(SHORT—BRY.AN) /(HJS/WS.169) 1(3/181/91*)
VL: B4
[VACHEL LINDSAY:
BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN]
[The Poet’s Discourse on
William Jennings Bryan
and the Campaign against William McKinley in
1896]
This
paper was presented at the Chicago
Literary Club,
which at
that time met at the Cliff Dwellers,
on the top floor of Chicago’s Orchestra
Hall.
The paper was read on March 18, 1991 by
its author,
Hugh J. Schwartzberg)
© 1991,Hugh J. Schwartzberg,
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
all rights reserved
Time
scrapes meaning from even the simplest verse. This provides some excuse for the
work of critics. Words are lost to the language; even obvious facts become
forgotten history. Tonight I propose to take one poem apart, to examine some of
its pieces with you, to identify them, to play with them, and then to
reassemble that poem as the piece of public declamation it was designed to be.
Like any
red-blooded American audience, most of you are now certain that you will be
bored, that poetry is someone else’s strange thing. I mean to surprise you; I
would like to delight you. While the information provided here may not do so,
the poem that ties this all together should do the trick. It is called “Bryan,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” The
poem itself will be the final fourteen minutes of this evening’s presentation.
Our author,
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, was born in Illinois, in Springfield, on November 10,
1879 in a fine family home. He grew up with a set of 400 toy wooden blocks and
a memory of the deaths (by disease) of three of his five sisters.
Lindsay
never met a payroll; never held a steady job for any substantial length of
time. He was the victim of periodic, severe depression, of occasional fits
which may have been petit mal, sometimes saw visions; and ultimately
developed disabling, paranoid hostilities. He had tried to live by his poetry
alone, a juggling feat which no one else in our century has accomplished. All
this apparently helped precipitate his suicide in 1931 by ingestion of Lysol,
in that same home into which he had been born. So when he says this poem is
designed to “knock your old blue devils out,”
he is presumably
talking about anti-depressive medicine of rather high order.
In 1896
(which is one subject of this poem) Lindsay was 16, a third year student in a
Springfield high school. The next year, Lindsay went off to Hiram College.
While there, he wrote an oration on his Springfield neighbor, Governor John
Peter Altgeld. After three years, Lindsay dropped out of college.
The
drop-out came to Chicago, where he studied Art across the street [at the Art Institute of Chicago] for three years. Next came a
year’s study of Art under the great Robert Henri in New York, who (when asked)
felt Vachel would do better as poet than as artist. Lindsay tried to sell his
poems to individuals he met in the street. He saw visions.
At 26,
Vachel Lindsay wandered through the United States trying to trade rhymes for
bread.
A few
people showed some interest in young Lindsay. William James saw Lindsay as
“brilliant being that you are,” but told him to “leave me to my decrepitude.”
Marsden Hartley remembered him as a face “filled with blond light, glowing with
its own splendors.”
Lindsay
self-published some of his works, to no success. A handful of his articles and
poems were published by others.
Then, in
1911, at the age of 31, he wrote about Altgeld in “The Eagle That is
Forgotten.” Printed in his local newspaper, this poem was widely republished.
Hamlin
Garland asked Lindsay to send some of his work to Chicago. Garland invited
Lindsay to address a group called “The Cliff Dwellers.” [They were meeting
then, as now, in this same place where I am reading this paper, in
3
this room
at the top floor of Orchestra Hall.] Lindsay was introduced to the members at
lunch, and said a few words. Lindsay then went across the street, to address a
few more words to the students of the Art Institute. That night, Lindsay
recited poems for Garland, Henry Fuller and Laredo Taft. Afterwards, he was
elected a non—resident member of the Cliff Dwellers, and his dues were remitted
for that year. Lindsay did not come back to visit this club, reports biographer
Eleanor Ruggles, who tells us several of these stories. He couldn’t afford it,
felt shy, doubted his own worth.
In April of that year, Hamlin Garland went down to
Springfield. At 31, Lindsay was still being supported by his physician father.
Garland told Dr. Lindsay that his son was a genius, that he should be patient
with him a little longer.
Once again,
Vachel set off wandering; he headed West. To Lindsay, the vast western desert
was “the American splendor.” This time, his attempt at playing 20th Century
troubadour was to fall apart, was to become a combination of tramping and
migrant labor, but only Lindsay knew the full, painful story.
Meanwhile, Harriet Monroe was busy [three blocks to
the
North of
where we sit, over at what was then the Chicago Public Library] looking for
some poetry for a proposed new publishing venture of her own, the beginnings of
Poetry, a Magazine of Verse.
Harriet,
coming across a mention of Lindsay as a “young artist—poet,” wrote to Vachel
asking that he send her some of his poetry. This correspondence with Lindsay
preceded the initial issue of the new magazine. A Lindsay poem led off the
fourth issue of Poetry in January, 1913. In April, 1913, says biographer
Ruggles, Lindsay took the train to Chicago and went to the Poetry office
and sat in The Poet’s Chair. Harriet said Mr. Lindsay was “the real thing.”
Three months later, he had twelve more poems in the magazine. That Fall, in her
introduction to his first book, Harriet Monroe spoke of this [q~] “young
Illinois troubador.” That November, Harriet talked one of the magazine’s
guarantors into popping for a $100 prize for Vachel.
Understanding
that Americans “hate and abhor poetry,” Lindsay invented a form of what he
called “the higher vaudeville,” a new kind of public declamation, while
striving to keep his work “real art.” Writing in Poetry Magazine,
Lindsay said: “I respectfully submit these poems as experiments in which I
endeavor to carry this vaudeville form back towards the old Greek precedent of
the half-chanted lyric.”
In
February, 1914, Miss Monroe said he had made a beginning: ~ “one stout
foot on the slope of Parnassus.” Harriet gave Vachel a $10.00 advance so he
could attend what his biographer describes as a Cliff Dwellers dinner for
William Butler Yeats. [The dinner was held not in this room, but a few blocks
South at the Fine Arts Building.] The dinner was sponsored by Poetry
Magazine, according to Miss Monroe. At the dinner, Yeats referred to
Lindsay as a “fellow craftsman,” and Lindsay ended the evening by reciting one
of his poems, quite successfully.
Later that
same year, Miss Monroe tried to fix up Lindsay with Sarah Teasdale, a poet from
St. Louis. Eventually, to Lindsay’s regret, Miss Teasdale married someone else.
Lindsay’s
role as reciter and national figure took off quickly. In February, 1915,
Lindsay declaimed before half of President Wilson’s cabinet. Present was the
then Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan. But the story of Lindsay’s
struggle, rise and fall, is not tonight’s subject. His poem is.
Bryan,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan was written at the height of Lindsay’s public
reputation. The poem was begun on January 1, 1919. His thoughts were colored by
the recent death of
his
Democrat father, and Lindsay knew that he himself voted Democratic in national
presidential elections because of his paternal forebears. He saw all the
characters of our poem, even Bryan, as dead or approaching death. That summer,
he and his mother were alone at the family summer camp, while he finished the
work. Lindsay looked back on a world when he and his father had been successful
Democrats in a Republican town, to a world when Lindsay still thought of
himself as a probable physician, following in his father’s footsteps. A
threnody for the death of the poet’s father became the death of a different
dream.
It was
about then that William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, listed Lindsay as one of the five
greatest living American poets. For Louis Untermeyer, he was the greatest lyric
poet since Poe. Five years later, writing in Poetry Magazine, Harriet
Monroe would call him “the best and furthest known of all our American poets.”
Lindsay
became one of the most popular poets who ever lived in terms of books sold and
public recitations given. His readings proved sensational, not only at Harvard
and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge and Westminster Cathedral, but also in middle-town
America. The Brits in particular liked Bryan. In 1927 the British Observer
said he was “easily the
most
important American poet.” In Oxford, said Robert Graves, who had arranged the
reading, he scored a “knockout.” The current Dean of Sangamon State, who is
eighteen hundred pages into a Lindsay biography, has estimated that Lindsay’s
total audience numbered in the millions.
Fame is
fleeting, and Lindsay’s fame fled. Poetry Magazine sponsored a final
dinner in his honor in 1929. On December 5, 1931, at 52, he was dead.
If our poet
has been forgotten, our subject poem was never well known. The style, like
Lindsay himself, is out of fashion. This poem was always too long for the
anthologies.
The poem
has a sub-title, which is missing in the only paperback version of Lindsay’s
Poetry now in print, and abridged in the only hard-back. That subtitle is
crucial to any understanding of the poem. It tells us the poem is about
“THE
CAMPAIGN OF 1896, AS VIEWED AT THE TIME BY A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD, ETC.” The
principal subject of our poem, therefore, is Bryan’s first campaign against
McKinley. At least since Browning, we have all understood that one of the
questions to ask of a poem is, “Who is the speaker?” When Lindsay tells us that
this is the Campaign of 1896 as Seen Through the Eyes of a Sixteen—year Old,
Etc., he is telling us that the speaker (at least in large part) is
Lindsay
himself, but the “Etc.” tells us something else: that there are
things in this poem which are beyond the vision of that sixteen-year old; there
is a final portion of the poem which looks at that campaign through older eyes.
Bryan,
Bryan is Art, and not autobiography.
The real
Bryan, says Dennis Camp, probably never visited Springfield until much later in
the campaign. And at sixteen, the real Lindsay was busy collecting every story
or photograph he could find which chronicled Governor Altgeld, and mounted them
into a scrapbook. It is not believable that the real Lindsay would have failed
to mourn the unsuccessful re-election race of John Altgeld on that election eve
of 1896, but bringing that into this poem might have destroyed the poem’s
focus.
The
subtitle also tells us that for most of this poem Lindsay wants us to forget
the Bryan his audience already knows (the man who is later to run again and
again, unsuccessfully, for President), and to think about what it felt like to
cheer Bryan as a youngster in 1896. It is only at the end of the poem that we
are allowed to return to the reality of the time in which the poem was written.
But remember, that’s not 1991 either; it’s 1919. And the Bryan of 1896 is
certainly not the Bryan we think we know.
For all of
us here tonight, Bryan is almost inescapably the Bryan of “Inherit the
Wind,” both play and movie, the man whose skull is full of undelivered
presidential addresses, and who leads the prosecution of Scopes in the
anti—evolution trial of 1925, with Bryan as villain facing off against Clarence
Darrow, the hero. The Bryan of 1925 is a Bryan whom Lindsay, unlike us, did not
yet know. So we, as readers and listeners, have an even more difficult job of
suspending disbelief than Lindsay thought he was requiring of his audience in
1919.
For 16—year
old Lindsay, Bryan was a Homeric super—hero, capable of setting loose against
the East all the mythic force of the American West. And Bryan’s mythic
opponents are Tubal Cain and the devils who let loose the dark
force of landlords, back alleys, and bank
vaults. Remember, this is in
part an adolescent’s view of the world.
The
structure of this poem is to view the Campaign of 1896 as a sort of American
Iliad: the Western [and Southern] States (the good guys) against the Eastern
States (the bad guys) . The Iliad had its campaign, fought
on two levels, with different sets of Gods struggling against each other, one
group helping the Greeks and the other the Trojans. Similarly, Lindsay’s vision
of the Campaign of 1896 is also
fought on
several levels: in part, the birds, beasts and flowers of the American West are
fighting against the office equipment of the American East, its roller—top
desks and its filing
cabinets.
If Homeric
Bryan is casting spells for the Wonderful West, it is Tubal Cain
who is performing this same function for the Evil East. In the Bible, Tubal
Cain was the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cain. The Book of Genesis
credits Tubal Cain with inventing every cutting instrument of brass and of
iron: all weapons. Tubal Cain is part of the world the great flood was designed
to destroy.
In our
poem, Tubal Cain is the evil spirit which stands behind McKinley
and Hanna.
If setting
a Homeric figure against Tubal Cain seems an odd mixture of Greek and Biblical
imagery, we might remember that Lindsay’s mother also provided an odd mixture
of Greek mythology and Christianity. There were daily bible recitations in the
Lindsay household, but there were also miracle plays based on Greek myths which
mother Lindsay wrote and successfully staged in her local Christian church.
Years later, Lindsay said, “It
takes an epic poetess to call a heathen show a ‘colloquy’and have the
associated elders and
deacons openly approve.”
The ideas behind a poem are not the poem.
There is a
story about a famous scientist who approached a famous poet and announced that
he had some interesting concepts for a poem. The poet is reported to have
replied, “Poems are made out of words, not concepts.” The words of this poem
are not the poem either, but they are important, not only for the structure on
which they are strung together, not only for their music, but in small part
because Lindsay provides us with a catalog of various terms which the American
West introduced into the English language. He sets these Western words against
his image of an American East, which had always failed to understand the West’s
message.
Lindsay,
our first important movie critic, sometimes seems to give us a series of movie
takes. For example, as we approach the State House in Springfield to hear Bryan
speak, it changes in size: “a speck, a hive, a football,/A captive
balloon.” The “hive” is a reference to an earlier Lindsay
poem about Bryan, but a football?!? _______
Lindsay
understood that America’s true totems are the animals which symbolize its
sports teams. “Why do we have
eleven
football teams named for Longhorns, Mustangs, Lions... 7” asked American
linguist J. M. Dillard in 1976, in his book American Talk.
Dillard
answered himself that this is because the frontier was the “biggest promotional
scheme in our history.’ It was a matter, said Dillard, of “cultural lag.’ But
Lindsay stood closer to the Age of the Frontier; Lindsay believed in our roots, and understood them.
In Bryan.
Bryan, Lindsay posits two opposing poetic orders, to match our political
sectionalism, West against East, Homeric Bryan against Tubal Cain; and Bryan,
in his Homeric guise, casts a series of real and imaginary beasts loose, as an
Army marching against the East Coast. The list
begins with
the Longhorns of Texas and the Jayhawks of Kansas. The fact that these are also symbols for the
athletic teams of these two states passes almost unnoticed.
Lindsay himself, writing later, spoke of
the University of Kansas cheer for its football team: “Let all students of the
University of Kansas teach the tune of the Jay Hawk Yell to the
world, especially to those inclined to true United States poetry.”
Lindsay
manages to smuggle into the list of Mckinley’s opponents a series of imaginary
beasts, including the Thingamajig and the Hellangone,
and other non-existent
beasties
such as the Prodactyl, the Wampus and the Plop—eyed
Bungaroo, as well as the Giant Giassicus. Throughout much
of our history, the unknowing tenderfoot has been sent in search of skyhooks
and spotted paint, and some of these Bryan-beasts have no greater reality than
those.
Take the bat-fowl
for example. To go batfowling was to stun a bird with a light and then hit that
bird with a bat. So a bat-fowler was one who practiced bat-fowling, and also a
swindler, a sharper who made victims of the simple and credulous. Which left a
batfowl, presumably, as one who had been swindled. So a batfowl
isn’t really a beast at all. It is simply a friendly bogey of revenge to swell
the list of things with which the West could frighten the East.
.
Bryan’s
western menagerie is led by its
eagles. The eagle
is our national bird, but we might also remember that Bryan had already dubbed
Altgeld as an Eagle, and during this campaign, Bryan was sometimes referred to
as the “black eagle of Nebraska.” These two, then, Altgeld and
Bryan, are the Eagles of the West.
Lindsay
makes vaudeville out of the political invective which was dumped on Bryan. The
language of our political discourse has changed so much since the Gay Nineties
that we
may think
that the examples Lindsay gives of the East’s attack upon Bryan are
unrealistic. In actual fact, even the most respectable Eastern newspapers
engaged in such billingsgate. In the poem, Bryan is called a “cheapskate,
blatherskite, populistic, anarchistic, deacon--desperado.” A
“blatherskite” in the ‘90’s, as now, was defined as a “babbling, foolish
person.”
In the lead
story on Page One of the New York Times for July 11, 1896, the Times
reported the Democratic Convention at Chicago Illinois, under the head, “Bryan,
Free Silver and Repudiation,” “Chicago Convention Chooses a Fit Candidate to
Stand on Populistic Platform.”
The story itself included this line:
“It was not until Governor Stone, speaking for
Missouri, hauled down the Bland standard and cast 34 votes for Bryan that the
gifted blatherskite was selected as the presidential candidate of
this Democratic Populistic Convention.”
Nor was the Times
alone. The New York Tribune reporter telegraphed from the convention
Bryan’s reference to a Cross of Gold and added: “This blatherskite
declaration stirred up the
depths of the popu1istic convention.”
Harper’s Weekly assured its readers that Bryan “would be as
clay in the hands of the potter under the astute control of the ambitious and
unscrupulous Illinois communist...” The New York_Tribune
that year called the defeat of “Altgeld the
Anarchist a “cause for national rejoicing.”
~ _/
When it was all over, looking back on the campaign,
the New York Tribune said: Bryan “was only a puppet in the blood-imbued
hands of Altgeld, the Anarchist, and Debs, the Revolutionist, and
other desperadoes of that stripe
There are fourteen real people whose names appear in
this poem. Some of these players
cannot be identified without a scorecard. While twelve are public figures, two
are not.
Referring
to the parade for Bryan in Springfield, Lindsay speaks of “Tom Dines and
Art Fitzgerald/Ah the Gangs That They Could Get.” These are not the
names of local political bosses, but rather record Vachel Lindsay’s actual
albeit minor role in the campaign. Lindsay had approached two friends to help
gather recruits for the political line of march. Art Fitzgerald and
Lindsay were both on the high school track team together, when Vachel won the
mile walk for the school. Fitzgerald later recalled that his father had been a
Republican, but that Lindsay had successfully drawn him into Democratic
politics.
If
this seems only slightly less obscure than that point
in the Four
Quartets where T. S. Eliot may be changing subway trains, I submit that who
these two are is less important than that the adult poet persona here remembers
nostalgically that in those days there were people who could
successfully bring out throngs for torchlight parades.
Writing in
1922, Lindsay recalled that, as children, he and his cousin did not tell each
other fairy stories, but instead played at Democratic parades. And he
remembered the cparad~ ratifying Cleveland’s election, when he was twelve, as
being [quote] “millions of miles long.”
The other
dozen names are easy to research, even if one or two are starting to fade out
of the history books. Seven of them came to stand as heroes for Lindsay, who
believed that it was important to recite a litany of heroes and to urge people
to choose at least one hero and to emulate him.
The first
hero is Altgeld. You may recall tha± Altgeld had pardoned the Haymarket Rioters
in 1893. This not only served to defeat Altgeld, but was used as a club with which
to beat upon Bryan.
Republican boss Mark Hanna of Ohio plays
first villain. He sent young Iheodore Roosevelt westward to speak at the
Chicago
Coliseum on October 15, 1896. T.R. was making his first major political
address, and he said:
Mr. Altgeld
is a much more dangerous man than Bryan. He is much slyer, much more
intelligent, much less silly, much more free from all the restraints of public
morality.”
He went on
to say,
“Mr. Bryan
and Mr. Altgeld are the embodiment of the two principles which our adversaries
desire to see triumph; and in their ultimate analysis these principles are
merely the negation of the two commandments, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘ and ‘Thou shalt
do no murder.’ Mr. Altgeld condones
and encourages the most infamous of murders.” . .“
This same
Theodore Roosevelt will be cheered by Lindsay years later because TR was later
to adopt much of the 1896 platform upon which Bryan had stood. Accordingly, at
the close of our poem, it is not the young boy of 1896 but the poet of 1919 who
speaks of Theodore Roosevelt, who had died the year before, in 1918. Lindsay
asks, in our poem:
“Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
Who hated Bryan, then aped his way.
Gone to join the shadows
with mighty Cromwell
And tall King Saul
Till the Judgment day.”
Before Bryan, Bryan,
Lindsay had written a poem about Theodore Roosevelt entitled, “In Which Roosevelt
Is Compared to Saul.” Elsewhere, in another poem, Lindsay cries, “Hail to
the sons of Roosevelt” and in still another speaks of the Theodore
Roosevelt Administration as “seven years of wonder.”
We learn from these other
poems that King Saul, the
first King
of Israel, probably appears in our poem as an emblem of the flawed hero, the
great political leader whose own direct heirs will not carry on the great
tradition, but whose political message will be carried forward by others from a
different line.
Cromwel1 (one of Lindsay’s
twenty major historical dreamer-heros) plays a similar role. Cromwell, too, was
a great but flawed political leader, the creator of the modern political state,
whose direct line is overthrown by the Restoration, but whose political
tradition as a Progressive was later to be claimed by Theodore Roosevelt, among
others. The image of the Regicide, the sword of God, (complete with John Milton
as Foreign Secretary) appealed to Lindsay.
To
understand most of the rest of Lindsay’s cast of characters, one must revisit
the 1896 Presidential Campaign.
Take Ben
Tillman, Altgeld’s political partner. A Harper’s Weekly cartoon
pictured Altgeld as the mad—looking leader of a crew whose emblem was “the
fifty cent bunco dollar,” while the Constitution of the United States fell from
their rostrum in tatters. At Altgeld’s right hand crouches a small, terribly
intense figure armed with a pitchfork labeled “Tillman.” That is United States
Senator Benjamin Tillman, who had been Governor of North
Carolina.
He ran for
the Senate in 1894, assuring the voters that if he won and if Grover Cleveland
ever came into the Congress, Tiliman would stick his pitchfork into him.
Therefore the nickname “Pitchfork” Tiliman for a leader among the
Senatorial Democrats who controlled the ‘96 Convention, along with Altgeld. At
the Democratic Platform Committee, Tiliman led off the fight for a free silver
resolution, suggesting that this was a battle by the South and West against the
Eastern seaboard.
Another
hero to whom Lindsay turns is John Brown. We have a very clear
idea of how Lindsay felt about the great abolitionist. In a poem called, “John
Brown,” Lindsay pictures a heaven-like Palestine with John Brown set to judge
the world.
If Bryan
and Brown, Altgeld and Tillman, Cromwell and Saul, are Lindsay’s heros, these
six are matched by six villains. We’ve already seen that one of these villains,
Theodore Roosevelt, will himself become a Lindsay hero in later life. There was
no forgiveness in Lindsay’s mind for his other five villains.
The first and foremost of the bad guys was a
Democrat, Grover Cleveland, who in 1896 was
concluding his second,
non-consecutive term as President of the United
States.
There have
almost always been two wings on the liberal side of that monster which is the
Democratic Party. One wing is that of the party of reform. It is dedicated to
throwing the rascals out and to achieving some kind of new structure which, it
is believed ,will serve the long-term end of improving the system. Cleveland’s
great achievement in this respect was, of course, the creation of the civil
service, which might have meant destruction for the political base of
Jacksonian democracy. (The adult Lindsay is politically consistent; old Andrew
Jackson was another of his heroes.)
The other
liberal wing of this many-winged beast which is the Democratic Party often
flies to aid the downtrodden and the oppressed, for the rights of labor and, in
1896, for the causes of the West against the East, which included cheap money,
bi-metallism, and/or free coinage of silver, which might have been expected to
induce inflation and thereby ease the debts which pressed upon the West.
Grover
Cleveland was hated by both Altgeld and Lindsay. A quote from Altgeld is
instructive:
“Cleveland
is today ignorant of the fact that there is a country’West of the A11eghenies.
Jefferson belonged to the American people; Cleveland to the men who devour
widows’ houses.”
Boss Hanna
had hoped to ride out the silver issue with a straddle program and a candidate
who could be seen as being on both sides of that issue. But another Republican
boss, Thomas Platt of New York, who appears briefly in our poem
as “lean rat Platt,” carried the Convention for the cause of
Gold.
Even with a
gold standard platform, McKinley proceeded to fudge his response to this, as to
every other political question. -
William
McKinley, Bryan’s opponent, ran on the prosperity ticket. He was the crown
prince of high tariffs, and in the past had been on various sides of the silver
issue.
Mark Hanna is
credited as the designer of McKinley’s campaign. That campaign operated on the
theory that McKinley was not going to answer any question he didn’t have to.
McKinley ran by sitting on his own front porch, meeting and mystifying such
delegations as came to praise and inquire.
In a
cartoon in the magazine known as Judge, McKinley was portrayed as a
draped statue inscribed: “I am the veiled Mahatma of Prosperity! Believe in me,
ask no questions and you will all roll in riches! Bowing before McKinley are
individuals labelled “Populist,” “Gold Bug,” “Silver Crank,”
“Greenbacker,”
and “Any Kind of Money Crank.” The only other identifiable figure is one
labelled “High Protection Maniac.” But flags and banners in the distance read
“Trusts,” “Combines,” and “Monopolists.” The accompanying editorial, fearful of
a Senate Finance Committee in the hands of Avowed Silverites, reported that a
majority of the Senate was in favor of the fifty cent dollar, and that Grover
Cleveland was protecting the nation against such treacherous assaults upon the
national credit and the public honor. Judge magazine wanted McKinley’s
“money views,” but could only report that:
“In
response to the question, ‘Do you stand for sound money or the fifty cent
dollar?’ put to him the other day, Mr. McKinley replied, ‘Public office is the
people’s honor. Public service well done is its own honor.’ This reply has been
criticized as being no reply. We do not think, however, that the vulgar rules
of logic should apply to the infrequent orations of this man, since he is
clearly one favored of heaven, who can speak only in terms of omniscience,
unintelligible to earthlings.”
If the Republican Party did not have answers to
specific questions, it did have campaign funds,or “spondulix”. The Democratic party spent between $450,000
and $600,000 on that campaign, as against the Republican Party’s expenditures
of more than five times as much, and the all-time record as of that date. The
conventional estimate of Hanna’s expenditurès amounts to just under $3,500,000,
of which more than $3,000,000 came from New York, and the rest from Chicago and
vicinity.
This money
helped pay for 1,400 Republican speakers and 120,000,000 pamphlets of at least
275 different sorts, almost ten for each actual voter, including materials in
Hebrew, German, French, Italian and the Scandinavian languages. Hanna is said
to have assessed each bank at one-quarter of one per cent of its capital, and
to have collected it, while Standard Oil alone came through with an amount
equal to almost half of the Democrat’s budget.
As the
election approached, some employers posted signs advising workers that they
need not return if Bryan were elected. Meanwhile, the New York Times
repeatedly ran stories in which alleged psychiatrists questioned Bryan’s
sanity.
Theodore
Roosevelt’s private correspondence makes it clear that East Coast Republicans
initially expected overwhelming defeat. Altgeld’s principal biographer, Harry
Barnard, to whom we are indebted at many points, concludes that in Ju1y and August, Bryan’s oratory
seemed to sweep all before him.
There is
one final figure in the poem we have not yet mentioned, and that is J. P,
Morgan, scion and head of the House of Morgan, the symbolic American financier
and big
business
person. Morgan symbolized monopolies, combines and trusts. And if the American
people wanted trusts, this election may have ensured they’d get them. Five
years after this election, J. P. Morgan was to create U.S. Steel.
Even before
1896, Morgan and others were often pictured in the political cartoons of the
day as huge, bloated figures with dollar signs on their chests,
sometimes with huge diamonds on their watch-chains, and occasionally with spats
on their shoes. As even my own grandfather still wore spats 40 years later, I
trust even the youngest among us remember that “spats” were fancy covers worn
on top of one’s leather shoes. This was not the kind of footwear to be worn
near the sod-huts in Kansas, where dwellings were often built out
of whatever was handy and shanties often had only sod roofs, and sometimes sod
walls as well. Some American historians are beginning to realize once again
just how rough it was out on the American frontier. This poem might have served
to remind them earlier.
In the
1950’s, a classic study of American political parties confirmed most of
Lindsay’s political analysis. Wilfred Binkley concluded that the modern
Democratic Party was essentially created by Bryan’s campaign of 1896.
The campaign of 1896 ended with the Democratic Party
publicly
committed to the needs of Labor, to the Have-nots as against the Haves, to the
sectional sensibilities of the South and the settlor West, and to a revival of
the national income tax. Some of the more moderate theories from Socialism and
Populism had found a new home. This coalition of forces was later to be
successfully represented by such figures as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon
Johnson. FDR did away with yellow-dog contracts, attacked the Supreme Court,
passed the National Labor Relations Act, championed a progressive income tax,
and took us off the Gold Standard. Each of these is traceable to Bryan and
1896, but Lindsay died two years too early to see any of FDR’s reign. Still
later, Lyndon Johnson knowingly used and shattered the same political mold in
the name of civil rights.
McKinley
carried both coasts and the midwest all the way to Wyoming, including all of
the larger urbanized states. But if we add in the non-voting territories, it is
clear that Bryan had created a territorially contiguous block of electoral
supporters, joining the Deep South with much of the Plains West. The shift of
only 14,001 popular votes, properly distributed, would have given Bryan a
majority in the Electoral College. The actual vote was a little more than seven
million votes for McKinley to just under six-and-a-half million for Bryan.
We are now
ready to look at that election campaign through the eyes of Vachel Lindsay, at
16 and at 39.
Of course,
this recitation will not sound like Lindsay himself, who was one of the great
performers. We have commercially available recordings of a number of the other
Lindsay poems. Although these do not include Bryan, Bryan, there was a recording made of our poem. For many years, it was
kept secretly at the Lindsay home. Elizabeth Graham, volunteer curator of that
monument—museum—home, once confessed to me that she was afraid that public
release of the Bryan recording would cut into the earnings of Nicholas
“Nicky” Cave Lindsay, Vachel’s son, who was then making do by reciting his
father’s verse.
Five years
ago, in 1986, a three-volume edition of Lindsay’s so-called complete poetry was
released by a small press, with support from the Illinois Arts Council, and the
second volume of the Collected Prose is expected shortly; these
publications seem to have passed unnoticed. By then, Vachel Lindsay had also
become one of the “forgotten.”
Here, then, is the poem.