The Standard Take on American Elections from Abroad
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Foreign observers were mystified by the ferocity of the American campaign. To Sydney Brooks, the distinguished British journalist, the real issue of 1896 was a narrow one: the Democrats’ demand that bimetallism be adopted by the United States at once independently of other nations versus McKinley’s ambivalent loyalties to gold and to bimetallism promoted by international agreement. Had Bryan campaigned on his platform in England, Brooks believed, it would have aroused only mild reaction. It was not “half so revolutionary” as the English Liberal Party’s Newcastle program calling for extensive politial and economic reforms for the working classes. The English could calmly debate the liberation of trade union from age-old restrictions, national abolition of child labor, and free trade, and the British industrialists not only paid an income tax, but was accepting greater governmental intrusion into his affairs on behalf of social justice. The American industrialist, in contreast, was little trammeled by national regulation, and the laws applying to railroads and trusts were generally hobbled by lax enforcement and crippling judicial interpretration. The alert industrialist or financier could extract huge profits, unburdened by income or inheritance taxes. Inevitably American society became an order of sharp differences between a small group of the fabulously wealthy titans and the squalid poor whose numbers were enlarged by the heavy immigration.
Meanwhile the men at the top wielded their wealth and power freely. No one better symbolized private strength than JP Morgan to whose financial citadel on Wall Street the President of the United States had to venture twice, seeking help to save the gold reserve. If Bryan was, as Sydney Brooks called him, “the first American Radical,” his radicalism derived less from his program than from the background against which it was expressed. If in America he was a radical, in Europe he would barely have been considered a moderate.
Bryan: A Political Biography, 1971, Louis W Koeing, 235-6
