18 - Imperialism abroad, reform at home
The Republocrats, Part 18: Imperialism abroad, reform at home
By Vince Copeland
In 1898 William Jennings Bryan had supported the Spanish-American War, like so many others who saw it as helping the Cuban revolution against Spain. But by 1900, when he ran for president for the second time, he began to take a more militant pacifist position. In this he was somewhat in opposition to the Democratic Party, but so great was his popularity that this was taken as part of his political personality and was, by and large, accepted.
Said Bryan about the war in the Philippines: "It is our duty to avoid killing a human being no matter where the human being lives or to what race or class he belongs." ("Bryan" by Louis Koenig, p. 326)
Considering all that has been said about Bryan as a demagogue and a superficial thinker, these sentiments of his are worth thinking about. However, the times were very different then and he represented different social forces than now hold the political arena.
No doubt it was not easy for him to take this position. But there was a tremendous anti-imperialist sentiment among the middle class, if not such a noticeable pacifist feeling. And the United States was truly at a crossroads in its history. Bryan must have felt it his duty to raise these issues in the starkest and most ultimatistic way he knew how.
We should add that the Democratic Party did get a few large campaign contributions from William Randolph Hearst and the silver mining interests.
Hearst owned silver mines as well as his newspaper empire. But he was a long-time Democrat and made a veritable profession of baiting Wall Street in his papers, identifying himself with the Democratic left for quite a period in spite of his wild chauvinism in the Spanish-American War. When he started the Chicago American newspaper about 1900, he made it a Bryan organ. He also started a national network of Democratic clubs that worked for Bryan.
So while the Democrats got funds from Hearst, any direct Wall Street contributions were always refused by Bryan. The total election fund of the Democrats was still less than half a million dollars in 1900.
INDEPENDENCE FOR THE PHILIPPINES
Bryan pledged that if elected he would call Congress into special session to declare immediate independence for the Philippines. Revolutionary promises like that are unknown to the big parties today. Even in those days, that promise was a guarantee that the party would be defeated by big business.
It should be clear that the Bryan phenomenon was indeed a preview to some extent of the later development of the Democratic Party. This was even somewhat true in respect to Black freedom. Like all politicians, Bryan wanted to get the African American vote, although he probably was very cautious about upsetting the Democratic status quo in the South, which did not include many votes for Black people. This contradiction generated opportunism among the Democrats on many occasions. And Bryan was not immune.
But he spoke at the 1900 convention of the Negro National Democratic League, which had branches in 28 states. The convention was the "largest of its kind ever assembled" up to that time.
"One of Bryan's happier days was a meeting with a delegation headed by Bishop J. Milton Turner, minister to Liberia in the Grant administration. Turner and his followers stressed their dissatisfaction with McKinley's policies and predicted an upsurge of Negro votes for Bryan, as did W. R. McAllister, president of the Afro-American Protective League, who confidently predicted the support of `free-thinking Negroes.'"(Koenig, p. 335)
A POLITICIAN FROM THE PAST
Although William McKinley again definitively won the presidency in 1900, and with the same old political line, he really presided over a different United States than the one he had known in the Senate. Even the pictures of him are redolent of the 19th century. But the sense of incongruity went deeper than that.
With nearly half the electorate voting for a program of social reform, it should have been obvious that different conditions were making themselves felt. Even if a new age had not already begun, certainly it was time for the government to make some adaptation to the crying needs of the people.
The social situation was tense. Wages had risen little since 1896, when the yearly average pay was $406--even less than in 1892. The work week was from 54 to 63 hours. The number of strikes was increasing. The newly formed labor unions had doubled their membership in the previous four years to 868,000 members. Although the Populist vote was low, it was largely because it had virtually been taken over by the Democrats (leaving the Populists with just 50,000 votes in 1900).
The Democrats seemed to be the main sponsors of reform and the Republicans the stand-patters. The Republicans and Democrats seemed to be polar opposites on social questions, especially judging from the extreme intensity of the 1896 election and the not-much-less-confrontational 1900 fight. But such was not really the case, as was to become clear in 1904.
McKinley was assassinated in 1901. His replacement, Theodore Roosevelt, made a number of concessions to the broad masses. Roosevelt was such a different kind of a person that his personality alone seemed to be the stimulus for a wholly different path in government. But this was an illusion.
To understand this proposition, let us look at another party, the new Social Democratic (Socialist) Party, and its reception among the people. It alone was by no means the spur that prodded Roosevelt to make concessions to the workers and farmers. But looking at the socialists' electoral achievements in comparison with our own age, we can see and feel the very different political atmosphere that must have prevailed.
DEBS AND THE SOCIALISTS
Eugene Debs, who had led the Pullman strike and then served six months in jail because of it in 1895, used his time in prison to good effect. He studied various socialist writers, including Karl Kautsky (who had not yet become a renegade). Debs came out of prison a convinced socialist at the age of 43. By 1900 he was running for President of the United States on the ticket of the Social Democratic Party, which had been formed in 1898. He got about 87,000 votes.
He ran again in 1904, getting 402,000 votes, and in 1908 with 420,000. The 1912 election netted him nearly a million votes out of 15 million cast, or 6 percent. And at that time every candidate took a position that seemed friendly to labor.
The Democrats, on the other hand, ran a very conservative candidate in 1904 and made their peace with Wall Street, although Bryan himself was still very much in the picture and still exposing the big money interests.
The Republicans, under Theodore Roosevelt, had made what appeared to be a 180-degree turn on domestic issues. They led an anti-corporation drive, especially from 1901 to 1909. How real and how effective this drive was, we shall see in the discussion of Theodore Roosevelt's politics.
(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@mcimail.com".)
