasting danger to the state.”
Conwell offered a different perspective on class conflict. It was not lust for money, as Watterson argued, but a desire for fraternity that animated workers, Conwell said. “The workingman wants to be equal to the king; he wishes to be the equal of the prince; wishes to be the equal of the capitalist,” he declared.
The man of the cloth then argued that the church — broadly defined — was best equipped to serve the political needs of workers. The major parties were only after votes, he said, while the church would promote fraternity among all classes and look after the material and spiritual needs of the downtrodden. “None but the working Christian Church, if I understand it, has always been and is still peculiarly reaching down the willing hand after the poor and after the lowly, to encourage the discouraged, to lift up the fallen, and to give to every man, if possible, equal opportunity with his brother,” Conwell asserted.
When his turn came, Weaver, a tee-total Methodist, took the question of religion in politics in a different direction. “The Church should be an organized army seeking to establish God’s kingdom on this earth by every legitimate means, of which legislation is one of the most today in civilized countries.” Not surprisingly, Weaver believed the program of the People’s party – government control of the railroads, free silver to reduce the tight monetary policy of the gold standard — would move the nation in that direction.
[image error]James B. Weaver from “A Call to Action,” his Populist manifesto, published in 1892.
But more would be needed. Weaver warned that the “government has been usurped and literally given over to the corporations.” The Republican party was responsible for the distress faced by many Americans “and the Democratic party is accessory after the fact to all of it.” The People’s Party led by Weaver was best equipped to take on the challenges that the other two parties wouldn’t or couldn’t.
“You know you cannot settle these great questions with these organizations,” Weaver said. “The new party is despised, as the Nazarene was despised, but I will tell you, and I use the word reverently, all hell cannot prevail against us.”
All this talk about religion in politics was too much for Woodford, the Republican representative in the debate. “I simply suggest to you that the Church is not a practical method for politically helping the workingmen, because an honest Churchman must follow in politics his conscience, wherever that conscience leads.”
[image error]James B. Weaver and his People’s Party running mate, J.G. Fields. Library of Congress/Chronicling America.
Woodford’s conscience directed him at an early age to the party of Lincoln – in fact, he said he cast his first vote for the presidential candidate nominated by the party before Lincoln, John C. Fremont. In defending his party, Woodford defended the ideology of self-improvement – what Lincoln himself called “the right to rise.”
“We believe that on this land and under this flag every man should be given the fairest chance to earn his living and to care for family and children,” Woodford said. A bit later, he took a swipe at Watterson and Weaver when he explained Republican views on money.
“Do you know the Republican idea? The Republican idea is this, that if a man is industrious and don’t indulge too much in Democratic beer, or weaken his system by Populist watering, but sticks to the old thought of industry, of honesty or labor, that the average man on this soil and under this flag will hew out a result that shall be one of the credits to the honor of the government and to himself.”
In the end, as is often the case, the debate settled nothing conclusively. Americans would debate the questions it addressed for decades to some — and some remain relevant today. But as a guide to political thinking in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, the Great Quadrangular Debate in Philadelphia is a noteworthy event in the politics of the Gilded Age.
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Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon com:
[image error][image error]Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver
