The Home Front:
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Mud-slinging in the Campaign of 1896 TWO WEEKS AGO, I reported Norman Thomas's comment that the recent election campaign had been "low-grade stuff, bush-league...
...McKinley was favored by about 7 million and his opponent by 6 1/2...
...Every now and then, too, the word "Communist" crept into the verbal broadsides...
...Both the World and the Tribune published editorials saying that the Bible was against the Democrats and all good Christians would, of course, vote Republican...
...Newspaper pages were spacious in those days, and the whole great space was covered by a mighty drawing...
...The first exhibit which I happened upon was the front page of the World for November 4, 1896, the day after McKinley was elected...
...This sort of campaigning is, I regret to say, not new...
...Considering such matters, my mind turned backward...
...That is...
...Bryan himself was an orthodox Presbyterian, a devout and notably patriotic citizen...
...practically half of the citizens favored the slimy villains...
...In a press interview, he stated that Adlai Stevenson had not changed since "he testified [sic] for Alger Hiss...
...It does not go back to the earliest days of the Republic...
...But, because he pardoned innocent men, not only he but all the leaders of his party were branded with the charge of anarchy...
...Yet, most of the preachers in the great city churches preached against him...
...The Republican party was portrayed as a magnificent Goddess of Liberty throwing the light of her torch on a symbolic representation of the Democratic party, which was pictured as a creature with the form of a devil at the upper end and tapering off into a slimy serpent in its lower portions...
...The Vice President covered a lot of ground when he proclaimed that the opposition candidates were "almost without exception members of the Democratic party's left-wing clique which has tolerated the Communist conspiracy in the United States...
...It was simply taken for granted that such is the way of politics...
...This Republican orgy of wild speech did not cease on Election Day...
...And it was the President himself who lent the great authority of his name and office to the comment that, if the Democrats won control of Congress, they would drive the wagon of state into a ditch...
...On Wednesday next the minority will bow gracefully...
...His reason was that there was no evidence against them...
...This work of art was elucidated by a heated editorial which proclaimed: "Not since the fall of Richmond have patriotic Americans had such cause for rejoicing as they feel today...
...Indeed, in one sense the peril was greater now than then...
...Vice President Nixon, for example, declared that "the Communist party has determined to conduct its program within the Democratic party...
...There, with mingled amusement and horror, I went through the files of the World and the Tribune...
...There was no evidence of repentance or contrition...
...The New York Times referred to "violations of decency, honesty and fair play," and a letter published in the Times provided some examples of Republican campaign tactics...
...he was as far as possible from being an anarchist...
...There was little of it before the campaign of 1828...
...All this was based exclusively on the fact that Governor John P. Altgeld, one of Bryan's supporters, had pardoned some of the men convicted in connection with the Chicago Haymarket riots...
...The Republicans in Wyoming published an advertisement describing former Senator O'Mahoney as "Foreign Agent 783...
...This great man said in a sermon on the Sunday before election: "A foreigner would think we were on the verge of a dreadful revolution...
...Though he was clean-shaven and handsome, he and his friends were regularly represented as ragged-bearded wielders of incendiary torches...
...The sort of campaigning typified by the recent reference to "twenty years of treason" was worked to the limit during the whole of that long anti-Bryan campaign...
...It went on and on...
...In order to secure evidence more reliable than recollections stored up from a distant youth, I spent a day in my favorite attic, the newspaper library up on West Twenty-fifth Street...
...Again and again, it was proclaimed that if Bryan won the Republic would fall...
...And there was not, as there is now, any sign of an awakening conscience...
...The present method of establishing guilt by association was more flagrantly used than it is now...
...The ultra-respectable Bryan, for example, was consistently pictured as an anarchist...
...But it started in gaudy and gory style with the great effort to prevent the election of Andrew Jackson...
...The Democratic platform contained, besides the free-silver plank, a number of proposals for reform which were later enacted into law...
...That was a little before my day, but I remember vividly a somewhat similar political battle, that of 1896...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Mud-slinging in the Campaign of 1896 TWO WEEKS AGO, I reported Norman Thomas's comment that the recent election campaign had been "low-grade stuff, bush-league stuff...
...The famous victory was not won by many votes...
...The only trace of good sense which I found in my reading was supplied by Cardinal James Gibbons, in those days the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in this country...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 48
