14 - Rebellion of the Bryan Democrats
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How Capitalists Rule:
The Republocrats
By Vince Copeland
Part 14:
Rebellion of the Bryan Democrats
There was much more to the rebellion at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1896 than we have described. The anger of the majority of the Democratic Party knew no bounds; there was enough energy for a complete revolution. What then prevented them from permanently changing the face of the party and breaking the hold of the Wall Street financiers?
One could say it was partly their own illusions. For instance, many thought that pure majority rule would have its way and the revolt would continue until the big rich got tired and threw in the towel. But no such thing happened. As we shall see, in later elections the status quo ante was restored. The Democrats swung to the right again for some time before they sponsored the left-leaning New Deal--which also gave way to a rightward trend later on.
McKinley slush was too deep
Another reason was the large amount of money that was by then necessary to take any presidential candidacy to the whole country. According to the New York World, while the forces of William McKinley raised $16 million, those for William Jennings Bryan could only muster less than half a million.
Nevertheless, there were 6,502,925 votes for Bryan, the most ever polled by a Democrat up to that time. McKinley edged him out with just 7,104,779.
Money alone played a tremendous role. But previous tradition and indoctrination of not just the masses but particularly their leadership had done its work, too.
The failure of the rebels proved that it is at the very least an extremely difficult task to take over one of the two big capitalist parties for the people themselves. If this kind of rebellion was insufficient to do the job, then any mere publicity campaign or change in voting procedure can hardly be expected to change the basic rules of the game.
"I vote for the man"
Around this time you began to hear the refrain, "I vote for the man [the individual], not the party." This came about partly because of corruption and the desire to get honest individuals in office to reform the government. But it was becoming more evident that the parties no longer stood for the same principles they had started out with and were better at "throwing the rascals out" than at having a consistent program of their own.
A vote for an individual without regard to party implies that the individual has some independent power in the legislative or executive body. And it implies that this individual's principles are so clear and his or her understanding and command of the political process so complete that any cooperation or teamwork is unnecessary.
How can a single person take on the 535 elected members of Congress, plus the executive branch and the Supreme Court? Even an organized party firmly united to accomplish some goal will find great difficulty doing so. And in order to keep its unity and strength, it must have the power to discipline or expel a member who refuses to vote with the party. But such is the power of the ruling class press that the average voter believes such party power is dictatorial and hurtful to the individual, merely by definition.
Suppose the party pledges in its platform to demand a certain minimum wage, but some of its representatives in Congress refuse to vote for this, or vote for a much smaller amount without party agreement. Obviously, these representatives would have let down those who put them in office. They should not be in the party and should not get the votes of the party supporters.
This system is followed to a degree in some other countries, but nowhere very consistently, except perhaps by the communist parties.
Some mistakes and a double-cross
Although the Democratic attempt in 1896 was indeed a genuine rebellion, it was not a revolutionary one and it did not open the door for a new and independent party representing the workers and oppressed people.
Had that happened, the party would not necessarily have won more votes. In fact, it might have totalled many fewer votes. And the tradition in U.S. politics is to sacrifice everything for victory at the given moment, rather than to build a party of opposition. This of course leads to many opportunist mistakes and minor and major betrayals of friends and allies.
In the case of the Democrats of 1896, it was the Black South that was most betrayed, while Northern labor, although not betrayed, was neglected more or less unconsciously. That is, the party activists thought they were the next best thing to a labor party, but this was not really so.
In Bryan's great speech to the convention, in which he told the assembled outcasts exactly what they wanted to hear, he called upon the delegates to stand up against the capitalist East with the knowledge that they too were "businessmen." The farmer was a "businessman."
"The man who is employed for wages," he cried, "is as much a businessman as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in the great metropolis.... The merchant at the crossroads store ... the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day ... who by the application of his brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain...."
The euphoria among the assembled Democrats is described vividly by Louis Koenig: "As Bryan advanced to each step of his definition, the crowd went berserk with approval and delight. Farmers, when they heard themselves classed as businessmen, sailed their hats through the air. One enraptured farmer thrashed a vacant seat with his coat, exclaiming, `Oh my God! My God!' When Bryan added to his definition, `The miners who go down a thousand feet,' he touched off a new uproar." ("Bryan" by Louis Koenig, G. P. Putnam Sons, 1971, p. 196)
It wasn't a labor party
The idea that everybody was a business person might be interpreted as merely a piece of rhetoric not to be pinned down for exact quotation or rule-of-thumb tactics. But the truth is that the basic drive of the convention was indeed in the direction of tiny, oppressed businesses, which were trying to become bigger and more prosperous businesses.
What's wrong with that? Only that to become big, the small business must eventually hire large numbers of laborers at the lowest possible rate of pay. Otherwise it goes into bankruptcy as a result of other businesses elbowing it out.
This concept also contains an implicit rationalization for the Wall Street tycoons themselves. But that was brushed out of the consciousness of the Democrats at the time and there was much genuine support for labor because labor was oppressed by Wall Street just as very small capital was.
Nearly all the leaders of organized labor did support Bryan, except for the head of the American Federation of Labor itself, the conservative Samuel Gompers, who waffled on the election although he supported "free silver." This was in spite of Bryan having offered Gompers the post of secretary of labor if elected. (There has been no such offer to a labor leader by a major candidate in the century since!)
Later in the campaign, Bryan spoke in Madison Square Garden and made an appeal to labor that seemed to fall flat. The contradiction about business people and perhaps Bryan's own ambivalence about the right to get rich lay at the bottom of this relatively poor performance. A more immediate reason was Bryan's failure at the time to push his party's proposal for an income tax on the rich or to lash out at the anti-labor injunctions that were already looming so large against union organizing.
It would be wrong, however, to say this is what caused his lower vote among the industrial working class. That was caused by the all-out takeover of the electoral process by big business and the multimillion-dollar brainwashing of the industrial workers along with the rest of the population in favor of the Republican McKinley. And there was a distinct economic upturn in that election year, which generated quite a few more Republican votes.
The Black South is strangled again
The election of 1896 also marked another double-cross for African American voting rights. The Black people, who voted Republican when they could vote, had been slowly emerging from the political vise clamped on them by the white supremacist southern Democrats after 1876. The compromises of Booker T. Washington and the apparent growth of a sort of modus vivendi that moderated the terror seemed to offer the hope of a political revival for the Black people.
But that is not the way it happened.
When the Democrats rebelled and Bryan ran for President, the Peoples Party decided to run Bryan, too. This seemed logical enough, since Bryan had taken up many of the positions of the Populists, although definitely not all, and not so clearly.
But this had a different effect in the South than in the West. The establishment party in the West was the Republican Party. The Democrats were the "outs" like the Populists, even though not as radical. But in the South, the establishment party--of a much more dictatorial establishment!--was the Democratic Party.
There were about a million Black farm people in the Southern Alliance who were loyal to the Peoples Party. By supporting the Democratic candidate for president, regardless of how good or how rebellious he might have been, the Peoples Party began to liquidate itself and leave the Black Populists helpless against their old enemy, the Democrats.
Bryan never apologized for this or made any real attempt to correct the situation. In fact, he moved from the West to take up residence in the South not long after the election, apparently thinking he had a bigger base in the South than in the West.
Oppression of the voteless
With all the whips and scorns of fortune that have been the hard lot of the African American people, the elections of 1876 and 1896 may not be fundamental--except possibly as turning points--but they are extremely illustrative of a political relation of forces.
The landless lot of the new Black proletariat and the semi-feudal system of sharecropping were the basic instruments of oppression. But the denial of the vote was the political _form_ of the oppression, even though the vote became less important as the Republican Party, which the Black voters still favored, moved to the right.
With the great number of segregated villages and towns, the African American freedom to vote could have meant a large number of Black sheriffs, Black judges and even Black mayors.
So the Southern dictators, even though hamstrung by their Wall Street masters, kept the lid firmly closed on this particular political cauldron. The lid was kept on by the terror, but the lid itself was the Democratic Party. And the Peoples Party now provided a facelift for the still super-racist Democrats by supporting them in the crucial 1896 vote.
Had the Democrats won the presidential election in 1896, there is absolutely nothing to indicate that they would have changed the racist rule in the South. The counter-revolutionary deal of 1876-77 between the Northern bankers and the Southern landowners was still very much in effect.
The whole rebellion in the Democratic Party, in other words, helped to snuff out a more fundamental rebellion of the Black masses that had been taking place more slowly and was now ending for a whole historical period.
A modern party takes shape
In some ways, however, the 1896 revolt did foreshadow the beginnings of the modern Democratic Party. Bryan was the first Democratic presidential candidate to blast the "trickle-down" theory and expose its weaknesses. And in spite of the fact that the party moved to the right during the years of Woodrow Wilson, giving wild support to the First World War, its general social and economic aims remained relatively liberal and foreshadowed the much more liberal New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941.
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@igc.apc.org".)
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