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Bryan had emerged as a leading spokesman for silver in 1893 when he opposed Cleveland’s successful effort to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. He had cast silver in class terms then, and he continued to do so.
Bryan wanted to bring the scattered free-silver forces—Republicans and Populists as well as Democrats—together, and he had become a favored speaker before silver clubs across the country. His main weapon was his voice, “deep and powerfully musical”
His demeanor matched his speech; it radiated strength, youth, and vigor.
The delegates nominated Bryan on the fifth ballot. The gold Democrats withdrew; they ran their own ticket, which Hanna secretly subsidized to draw votes from Bryan. They became the equivalent of the Western silver Republicans, who backed Bryan.
Bryan had delivered his position in one of the less-often quoted sections of his Cross of Gold speech: “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.” This had, in fact, not been the Democratic idea, as Cleveland could testify, but Bryan proposed to make it the Democratic idea.
He took 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176.71 As in many American campaigns, a switch of a relatively small number of votes in key states could have changed the outcome. If Bryan had drawn a little under twenty thousand extra votes spread over six states—California, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Oregon, and West Virginia—he would have carried the electoral vote.
Reform was hardly dead. What had died was the transformative dreams of the Knights, the Farmers’ Alliance, and Populists.
Nor was the pendulum about to swing back to the Democrats any time soon. The old ethnocultural balance of American politics had toppled. The election of 1894 had begun to solidify a critical realignment first noticeable in the state elections of 1893. The new alignment came less from mass changes in party loyalty, although there was party switching in the chaotic years between 1893 and 1897, and more from a combination of the ability of the Republicans to mobilize new voters and remobilize voters they had temporarily lost, and the decreasing ability of Democrats to muster their voters.
The Northeast and eastern sections of the Midwest led the movement into the Republican Party. Not until 1932 would the Democrats again take a majority of the congressional or presidential vote.
The gold standard continued to be clumsy and unsustainable, but in the historical moment it survived because gold discoveries first in South Africa and then in the Klondike in 1896 dramatically increased supplies of that metal, easing deflationary pressures.
But in the 1890s, the United States was less egalitarian and less a country of independent producers than it had been in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Workers everywhere in the nation feared a loss of independence.
