The Democratic Nomination
After the second
defeat of Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan
in 1900, conservative leaders quickly regained ascendancy in the
party. The “reorganizers” wanted to move the Democratic
Party away from the dead issue of free silver and return it to
the pro-business philosophy and urban-North/rural-South base of
former president Grover Cleveland. In the process, they
alienated many of Bryan’s supporters. Although the “Great
Commoner” rejected a third consecutive run for the White House,
he continued to play a leadership role in the party. In
speeches and editorials, he advanced his populist agenda and
relentlessly criticized the party’s conservatives. The
result of the conservative-populist struggle was a bitterly
divided party headed for electoral defeat in 1904, leaving Bryan
poised to reclaim the nomination four years later.
The major flaw in the
conservative reorganization effort was failure to cultivate a
candidate of national stature. In 1903, the politician of
choice was Senator Arthur Pue Gorman of Maryland. His
pro-business and anti-imperialist views made him an attractive
candidate, even though his
trade-protectionist record was at odds with the majority of
Democrats. White southerners appreciatively remembered
Gorman’s opposition to the
Federal Elections Bill (“Force Bill”) of 1890.
Democratic financiers George Gould and Thomas Fortune Ryan
promised to contribute generously to his campaign.
Gorman’s candidacy, however, was ended by his vocal condemnation
of President Roosevelt’s Panama policy. The Maryland
senator miscalculated his ability to influence his party on the
issue and the intensity of support for a Panamanian Canal in the
American South. When the Senate ratified the Panama Canal
treaty on February 23, 1904, nearly half the Democrats joined
the Republicans to vote in the affirmative. Gorman ended
his presidential bid shortly afterward.
As Gorman’s candidacy sank, a
boom arose for Grover Cleveland. On the issues, the former
two-term president (1885-1889, 1893-1897) was the ideal
candidate for conservative Democrats, favoring the gold standard
and tariff reform and opposing an expansionist foreign policy
and federal protection of voting rights. However, the
67-year-old Cleveland preferred his active retirement as a
trustee of Princeton University and so declined to enter the
race. Richard Olney, attorney general and secretary of
state in Cleveland’s second administration, also turned down
entreaties from conservatives to launch a candidacy, as he had
in 1896 and 1900.
With Gorman, Cleveland, and Olney
out of the race, and faced with almost certain defeat by the
popular Roosevelt, no nationally known Democratic candidate
emerged. Instead, Democrats coalesced around a state judge
from New York, Alton B. Parker. In 1885, Parker had
managed David B. Hill’s successful gubernatorial campaign, and
was rewarded by Governor Hill with an appointment as judge on
the New York State Supreme Court (a lower state court).
Parker soon gained a reputation among lawyers and fellow judges
for fairness, competence, and courtesy, and quickly climbed New
York’s judicial ladder. In 1897, he won a landslide
victory as chief justice of the New York Court of Appeals, the
state’s highest court. Ambitious for a seat on the U.S.
Supreme Court, he turned down offers over the years to run for
governor or senator.
Nevertheless, in 1903, Hill
convinced Parker to test the presidential waters with a speaking
tour of the South. The judge played to the Democratic
Party’s white base, expressing no criticism of anti-black voting
rights violations and lynchings. Instead, in a speech
before the Georgia Bar Association, he argued that the 14th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was not originally understood
as having granted Congress or the Supreme Court the authority to
restrict states rights. After the trip, he allowed Hill to
organize a presidential campaign for him. Parker fit the
conservative Democratic profile of a presidential candidate:
he supported the gold standard and tariff reform, opposed an
expansionist foreign policy and federal protection of voting
rights, and his judicial record evidenced both deference to
legislative acts and recognition of labor rights. Unlike
other pro-gold standard Democrats, he had loyally supported
Bryan in 1896 and had not been involved in intraparty
skirmishes.
After his Southern trip and
before the Democratic National Convention in July 1904, Parker
refused to comment on the issues. His silence, plus
backing from the Democratic business community, spurred Bryan to
label him “the muzzled candidate of Wall Street.”
Opposition from the temporarily discarded Great Commoner only
enhanced Parker’s candidacy among conservatives. The
populist/progressive wing, however, also had difficulty finding
a rival candidate of national stature. Early hopes were
pinned on
Tom Johnson, the reform mayor of Cleveland, until he lost
the Ohio gubernatorial race in 1903. Bryan promoted
several possible candidates—ridiculed by the conservative
Democratic press as “Bryan’s Little Unknowns from
Nowhere”—before settling on Senator Francis Cockrell of
Missouri, a 69-year-old former Confederate general.
Taking up Bryan’s mantle, without
the Great Commoner’s support, was
William Randolph Hearst, the wealthy publisher of the San
Francisco Examiner and New York Journal and a
Democratic congressman (1903-1907) from New York. Hearst
advocated government-ownership of railroads and public
utilities, a graduated income tax, an eight-hour workday,
antitrust legislation, and the rights of labor unions. His
presidential candidacy gained momentum in the winter of
1903-1904, so that he had over 200 newspaper endorsements by his
41st
birthday in April 1904. However, his views were contrary
to the general direction of the party that year, his arrogance
alienated other politicians, and his morals offended many of
Bryan’s supporters. Therefore, his personal expenditure of
$1.4 million ($28.1 million in 2002 dollars) resulted in less
than a third of the delegates needed to win the nomination.
The Democratic
National Convention met in St. Louis on July 6-9, with
Congressman John Sharp Williams of Mississippi as the temporary
chairman and Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri as the
permanent chairman. The stark division in the party became
obvious on the first day when the mention of Grover Cleveland
provoked such raucous jeers and cheers that a police squad was
called to prevent possible violence. The loud volume
continued throughout the proceedings. Conservatives
controlled the platform committee and intended to “bury Bryan.”
The Great Commoner arrived at the convention criticizing
Parker’s silence and the candidate’s alleged dominance by
campaign manager Hill and financier August Belmont Jr.
The Democratic
Party Platform called for reduced federal spending (singling out
military expenditures), ample funding to improve national
waterways, tariff reform, a thorough investigation of public
corruption, direct election of U.S. senators (rather than by
state legislatures), arbitration of labor disputes, and an
eight-hour workday for federal employees. The document
condemned Republican “imperialism” in foreign policy and
President Roosevelt’s unconstitutional “executive usurpation” of
legislative and judicial powers. It endorsed construction
of “the Panama Canal speedily, honestly, and economically.”
To assuage the party’s silverites, a plank endorsing the gold
standard was omitted and, in return, Bryan’s plank for a
progressive income tax was left out to placate conservatives.
The Great Commoner won a partial victory when the antitrust
plank listed some specifics: denouncing rebates and
favoring a grant of authority to courts to determine if a
business corporation was an illegal monopoly.
On July 8,
delegates nominated Parker on the first ballot with 679 votes to
181 for Hearst and 42 for Cockrell. For vice president,
delegates nominated Henry G. Davis, a wealthy railroad owner and
former senator from West Virginia. At 80 years of age, he
was the oldest person ever nominated for that office by a major
party. Davis had been staunchly pro-Union during the Civil
War, and his West Virginia residency brought geographic balance
to the ticket. His trade protectionist view was a
counterweight to Parker’s tariff-reform stance, but it was the
former senator’s deep pockets that were most attractive to
delegates. During the campaign, he contributed $185,000
($3.7 million in 2002 dollars), which was over a third of the
very small election fund.
The biggest
news of the convention was Parker’s “Gold Telegram.” New
York newspapers headlined the platform’s omission of a
gold-standard plank and urged Parker’s intervention. The
judge sent a telegram to the convention stating that the gold
standard was “firmly and irrevocably established” and that he
would act “accordingly.” He bluntly asserted that if
delegates found his opinion on the issue unsatisfactory, then he
would not accept the nomination. The telegram angered
conservatives as well as populists and provoked such a furor
that Convention Chairman Clark called a recess to prevent a
possible riot. A carefully worded response was cabled to
Parker justifying the omission on the grounds that the money
question would not be an issue in the campaign. Some
newspapers praised Parker’s ultimatum, while others compared it
to Bryan’s insistence on a free-silver plank before he would
accept the nomination in 1900.
|